Do professionals think this is true about aspergers?

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I questioned a psychologist about the "lack of imaginative play" thing once because I had a very vivid imagination as a child- I still do- and the majority of my time was spent playing in an imaginary world centered around my special interest, which was horses. It was very elaborate. He asked me "Did you play with other children or by yourself?", to which I answered "by myself". When he asked me why, I told him it was because other kids didn't know how to play in my world, they wouldn't do it right". He said that was the key, that it's not that autistic children don't have an imagination or enjoy imaginative play by themselves, it's that they don't engage in shared imaginative play.

I think people interpret the criteria far too literally. You don't have to have that symptom to have AS and you could have it mildly, and it's written more for children.
I didn't have much of an imagination; it was more about what I picked up in movies, and I really didn't know people had feelings that felt like my own. I knew they felt physical pain and felt emotions, but I never understood that it was in the way I felt it.

Once again: the criteria isn't false, you just can't relate to it personally.

Fiction was hard for me to read and I prefer very factual themed fiction (science fiction). So, this technical reading, limited imagination (or social play) and problems understanding peoples emotions isn't very far off from me.

Both can be creative. It's not simply one is and the other isn't.


I think after this thread, if I was a heavy drinker, I'd down a whole bottle of whisky. Stereotypes exist for a reason and anyone can be creative and imaginative. Most of the criteria to any autism diagnosis has a strong emphasis on a lack of communication and social skills.

Ah yes, even though I read a lot of fiction and enjoy it I often get extremely annoyed with the smallest or largest of plotholes, inconsistencies, or illogic. I guess aspies may be that type as they focus on details. Also I've heard that one of the reasons NTs like fiction is to relate with the characters, something I find harder to do as I find a lot fictional characters to be stupid jerks who I can't relate with. I read for the plot and the world, for the story.

There are two words that get confused a lot: empathy and sympathy. Sympathy means that you feel sorrow for others when they are in difficult or hard situations.

Empathy is more about understanding how they feel in their situation and being able to see that they are hurting without being told.

Aspies tend to have difficulty with empathy, knowing that people are hurting. But, once they realize or are told what is going on, they are fully capable of sympathizing with someone.

Part of the problem here is that it's like saying Aspergians have no feelings and then saying they're oversensitive. Which is it? Well, whichever one the person speaking finds to be to their advantage, of course!

The other part is separating things that might be (or seem) common to Aspies from actual diagnostic criteria. I checked. I found nothing in the diagnostic criteria that says anything about being uncreative or unable to engage in imaginative play, regardless of whether it's with others or alone. What is there is that an Aspie may be self-absorbed or disinterested in connecting with others generally. But there are two categories of requirements for diagnosis, and different numbers of things must be found in each. Not all of the things in both categories must be present, just enough of them in both, rather than too few or none in at least one category. All the rest is stuff that often happens to go along with being Aspie, with great variation in both what's required for diagnosis and the other things that might also commonly be found. The stuff that's simply common is probably rooted in the same cause as the stuff required for diagnosis, though, which is to say, the same things about a particular person's variation of brain wiring.

Did I make sense just now?

It's in the diagnostic criteria for Autism in the DSM-IV (as an option of something to meet). Not Asperger's Syndrome though.

I find anything that references Theory of Mind to be biased against Autistics. There seems to be a movement to put all Autistics into one easy to label box. Some people like fiction, some don't. Some people have great imaginations, some don't. And this holds true for both NTs and people on the Spectrum…

me too.

Just take a look at the random discussion section of this forum, (which is the 2nd most active) and anyone can see that aspies have great imaginations.

From my experience, it's the NT's who lack imagination.

I'm so glad it's not just me! Off topic, I love your avatar by the way.

The way I like to see it....Aspies are a different breed from NTs. We have our set shared things that show that we are an aspy, but other than that, we're still incredibly varied and have our own varied personalites.
It's like comparing two different breed of dogs. One breed may have what is considered normal for that breed and makes it identified as it, but it's also got its own varried personality, it's its own thing! So, of the Homosapiens I like to think of it as the NT breed and the Aspy breed. =)

Spontaneous imagined play. I think it is a form of imagination - it is not implying, as far as I know, all forms of imagination and creativity.

In my amateur, non-professional view, 'Spontaneous play' is the ability to create a narrative, roleplay a character, and evoke them in an imaginary setting on a continuum. This is one of the things they test for a diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome using props to construct a narrative and using a wordless story book.

I was presented with several toys and the only way I was able to think of a narrative was to borrow an assimilated narrative from a tele-newscast that I remember involving "Balloon Boy" from CNN. This isn't spontaneous imagination. It is a creative use of known experiences. This got me to thinking that constructing narratives isn't something that comes easily for me. I have exceptional rote memory that I assimilate and use 'creatively' because I apply it in a different way. It always comes from what is 'known' though. My creativity is limited to what is known in a lot of ways. I do consider myself a creative person - spontaneous, constructed, imagination? No, that's difficult for me to invoke, because it isn't linked to the known. It makes me a good researcher and 'explorer' of new ideas however. Think of the Borg - they always function from what they have assimilated.

