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5:01am July 1, 2013

➸ From Dumnonia to Armorica: Temple Grandin says there are three types of thinkers and I am none of...

thesiegeperilous:

Temple Grandin says there are three types of thinkers and I am none of them. While I do understand verbal language and have a talent for linguistics, I don’t think verbally for most things. I am garbage at pretty much anything requiring pattern thinking, I’m terribly dyscalculic and while I am a…


It’s not hard to be unlike her descriptions. I daresay many people in her interviews were not at all like the categories she decided to make for them. Just too little understanding of our diversity, and it’s clear categories play a huge role in her thinking. She came up with three categories and stuffed everyone into them. Whether they belonged or not.

I almost wonder if your therapist was influenced by my writing. Native language is a word I used a lot in a viral video many years back.
Anyway I’m very physical too, very kinesthetic, and very sensory in my approach to everything.

I experience the world as a whirlwind of sensory impressions. The way my body moves is about taking all that into my body and turning it into a motion I can relate to. The sensory stuff forms patterns. Not intellectual patterns, just connections on the sensory level.

I deal with language by associating shapes, sounds, words, movements, with situations over the years until they began to settle into patterns where I could use them as they became associated with situations and feelings and thoughts.

My best senses are kinesthetic and smell. My worst is sight, then hearing. But even in the worst, I get a lot out of sight.  Not the identities of things. But the patterns of their motion.

I can get large amounts of information out of tiny little things, like the clink of a glass will tell me about all the patterns around it.

Sometimes I will get so much in tune with those patterns that I will (or would, if able) be just dancing around the house and open the door absent mindedly just as someone walks up. Not magic, just sensing.

Donna Williams has written a lot about sensing, as opposed to interpretive thought. I don’t believe evening she says about it, but it’s still worth looking into. Autism and Sensing: The Unlost Instinct. Sensing describes my dominant mode of thought better than any other term I’ve found. And Temple Grandin avoids the topic altogether. All her descriptions are of forms of interpretive thought. Which are important, but far from universal especially among those of us who grew up with severe comprehension problems.

I can still have trouble with such basic interpretive things as identifying objects. But I’ve found my own way to get around without that unless I really need it. It feels uncomfortable to get trapped too long in interpreting thought. Feels like knives.