Advertise on podcast: The AutSide Podcast

Cathy and I explore the distance between understanding and having the words available, following a thread through forensic science, the Script Garden, and maths—with fresh bread giving fractions somewhere meaningful to land. Cathy and I finally managed to sit down for another chat after a few weeks away, and we covered rather a lot of ground: language, learning, forensic science, calculus, and fresh bread. There is usually a thread. Sometimes it takes us a wee while to find out how much is attached to it. We began with something that can be difficult to explain when you write and speak professionally: having language does not mean having the words available for every situation. I can lecture on a familiar subject and still encounter a moment for which I have no usable response. There is always more growing to do in the Script Garden. I also talked about how my writing happens. Something sets off a flood of connections, I talk into my voice notes, and then comes the work of finding the threads and giving them somewhere to live. What eventually appears as a tidy series of essays began as rather a lot happening at once. That brought us to maths, including Cathy’s account of a young person who can calculate what he needs whilst working in a garage but struggles with the questions presented at school. How do we help someone recognise the relationship between what they already understand and the language an examination expects? Naturally, I brought bread into it. Making a loaf, sharing it fairly, and eating it together gives fractions and proportions somewhere to land. By the time we introduce the mathematical language, we have something to talk about—and hopefully some olive oil and herbs to go with it. Cathy later observed that I had her with the bread and lost her with the Xs and Ys, which rather helped demonstrate the point. A lovely morning of conversation, a little silliness, and the question that keeps finding its way into everything I do: what has to happen for meaning to become language? The AutSide is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit autside.substack.com/subscribe

I supply the life; others claim the authority to explain it. Across womanhood, autism, language, and queerness, I carry the work of correction—and ask what future my children inherit when who we are is treated as up for debate. I supply the life; someone else is granted the authority to explain it. This Sunday morning, I am thinking about how often that relationship returns across my life—my body, my language, my work, and my queerness—and how lonely it becomes when being the person concerned does not reliably make me the person heard. I am six feet seven inches tall, athletic, and powerfully built. I am a woman. Yet narrow expectations of womanhood make my body something other people believe they may question. I am autistic and a gestalt processor who struggles mightily with language, working within a system that tolerates my autism whilst largely ignoring the conditions through which speech becomes available. I am queer, living within patriarchal and capitalist arrangements that make recognition conditional upon conformity. These pressures accumulate in one life. Mine. The ASHA correspondence gives this relationship a concrete form. I identified discrepancies between claims published about my work and the source cited to support them. The journal reported a review and declared it closed without explaining how those discrepancies were resolved. Its account travels with institutional weight. My correction has to travel with me. I do not “identify as” autistic, queer, or a woman. I am. When I speak, I am telling you who is here. Yet finding the words does not guarantee that anyone will allow them to change their understanding. I am getting older, and I worry about the future my children inherit: whose needs will shape support, whose testimony will matter, and how much life they will spend defending their existence. Self-knowledge cannot perform all the work of belonging. I need others willing to listen, revise their assumptions, and share the labour of understanding. When my life exceeds the norm, there must be room for the norm to change. The AutSide is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit autside.substack.com/subscribe

I speak frankly about pain, bullying, identity, and the effort behind the words. My life existed before recognition; my needs persist when I can speak. A personal account of what has been happening behind the recent writing. I have not had many good days lately, and I wanted to speak about what has been happening before the effort of making a polished account became another thing I could not manage. In this video, I speak without prepared supports for about forty-five minutes—about pain, identity, bullying, language, and the work of navigating institutions when I do not already have the scripts for what they require. The words were available for this recording. That does not mean they are always available, or that speaking comes without cost. This summer’s legal name and gender marker change was an important point in a much longer history. Being taken from my birth parents, having my identity sealed, and discovering my adoption at seventeen left me with a reality I have spent decades trying to understand. Some pieces have become clearer; others remain contradictory and may never resolve. For me, those unresolved pieces continue to require attention. Not having words for what was happening did not mean nothing was happening. It meant I had to live through it before I could explain it. That distinction runs through my present circumstances too. The injury to my leg has brought persistent pain, interrupted sleep, uncertainty, and difficult conversations about what happens next. Updating my name across accounts and records has brought another succession of demands—telephone calls, explanations, documents, and procedures whose instructions are sometimes only available after I have managed to ask for them. I can do some of these things. People see that I have done them. They rarely see how much capacity the doing consumed, or what became unavailable afterwards. This week, a staff training about bullying brought years of experience into the room with me. I was being asked to attend to a story in which teachers protect children from bullying, whilst carrying my own experiences of harassment and repeated misgendering at school—and knowing that queer pupils have also described feeling unsafe. I spoke out. An assistant principal subsequently listened, discussed next steps with me, and asked for a written statement. I was grateful that she took the matter seriously. Producing that statement still required me to find an order for experiences that arrived together, tearfully, under pressure. My writing is part of how I make that order available to myself. AutSide and Sensual Residue hold scripts, histories, feelings, and ideas that I return to when I need language for my life. What reaches a reader as an essay also serves me as somewhere to put what cannot keep crowding my attention. This is why I keep returning to the difference between an output and the conditions that made it possible—and why I write about witnesses, whose silence can help establish what a room permits. I do not want my own silence to become part of that permission. I have always been autistic. I have always been a gestalt processor. I have always been a queer trans woman. Recognition, diagnosis, disclosure, and corrected documents mark moments when something became speakable or officially acknowledged; my life was already there. This recording is a moment within that life, and an attempt to share the circumstances behind the recent writing. Thank you to everyone who reads, watches, comments, shares, or subscribes. Your support helps make this work possible, and sometimes helps with the ordinary necessities of living too. I am deeply grateful. The AutSide is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit autside.substack.com/subscribe

