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Joined: Jan 2001
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 1,773 |
Temple Grandin is a PhD and a leading designer of slaughterhouses. She is also autistic. You can read a fascinating first-person discussion of her method of processing thought and language here: http://www.grandin.com/inc/visual.thinking.htmlAnd here is an excerpt: Autistics have problems learning things that cannot be thought about in pictures. The easiest words for an autistic child to learn are nouns, because they directly relate to pictures. Highly verbal autistic children like I was can sometimes learn how to read with phonics. Written words were too abstract for me to remember, but I could laboriously remember the approximately fifty phonetic sounds and a few rules. Lower-functioning children often learn better by association, with the aid of word labels attached to objects in their environment. Some very impaired autistic children learn more easily if words are spelled out with plastic letters they can feel.
Spatial words such as "over" and "under" had no meaning for me until I had a visual image to fix them in my memory. Even now, when I hear the word "under" by itself, I automatically picture myself getting under the cafeteria tables at school during an air-raid drill, a common occurrence on the East Coast during the early fifties. The first memory that any single word triggers is almost always a childhood memory. I can remember the teacher telling us to be quiet and walking single-file into the cafeteria, where six or eight children huddled under each table. If I continue on the same train of thought, more and more associative memories of elementary school emerge. I can remember the teacher scolding me after I hit Alfred for putting dirt on my shoe. All of these memories play like videotapes in the VCR in my imagination. If I allow my mind to keep associating, it will wander a million miles away from the word "under," to submarines under the Antarctic and the Beatles song "Yellow Submarine." If I let my mind pause on the picture of the yellow submarine, I then hear the song. As I start humming the song and get to the part about people coming on board, my association switches to the gangway of a ship I saw in Australia.
I also visualize verbs. The word "jumping" triggers a memory of jumping hurdles at the mock Olympics held at my elementary school. Adverbs often trigger inappropriate images -- "quickly" reminds me of Nestle's Quik -- unless they are paired with a verb, which modifies my visual image. For example, "he ran quickly" triggers an animated image of Dick from the first-grade reading book running fast, and "he walked slowly" slows the image down. As a child, I left out words such as "is," "the," and "it," because they had no meaning by themselves. Similarly, words like "of," and "an" made no sense. Eventually I learned how to use them properly, because my parents always spoke correct English and I mimicked their speech patterns. To this day certain verb conjugations, such as "to be," are absolutely meaningless to me. I tend to combine the verbal and visual when I think, and tend to store information as a conclusion for which I then have to consciously search for the supporting facts. What about you?
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Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858 |
Dear Sparteye:To have a person so successful despite autism tell her story is valuable in helping both parents and others to be better able to deal with the problem more appropriately. Thanks for the post.
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Joined: Mar 2001
Posts: 2,379
Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Mar 2001
Posts: 2,379 |
I tend to try to reduce information in constructs to a nuclear argument, the schema of further concepts. (For me, facts which do not bind easily to such schemas are hard to remember.) These concepts may--and very often do--have visual analogues. One type of analogue is character, or plot, so that this kind of thinking may be realized in dramatic production.
Poetic thought is more akin to music or dance and appears independent of me. Language itself becomes world, image, angel. Insistant but not lingering.
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Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 218
enthusiast
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enthusiast
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 218 |
Are some of you able to slow down thought by requiring yourself to formulate words and phrases for meaning within your heads (talking to yourself) and, when necessary, speed up thought by only going through visual images and/or emotions? Can thought be sped up in that way?
Maybe I should be asking this of good ole Noam.
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Joined: Mar 2001
Posts: 2,379
Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Mar 2001
Posts: 2,379 |
Nope. When they're sluggish, they slug, when they're racing, they race.
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Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 11,613
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 11,613 |
Brandon! How'd you get inside my head?  Thank you, though, for clarifying for me what thought-processes I do go through. I've been trying and trying to come up with an answer for Sparteye (tremendous post, by the way, Dear!), and couldn't decide where to start. I do both of the things you mentioned, though my speeding-up isn't always intentional. I generally try to formulate my thoughts and choose my words before speaking, mostly so as not to appear to be an even bigger fool than necessary, but sometimes it is because I have a specific purpose: not hurting someone's feelings, for ex. The only thing I can think of right now when I deliberately speed up the process is when a friend asks me for another friend's phone number: if I don't know it right away, I'll picture the telephone keypad and my "ghostly" hand dialing. Interestingly, when I get excited (that happens a lot), my thoughts go into kind of a hyper-drive: my mouth cannot keep up, nor can I form words in my brain--just pictures, usually of the event and/or the person I want to tell. I could see this happening to my son one day when he was about three. He didn't even have much understanding of his own emotions yet, let alone the vocabulary to convey them well. I am afraid I exploded with laughter the day when, after I denied his request, he simmered and simmered, then said, "you...you... meaniac!" That has become a joke word in our family!
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Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858 |
We tend to think of language as indispensible. But remember, people functioned long before there was any speech. Too bad we have so little understanding of that process. I have had a couple episodes when something made me extremely angry. I carried out a fairly complex series of acts, without any recognized verbal process.
I wonder to what extent autistic children function at that level.
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Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,146
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,146 |
Maybe I should be asking this of good ole Noam.
Didn't he recant everything? Deep doesn't exist, etc. Where's Old Nick?
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,439
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,439 |
Sparteye - thank you for this thread.
When I saw length of the link I nearly did not read it but once started I was fascinated and read all.
What follows in blue I found a wonderous description of friendship and autism :
To wash the inside of the bay window, I had to crawl through the sliding door. The door jammed while I was washing the inside panes, and I was imprisoned between the two windows. In order to get out without shattering the door, I had to ease it back very carefully. It struck me that relationships operate the same way. They also shatter easily and have to be approached carefully. I then made a further association about how the careful opening of doors was related to establishing relationships in the first place. While I was trapped between the windows, it was almost impossible to communicate through the glass. Being autistic is like being trapped like this.
The entirety of the piece started me wondering about telepathy ...
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Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 11,613
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 11,613 |
started me wondering about telepathy ...
Don't get me started on telepathy, or you'll have everyone jumping you. I posted ages ago how I've always wished I could just send the picture in my mind straight into someone else's. It sure would prevent a lot of misunderstandings.
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