Home 2023 › Forums › The General Hall › "Stimming" as a function-signal
I will try my best to keep this post concise as I really do not so much need for it to be a very long one, and in order to facilitate this process, instead of explaining "stimming" myself, I will provide an external explanation.
Almost everyone engages in some form of self-stimulating behavior. You might bite your nails or twirl your hair around your fingers when you’re bored, nervous, or need to relieve tension. Stimming can become such a habit that you’re not even aware you’re doing it. For most people, it’s a harmless behavior. You recognize when and where it’s inappropriate.
For example, if you’ve been drumming your fingers on your desk for 20 minutes, you take social cues that you’re irritating others and choose to stop. In people with autism, stimming might be more obvious. For example, it may present as full-body rocking back and forth, twirling, or flapping the hands. It can also go on for long periods. Often, the individual has less social awareness that the behavior might be disruptive to others.
Though I understand that CT is not predictive of every aspect of a person's cognitive functioning, assuming that the embodied cognition aspect to cognitive science is the one endorsed by this theory, within the context of CT's methodology (which is largely based on directly observable, visual cues or observations rather than any kind of inferential methodology), if there is an interfering aspect (like stimming, for example) it may become an important question to consider how these behaviors manifest cognitively (or at least consider the questions of their causality). At the very least, an explanation of how disorders and disabilities might have an effect on vultological readings would be useful.
The way stimming is described here seems quite in line with the vultological signals of the Pe energetic (outwardly expressed, uncoordinated, excess energy); however, I have reasons to be skeptical that autism is related to Pe (or to any specific energetic, for that matter, though I think certain energetics and axes are more related to it than others). A simple reason would be that autism usually implies an unawareness of what lies outside of one's experience (or at the very least, an inattention to how one comes off, which can lead to one being unaware of the environmental reactions to them) - and that this seems directly contrary to the definition of Pe as an energetic (which seems the most externally contingent out of all of them).
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