Cathy and I ask whose testimony counts as evidence. Autistic people describe the load, pain, and preparation behind observable behaviour—yet our accounts are too often dismissed before they enter the record. Today, Cathy and I returned to a question that runs beneath so much of the argument about autism and gestalt processing: what counts as evidence, and who gets to decide? I can describe what happens inside my own experience—the accumulation of information, the difficulty recognising bodily signals, the labour of rebuilding a plan—and still find that description treated as something outside the evidentiary record. The behaviour is available for somebody else to interpret, whilst my account of what produced it becomes suspect. I am visible as an object of study. My standing as a witness is less secure. I reached for the language of witness testimony because it makes that imbalance difficult to ignore. A witness’s account need not settle every question to belong in the record; it can be examined, compared with other accounts, and considered alongside other evidence. Autistic testimony deserves that same seriousness. My description cannot, by itself, establish a neurological mechanism or prove that every autistic person processes as I do. But those limits do not make it evidentially empty. There is a consequential difference between asking what an account can establish and deciding, before examining it, that the person giving it has nothing to contribute. We explored that difference through my childhood difficulties with toileting. From outside, the problem might be framed as a failure to request permission or use the required phrase. From inside, there were questions about whether I could recognise the bodily signal at all, and whether language was accessible when I needed it. Requiring the correct words does not resolve either difficulty; it can make access to a basic bodily need depend upon the very capacity that is unavailable. My testimony brings those conditions into view, including the humiliation and trauma that a record of successful or unsuccessful toilet training might never capture. What an adult counted was not necessarily what the child endured. Changing plans offered another example. I described how preparing for Saturday establishes a whole arrangement of expectations, language, bodily readiness, and practical decisions; moving the meeting to Sunday does not necessarily dissolve that arrangement. The first remains active whilst I construct the second. What looks like a small alteration from outside can become an accumulation from inside. Cathy recognised related accounts from other autistic adults, and we considered what happens when schools repeatedly change seating, schedules, activities, and meals, then explain a child’s eventual overwhelm through the last sound or disruption. The final event is easy to observe. The load that made it consequential requires a longer record—and attention to the person carrying it. This also shaped our discussion of my developing paper on what “gestalt” can mean. I want a protocol that makes clear where a claim resides: in a description of cognitive architecture, a framework for understanding, or an intervention. Each raises different questions and requires evidence appropriate to those questions. A change in observable performance cannot automatically establish the architecture that produced it, just as testimony about an experience cannot automatically validate a particular intervention. Precision matters here because an argument against one claim should not quietly become permission to dismiss every other claim sharing its vocabulary—including the experiences people are trying to describe. We ended with the distance between visible achievement and the support required to sustain it. People can see me teach, publish, and speak; they cannot necessarily see the preparation, unstable access to language, accessibility tools, pain, or narrow margin behind those outcomes. If competence becomes grounds for disbelieving my support needs, then the work of managing disability helps conceal the disability itself. That is why this conversation matters beyond a dispute over terminology. Autistic people are offering accounts of what support does, what demands cost, and what childhood experiences leave behind. Our testimony needs scrutiny, context, and careful interpretation. It also needs to be admitted. The AutSide is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit autside.substack.com/subscribe

