Autistic Traits and Psychic Ability EP 11 (podcast 2 on this topic)

Is there a relationship between autistic traits and psychic ability? 

Join me for a discussion of how autistic traits like hyper-sensitivity, hyper-connectivity and pattern recognition might relate to psychic abilities. 

The blog post and autism trait charts I mentioned in the video can be found on my blog at: https://barbaragraver.substack.com/p/charting-my-autistic-traits

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Visit my blog at Writing After Dark (https://barbaragraver.substack.com/)

Full transcript follows. If you need closed captioning, please listen via the podbean app or at AutisticPOV.com (https://www.autisticpov.com/).

EPISODE 11 TRANSCRIPT

If your podcast provider cuts off the transcript, you can see the full transcript for this episode at AutisticPOV.com

 

Welcome to Autistic POV. My name is Barbara Graber and I started this podcast to share a bit of my journey as a late diagnosed autistic. Hi everybody, this is Barbara Graver.

0:21

Welcome to Autistic POV. In this episode, we're going to be continuing to talk about autism and psychic abilities. In our last episode, we talked about autism and psychic abilities, particularly in the realm of some of the research and controversy around nonverbal autistic people and their telepathic abilities.

0:45

And one of the interesting things for me that came out of that was it kind of changed my thinking on the whole concept of the spectrum. And this happened actually as I was doing the podcast. I was thinking about how I have some intuitive abilities and here are these people who...

1:02

that have these strong, apparently strong, telepathic abilities. And I was thinking, you know, it really is a spectrum. But the more I thought about it after, that one trait is on a spectrum. So to me, you can't put one autistic person... at one end of the spectrum and another autistic person at the other.

1:25

And I know people say, oh, it's not that kind of a spectrum. But the definition of a spectrum really is something that goes from one extreme to another. Like even with color, you might say, oh, red's not in any way inferior to violet. But yet red is, if you look at the wavelength of red,

1:44

you will see it has a slower, larger pattern where violet has a very pattern so it is a rating system a spectrum is a rating system and I just don't like that because the more I learn about autism the more I realize there are specific quote autistic traits and people have a constellation of these traits we

2:08

may not have all of them we may not have all the same traits but but a lot of us have a gradient of traits. For example, and I'm going to share a link to this. After this podcast, I did actually a blog post on the traits in autism, and I listed 10 traits.

2:29

I kind of loosely adapted from the DSM-5, and I rated myself 1 to 10 on those traits. So some traits like repetitive motor, I was very low. Other traits like hyper fixation. I gave myself a 10. Maybe that was too much, but I'm very, very high on that. So that's, I think that's true of everyone.

2:50

And there's other things that complicate it, obviously, like apraxia and different intellectual capacities. But I just think that whole idea of low to high that's perpetuated by the DSM-5 is very misleading. So I'm not using that word spectrum anymore. I even changed my blog. It was writing on the spectrum.

3:09

I changed it back to writing after dark because I just don't buy into that spectrum idea, that ranking anymore. However, when it comes to individual traits, we certainly can rank people. And If being psychic is an autistic trait or not, I think is debatable. But it is a human trait.

3:29

And I do think it can come under the greater heading of sensitivity. And the reason I think that is because I had a lot of experience, a lot of different psychic experiences. I've had precognitive dreams. I've had visions. I've had a lot of experiences. I do not consider myself... overtly psychic.

3:49

These are just things that have happened to me in kind of an episodic way over the course of my life. And these things have informed my belief system. I believe in certain things like the paranormal, the supernatural, because of my psychic experiences. And I use my intuition all the time in understanding things and understanding people.

4:11

It's a huge help to me. So I To me, it's a trait that falls under the greater heading of hypersensitivity and possibly hyperconnectivity too. One of the things I was thinking about over the last two weeks since I did the podcast is the idea of the brain as a receiver.

4:31

And that's an analogy the biophysicist Rupert Sheldrake uses. He says, imagine a radio. And if you took a piece out of a radio, you would no longer hear music. And you would think that the radio could no longer produce music. If you didn't understand a radio at all, you might think that this radio is broken.

