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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
guys can we talk about this completely insane thread where oxytocin nasal spray apparently makes an autistic guy not autistic temporarily? i'm gonna be fucked up about this for days
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eeby deeby cooper
@punished3liza
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here's a fascinating document i discovered by accident yesterday. it's a case report written by an autistic redditor, with all the expected writing mannerisms such status imparts, of what happened after he was given an oxytocin nasal spray prescription. archive.is/UgNfp
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
look at this fucking shit. just this whole paragraph about him having sex with his wife
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eeby deeby cooper
@punished3liza
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he describes subjective effects like wanting to stop posting and go stare at his wife, speaking at normal volume, & suddenly making vocalizations during sex for the first time, which he assumed was something neurotypicals had just seen in porn and imitated
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
"I noticed my son's aspergers bigly today. I keep looking at him when I talk to him and he's like "what" and I'm like "what what" and it's really awkward. I can see what NTs see when they talk to us." the oxytocin *opens up a new way of seeing*
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eeby deeby cooper
@punished3liza
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another thing he describes is being able to look at his son, who is also autistic, and suddenly perceive how normal people have been perceiving himself his entire life.
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
"I saw some kind of social hierarchy in some men when they were talking together. Like one would have neutral body language and the other would have forward body language."
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eeby deeby cooper
@punished3liza
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there's no reason for anyone to fake this kind of post and the author is an authentic and active reddit account so i believe it is real. the descriptions of a jekyll-and-hyde type switch from normal family man to cringing autist at the end of the 3-4 hour dose window is amazing
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
"It's almost as if my brain is reprogramming itself to give more association in memory to these experiences while on oxytocin and less association to those old traumatic experiences."
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
Replying to
@QiaochuYuan
"I had thought of something sad and my face automatically went into sad expressions and my eyes started going into tear mode. I also was unable to stop looking at my wife's face for like an hour during our daily sexdown." DAILY SEXDOWN
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eeby deeby cooper
@punished3liza
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he starts spontaneously and completely involuntarily experiencing normal facial expressions. these are all things that many "high functioning" autistics have to overcome by sheer force of will. i had to learn through practice and study how to make 'natural' facial expressions
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
let me say something about why i find this so exciting: the fact that a single person was able to have this experience, even if it doesn't end up replicating easily, shows that *the neural circuitry for all this stuff is not missing*
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
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Replying to @QiaochuYuan @hyperdiscogirl and @sunofdopamine
even if oxytocin or w/e doesn't pan out as a single-use miracle i could imagine it working well in combination with other things like MDMA and good therapy. it's already fascinating to me to know that it could work at all; that means there's no *missing neural circuitry*
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
and that whatever is going on it's more like some kind of low-level global setting gets tuned weirdly. since that setting is apparently affected by oxytocin, maybe it's something like "degree to which other people and self seem like friendly humans" but who knows
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
back to the reddit guy. he talks about getting tremors from memories of having sex with his wife! if someone had taught him how to do somatic experiencing at this exact moment he might've had a really good time shaking
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
by day 8 he's had so much sex with his wife that he's feeling "drained, sexually" although by day 9 "wife seems kinda disappointed when [the sex is] over" lmao i'm so happy for them
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
day 9 "It's like i could speak NTese" - he's not only accessing his feelings but effortlessly describing them to other people in a way they can understand. also empathy: "can see how the other people is feeling and anticipate their feelings"
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
day 10 "a very slow muscle relaxation event" - he's describing undoing muscle armoring from C-PTSD!!! "severe muscle knots... all over the region in my neck and shoulders and shoulder-blades"
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
day 11 "gaining new abilities with regard to sensing touch in my peripheral limbs," "flexibility is off the charts and I am doing stuff that would make yoga people impressed, but it's not yoga; I'm just trying to move to a position that relieves the knots" e m b o d i m e n t
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
(but personally i am much more interested in oxytocin for C-PTSD than for autism as such, and there's also apparently a whole literature about oxytocin and PTSD)
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
speculative followup
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
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so now that i've had some time to calm down a bit let me do a slightly more sober thread where i speculate about what might have been going on with oxytocin guy and what kind of sense self-experimentation with oxytocin might or might not make twitter.com/QiaochuYuan/st…
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