What does ‘gestalt’ mean across fields, and what evidence supports each use? This video introduces my developing paper’s floor-and-sense map. Subscribers are invited to examine the draft and help refine its distinctions. An explanation can sound settled long before the argument it explains is ready. That is one reason I generate these video explainers during research: I want to hear what happens when my developing work is compressed into a sequence that promises to make it clear. This video was generated in Google’s NotebookLM, using Gemini, from the rough draft of my upcoming paper, What ‘Gestalt’ Can Mean, and at Which Floor. It offers an early look at the work, and another layer of examination. An explainer has particular demands: it selects a route, establishes an order, decides what needs introducing, and moves the listener towards a conclusion. Listening to that sequence helps me examine whether the relationships I intended have survived. Where does a distinction become an absolute? Where does a provisional map become a settled taxonomy? Where does the system supply certainty that my sources, or my argument, do not support? This one is imperfect. It sometimes describes entire fields in sweeping terms, narrows perception to the visual, and presents the difficulty of a unifying definition as though its impossibility had been established. Those are places to return to the draft—to check whether my wording invited the interpretation, whether a boundary needs strengthening, or whether the system has added something of its own. Its errors become questions for my work. They do not become my conclusions. There are also quirks that are difficult to miss. It absolutely butchers the pronunciation of my name, finding several inventive ways to get it wrong. In my experience, names outside its familiar English naming patterns also require explicit pronoun instructions, or the system defaults to he/him. I specified she/her here; the narrator obligingly reads that instruction aloud in the introduction. These details matter. A tool can help make someone’s work available whilst still failing to recognise the person whose work it is. For me, as an autistic researcher with communication and language difficulties, this process provides another way to check what I have managed to communicate. I generate the research, the analysis, and the argument. The system returns an interpretation that I can listen to, question, and compare with what I meant. Understanding and language do not always become available together for me; hearing the work organised externally can help me locate what still needs expression. That is part of what I want to make visible by sharing this video: how a tool can support participation, and how much active judgement that support requires. The paper responds to a recent call for a clear definition of ‘gestalt’ by examining more than a century of its documented use. Across perceptual psychology, linguistics, developmental research, and communication practice, the term has described related forms of organisation without consistently describing the same object. My purpose is to help stakeholders specify which sense they mean and what kind of claim they are making. A floor identifies whether the claim concerns architecture, a developmental framework, or intervention. A sense identifies what is being described as whole within that claim. Those distinctions help us ask whether the evidence offered addresses the organisation proposed, and what further evidence would be needed to connect one level with another. Programming several words onto one AAC button, for example, establishes an externally unified selection. How the person perceives, remembers, understands, or processes those words remains a further question. The relationship can be investigated once it has been stated clearly. The paper proposes a specification standard to support that clarity. It leaves substantive questions about developmental stages, processor classification, and particular communication arrangements open, so that further research and practice can address them with greater precision. I welcome readers into the draft whilst it is developing. Consider this an invitation to open, crowdsourced critical review: identify missing sources, question the distinctions, challenge an inference, or show me where the language carries more certainty than the evidence permits. Where does the map help? Where does it need redrawing? The video is one interpretation of the work. Your reading can help me strengthen the work itself. If you wish to participate, feel free to reply to the email copy of this post with your contact information. The AutSide is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit autside.substack.com/subscribe