4:51

It can't produce music. But that's not actually how a radio works. What's happened is that the radio is no longer receiving the music. So the brain can, I think, be thought of also as a receiver. And the question is, what are different brains receiving? And I think in autism, perhaps, our ability,

5:16

our hyperconnectivity coupled with our hypersensitivity might make us possibly make our brains a different kind of receiver. And there's been no research done on this. This isn't scientific at all. This is just kind of what I think. But I don't personally believe that the physical brain generates consciousness. I like Carl Jung.

5:41

I like the idea of the collective unconscious. I like the idea that we're receiving information. And the reason I like it is because it's happened to me. I've gotten information in dreams and I've gotten information through various psychic means. And it just made me think that maybe we're making connections in different ways.

6:05

And maybe our hypersensitivity extends beyond the material to a degree and maybe we're using a different kind of method of connecting and I know in my own life I've gotten a lot of information and and understood a lot of things through synchronicity and synchronicity part of

6:28

synchronicity is pattern recognition you could be going along in your life and there could be a bunch of synchronicities but if you don't have that eye for detail and that capacity for pattern recognition that a lot of autistic people have, you could totally miss that. You could totally miss the synchronicities because it's not going together for you.

6:52

And pattern recognition is... connecting things. So it's funny to think that the model of autism is that different areas of the brain aren't connecting, and yet we're still making connections, maybe through hypersensitivity, maybe through pattern recognition. And I don't have any answers on this at all. I have no answers, but I do think it's really worth exploring.

7:17

And I did because I started having what my one friend called the dead boyfriend dreams. I started having these dreams about people I had known and lost touch with who had died. And they were evidential because I had no idea. that these people had died, and they were unusual dreams.

7:34

And this was just a short period in 2012 when this was happening to me. And so I decided to study mediumship, which was not the way I really should have applied this, but that was how I felt at the time. I felt getting information, I'm dreaming of the dead, I must be a medium.

7:51

And so I studied with a spiritualist for a couple years, and I ultimately decided that I don't personally want to be the person who is like the ambassador for the afterlife to the grieving. I just don't want that responsibility. And it's fine for people who do. I just don't.

8:11

So after a couple years, I'm like, this really isn't for me. I moved on to something else. But I sat in on a lot of spiritualist development circles. And I did a lot of psychic development exercises. And one thing I noticed in almost all of those groups is that we were all kind of highly sensitive people.

8:28

And not that we were all autistics. Definitely we weren't, but we're all very sensitive. And I just thought that was interesting. And people used to talk about the clairs. I imagine they still do in these development circles, how you have different senses of the material and you have different senses of the immaterial.

8:50

So for example, clairvoyance is clear seeing. So you could see the material world, but some people could see the unseen realms, say, and they have clairaudience, they have clairsentience, they cover all the senses. So is this just hypersensitivity, a very refined way of sensing? And is the lack of interconnection between different brain regions in the autistic

9:20

brain not really a lack of connection, but a different kind of connection? This is what I'm curious about. And for me, I bring information in and a lot of times something happens. It's creative. It's intuitive. It could be psychic. It could be a synchronicity. Something happens outside of me that helps me make sense of that information.

9:42

It helps me connect things. It's a different way of processing. And I just wonder, there's so much about autism that's described like what you could see from looking in the window. It's all based on behavior. The diagnostic criteria is all based on behavior. And it was a model of behavioral psychology, essentially, initially.

10:07

And people are starting to move away from that, but it's still, if you look at the DSM-5, that's all stuff you could see from across the room. It has nothing to do with anybody's inner states. And I just wonder how much that's missing. And so it's interesting to me with the whole, like,

10:25

I'm not sure about the telepathy tapes and the nonverbal autistic telepathy. I read about it and I was really excited about it. And then I thought there's just, there's just a lot here, a lot here that's very tough to research. And I'm not discounting it, but I'm not basing

10:43

I'm not basing what I think about autism and psychic ability on that either. I mean, I think with savants, people always say, how are they doing this? How is a three-year-old playing Mozart? To me, it's not how. It's where did they get it? Where did it come from?

