Thread by @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

https://twitter.com/punished3liza/status/1485750408643432448

look at this fucking shit. just this whole paragraph about him having sex with his wife

https://twitter.com/punished3liza/status/1485750412175044611

"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*

https://twitter.com/punished3liza/status/1485750415861841922

"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."

https://twitter.com/punished3liza/status/1485751440320643073

"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."

https://twitter.com/punished3liza/status/1485752076969791488

"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."

"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."

‼️

"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

https://twitter.com/punished3liza/status/1485752758347059202

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*

https://twitter.com/QiaochuYuan/status/1485803928709070850

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

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

"[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…

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

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

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"

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"

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

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…

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

alright jeez that site is apparently sold out of the nasal spray so uh here's a different site linked by a friend, which i haven't tried and know nothing about and can't directly vouch for

canada.direct-peptides.com/product/oxytoc…

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…

(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)

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

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…

speculative followup

https://twitter.com/QiaochuYuan/status/1486160266286931971