Got "Thinking in Pictures" for my birthday.

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Yep, it's my birthday. Wheee. But I opened my presents yesterday, since my husband has to work today (Monday.)

Anyway, I was looking through Temple Grandin's book "Thinking in Pictures", and came across some things that I found interesting, and that made me think.

One was where she describes her emotions. She says she's only able to experience and understand simple emotions, and not complex emotions. She says she cannot understand the feeling of loving someone one moment and wanting to kill them in a jealous rage the next. Well...is THAT really the type of "complex emotions" that NTs experience? Because I certainly don't understand that kind of feeling either. I never gave much thought as to how my emotions compare to other people's. What she describes about her feelings does not sound odd or defective to me. What do you think? Is she lacking something in the "emotions" department if she can't love someone AND want to kill them?

She says that when looking at a beautiful sunset, she can see that it's beautiful, but doesn't experience rapturous joy. (I'm paraphrasing.) But then she describes how she feels when accomplishing a certain task, and it sounds like something pretty intensely positive. Although she seems to believe her feeling is somehow less than what the NT looking at the sunset is feeling, I can't help but think that it really is not LESS-than. I mean, none of us can feel what another person is feeling, no matter how empathic we are, because we are not in their head. Who is to say that the person getting all joyful at the view of the sunset is experiencing some greater, more advanced emotion than the person who is feeling on top of the world because of the work they have done?


Another thing that I wonder about is this. She now understands that not all people on the ASD spectrum think in pictures. But has anyone really studied, scientifically, how people in general think? I mean, it seems to me that in the general population, some people will think in pictures, some in words, some in a different way, and many in a combination of ways. I tried to google this topic, and couldn't find much. Some people seem to assume that everyone thinks in words, and some seem to think that everyone thinks in pictures, but it was all just assumptions based on their own experience. I'd like to see some good scientific research.

Any thoughts?

By the way, I am enjoying the book quite a bit. I've pretty much blasted through it, and I recommend it highly. I did find Oliver Sacks' forward a bit annoying, though, with too much emphasis on how bizarre and unusual Temple Grandin is, as if no one in the reading audience could possibly imagine a person with any autistic traits. I'm not particularly obvious or intense in my aspie traits (at least I don't think I am), but Temple Grandin isn't all THAT weird. Sacks' forward was a bit offensive, in my opinion.

Happy Birthday!

I'm a fan of Temple Grandin books.


I was a little taken aback by her idea that flip-flopping between love and jealous rage was a common and complex NT emotion. I've never felt that way. I don't know anyone who has. It happens sometimes and the horrifying results are sometimes in the paper. When I read the book I didn't get why she thought it was a typical example.

After a few months on WP, I'm starting to get it a little more.

Judging from some posts, it seems that sometimes AS people percieve the gap between themselves and NT people as being considerably larger than it actually is. There is a definate gap and therefore also miscommunication, misunderstanding and sometimes hostility from both sides as people yell at each other across the gap. But what I see here sometimes is that there are a lot of posts where people try to fill-in-the-blank. Making guesses at what's on the other side of that gap based on a combination of conversations participated in, conversations overheard, media, experiences with other people. This goes both ways. Most NT people base their knowledge of AS on the media, extrapolating from somebody they know, or research done on a two dozen people which then gets extrapolated to all AS people- or wildly misinterpreted by the researchers themselves. What I see on here is a gap between my NT self and AS people here. But the gap is not as large as some people think it is. There are so many threads where posters describe their experiences or thoughts and then go on top assume that these experiences and thoughts are unique to AS and NT people have never experienced anything remotely similar, or that all NT people must have a shared experience which is utterly alien to the AS poster.

I think this happened to Temple Grandin too. She heard about this phenomenon of love feelings morphing into rage and assumed that everyone on the other side of the gap- all or many NTs- shared this emotional experience. Pair that with the AS way of taking things literally and she would be further mislead by the very common expression "I love my husband/wife but I could just kill him/her right now" said by people who would never do any such thing and are actually just annoyed.

I have a feeling something along those lines happened with the sunset too. She feels something when seeing a sunset. She's heard NT people describe their saw-a-sunset feelings and they don't sound just exactly like what she felt. So she assumes that the gap between what she feels and what these other people feel is far greater than it actually is. The gap is there, but the gap may actually be in how people DESCRIBE their feelings about sunsets to each other rather than the feelings and perception itself.

I share the Oliver Sacks annoyance. He seems to have fallen into the researcher trap of staring so hard at difference that he can no longer see commonality.

I totally agree, Janissy.