Inside the Autistic Brain – THE RESULTS ARE IN!

Have you seen your brain before like this? No, not at all. You're built in a very interesting way. You have what I call the gifted poet brain. One person can't handle the information, can't process it coming in. The person is processing it all too much. That's you. It's a rawness. It's a fire hose of social. Hey, good morning. Hi, Andrew. How are you going? Thanks. I'm going to start with the performance test because it is more valid and straightforward and easy to read. And overall, you're sharp, but a little tired is the takeaway. The average score age match compared to other 38 year olds is 100. So you're at that top edge of typical where you're starting to become advantageously on and you're fine for being reactive or impulsive, nothing in the way there. However, you can see these little bar sets below each of the four big resources and you can see that blue bar is not hanging out at the top. And later in the day, this one's going to kind of wear out or when doing too many things at once, your stamina is low and you also have a cranked up, what's called prudence. You're being very careful. You're noticing or adjusting. I'm curious how the carefulness gets measured in the test because I mean that that matches my experience. And overall, how it comes across is I do reasonably well on these things, but it's because I'm extremely careful and I get very tired. Prudence is what happens after you start to make a mistake. What happens the next trial? Do you correct? Do you make the same mistake? So stamina is the big takeaway here. This is all within normal limits or typical, it's all fine, but you shifted gears oddly fast, oddly quickly in the auditory system, but not typically in the visual system. That's kind of interesting. That's interesting because I once had my visual memory tested and it was off the charts low. It makes sense that my auditory is better, but it's interesting here that my visual is quicker, but it's harder for me, but the auditory is easier, but it's also slower. There's some stuff going on in the auditory system behind the right ear. I would guess your partner, friend, whatever starts talking to you and you have a habit of saying, Oh, sorry, what? Because you weren't already listening, so to speak more automatically. Actually what happens is very similar to that is I hear it, I remember it and I respond to it 20 seconds later. So it's like, I'm busy doing something, I'm asked a question, I'm like, hang on, let me just finish doing what I'm doing and then I respond to it. Yeah, this is exactly what I'm talking about. This is usually a very subtle auditory processing issue and for you it's super subtle, but there it is. And we saw it in the performance test and that is what you're describing behaviorally. Get your professional romantic and other partners in the short term to call your name or give you a beat of time, give you an alerting cue and then a beat of time and then continue. Hey, honey, you want pizza? So much better for you than, honey, could you please put that down if I'm in a stopping place and come look at menus? I'm so hungry. You'll hit the break, you'll orient, you'll start to pay. So tell your partner, here's how you can help me listen to you better. Give me that beat, but you can also train this away. You bring down the thetas, up the alphas, up the betas, and you should be able to notice more control over the stream of information that's kind of always there. So there's some stuff going on in the frontal lobe where the alpha is super low, the chill, the rest mode, the actual activated voluntary tone, they're both kind of low, but it's taking over as an automatic frequencies, letting that tissues kind of act and react, both sides actually doing that in the frontal tips. And the frontal tips are involved with the approach versus the avoid system. They help you balance that. And you can think of a front porch of a house with a happy little kid in the left going, hey, world, come here. On the right of the porch is a grumpy old man going, no, leave us alone, too hard, sucks. And you balance that based on how safe and energetic and rested and excited, whatever else you might feel. This left front having a lot of theta and not a lot of beta often means that someone's happy little kid doesn't want to go outside, even though it's sunny, no too much work. I don't want to. And they get a motivated and hard to find your joy, your brightness, your resilience, your effort kind of stuff. I usually have to put a lot of effort into motivating myself to do anything. And it doesn't last. The energy doesn't last very long. The right front, the grumpy old man, when he has lots of theta, it's more than just irritability. The left front is feeling a sense of overwhelm. And I call this the dread marker, where your happy little kid is inside and will come outside and skip around the neighborhood and your grumpy old man's out there being angry at the traffic, scaring the neighbors a little bit, like exerting and bracing against things being hard. So those are things that