My developing paper traces over a century of ‘gestalt’ across fields, asking how its different senses can support a shared language for research and practice. Read the draft and help refine it through critical review. Sometimes I need to hear my argument returned to me before I can hear where it has become vulnerable—where a distinction I thought I had established remains exposed to another reading, where a connection has been supplied rather than supported by the text, or where the language has not yet caught up with the work. The audio shared here was generated by Google’s NotebookLM, using Gemini, from the outline of a paper I’m developing, What ‘Gestalt’ Can Mean, and at Which Floor. This is an early look at work in progress. The generated ‘hosts’ make sweeping claims that my outline does not warrant, and those errors are part of why I use this process. I listen for what survives and what changes. Does the argument remain recognisable? Do its distinctions hold? Where does a carefully bounded proposition become a declaration about an entire field? When the system overreaches, I return to my own work and ask why—whether something in my wording invited that reading, whether an important boundary needs to become more explicit, or whether the system has supplied an argument of its own. An error does not automatically identify a fault in my paper. It gives me a place to examine. I am sharing this episode partly to offer a view into that recursive research process, and partly because the paper has implications across several fields. I also want to show how these tools can help someone with communication and language difficulties, like me, participate in the world. I generate the work—the research, the analysis, the argument. The system gives me another way to check what I have communicated, to hear what has become available to a reader and what remains insufficiently carried by the language. That access matters. I have paid hundreds of dollars for an editor to examine an academic paper, only to find evidence that my work had been run through Claude and returned to me at the human editorial rate. In trying to find a human editor for my academic work, I encountered an economic problem as well as an accessibility problem: the human attention I was seeking had become difficult to obtain in a market where editors are expected to compete with Claude’s speed and cost. Using the tool directly gives me quick and timely access to a checking process I can repeat, question, and inspect. For someone whose language does not reliably arrive at the same time as her understanding, that can help an argument reach the world. The paper itself responds to a recent discussion of the need for a clear definition of ‘gestalt’. My response begins with the term’s documented history across more than a century—a history in which it has acquired several related, but distinct, uses. Perceptual organisation, linguistic structure, developmental direction, an inferred organisation within a learner, and an arrangement programmed into a communication system can all be described using this word. Each use asks something different of the evidence. My purpose is to trace those uses and help stakeholders specify which one they mean. A single unifying definition risks concealing distinctions that research and practice need to preserve. Two working terms organise the paper. A floor identifies the kind of claim being made: architecture, a developmental framework, or intervention. A sense identifies what ‘gestalt’ denotes within that claim—what, specifically, is being treated as a whole. Naming both helps us ask whether the evidence offered addresses the organisation claimed, and what further evidence would be needed to connect one level with another. This is a contribution towards a shared language. The paper leaves substantive questions about developmental stages, processor classification, and particular communication arrangements open. Its examples examine the relationship between claims and evidence, including the language of my own earlier work. The generated hosts sometimes turn that examination into a critique broader than the one I am making. Their confidence should not be mistaken for my conclusion. I am opening the draft to readers whilst it is still developing. Consider this an invitation to a form of crowdsourced peer review: read, comment, question the distinctions, identify omissions, and show me where a source or a claim needs closer attention. This is open critical reading, with responsibility for the final argument remaining mine. Where does the paper help you understand what is being claimed? Where does it leave you uncertain? Where have I failed to preserve a distinction that matters? Those are comments I welcome. They are part of how the work becomes more precise. For subscribers who want to take part in the review, please reply to the email copy of this with your contact information. The AutSide is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit autside.substack.com/subscribe

After weeks apart, Cathy and I returned to a question at the heart of my work: how does meaning become language? We followed its history across disciplines, brought it back to my classroom, and celebrated a sold-out webinar. It was good to speak with Cathy again after several weeks apart. She returned with a deceptively simple question: what is gestalt, and where does a definition begin? That gave us a way into the work I’ve been doing whilst she was away—tracing a history that reaches well beyond Marge Blanc, Anne Peters, or Barry Prizant, and asking what has to happen for meaning to become language. We talked about how easily that question gets divided among disciplines. Psychology, linguistics, speech and language therapy, and education each hold a part of it, but the connections can disappear when everyone works in a separate room. Much of the scholarship I’ve been reading approaches the question across those boundaries, often in languages that Anglophone discussions overlook. Cathy recognised that this is a global conversation, and it was lovely to be able to share where the trail through those papers has taken me. The question matters in my classroom as well as in the literature. A child can learn that a kettle is hot before she can say, “The kettle is hot.” The experience has meaning; the architectural question is how that meaning becomes available in language. That same distinction runs through my current AutSide series: an observable behaviour may be called executive dysfunction, social deficit, or communication impairment, but the behaviour alone cannot tell us what produced it. I also caught Cathy up on the conversation between my two Substacks. AutSide is where I’m working through questions of architecture, whilst Sensual Residue follows what it has been like to live with the consequences—including the life behind No Margin for Error. So often I do something first, then find the words to explain what happened and why. Writing lets me test whether the language carries the meaning I was trying to convey. We ended with the news that Cathy and Ali’s webinar had filled all 400 places within 72 hours. I’m delighted to be taking part alongside others. More than anything, though, it was good to be back in conversation with Cathy—to pick up the thread, find that it was still there, and know we’ll speak again next week. The AutSide is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit autside.substack.com/subscribe

