Is it true

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That people with autism excel in visual thinking?
and if s, what exactly is meant by this?

Charlie

I 'ave no idea.

It is true for many of us. I am a visual thinker. In order for me to understand how something works, I have to have a picture in my mind of the internal working of whatever I am studying. This means that I have formed a picture or a diagram of the object in my mind and can actually see things moving. If I cannot do this then I don't know how the object being studied works.

many do but many do not. there are different types of thinking but they tend to be extreme.
i have the extreme visual thinking so right now as i type i have literally picture after picture going off on a kind of movie screen in my brain. for instance - when i wrote movie screen then, i saw an incredibly detailed image of the old drive-in theatre screen that hugs the freeway up on the Gold Coast just near Boyd's Garden World. i see all its struts and its structure and i can see the surrounding area. now, as i have written this small paragraph on the drive -in theatre screen i have seen many many other associated pictures in detail as i write.

what this means is that autistics live in two worlds - the interior world of pics, in my case - for some others it might be sounds, - and then the external world.

this is why living can get so very tiring...because we have to constantly straddle the two and mediate between them in a way ordinary people do not. many not autistics have visual thinking, but nowhere near as rich or as complex as many of us have it. (as i wrote that sentence then, i was taken to images from my dentist i went to recently -- he is NT and he knows i have AS and we were actually talking about different ways of thinking - so while i am writing about this i go to all these images of a related coversation - in pictorial form. many many images and specifics of the dentist's room with pics on the wall, the garden outside and teh utensils and the little seat with the cd's and the place where i place my wallet and hat and keys.)

i can have huge zone outs - where i am consumed by the internal visuals and am unreachable as a result. at these times i have the "aspie stare."

i hope this now makes sense to you.
it is extremely wonderful.
it is also exhausting,
and it can also be very frightening when coupled wiht heightened visual acuity and alterations in colour and smell and touch and sound. then it can be somewhat nightmarish and upsetting.

i knew i was incredibly hypersensitive, but i had no idea just how extremely visual i was.

i can lay down in the evening and watch full technicolour movie segments in my brain.

it is fun, exhiliarating, tiring and scary. the material world basicaly serves as fodder for the interior, actually.

i would not want it any other way.


read temple grandin's stuff on it - "thinking in pictures" to get a better understanding of it

Last edited by millie on 31 Jan 2009, 5:37 am, edited 1 time in total.

I'm a visual thinker too. I can work out math problems better if I picture how to work out the problem in my mind. And what millie said about watching full technicolour movie segments in her mind - I can do that too. I remember once when I was about 8 years old I did that for about 3 hrs, so it was a full movie.

Wow, I never realized how incredibly visual my own mind is until your post.

actually (hi mills as well), i have come to the belief that it might apply to all autism

from what i have gathered there is a difference of opinion here between Temple Grandin and Donna Williams. from what i read about DW so far, which is little but on the todolist, i believe i am much more like her than TG

however, having read An Anthropologist, some of TG's stuff scannily, i have come to wonder

it is precisely that stuff that is so foreign to me that i still feel so eerily related to,,,... with may even be better
i had the same experience when reading other personal accounts of autism
(i would wish to translate one from a Flemish girl, now THERE's an idea!! !);
alien world but still somehow soooooooo similar, and i am NOT a visual thinker

it was asked me literally, first thing, almost two weeks upon having had me admitted for diagnostic observation, not by a trained nurse, not by one of the two psychiatrists on my case, not by the clinical psychologist who was only involved later for iq&personality testing in the framework of possible ASD
(their working hypothesis being bipolar - under my explicitely objected allowance, i was glad when sick, hoping it was a result of lithium & first proof in my favour), not by the srinks' assistant exposed to administering the test and had to take me (that was the nicest time of the entire bloody month)

not by any other person involved in my program/case

but by the hospital social worker I had 'requested' to see
first thing he asked, i believe
are you a visual thinker

i had six weeks before identified my status, correctly; i had read TG, i had not related, especially when it came to that encyclopaedia of images of hers; no way; that was my creative problem: no memories, no live ones, just some knowledge of fact, no imaginative imagination
but father had absolute hearing and photographic memory, and i am considered his image
(i am not!)
but must be relatable..., so... backburner.topic

still is ... i will get back

THIS IS IMPORTANT
Donna Williams, IMO, is wrong: we are like TG

..........

EDITimmediate: sorry, finishing this staccato-like, other things to do, but need big picture presented now:

.......... its just:
our sense of imagination happens to be different from the more typical auti-aspic
(if you allow me that touch of discrimination, in the neutral sense(!)
that i am a person of discriminate taste);
hence: our imagery is the image of language

language is the 7th sense, and the 'combinatory' one at that (it is THE 'meta-sense')
as autists, our 7th sense remains unconnected
that leaves our linguistic imagination unbound and roaming onbounded anywhere
where the memory of linguistic vision and/or sound takes us

and, highly (linguistically) autistic:
i strongly believe, am therefore convinced, that the autistic brain=>mind
simply does not 'combine' its severally perceived sensorial input

this not.creates but => IS another way of callingit/diagnozing alexithymia
[not to be read as a- but as DYSlexithymia]
which IMHHHHHHHO is the primary symptom of what is usually called autism

it's just not 'presented' (*=presented, but =perceivedbydxprofessional)
as visual thinking, so...
how now to rephrase this 'visual thinking' [concept] into=>within something wherein my&DW's presentation would team up with this visual thinking

my response to the social workers question: ...... huh
(i was so surprised that it even came up) ......
......
*sitting back in giving up fashioned jesture...*
i, for the life of me, cannot visualize what that could mean...