11:00

Like, where are they just plucking it out of the air? It kind of seems that way. So I think savants could make a case, possibly, for some kind of non-local transfer of information. But for me, it's just easier for me to base it on myself and what I do and how my life works.

11:19

And I'm not sure that I'm explaining this very coherently. And it's because it's a new idea to me. I'm just exploring it. I'm not a science person. It's very hard for me to understand the science. And the science is important. Just like if you're trying to listen to music, the radio is important,

11:37

but that doesn't make the radio the source. And our brains are important, but that doesn't make our brains the source. And I think that it could just be that with autism, we have a different way of processing it. Autism was looked at from a behavioral standpoint for so long, and the science is far,

11:57

far from where it needs to be, obviously. And I'm not even sure we can ever understand it through the science, particularly if some of what we're doing is actually non-local. How are we going to understand it through the science? I don't know if this was helpful or not.

12:14

I mean, this is just me kind of trying to figure this stuff out. And I'm going to talk a little more about it. I'm going to try to put it in some kind of a coherent presentation. And I'm probably not going to rely hugely on the science,

12:29

partially because that's really not my thing and partially because it's not there yet. And also, I always feel that the materialistic paradigm is looking at things backwards. I've always felt that.  I feel that there is something that informs our. physical reality.

12:51

You don't have to believe in God necessarily or religion to believe that. You could believe in the collective unconscious. You could believe in whatever you want, really. It's kind of all somatics. But I do think there is something beyond us that is more relevant to our existence than what we're kind of seeing at ground level.

13:12

So maybe that's true with autism. Maybe it's not. But I'm going to try to talk about it a little more in my bumbling, kind of not particularly coherent way. And just not because I have all the answers. Obviously, I don't. I'm just kind of stumbling around in the dark like everybody else.

13:30

But I think it's nice to talk about these things. It's nice to think about these things. And I hope maybe something I said... might get you thinking and you might go in a completely different direction and that's fine. But the point is we're thinking about these things.

13:44

And I think seeing autism as a spectrum of low to high or a disorder or a dysfunction is just does a such a disservice. But the neuro normative paradigm is, is always going to be there because just because of the numbers, just because there's more neuro normative people than there are us.

14:04

So it's kind of up to us, I think, to reinterpret this stuff and to try to look at it from a different perspective. And that's what I'm trying to do right now. And I'm very interested in the idea of autism as a different way of processing, not a dysfunctional way, a different way. And...

14:25

And this is where I'm at with it right now today. So I'm going to do more reading. I'm going to do more thinking. I'm going to do kind of going over my own experience more. I'm trying to write this memoir, which I mentioned before. And that has a lot to do with psychic stuff.

14:42

And that's how I kind of got here because I couldn't tell that story. I couldn't just tell the story of me as an autistic person without going into all the psychic stuff and all the paranormal things. Because to me, to me, they're connected. And that's how the memoir is going to be.

14:59

And I want to kind of explore this in the podcast. Hope you'll bear with me. I hope you'll take it for what it is. Somebody trying to figure it out, not somebody with all the answers. So that's it for today. These are my thoughts on autism and psychic ability for today.

15:13

And I will be back again in June. I'm doing the podcast, trying to do the podcast the first and third Friday, sometimes I'm a day or two late. But I will be back again in June and I'm going to continue on this topic. So I'm going to be sharing a little bit of my own experience.

15:32

I may come back to the telepathy tape stuff or I may not. I'm not sure how relevant that really is for me, but I may. And Diane Powell, like I read her website and I think she's really interesting. I listened to some of her lectures. I mentioned her.

15:46

in the last episode, but I'm not sure how relevant her research really is for me. So, but I'm going to be doing like some of my own research to the best of my ability, and I'm going to be kind of trying to process my own experience through that and share with you guys what I come up with.

16:02

I hope it's helpful. So that's it for this week. Next time we'll continue on this topic. And until then, this is Barbara Graver of Autistic POV, and thank you very much for listening.

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