2003-09-11 - 10:50 a.m.

I read an interesting blurb in Maclean's today. It was a precis of a book based on research into the differences between male and female brains. I might as well type it out since it's already as compact as possible. The bold part is the part I underlined, especially meaningful to me.

"One-day-old babies in an English hospital were offered a choice of objects to view; a mechanical mobile or a woman's smiling face. You guessed it - according to Simon Baron-Cohen's The Essential Difference (HarperCollins), the girls looked at the human and the boys looked at the thing. Sifting through 20 years of research, the author, a Cambridge University psychologist, finds the core difference between the sexes' brains to be that female-type brains are better at empathizing and communicating, while male types excel at understanding systems. His own theory, in fact, is that autism and Asperger's syndrome are simply examples of the extreme male brain in action. Those who live with the conditions can be brilliant at analyzing the most complex systems, but be unable to relate to others' emotional lives. ..."

Well then. The reason this bit captured my attention is that I've so recently written here about how I feared I had social autism. At the time, I threw the word "autism" around as kind of a jest, while all the time trying to expose something within myself that I knew to exist and to bother me, whether or not I knew exactly what it was. I can say with complete assurance that I do agree with the above researcher; I most certainly do have a strong ability to comprehend large and complex systems fairly easily. This is what makes me a good computer programmer. Likewise, I've known for a long time that I have trouble relating to other people, and especially that I often feel strangely emotionless and detached in situations where I think I should feel something.

This isn't to say I claim to be afflicted by some serious syndrome. I mean, it's noticeable enough that it affects my life, but I don't pretend to blame my failings on a mental deficiency. It does, however, give me some reassurance that I'm not as bad off as I thought, that it's natural for me to be this way. It's all about balance, I suppose. I have deficiencies in exchange for talents.

It's not like I'm always emotionless. I actually consider myself very sensitive for a male. Oddly enough, I sometimes feel completely overcome by strong emotions with hardly any trigger or reason. I'm sure in the next few hundred years we'll figure out what all these things mean and why they happen, but for now I'm content to feel a little more like I belong.

I had lots of lucid dreams last night. As I lay there waking up, I remember going through the history of my feelings about computer games. I know that's not a sentence that is going to make a lot of sense to most people. Sorry, I just don't have the language to explain it really. The best analogy I can use is that of the feeling you get when hearing an old song again for the first time in a while. Say you had passed a summer with some friends at some camp and you had listened to this song dozens of times, but then hadn't heard it again for a year or two. On hearing it, you might have this strange feeling of remembering the feeling of that summer. By the feeling, I mean a sort of misty foggy remembrance of all the events of the summer condensed into a snapshot emotion that comes back at you vaguely through the heat-haze of time. Anyway, I get these feelings often, remembering say a time when a group of friends used to show up at my house at 7am and we'd all bike 10 kilometers down the back roads near Elliot Lake to go have a picnic at a scenic spot. We did that almost every day for 2 weeks, so when I think about it now I get a sort of feeling that temporarily sits on top of my current emotions and reminds me of what it was like back then.

So anyway, like I said, as I was waking up, I ... let's say I mentally browsed through the chain of feelings that I've associated with certain times in my life where I played a lot of computer games, feeling each in turn, sort of sampling them, the initial awe and joy, the looking forward to unknown future wonders, the coming to age of the promise of the technologies, and the going forward beyond what I had dreamed into fantastical and absorbing virtual places.

Heh. Some times it hits home that I'm only writing this as a record for myself.

Anyway, time to get some work done. I was remembering that this morning I had a strong lasting feeling that I would do lots of programming today, that I was setting my feet on a path that would lead to lots of work being done in the coming days. It's amazing how quickly and completely those feelings fade as the day wears on.

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