*Hypersensitivity to Symbolic Systems, esp. Language*

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I've read that some people on the spectrum experience numbers, and days of the week, among other ( objectively ) "non" coloured things, as having colours, and shapes, as if the components of certain symbolic systems have an unusually "embodied"/"concrete/physical nature to some of us.

On a thread I posted, with a poll asking who was addicted to language, most of the many that voted said that either language was "their life" or that they were "heavy users"; in other words that the symbolic system which is language has a particularly powerful place in their life. I have also read many people on WP say, ( and this includes me ), that they are hypersensitive to misuse of language, ( whether grammatical misuse, sloppiness of expression, statements that turn out not to mean what they say, language used as "filler", etc ), and that they have a tendency to take language very literally/seriously.

And then there are the computer programmers, mathematicians, linguists, code breakers/creators, etc; skills/professions supposedly associated with being on the spectrum.

So what I am wondering is whether many people on the spectrum are hypersensitive to, especially aware of, symbolic systems, whether visual, numeric, or language/words, but particularly words. Do many of us experience symbols, not just numbers, as having more "body" than the general population does?

What does "a word" feel like to someone on the spectrum ( who is sensitive to that particular kind of symbol )? People are beginning to get used to the idea that many on the spectrum see numbers as coloured, for instance, but it seems to me that noone has wondered if some of us experience language differently in exactly the same way, ie. words having body/physical presence/three dimensionality for some of us.

Does language, to some of us, seem like an immense, if only partially embodied "person/being", whose behaviour we spend a lot of energy and neuronal connections on understanding/grasping, and processing. And experiencing language as partially "embodied", ( as some on the spectrum see numbers as abstract coloured shapes ), when we listen to people talking, when we read, when we speak, maybe it seems to us that we are hearing and/or responding to a huge presence, whose signals/codes we vibrate to as sensitively as NT's do to body language.

Language takes up a lot of space in my life. It is not some flat/one dimensional thing. It "lives".

I notice that since giving up gluten, and massively reducing my consumption of dairy, language has become "flatter", less "convincing". I see through it more easily, as if the food peptide opioids in the gluten and dairy had something to do with language having such a presence for me. It is only now that I realise that language may not seem like this to most NTs.

I also realise how much I used to, ( still do a lot of the time, but significantly less so ), automatically expect, ( and/or hope/wish ), that language would be made flesh, because it seemed so "solid" already. I used to persuade myself that it was, ( made flesh ), most of the time, refusing/unable to recognise all the ways in which it had not been, using more language to "explain" the mismatches! Or experiencing confusion/painful feelings if/whenever I couldn't.

Who else thinks that they too may be experiencing ( the symbolic system which is ) language as "physically"/three-dimensionally, as some on the spectrum experience numbers etc? And that this may partly explain why some/many of us concentrate on/process ( verbal ) language to the exclusion/detriment of body language? And why some people, including myself, have said that they can understand body language very well when there is no question of them talking with/listening/speaking to the people, ( eg. like when watching people in train stations. ).

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Love affair with language topic

Printed words have a life of their own. I can imagine the surface (page) upon which they are written to be three dimensional and active, meaning the words move back and forth, zoom in and out, and the surface (page) has a sort of depth. The words fly all over, and the effect is stimmy, for me, I guess.

Interesting point, Ouinon.

I definitely get what you mean. Although I don't have synaesthesia, or anything of that nature, words do have a "feeling" for me. It is super-easy for me to memorize new vocabulary, whether in English or another language, because all I have to do is attach the feeling of the meaning to the new word. This means that the connotation of a word is a particularly rich experience for me, and it bugs me when people use a word which technically would be appropriate based on the dictionary definition, but is incorrect based on its connotation. Also, I have a really amazing (sorry for the lack of modesty) ability to understand the meanings of words I've never seen before- especially if they are longer words with multiple parts. Even if I have no idea of the derivation of a particular word/portion of the word, I often know what it means anyway because it just feels a certain way (probably I had picked up on the meaning subconsciously from other similar words). I have studied Latin, and if the word has Latin roots, then of course it is obvious how I know the meaning. But often I have no idea *how* I know the meaning of particular portions of words- I just do. This helped me on the GRE, where I scored an 800 on the verbal section (which apparently no one does ever- people get 800s on the math section but never on the verbal section).

