as small as a world and as large as alone, Do other autistic people think directly in...

8:36pm August 31, 2014

Anonymous asked: Do other autistic people think directly in meanings? Unless I am specifically doing something involved words like reading or talking, I think in meanings. Not even pictures. I don't even know how to accurately explain it, but if I try to speak without going over words first in my head, It will often come out in the order I thought it. Which makes little to zero sense in English. Even to me. But I know what I meant when I thought it. I can't find any information on it :(

natalunasans:

youneedacat would know what this is.

I’ve known people who call this ‘thinking in thoughts’. And yes, some autistic people do it. It’s like… there’s words. But there’s also ideas, and the ideas come before the words (even in people who think in words, they’re usually just not conscious of this, but it happens underneath the word layer). And some people think in pure ideas, without sensory information or words attached to them until later. I’ve seen many different autistic people describe it in many different ways.

It’s not my main mode of thinking but it’s a mode I can go into at times. (Most people don’t just have one way of thinking, we just have a dominant way of thinking that’s the most obvious to us. Like for me, I think in sensory and pre-sensory patterns the most readily. But obviously I have a system set up for ideas and words, or I wouldn’t be having this conversation.)

I think it’s fascinating how many different ways that autistic people think. One time I tried to keep count of how many I’d heard of, I made a list, and all I remember was it was extremely long.

Like even “visual thinking” isn’t just one thing. There’s Temple-Grandin-style visual thinking, which is extremely detailed and specific scenes, often with motion added. There’s thinking in the printed word, as if a typewriter is scrolling across your mind. There’s thinking in a mix of colors and shapes that all have specific meanings. There’s all kinds of visual-conceptual synesthesia that ties into thinking for some people. There’s thinking in really vague fuzzy pictures. There’s thinking in something akin to line drawings. So even just a phrase like “visual thinking” doesn’t capture the whole array of ways you can think visually.

And I suspect that thinking in ideas/thinking in thoughts is similar, where there would be many different variants on it, but due to the nature of the kind of thinking, it would be very difficult for two people to even describe the nature of their thoughts well enough to compare notes. I know that I’ve heard of it time and time again, though. It may be unique to each person, or there may be more general versions of it that lots of people have.

Also, while I’m on the subject, there are people who are totally blind to their own thoughts. They can’t see the idea-layer in their head at all, or any word-layer, or sensory-layer, or anything else. They only discover what their thoughts are once they hear them come out of their own mouth, or typed onto a computer screen. So they experience their thoughts only as expressed, not as internalized. Donna Williams talks about this a lot. I think I sometimes have the problem but not as severe or constant. It seems like a kind of agnosia almost, like having an agnosia to your own thoughts. Because clearly the person is having thoughts, they just don’t have conscious access to them at all.

I find the way people think absolutely fascinating. The way autistic and other neurodivergent people think, but also just the way people think in general, whether neurodiverse or neurotypical. There’s a lot of variation in the range of 'neurotypical’ too.

But yes. Heard of this. Heard of it lots. Lots of autistic people do it. Very common. Very cool.