Re: On Stimming

[Guest guest]

Interesting ideas, WIliam. 'Pacing' (walking back and forth, or around a room etc) in humans and aniumals may be similair?'My cat Rusty is a servant of the Living God....'adapted from a poem by SmartSubject: On StimmingTo: FAMSecretSociety Received: Wednesday, March 7, 2012, 7:18 PM

I was reading something the other day that made me think about stimming.

Simply put it goes like this. There are two stages of sleep: Deep and REM. In deep sleep the body remains still. During REM, the eyes move but so can the body in twitches and jerks (and sometimes sleepwalking, etc.). There is a circuit of sorts in the brain that keeps the body from fully acting out the dreams, most of the time. However, if that part of the brain is damaged, that safeguard is gone. Animal studies have shown that if that part of the brain is damaged, then the animals will indeed act out their dreams in full.

The author put forth the idea that this same bit of the brain works during the day as well. It functions to keep us from acting out our thoughts. In most people it is imperfect. Thinking often manifests as fidgeting, twiddling thumbs, pacing, and the like. This might not so much be acting out what one is thinking but is a spillover of the nervous energy be generated by the brain.

So perhaps stimming is related to this. Since people with Autism tend to spend a lot of time in their heads, perhaps the energy of all that thinking is spill out as stimming, which is itself just a more pronounced form of what others also do. Perhaps the filter is faulty and lets more movement through (testable by watching REM sleep movement), perhaps the "thought energy" is of higher power, or perhaps some other Body/brain disconnect. After all, many people on the spectrum either dislike being touched, have a need for more physical sensory stimulation or the like, so perhaps that is part of it, though I haven't thought that angle through yet.

Perhaps stimming gets worse when exposed to sensory overload because it is taking more mental effort to block it out and continue to focus on what they want to focus on. More mental effort means more bleed over of energy thus more stimming. Perhaps meltdowns in part because the body can no longer handle all the energy overflowing from the brain.

Being distracted here so I'll try to come back to this later. But my basic point is that perhaps stimming is simply a sign of thought in Autistics as fidgeting may be a sign of thought in NT's.

[Guest guest]

Its possible. Its likely the animal is being drive by its instinct to look for food. Even though in captivity it certainly knows it will be fed, but it still has the drive and energy for it. Perhaps they are imagining and thinking in their way where food might hidden. A neighbor's cat likes to sit in a spot in the hall where it can see into most of the rooms in the house. It can't see out of windows, but if a mouse were to move in any of those rooms, it had a good chance of being seen. So perhaps instinctively, the cat knows a good hunting spot when it sees one.

Interesting ideas, WIliam. 'Pacing' (walking back and forth, or around a room etc) in humans and aniumals may be similair?

'My cat Rusty is a servant of the Living God....'

adapted from a poem by Smart

[Guest guest]

When we brought her to our home to live, our feral cat, Boots, would often 'rest' in the centre of our house, we called it "Boots' control position". Even though she was retired from her work as a mouser, she could certainly have been instinctively in a good hunting position. The centre of our house gives visibilty into all our mainfloor rooms except the back porch!Boots certainly kept her survival instincts when out in our yard, she would not lie on the bare lawn like our domestic cats, she would 'hide' in low growing flowers so that the silhoutte of her head would not be visible to winged predators. When she still lived on the prairie, we saw an owl bigger than her watching her from the roof of a gainery, she knew it was there, and kept watch on it.rl'My cat Rusty is a

servant of the Living God....'adapted from a poem by SmartSubject: Re: On StimmingTo: FAMSecretSociety Received: Sunday, March 11, 2012, 7:14 AM

Its possible. Its likely the animal is being drive by its instinct to look for food. Even though in captivity it certainly knows it will be fed, but it still has the drive and energy for it. Perhaps they are imagining and thinking in their way where food might hidden. A neighbor's cat likes to sit in a spot in the hall where it can see into most of the rooms in the house. It can't see out of windows, but if a mouse were to move in any of those rooms, it had a good chance of being seen. So perhaps instinctively, the cat knows a good hunting spot when it sees one.