Aspies For Freedom

Temple Grandin wrote and lectured much on ‘thinking in pictures’, imagining that, because a majority of high functioning people with Asperger’s did think in pictures (though many were auditory thinkers who thought in words) that, therefore, this was indicative of how ALL people with autism thought.

As a kinesthetic thinker who learns through DOING and thinks in movement, and someone with marked impairments in both visual and auditory thinking and learning, I wrote an article, ‘Not Thinking In Pictures’ to draw attention to the damaging effects of such new stereotypes which would promote that people who processed like me, should be taught via a medium which would fail us and have us judged by that failing.

I was glad to see that Temple has since retracted this assumption in her ‘revised edition’. But her recent expansion from believing there are only two main forms of thinking; (auditory which she ascribed to non-autistic people and visual which she ascribed to people on the autistic spectrum) to a mere three (which now include musical and mathematical thinkers), still leaves out a remarkable minority and one which may shed much on those who are last to gain functional language because of the very nature of how they think and learn.

In a recent 9 stop tour I surveyed my audiences of 200-300 at each lecture about their thinking styles. Those present were largely non-autistic people. I asked them to put up their hands if they thought in and learned primarily via words. Around 50-70% of each audience put their hands up. I asked then how many thought in and learned via images, thought in pictures. Around 30-50% of the hands went up. I asked how many people felt they fitted neither. Only 1-5 hands would go up in each audience. I also asked the visual thinkers how many were somewhere on the autistic spectrum.

There were those who thought in music for whom experiences, moods and thoughts triggered music and songs and who learned best when they sang something, put it to music or were sung to or heard a story through rhyme. There were those who think in systems and structures, pure relationship links with no words or pictures to them, a purely sturcturalist type of thought, people thinking purely in systems.

Extract from article by Donna Williams on http://www.americanchronicle.com/article...leID=12295

The great horror of human society, the one that always gnaws at the edges and invokes the most fear, the one unspeakable truth, is that we are all, deep down, not the same.  We are all different.  We are all individuals.  We are all, ultimately, alone, with others beside us, but nobody else actually being us. People with markedly different minds throw this truth out, plain to see, and that is why they are treated so horribly.  They force society to face itself, and it cannot stand what it sees.

Those people who try to explain society to itself very often desperately wish to bury the idea of fundamental diversity.  Thus, they try to lose everything into as few categories as possible.

I hear a phrase and don't understand it until I "see" the letters shining in my mind, which I then decode, think up a response to, again reading it off the "screen" in my head, and finally answer.  This takes time, and people often get the impression that I'm "slow" or unintelligent, because I have to do all this processing first. Although I can do it fairly fast now, after years of practise, often when I was younger by the time I'd worked out a reply the conversation had moved on and I'd contributed  nothing.  But what I'm wondering is, is this "seeing letters" thinking in pictures, or words?

Alison

I'd say pictures, but a different kind.

My thing is that I have to translate things into concepts.  I find this easier to do with images than with sounds, although wordthink is a useful habit for acquiring different languages.  

But for me, it doesn't seem like images or words or even anything described in the article are what my thoughts really are.  Most of them are concepts that are paired with words or images, but sometimes I feel a completely abstract idea flick through my skull, and in describing it, I am surprised at the number of words I must use.  I've never had my thoughts interrupted or broken off, like I often see described in books, however complex the concept or situation they describe.    

Sometimes I connect thoughts to completely random and irrelevant senses as well, like touch or smell.  But this doesn't happen as much as sounds or letters, because I don't communicate this way, so translating it this way is useless.  Although certain complex concepts seem to lend themselves more easily to touch.  

I don't think in systems, though, nor in music.  I hear music all the time, but my thoughts are different, a second layer, sometimes a third if I have a visualizer going.  Movement, texture, smell, are just more arbitrary symbols my brain sometimes chooses.  

At the beginning of this sentence, I know how it's going to end.  I haven't heard it, seen it, felt it, smelled it, or anything else.  I know the concept I want to communicate, it's pulling things out of it that make sense to other people that's work, whether it's letters or speech sounds.

Very true.  Fear of the stranger is a primal fear, and we are the quintessential strangers.