Sometimes The Illiad And The Odyssey is easy, other days Junie B. Jones is hard. Sometimes I say 'economical' and 'medical trauma' and 'expository', but other days I can only manage 'money' and 'bad doctors' and 'talk-y', sometimes not even that.

And no I don't have any control over if I use 'baby words'. Maybe it makes you uncomfortable to hear a teen say 'tummy' or 'potty', but that's not really my problem. Sometimes my brain can't form words like 'stomach' and 'bathroom', or even if it can my mouth can't make the sounds. And I deserve to communicate my needs and wants even when it can't.

Reading can be hard, hearing can be hard, writing can be hard, talking can be hard. Sometimes doing something as 'small' as trying to comprehend language can be exhausting, excruciating, impossible. And some people are always like that.

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS, that is 100% autism.

Here’s an example:

My mom: “Pack a snack.”

My brain: “No idea what that means.  Let’s just keep reading this book instead.”

My mom: “Why aren’t you packing a snack?”

Me: “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

My mom: “Put five Oreos in a plastic baggie and put it in your backpack!”

Me: “Oh!  Why didn’t you just say so?”

In this example, “pack” was too vague (packing implies a vessel that I must put something into, but she didn’t specify WHAT I was putting into.  A suitcase? A lunchbox? My backpack? The cooler?  Too many choices, ERROR: CAN NOT PROCESS)

and “snack” was too vague (a healthy snack? A yummy snack? An apple? Crackers? Cookies? Who is the snack for? Is it for me, or for Mom, or for a third person? Too many choices, ERROR: CAN NOT PROCESS)

Scientists from the Higher School for Economics and Aarhus University have demonstrated that spatial navigation is linked to language comprehension.

The latter is a complicated cognitive function, and is performed by a network of cortical generators in the brain; physical experience, like movement or spatial motion play, play a key-part in psychological experiences as well as cognitive functions, which is related to how one mentally constructs the meaning of a sentence. The team carried out an experiment at the HSE Centre for Cognition and Decision Making, explaining the relation between those two systems by using neurophysiological data and describing the brain mechanisms supporting navigation systems in both domains.

In storytelling, individuals need to be able to jump to another person’s POV; the study is the first attempt to show that the brain simulates sentence perspective by using non-linguistic areas, which are typically in charge of video-spatial thinking. Earlier studies already pointed out that humans have certain spatial preferences, based either on the individual’s body (egocentric) or independent from it (allocentric); although this is not absolute and changes in various situations, those preferences define how one perceives the surrounding space, as well as how they plan and understand navigation in there.

For the experiment, the participants had to solve two types of tasks; the first was a computer-based spatial navigate task, which involved movement through a twisting virtual tunnel, at which’s end they had to indicate the beginning of it. The shape was designed so that participants with egocentric and allocentric perspectives would estimate this starting point differently, which helped the researchers to split them up according to their reference frame predisposition. The second task involved understanding simple sentences and match them with pictures.Those were different in terms of their perspective, and the same narrative could be described using first or second person pronouns. The participants had to choose pictures matched the situation described best by the sentence.

...I seriously thought it meant an online record of a webmaster’s changes to a website.  I had no idea it meant something else, would get shortened to ‘blog’, resembled a cross between a diary and a guestbook (anyone remember when guestbooks were the main way to communicate with website owners? anyone remember the Internet before websites?  I swear I’m not that old but online eras are so short) and would take over the Internet.  

MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

What is “rude”?  I do not F*CKING know, and I will NEVER UNDERSTAND THIS WORD IT MAKES NO SENSE ALLISTICS JUST MAKE SHIT UP I SWEAR

Social words like “grateful” and “rude” are the HARDEST for me, but I also struggle with simpler words like “shoe”.

Seriously, what even is a shoe?  Are sandals shoes? SOMETIMES THEY ARE AND SOMETIMES THEY AREN’T, WHAT.