I am very sensitive to the subtleties of language. While some people may wake up in the morning and not even think about language or how to use it, I on the other hand wake up and think about which of the many ways I will say good morning to my parents. Or if I'm talking with someone online, I have to pick which would be the most appropriate way to tell the other person that I have to go to bed, depending on the context of the situation. I am sensitive to the misuse of language as well. I fail to understand why some people say "I'll be back in 20 minutes", and they don't return until 30 or 40 minutes have passed.

I have an affinity for systems of any kind. Set Theory, Systems Theory, Cybernetics, Information Theory, Neuroscience, etc..

Of course.
Words and phrases have their own personalities, emotional carriage and demeanour.

I do like to delve into the written word. I know German as well as English. I can also pick the meanings of words written in other foreign languages as well. Voice communications though is hard for me. It takes a lot of my energy to follow the conversation and spoof the right amount of eye contact. If there is more than one conversation going on, then slow signing or using the written word is the only way i can understand. As far as words meaning certain colors to me, that is not necessarily true. However when I see a specific word, I also see a picture.

For me, words always feel like something and move in a specific way. I can feel them moving in my head and stimulating my mind with their textures. Some words are particularly pleasurable, and I like to read them again and again, just to feel that motion. The same thing applies to art - images, forms, aesthetics all have, as well as the meaning the artist saw in them, a particular way of movement when I am looking at them. They revolve, they go around corners, they rise and fall. I do not see this happening - I feel it.

This is not the case with spoken language, although it sometimes occurs with music. Usually, auditory things just slide past me and I can't grip them or feel them.

First of all I wanted to say how wonderful these replies were to read. I identified particularly with the following, but all of them struck a chord. Thank you very much.

I so get that. It's as if can "feel" the meaning, as if it takes shape from its context, and from other, similar, words etc. I used to do that all the time as a child, reading books full of unknown words, and "making out" what they meant, as if piecing together a collection of shadows in a dark/dappled landscape until see it is a person, or an animal, or whatever.


Totally totally. Me too! I horrify myself sometimes with how much attention, and time, I will give to the precise wording of the simplest phrases.

And about the "be back in 20 minutes" I get this about so many things. First time I noticed consciously that it seriously bothered me was 10 years ago in a hotel when, after having hung a "Do not Disturb" sign on the door, I was disturbed by the cleaner an hour or two later, just as if I had not hung the sign out at all. I realised that I "believed" that if language said something, "it was/would be so"! !!

That's what I meant about expecting, ( and hoping/wishing ), that language would ( generally ) be made flesh, and how much time and energy, and more language, I then put into either pretending that it was, or justifying/explaining why it was not, in such a way that language was not called into question; either by believing that people were stupid, dishonest, hypocritical, waffly, unconscious, imprecise, and/or by blaming/accusing myself of some "error". I have exhausted myself, alienated people, cut myself off from reality, rather than allow even a shadow of a stain to fall on language.

It has taken me until now to see that I have been mistaking infrequent and "miraculous" close matches/concordances between language and reality for "life" as it "should/could be if I did the right things; whereas in fact language is a whited sepulchre, and it is only after the bindings/wrappings of language have been thrown off that see "life". Dreams are more real than language is.

Has anyone read "the Little Mermaid" by Hans Andersen, in which he uses a classic mechanism of "fairy tales"/teaching tales; reversal? The mermaid gives up her tongue to gain legs, when the story is really about giving up her "tail", and the sea she swam in, to gain speech/language.

Language is addictive, to those sensitive to it, I think, because words have so much weight/texture/life etc, like money seems to have to a gambler, and apparently the main thing which makes for psychological addiction is unpredictability; not knowing if the next time will "win". So with language; it is soooo unpredictable; have no idea if in fact such and such words will mean the same thing next time, whether can count/bet on them or not.

And when language does seem to be made flesh, WOW!! ! It is dangerous/powerful/revolutionary. It happened to me, several years ago, and it hooked me even more than I had ever been before. And it has taken me till now to see that if my experience seems to match language it is because I have cherry-picked my experience to make it look like it, cherry-picked the bits of my experience which make it look as if words have been made flesh.

Gluten, ( bread/wheat ), and alcohol, tended, very successfully, to encourage my belief in the supremacy of language over life. Because gluten ( and dairy to some extent, but not so oppressively ), make me take language very seriously, ( perhaps why gluten provokes depression in me ? ), and alcohol enabled me to blur my life/experience enough to "match" it with the language, ( until I couldn't handle that amount of alcohol anymore ).