Belonging is more than entering a room. In this video, I consider literacy, gestalt processing, visible strategy, and the structures that must change when every learner is fully understood as having belonged there all along. This morning, I recorded a video about belonging from the ordinary room where much of my writing happens—in my home office and library, surrounded by books, papers, old technology, and the accumulated life of the work. I chose flowers and pearls because I needed something lovely. My leg is not healing as it should, the pain remains significant, and getting dressed has become one of the ways I remind myself that pain does not get to possess the whole field. I wore red lipstick, too, and found myself smiling on camera—teeth crooked, tea-stained, chipped, and unmistakably lived in. I am beginning to like that smile. I am beginning, a wee bit more each day, to feel that I belong in this body. That feeling belongs inside this video because its central argument is that inclusion and belonging are not the same. Inclusion says: you may enter the room. Belonging says: your presence tells us what this room must become. I talk about students who enter literacy classrooms already carrying years of difficulty, observation, correction, and shame. They may be physically present, receive accommodations, and even become successful by institutional measures. None of that necessarily means they recognise themselves in the learning taking place. I talk particularly about Self-Regulated Strategy Development as a way of making the hidden work of reading and writing visible. Accomplished readers and writers anticipate, hesitate, lose the thread, make connections, manage emotion, revise their understanding, and begin again. Yet schools often conceal this activity, show students only the finished product, and treat those who cannot infer the missing process as deficient. For gestalt processors, meaning may arrive as a dense, simultaneous whole long before it can be presented in the sequence a classroom expects. We ask for the main idea before the dust has settled around the whole of the text—then mistake difficulty producing ordered language for an absence of organised thought. Belonging begins when we stop treating the learner as a failed version of the person for whom the room was supposedly built. It begins when her presence changes our practice, her account of her own process carries authority, and difficulty does not revoke her membership. Perhaps that is what I am learning in my own body, too. Belonging is not the reward for becoming perfect. It is the knowledge that I do not have to become someone else to remain. The AutSide is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit autside.substack.com/subscribe

This episode is an experiment: I fed the last several months of reference tracing, the Kazakh and Soviet lineage behind gestalt language processing, into Gemini Notebook and let it generate a conversation between two AI hosts. What comes back is not a paper. It is something closer to a century of Eurasian scholarship compressed into a single breathless walk-and-talk, and it holds up far better than I expected it to. The claim underneath everything discussed here is simple to state and hard to sit with: the way most of us were taught to think about language, letters first, then sounds, then words, then sentences, brick by brick toward Shakespeare, is not how language actually develops in a human brain. It is how instruction happens to be sequenced, and somewhere along the way that sequence got mistaken for the mind’s own architecture. This episode traces where that mistake was first named, and named specifically, by Kazakh linguists working under colonial and then Stalinist pressure in the early twentieth century, decades before Western cognitive science caught up to the same insight from an entirely different direction. Akhmet Baitursynuly built the first Kazakh grammar for Kazakh children starting from speech they already possessed, not from meaningless atoms they’d need to assemble. Qudaibergen Zhubanuly went further and diagnosed the mechanism itself, how atom-first literacy teaching quietly becomes an atom-first theory of mind, and connected that error directly to colonial linguistics mistaking a poor methodological fit for a deficiency in the people being described. Vygotsky, working in Soviet psychology at almost the same moment, arrived at a structurally identical claim from clinical and developmental evidence, thought moves through meaning toward word, not the reverse, and did so while sitting in the same professional rooms as Sukhareva, whose clinical work on childhood psychopathy was converging on the same principle from psychiatry. None of this is presented as a tidy family tree. It’s closer to several rivers meeting, each arriving independently at the same refusal of the brick-by-brick model, before the threads gather in Shakaman’s 2023 paper on the ‘Gestalt Words’ and, from there, into the argument this podcast keeps circling: that gestalt language processing in autistic people is not a broken version of the bottom-up model. It is the ordinary human architecture, visible. A small note before you listen: this was generated from source material, not scripted by a person, and several names get mangled in the audio, Baitursynuly, Zhubanuly, and Shakhnarovich among them, along with a few Russian terms. I’ve left it as generated rather than corrected, partly because the errors are a genuinely interesting artifact of what happens when a century of transliterated Eurasian scholarship gets run through a model trained mostly on English, and partly because the argument survives the mispronunciations intact. The AutSide is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit autside.substack.com/subscribe

At the end of two converging series, the question changes: meaning does not overflow into language. Safety, stability, access, and meaning time allow a superpositional field to resolve. The word is only the trace. This is the epilogue to What Has to Happen for Meaning to Become Language?—and it arrives as the simultaneous series on Sensual Residue is also reaching into questions of field, dimensionality, access, and what remains alive before resolution. I did not expect the two series to meet quite here. But at the end of this long journey through Stage 0, the Script Garden, Shakaman, cognition, concept, sign, and the extraordinary machinery hidden behind successful language, I think the original question has changed. Perhaps I have been looking for a pathway when what I needed was a geometry. That became clearer when someone recently described my cognitive experience back to me as “parallel processing that cannot serialise”—a mind holding too much at once and therefore requiring an external container for the overflow. The description was thoughtful and sympathetic. It was also wrong. Parallel versus serial is still binary. I continually describe my experience as superpositional. There is no container becoming full. There is no overflow. It is all there—and some of what eventually becomes discrete enough to name may not yet exist as discrete things at all. Shakaman’s architecture can be written sequentially, but analytical sequence does not necessarily describe cognitive mechanism. In my dimensional model, field resolution requires safety within the lower dimensions. Stability permits sustained access. Sustained access permits entry into meaning time. And the fifth dimension is where the question at the centre of this series becomes capable of resolution: the superpositional field can resolve sufficiently for meaning to become linguistically available. Technology has changed what I can do there because I now have machinery I can trust with portions of the processing—holding intermediate structures stable, recovering relationships, testing formulations, and giving me different doorways back into the same field. Nothing has been emptied from my mind. Nothing has become serial. More has become resolvable. Sometimes that resolution becomes a sentence. Sometimes, after years, it becomes a book. And then I want people to take those books—teach them, build courses from them, disagree with them, and carry the ideas somewhere I never could. That delights me. That was the point. But the thing I eventually managed to make sayable is not the machinery by which I came to know it. A fluent sentence cannot tell you how it became possible, and a book cannot tell you the shape of the cognition that produced it. The word comes late. The trace is not the machinery. Language may be the lower-dimensional trace of a resolution that became possible elsewhere. The AutSide is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit autside.substack.com/subscribe

