As you prefer - I'm not qualified to comment, but have an interest in personality disorders and the "high empathy" point you mention happens to be resonant for me personally.
Conversation
Let's start with social stuff.
I'm fairly socially inhibited. Have a lot of anxiety traits. Hyperreliant on verbal ability.
Cause of anxiety: I have trouble with social fluency. I understand social rules implicitly, but get overwhelmed by density of info/second guess a lot.
2
3
This may be partly due to upbringing, as I've been making major improvements in these areas over the last years and don't seem to have base-level issues with functioning.
Apart from the lack of socio-emotional latent inhibition. I have to look away from faces when talking, e.g.
2
3
When I'm not anxious, I tend to be hyperextroverted to the point of being a nuisance to people who can't deal with high energy.
I'm talkative, intense, very larger than life, sort of effortlessly/unintentionally taking up space.
I can turn this off, but it *wants* to be on.
2
1
6
That's mostly it for explicitly social stuff.
With empathy, I am ridiculously sensitive to sensory inputs and information about people in my environment, and constantly modelling people intuitively. I wasn't even aware of this until earlier in my 20s, but I have always done it.
3
6
E.g. I've had multiple experiences of telling people stuff "they've heard from their therapist"/that they don't believe at the time and later go "holy shit, dude, how?"
This is not something I can switch off. It's compulsive.
1
2
I am so socially hypersensitive that I have a lot of experiences that seem/are pre-cognitive wrt. others.
I pick up changes in people and notice problems weeks in advance of attendant behaviors. Sometimes these come in dreams.
It's incredibly hard to lie to me, if I know you.
1
5
For cognitive content, I have a lot of weird hyper/hypofunctions intermixed.
I have a lot of savantisms, areas where I pick stuff up effortlessly and develop unusual skills. I'm constantly bridging topics and seem to have massive parallel processing, even for a human.
1
3
At the same time, deep focus on any one thing is almost impossible and I have a lot of problems with modelling anything I don't have a natural feel for.
It's very difficult to learn by rote, for me. I'm teflon for anything I can't play with, even when I really want to learn.
Sometimes I come back to something that was "impossible" and find that it's suddenly effortless, to the point that I'm like 2+ standard deviations above normal ability.
(This in areas where I used to be totally clueless, often very recently, despite concerted effort.)
1
4
I feel like my thought processes are as likely to overfit and lead me into some complete nonsense as they are to give me some completely novel insights from very low information density.
2
3
Show replies
I had to start reading this thread backwards, because time is an illusion and also I got bored
Focus and rote is for people whose brains are content to be ordinary.
But we are initiated, aren't we Bruce?
1
1
I would actually really like to activate a deeper level of insight into any one thing so I can branch *everything* to that one skill.
Feel like I'd start developing superpowers at that point.
1
Show replies