and smiled when realizing how aptly considered that spontaneous-ish response must have 'presented', which timed&mirrored his smile; fifteen minutes on into the conversation i had declared my emotional motivation&ambition for what to do with the rest of my life...
"You are not bipolar." he simply observed, as i knew on the basis of the driven emotion with which it was expressed
edit:and i knew i had won my battle from then on, i knew this would be reported back to HQ

(gosh i AM writing well, today: precision is my measure)

precision in MY spelling and in MY txt.presentation =design
(every trait of this post is as i want (so far)(inasmuch as i have been able to notice, or see?)
caps only when required, small i; any non-letter as intended, total conscious awareness of how this is meant by me, and may be grasped by you - i aim but ONE thing: total clarity and that means ambiguity&reference where required-possible, but voided-or-1dimensionally unambiguous where misunderstanding might occur

words are sooooooh incredibly slippery, dangerous, debilitating, AUTISTIC!! !! !
and that is just words, i have not yet explicitely addressed all aspects of grammar, let alone 'speech' i.e. presentation (in sound and vision)

the question therefore needs to be rephrased:
what is 'visual thinking'

it is RECORDED thinking
all autists (i believe) are to any extent prone to recordedthoughtprocessing,
we do not communicate (internally first, externally second) our senses,
we are capable of working with separated sense only
some of us do this better than other, faster,
so seemingly 'normal'
but our, my, linguistic sense is still not (Alexithymia), or , at best, poorly ...
(maybe depending on the particular emotion, mine is angerunexpressed [LouReed)
... (DYSlexithymia) related with an emotional source [which is SELF, ... Millie!]

maybe, maaaayyyyy be... some of us are capable of 'multi-sensing'
(would that constitute a difference between auti and aspie?)
but never with all 6 senses
and if i were to choose which sense would BASICALLY always be separated...
it would be, not 'my' 7th one which is the 'legendary'sixth sense, but
the historically identified 6th sense: the sense of (physical) self, i.e.:
(propriowhatisitcalledagain)

SENSES in (abstract non biological/neurological hypothesized MODEL
(parallel to the (6points) Communication Model of Jakobsson (ref.)):

sense 1 / fivesenses: 23456 / 7=language=metasense:culture=3rdworld=platonicIdeatopia
sender / message: c.c.c.c. / 6=receiver =>^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

message consists of 4 aspects=functions: channel, code, context, content (latter?)
1: sense of self : proprio'gnosis'
23456 (in this order preferably): taste, smell, hearing, sight, touch
7: language

Jakobsson's model of six refers to all basic communication, each message containing said six-functionality; it does not allow for selfreflective communication (selfawareness, discourse of thought, or ongoing social exchange; it couls be said it lacks Chomskian syntactical openness to growth - the model can be said to be representative of the thing an Sich; however, things never are 'in themselves' alone: there is always at least also the observer (including observer' fallacy & intentional fallacy to be considered in any model)

a proper model would have to able to cope with that mode
i therefore in my mind postulated a 7th point, to be defined as:
following 1/6 simultaneously, but reversing along parallel line back to source-self=1
(but now informed by the primary process, so not identical>>parallel)

thinking about how to phrase this, i believe it can be said that what Jakobsson's model lacks, is the dynamic of dialectic thought which is both bound-inward and exploratively outward

life, biology, including culture, is ever in flux, dialectically, both consciously and unconsciously, that is my model

it is structurally no more then an abstracted COPY of Darwins theory applied to historical culture

that then would be the NT normal brainfunction;
in autism, the 7th sense, or at least the 7th position, is still explicitely or implicitely there, (and to be addressed)(thus active in any sense (all phunny references intended, allways))
but not/ill sourced=fed=grounded=clicked=&ccc by the other senses
i.e.: not relating to the 'fullness' of 'authentic' and 'complete' human experience

this underlies all this fragmentation of our personalties,
note that my model still allows for imagination, or social awareness
but differently, not as full (emotionally), more openeyed towards form

Donna Williams & me, we do not emotionally appreciate 'content', we read labels; as Temple Grandin reads picture; labels are just other pictures, thatsallfolks

i'll post this now and see what happens, me tired after this
edit: and 'jakob'sed' after the edit, thx

Last edited by oblio on 31 Jan 2009, 8:16 am, edited 1 time in total.

oh wow, yea that makes a lot of sense now, and I really appreciate the depth of detail in your descriptions. After reading your view on it, I can say I definatly relate. I have times when I zone out and think and have all these images going through my head. Most words I write, I seem to have an image attatched to them also.
Sometiems I'll spend ages going over a sentence and your average NT can make sense of it, no problem, but with me, its a case of breaking it down and actually picturing the content of the sentence.

I've always thought I was a visual thinker but never really knew what that meant fully, and, like a couple of people who have replied to this topic, I never realised how much of a visual thinker I was!

Thank you for the input!