Pain, questions, medical trauma, a former name, and one effortless she. What happens when a hospital demands sequential answers from an autistic gestalt processor experiencing the whole field at once? This was supposed to be another Sunday Mornings with Jaime & Cathy. Instead, I became quite ill, missed the timing for our conversation, and spent part of the week moving through urgent care and hospital. But somewhere between the pain scale, the laboratory, the ultrasound, the questions, and the accumulating uncertainty, I realised I was living the question I have spent this entire series trying to understand: What has to happen for meaning to become language? An autistic gestalt processor with a very visibly obvious medical problem goes to hospital—and almost immediately, she is asked to take the whole of it apart. Rate the pain from one to ten. Describe the onset of symptoms. Tell me what happened first. What changed next? Have you ever been known by another name? Each question asks for something small and sequential, but the experience from which the answer must be extracted is neither small nor necessarily sequential. Pain, memory, sensory information, medical history, uncertainty, social inference, institutional power, and the unfinished residue of every previous interaction can remain informationally alive at once. The answer that finally emerges conceals that labour. A pain score becomes seven. An enormously complicated history becomes a neat chronology. A former name becomes an entry in a database. The hospital receives Stage 1—the language. I am living everything that has to happen to get there. And then a nurse speaks to the doctor and effortlessly calls me she. Nothing happens. That is precisely the point. I do not have to correct her, assess whether correction is safe, recover from being misgendered, or reconstruct the sentence I was forming before the interruption. The medical problem simply remains the medical problem. Sometimes support is not another thing added to the field. Sometimes support is what allows something to leave it. So this Sunday morning is a little different. It is about pain, medical care, autistic processing, and what becomes visible when the demand for language arrives whilst the whole of experience is still alive. Do not mistake the answer for the process that made the answer possible. The AutSide is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit autside.substack.com/subscribe

A new school year means new students, new relationships, and a Script Garden filling with meaning. But how does any of it become usable language? I’m starting with the question between Stage 0 and Stage 1. It is the beginning of another school year, which means I am back in the Script Garden. New students on my caseload. New students in the Maths classes I support. New teachers, new classroom dynamics, new relationships, and an enormous amount of information arriving all at once. I am paying attention to all of it. Rather spectacularly so. But thinking about something and having usable language for it are not the same event for me. At Stage 0, there is already a great deal there: scripts, patterns, memories, sensations, observations, language, relationships, notices, wonders, and things other people have said. It isn’t empty. There is something almost superpositional about it—multiple possibilities remaining simultaneously alive whilst new information keeps arriving. A student may understand. They may not. They may understand the mathematics but not its language. They may understand both and not yet trust me enough to show me. I don’t necessarily want to collapse those possibilities too early, because sometimes that is precisely how I get a student wrong. Meaning is forming. There just may not be a sentence yet. But eventually I need one. I am an RSP teacher. I have students to support, teachers to collaborate with, IEPs, meetings, documentation, and decisions to make. At some point I have to step out of the Script Garden carrying a word. And that has left me with a wonderfully inconvenient question: How do I actually get from Stage 0 to Stage 1? What has to happen for meaning to become language? Sometimes I know the whole before I can find its parts. Sometimes I know that a sentence is wrong before I have any idea what the right sentence would be. What, exactly, is happening in between? This is very deliberately N = 1. I am not speaking for all autistic people, all gestalt language processors, all RSP teachers, my colleagues, or my employer. I am following my own problem of practice. My ASD Level 2 diagnosis matters here because much of the support I need has to be constructed by me: externalising information, collecting it, parking it somewhere safe, returning to it, moving it around, letting patterns emerge, and eventually developing words and scripts stable enough to use when I need them. That is accommodation, but it is also simply part of how I make my work possible. So this video is a prologue, not an answer. I don’t know where the question is going yet. I’m going to do what I tend to do on Substack: collect things, park them, play with them, and see what grows. Somewhere inside that rather overgrown Script Garden, I am hoping to understand a little more about what has to happen before all that meaning becomes something I can actually say—and, with any luck, come out the other side with enough usable words and scripts to remain employed for another year. The AutSide is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit autside.substack.com/subscribe

