10:31pm August 8, 2014

“I’m a visual thinker, really bad at algebra. There’s others that are a pattern thinker. These are the music and math minds. They think in patterns instead of pictures. Then there’s another type that’s not a visual thinker at all, and they’re the ones that memorize all of the sports statistics, all of the weather statistics.”

—

She’s really… oversimplified things. She interviewed hundreds of people about their thinking styles, and then came up with something like four or five categories for them. I’ve read hundreds of autistic people talk about their thinking styles, and I know that they are more complex than anything Temple Grandin is willing to wrestle with.

For instance: I am very sensing, which is a category Donna Williams came up with to describe a pre-rational kind of thought that is common in autistic people who grew up with certain severe receptive language difficulties past a certain age. I also have the capacity for interpretive thought or I wouldn’t be having this discussion, but sensing is my dominant mode of thought by far. I am not visual, nor auditory. I am more tactile-kinesthetic and olfactory. I think in sensory and pre-sensory patterns, which have nothing to do with “music and math minds” at all, because ‘pattern’ is a word with far more than one meaning. I don’t fit any of her descriptions at all, but I swear I exist, and am autistic, and have a particular, uniquely autistic kind of mind. I know lots of other autistic people with minds just like mine. But will you hear Temple Grandin ever mentioning us? I doubt it. Too complicated. She likes her categories neat and simple.

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