Theme
3:34pm February 1, 2012

This is in response to that one person who was attempting to explain nonautistic people to autistic people.

Not really a reply to the whole thing, just to the idea that autistic people’s underlying default way of thinking is logical and nonautistic people’s is emotional.  Note that I already understand you’re not saying nonautistic people can’t use logic or anything like that.  I’m just talking about the assumptions about what is the underlying style of reasoning people have. 

(Read this as if “OS” is in quotation marks throughout the whole thing. It’s hard to put in quotation marks on my iPod right now.)

I understand that a lot of autistic people, perhaps especially a lot of autistic people who tend to be active in online communities, have a system going on where their OS is logic.  It’s a common way of assigning various long-term priorities in an autistic brain, from what I’ve seen.  But it’s not the only one. 

From looking at how nonautistic people tend to think, I don’t think their OS could generally be described as emotion either. It seems like a common way of thinking, to see logic and emotion as opposites. Probably made popular by Star Trek. But I don’t think they are. And I don’t think emotion is a good way of summing up the thinking styles of nonautistic people.  Unfortunately I don’t know how to sum up the general style I’m thinking of. I can perceive it, I know what it is, and I don’t know the words. At any rate, it’s an actual system of thinking, with lots of variations of course, and emotion is not really an accurate way of summing it up.

As for how I think.  I’m autistic, and from my observations my way of thinking does exist in a lot of autistic people whose main system of thinking isn’t logic. We don’t seem to form a majority online, or even close, but it’s hard to say how common we are among people who don’t make it online. 

It’s very sensory, and what a friend describes as “watery” – things flow into each other a lot, and there can be a sense of the world as swirly and dominated by various currents.  Things become known by familiarity, the patterns they make in all the swirling. Not the abstract patterns of mathematics and logic with discrete units in various shapes, but the concrete patterns of sense impressions flowing into each other.  Similarly the sensory component of this kind of thinking is not like Temple Grandin’s version of visual thinking, where objects are well identified and separated. It’s more like texture and color and tone, without necessarily identifying or separating out the objects they come from.  It’s very different, and hard to translate because it’s way outside of language.  Intuition figures highly. 

I’ve run into a lot of autistic people who think like me, so we can’t be such an extreme rarity. And while some of us can “translate” into logical terms, our basic OS is not logic-based, and not emotion-based either. But is often read as emotion-based by more logic-oriented autistic people, who often figure that anything they have trouble understanding must be emotion.