What if reducing workload is not about doing less? This episode explores Quantity, Concurrency, and Content—and how real support can give unfinished information somewhere else to wait. I put yesterday’s AutSide piece into Gemini Notebook because I wanted to hear what happened when the argument was handed back to me in another form. The resulting conversation begins with the deceptively simple arithmetic of workload reduction: if twenty problems become ten, surely the work is now half as heavy. The hosts quickly discover the problem I was trying to name in the essay. Once we move from physical quantity into cognition, the arithmetic stops behaving so neatly. A single problem can carry directions, retrieval, intermediate results, formatting expectations, uncertainty, and unresolved information simultaneously. Cutting the page in half does not necessarily cut any of that in half. What I particularly enjoyed hearing them work through was the distinction amongst Quantity, Concurrency, and Content. Quantity is what schools can easily count. Content is what I actually need a student to know or demonstrate. Concurrency is the less visible part between them: how much information must remain alive at once for the student to continue. The episode reaches for the image of fifty browser tabs—not fifty extraordinarily difficult things, simply fifty things that have not been permitted to close. The discussion becomes most interesting to me when it turns from explanation towards practice. If retrieval is not the Content I am assessing, I can provide the formula. If an intermediate result needs to remain available, I can give it somewhere outside the student to wait. If several instructions are competing simultaneously, I can change their arrangement. The student still has to understand the mathematics, science, history, or language in front of her. I have not necessarily reduced the intellectual demand at all. I have changed where the unfinished information has to live. The episode puts this rather nicely: the human does the processing; the tool can do some of the maintaining. And I was glad that the conversation followed that idea into special education itself. This is why the work cannot be reduced to sitting beside a student and keeping her “on task.” To reduce a workload without accidentally reducing the learning, I have to understand what is load-bearing in the assignment in the first place. The episode describes that as finding the load-bearing walls of the Content—knowing what can move, what can be externalised, and what must remain. That is specialised intellectual labour, performed across students, teachers, subjects, and an entire school day. A style note here, because I know this will matter to some readers: yes, I know Gemini Notebook is AI. I have disclosed my use of it before, and I am disclosing it again here. This episode is another demonstration of why the tool has become valuable in my life. I put my article—my research, my argument, my thoughts, my writing—into Notebook, and it explains the whole back to me in another form. Sometimes I need that. When I have spent days working from inside an idea, hearing an automated system reconstruct the complete gestalt helps me check whether the whole I thought I had written is actually the whole that made it onto the page. It can expose a missing relationship, an ambiguity, or simply reassure me that the architecture holds together. The tool is not originating the thought for me; it is giving my thought back to me so that I can inspect it from outside. I can error-check that reconstruction against what I actually wrote, and then choose to share the result with subscribers and followers. For me, that is not an embarrassment to hide behind euphemisms about technology. It is support. The AutSide is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit autside.substack.com/subscribe

Cathy and I begin with workload and signal-to-noise, then arrive somewhere deeper: if meaning is already present before words are available, what conditions allow us to step out of the Script Garden with language? This week, Cathy and I began with workload—specifically, what we actually mean when we reduce it. There is a tendency in education to treat workload as quantity: fewer questions, fewer pages, fewer things to complete. But that is only one part of the load. A student may have ten questions instead of twenty and still be required to hold instructions, formulae, vocabulary, prior knowledge, shifting representations, and the purpose of the task informationally alive all at once. Sometimes the difficulty is not how much work exists. It is how much must remain simultaneously available whilst the work is being done. That brought us back to signal and noise. If the communicative signal is simply we are leaving at noon, everything surrounding that message may be meaningful in its own right without being relevant to the immediate communication. For me, the difficulty is that I may not yet know which information is signal and which is noise. Until the organising meaning becomes clear, too many things remain alive. The same thing happens in classrooms: teachers can flood a room with language, directions, explanation, context, encouragement, and detail, leaving a student to discover retrospectively what she was actually supposed to do. By the time the signal resolves, the lesson has moved on. And then the conversation turned towards the question that has been occupying me increasingly this week: what has to happen for meaning to become language? I can watch students manipulate a geometric figure until it reaches the correct position—they know what happened, because their hands can do it—then watch them stop when asked to name the transformation or write the proof. Meaning is present. Language is not yet available. That is the Script Garden problem for me: how do I get from Stage 0 to Stage 1 with a word? A sentence frame cannot solve that merely by existing. Somehow the internal meaning has to connect with the available language. Cathy brought that question back into relationship. Perhaps our task is not to make a child produce more language but to create the conditions within which language can grow. That distinction matters enormously to me. I increasingly struggle with calling this intervention, because intervention suggests something introduced from outside to alter an existing trajectory. What Cathy described was different: noticing, wondering, attending to movement and scripts, offering natural language models, building safety, and allowing connection itself to become part of the conditions for development. The Script Garden does not grow because somebody keeps demanding flowers. It grows because the conditions permit growth. Which brought us, unexpectedly but perhaps inevitably, back to evidence. My old forensic world taught me to ask whether an observation can be documented, repeated, and reproduced by somebody somewhere else. Cathy recognised Marge Blanc’s descriptions in the children she already knew; she used the framework in her own practice; parents recognised their children within it; other practitioners have done likewise. That does not answer every question about efficacy, nor does it remove the need for research. But it does leave me increasingly interested in a question beneath the argument about interventions: what architecture are all these people independently encountering? Before we ask whether we can make language happen, perhaps we need to understand what is already happening when meaning becomes language at all. The AutSide is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming apaid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit autside.substack.com/subscribe