if that rings true, if those metaphors, silly as they are, ring true a little bit, you have an opportunity to train the frontal lobes and right the ship a little bit, bail yourself out and have that natural buoyancy back where you can ride stress and not be listing in the absence of a storm. I'm seeing a little bit of extra delta amplitude and down here seeing some low delta phase lag. Here's the scaling on the phase. It's line thickness. Low phase lag stuck together delta phase generally means that we're feeling some brain fog, some persistent fatigue and tiredness. Yeah, definitely. I'm currently on a four month break to try and feel better about that. So what I'm realizing is that rest is not, rest is definitely helping, but there's definitely more to it than simply taking a break from what is draining. Yeah, it's not the amount, it's the architecture or the quality of your sleep. That's why falling asleep is okay, but the maintenance of sleep is not necessarily okay. I thought you might be interested to see before we leave this page though. You're built in a very interesting way. You have what I call the gifted poet brain. There's a spectrum of, it tends to be changes in how you focus and in how you process the outside world. One person can't handle the information, can't process it coming in. That person is processing it all too much. That's you, it's a rawness, it's a fire hose of social. It's not a hard to discern noise stream. This is how fast your brain is. We're looking at the left hemisphere and we're looking at the peak frequency or the average frequencies and alpha is your speed of processing. You're built fairly fast as one can be, which is great actually. The places where some of the numbers are a little bit draggy, some of the circuits are the same places where the delta is actually fast. Deltas rest and repair, you want to see delta close to zero. When we're not reliably getting into deep enough sleep in those cycles and catching a little more deep sleep each time, the delta feels shorted and starts to rush around fast during the day and try to rest us when we're awake and we feel both tired and rushed. That seemed valid, a little bit of chronically burnt out and kind of rushed at the same time. Definitely. I've been diagnosed with excessive daytime sleepiness. Yeah, sure. There we go. Whenever I see delta pushed up this high, people feel really tired. They feel like they're not getting enough deep sleep. And when this hangs out above one or at one or above one for a while for a few months, it eventually collapses in a negative numbers and you're not there. This is actually the less acute version. This is like a sleep deprivation for some reason. Maybe it's apnea. I'm seeing a sprain that is like, why do I feel tired? Let's see, here's eyes open. It's more in the back of the head, more visual, side to the head is more auditory. So I guess some sort of visual stress or strain. Yeah, I actively ignore most visual things like I don't, I don't watch TV. I avert my eyes from flashing screens in public. Wow, that theta is really strong. The right, this is visual attention. Like you're like a kid is playing baseball and forgot his sunglasses. I can't see anything. Where's the ball? You have both like a wide open one and one that's actually struggling. You have a mixed social and sensory junction box. It's interesting. I'm not surprised you focus on EQ and things. It's probably a thing you like spend time thinking about and experiencing quite, quite differently. Exactly, exactly. I have, it's no exaggeration to say that I've had this as a special interest for more than 30 years. I've gone to ratios here last in the document and we're just seeing all the same stuff. Honestly, we're seeing lack of sleep depth, lack of motivation, bit of sensory stuff for the visual and auditory and, you know, sensory, uh, social focus again. Um, cool. And if you feel like changing this stuff, I mean, again, I'm never here to tell you what you should do with your brain, but this is generally fairly tractable. If you want to push your brain around. The thing that has the most of my interest is basically what I've already been focusing on, which is sleep. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I really don't see much of a problem with the auditory stuff. Uh, I mean, it's probably a two out of 10 priority in terms of actual impact, but if I can find a way to allow my brain to rest, then I feel like it could actually come back online again, because at the moment I feel like it just has such a low capacity to do things. And then I do something and then I burn it out straight away. Uh, and then I have to rest again. And then as soon as I go back, I burn it out straight away. So, um, trying to find a way to stay in that middle ground without burning out. Um, yeah. Sleep and stress and attention are all kind of the same resource at some level. So perfect. Well, uh, thanks for that. And thanks for hooking me up with Chris in London. Um, and yeah, I'll talk to you another time. Well, I look forward to talking to you. Take care. Bye. Bye.