(neuro)psychology
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Brain Rot: Word of the Year 2024—and a Symptom of a Deeper Crisis
In 2024, the term brain rot was crowned Word of the Year, capturing the zeitgeist of an era grappling with the effects of digital overconsumption. Originally slang for the mental fog and distraction caused by endless scrolling, brain rot now symbolizes a broader societal concern: our diminishing ability to focus.
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Writing fanfiction to cope with mental health issues
Recently, I found this personal narrative that depicts a 15-year-old French girl’s experience with depression and how writing fanfiction has helped her cope with her mental health struggles. Republished with the author’s permission.
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Synaesthesia – an essay on the adjacency of the sense of hearing and the other senses
During my Master’s degree in musicology at Utrecht University, I took the course “A History of Modern Listening”. This blog post is based on an essay I wrote for that course, and published in response to a Tweet by Elise Cordaro.
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Neuromusicology
Deciding on topics for the assignments of my studies in neuropsychology are an easy task for me. I took up this learning because I wanted to understand the autistic brain. Now that we are in the modules regarding aural processing, it feels only natural that I – as an autistic musicologist and musician – write about the autistic brain on music. Hashtag “cognitive music science” or “psychology of music” or “neuromusicology”. But what exactly do those terms mean?
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Nunchi
As an aspiring polyglot and a student of neuropsychology, I have a sweet spot for untranslatable words (from foreign or historical languages) that describe emotions, psychological states and/or behaviour. Because I got so many positive reactions about my work on hiraeth, I decided to share this interest with you by means of a new category for this blog: “Lost in Translation“. This first entry will be about the Korean concept of Nunchi, as I was recently interviewed about this by journalist Annemieke Riesebos for the Dutch magazine Grazia.
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BWQ: Bisexuality & Autism
Two and a half years ago, my partner and I went to EuroBicon, the European Bisexual Conference in Amsterdam. There, I presented a paper about queer mermaids, hosted a workshop on the bisexual mermaid, played games both analog and digital, went to an awesome 80-90’s disco, had fabulous food and… met Robyn Ochs. As an academic cum activist, Robyn immediately made an indelible impression on me. Therefore, I am very happy that she invited me to write for her grassroots publication Bi Women Quarterly – aka BWQ – and that my writing even made it to the front page. Thank you so much, Robyn! With her permission, I publish the…
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#spoonie
For me, one of the most puzzling aspects of autism is still the “road-to-overload”. Sometimes the day seems like a four-lane highway that you smoothly cross over, another time you feel like rope dancing over an abyss… through snow and blizzards! But quite recently, I encountered the hashtag #spoonie, that refers to people who use the so-called “spoon theory”, a metaphor that enables users to concretise their energy levels. As it helps me, in this blog post, I share it with you in the hope that it may help you too.