Yes! As fascinating a collection of moods, and faces, and manners, as real people have! Like a pantheon of ancient greek gods. And they are "speaking to", conversing/sharing all this with me! I have experience(d) language/words as "beings" of great importance, to whom I generally doff(ed) the cap of my experience.

Actually I think I have been experiencing language in the same way as the people who wrote the Old Testament did; I think when they referred to God many of them, especially in the older sections, meant language. To which life, and people, everything, everywhere, should and must defer/bow down, ( back when they worshipped Logos/the word as god ).
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Last edited by ouinon on 17 Jun 2009, 11:17 pm, edited 2 times in total.

I myself feel that the words in any language I experience, have a texture or some sensual quality in that whatever words I hear they either have a pleasantness to them or that they have a sharpness and some words I use and some I avoid speaking altogether. Yes, I have heard about Synthaesia, but I was never diagnosed with that. I'm wondering if Asperger's syndrome has wired my brain in the sensory portions in such an odd way that data from all my five senses could be feeding into the higher abstract systems in my neocortex. That would definitely be food for thought ( no pun intended!)

I think you are on to something here. Our brains make unusual and intense connections

I find words to have character and writing to have texture. Reading gives a weird mind massage that I crave when I haven't had my daily dose.

Sounds like you are describing the prosody, rhythym and emotional content of language. Although everyone, not only people with aspergers seen words as having attributes. I remmeber reading that when given two made up words, bouba and kiki, people will assosiate bouba with a smooth shape and kiki with a sharp shape.

"Everyone" might do that, but that is not what I am describing. If you don't experience it yourself you may not know what I/we mean, in the same way I don't know what it feels like to experience numbers as coloured shapes, parts of landscapes, as Daniel Tammet does for instance.

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Absolutely. Like a tranquiliser too sometimes. But "massage" is a good description, because it's like lots of little pressure points being stimulated.

I suddenly realised that I feel a bit like that about handwriting. It's so soothing, satisfying, scribbling away, like "chanting", a flow of repeated movements of my hand, the spillage of words from my pen.

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That's interesting, because words mean as much to me when spoken, so long as are spoken in the "correct" way, ( eg. not too much of an accent, in the "right" place, not too loudly, etc ). If people with thick/heavy accents or bad grammar speak to me I feel as bothered, almost "offended", as a Muslim might about someone eating pork at the same table as them. Language definitely as God/a god in that sense; sacred, etc. ( I'm not proud of my reaction; it just happens )


To go back to what you said, because I feel so much the same way; I was wondering whether "fluid intelligence" might come in here. Fluid intelligence which seeks and creates meaning, recognises patterns, ascribes agency, attributes cause, makes connections between apparently unconnected phenomena, etc. In those with high fluid intelligence, words might come together in a much more "lively" network/system, with far more links between "separate" elements than is the case for most people, and make language more "three dimensional"; each word deeper/richer/more solid because of the many connections that we experience it as having.

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Mostly it's lyrics embodied in music for me (nothing high-toned for me, I'm a Stones fan). I can hold Jagger and Richards in the palm of my mind, and sometimes, when I'm mentally more robust Beethoven and Mozart, but much more often I've got to listen to the music of the ill, what can I say?

But lit-wise, I gotta say that Faulkner, Joyce, Pynchon (at least in Gravity's Rainbow) and most abso-specia-lutely of all Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian, man, Child of God, Outer Dark, Suttree, it's where it's at) do the same for me. Poetry-wise, TS Eliot and John Ashbery (I don't think there's a connection) are the most almost-synaethesic for me. I've attempted the same, lit-wise, but my talent is short of my vision, alas. And, don't laugh, constructed languages, they can do it for me, almost or maybe yeah just barely, not Esperanto, too crude, but there're some out there: Ithkuil, Kelen, excellent to lose some hours in. And, it almost goes without saying, the classical languages: Latin and Greek (don't underestimate Latin, a lot of folk do, I think it may be the most beautiful lang of all, Virgil and Ovid), Old English (not technically classical but oh well) and Gothic, Sanskrit and Pali, ooh man. More a rave than a coherent reply, but that's the late night mood I'm in, it's all I got, hope it's worth a little.

Also it can be fun if frustrating to create your own language, ala Tolkien, in the sense of continually work on one or two, not complete, but aim for perfection. It's passe on the Internet now, but hey, who's too know. Aenig.