I do not use Gemini Notebook because I need it to think for me. I use it because too much thought remains alive at once. Essay, timeline, infographic, podcast—different doors into the same relational whole. I keep returning to Gemini Notebook because it does something I genuinely need—not because I need it to think for me, but because I need support moving through the world of words once too many of them become alive at the same time. My difficulty is rarely the absence of thought. It is almost embarrassingly the opposite. Sukhareva is there. Peters is there. Prizant, Nelson, Kanner, Shaqaman, contemporary Chinese scholarship, developmental psycholinguistics, the Naysayers, my own nine essays, their citations, the disagreements amongst them, the historical changes in terminology—all of it remains available simultaneously. I know the shape before I know how to walk another person through it. As I wrote in the piece, the expensive part is often moving from that relational whole into the selective, sequential form through which somebody else can encounter it. That is where I require substantial support. Notebook has become part of that support infrastructure because it gives me several different ways of moving through the same material. I can give it my own articles, research, arguments, and sources, then ask it to help me reorganise what is already there. An infographic lets relationships coexist spatially. A timeline lets chronology become the organising structure. A mind map lets me move amongst relationships without pretending they arrived sequentially. And now there is this podcast—a conversational rendering of the same informational field. None of these replaces the scholarship underneath them. They are different entrances into it. The original experiment was precisely this: could something that exists for me as a large relational whole be made available to somebody else without requiring them first to reproduce my entire journey through thousands of words? And I rather love what the podcast notices about the actual argument. It begins with the absurdity at its centre: a century of researchers can repeatedly encounter recognisable patterns in autistic language, but those observations become remarkably easy to erase if we search backwards demanding contemporary vocabulary. Sukhareva did not need the term gestalt language processor for the children she observed to be there. Neither did Kanner, Peters, Nelson, or Prizant. Different researchers brought different questions, theories, disciplines, languages, and desired outcomes, but the humans did not vanish between those frameworks. The podcast compresses this beautifully: “The humans didn’t change, just the lexicons did.” That is very close to the historical gestalt I have been trying to make visible—the lexicographers change; we remain. What becomes especially striking, though, is that the podcast itself eventually turns towards the reason I am using Notebook in the first place. It describes the problem as trying to take a vast web and force it into a single straight piece of string—the researchers, dates, clinical disagreements, frameworks, and relationships all informationally alive together, whilst academic prose demands that I select one thing, then another, then another, paragraph after paragraph. Notebook can hold some of that intermediate organisational labour for me. That matters. My support need does not disappear because I can eventually produce fluent prose. Successful language can conceal an extraordinary amount of machinery. Here, some of that machinery is external, visible, and twenty dollars a month. Perhaps that is why I find this podcast so delightful. I wrote the research. I followed the citations. I made the historical argument. Then I gave that body of work to a tool that could return it through another doorway—and, listening to two synthetic voices discuss why an autistic researcher might need multiple representational forms to move a relational whole into communicable language, I find the form becoming part of the argument. Essay, infographic, timeline, mind map, podcast: not five different thoughts, but five ways into the same one. Accessibility does not mean finding the single simplified version through which everybody must enter. Sometimes it means allowing the whole to have more than one door. Here’s the link to the source article with the complete reference list: https://autside.substack.com/p/we-have-been-here-all-along Let me know what you think. The AutSide is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit autside.substack.com/subscribe