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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

"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

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-???)

"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

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-???)

"I also think this hormone may be impacting my PTSD because now I don't get grossed out when my wife does certain things that my rapist did."

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eeby deeby cooper

also extremely therapeutically relevant is that he describes serious improvements in his PTSD and rape trauma symptoms

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

"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-???)

"I just caught it by accident but it seems like you could make the trauma lessened by repeating the trigger while on oxytocin but have the trigger lead to a positive outcome instead of a bad one." ‼️

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

"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

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-???)

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-???)

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-???)

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-???)

also this little snippet from the wikipedia article makes me very curious to know whether oxytocin can reduce gender dysphoria 👀

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

"[I]n males classified as having “insecure” attachments, oxytocin increased the level of attachment security in the majority of participants." ‼️ ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

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

4:21 AM · Jan 25, 2022Twitter Web App

QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

Replying to

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-???)

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-???)

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-???)

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-???)

i've been throwing this link around in the replies but just to have it in the main thread: here's a place where you can buy a $50 oxytocin nasal spray, i have already bought one for a friend, if you try it PLEASE REPORT BACK science.bio/product-tag/ox

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

like seriously if you try oxytocin i wanna hear about it, positive or negative results or whatever, DM me, i'll be checking my DM requests

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

there is apparently also a whole medical literature about oxytocin therapy for autism already that i am probably not qualified to deep dive into. found a random site that claims "research shows mixed results" raisingchildren.net.au/autism/therapi

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

(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-???)

one negative report about the science.bio spray via DMs so far :/ unclear if it was fake or went bad or there were other things going on. i’m gonna do a follow-up thread where i wildly speculate sometime today

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

hmm nuts, from the SSC subreddit. i do have a wild speculation about why RCTs might not be a good idea here specifically reddit.com/r/slatestarcod

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

speculative followup

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

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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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

suggestion in the DMs to experiment with high-dose N-acetyl cysteine or more speculatively acetyl-L-carnitine

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