In art school I had a hard time in my concept art class for game design because people's creative process was so averse to my own, nothing they said made sense in their fictional planets, because it wasn't grounded in the known physical application of earth physics - brain couldn't go there with them - nor did they create laws of reality to govern their planets. Granted there is a difference between science-fiction and fantasy. But those genres function in separate worlds that use known variables and how they interact follows some consensus of law and order inherent to their imagined world. It's logical.

When I was given a storybook with no words. I had a very difficult time creating a narrative because I had to make sense of everything I was seeing first before I could start making a story. Any reality I created had to make sense on the grounds of this reality - I had a hard time floating an idea without analysis first. I had a hard time being spontaneous. I'm impaired in that area. I went straight to the back so I knew how to end the story and what to expect. In the end it took me a very long time to come up with a story and I think part of this spontaneous, imagined play deals with working memory as well, because you need to float a lot of things in your head simultaneously. It involves a lot of multitasking.

In my research papers within my pursuits in academia I find myself having to read 2x if not more the material others end up reading so that I can construct a narrative or a position without feeling like I plagiarized every portion of my analysis. In order to create my own perspective I have to create an amalgam of all sources I have read (tons of reading), creating some form of consensus in all the reading, so that I can go forth and write about it ( in my own quasi-subjective-perspective).

Writing papers is supposed to help you learn by engaging your critical thinking skills, but I already do that so naturally - thus I have inherently much more analysis and a harder time organizing it in rhetoric, spontaneously, in my own words without a lot of internal deliberation, appropriate to my developmental age (relative to neuro-typical peers). It's exhausting but my analysis is always deeper than my peer-group on average. I need a lot more time than my peers. Modern academia is in a lot of ways conducive to this superficial, fast-food approach. I tend to think that in the 19th century, academia was better suited to people of our disposition.

I can engage in imagined play with children (however exhaustive it is for me), as I did with my sister when I was younger, but I do not initiate it; I parallel play. I would use elements of imagined play borrowed from my sister when we used to play with stuffed animals together and repeated them in an ad-hoc fashion for that specific task.

Imagination and memory are inherently linked in the brain. I know my memory is in many ways associative - not one thing is held in my brain that can not be related to an endless stream of other things. I still think there needs to be more neurology and brain science behind a lot of these claims from psychology, dealing with memory, imagination, and play, because those on the spectrum do process these things differently, which is why our problem solving skills are invaluable. They use a different set of brain processes, thus come up with different perspectives on the same thing.

If someone wants to do some research I believe the neocortex and the thalamus are involved with imagination and memory.

That reminds me of my English O level. I took it a year early (aged 15) and got an A because I knew how to write good stories. But I hated doing it, it was totally fake. I mechanically put in the elements I knew the examiner would want. I had just learned what the examination wanted. But like you, I never spontaneously made up stories. I figured there were millions of stories already, why create more? Is there some kind of shortage?


EXACTLY!! ! I get this on comics blogs all the time! I'm always the lone voice demanding that they make sense. I ended up making web sites onthe physics behind superheroes and on why Fantastic Four issue 1 can be realistic. Not that it obviously is realistic, but I had to find a way to make it realistic it in order to enjoy it.


It's all coming back to me now. I was pretty smart at school, so my parents entered me for a free scholarship to a local private school. But I failed the entrance exam,which consisted mainly of finishing a story. I think I good a "good enough" job, but I'm sure the other candidates would have done better.


This all sounds so familiar. I am currently constructing a logical argument for why the universe exists, why time ha an arrow, etc. Why? Because I am interested in economics, and for me a completely robust theory has to be logically provable with NO assumptions. it has to be complete. And if that means going back to basic concepts of reality then so be it.


Do you make time charts? I make a time chart of every non-simple book I read. I remember a very complex time chart of Catch-22. It as the only way I could make sense of the novel. It jumps around in time, and NT readers seem to see this as a Good Thing.



I very much agree. Some things seem so obvious to me - such as consciousness being equal to short term memory; and my brain is always either completely blank or filled with huge vistas.

I very much enjoyed your post. Thanks.

Last edited by trappedinhell on 03 Dec 2011, 3:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Hahaha, yeah that's a great anecdote. I think the feeling of contrivance or 'fakeness' is something I deal with routinely. I cannot create anything without changing everything about me.

At least you're an honest person, right?

There's still Stephen King (very prolific, of course) who as a boy worked on his skills by putting down movies which he had seen onto a piece of paper.

And Shakespeare didn't do original stuff, but re-told stories in circulation.

I really think most 'normal' kids (cough, cough) do this by lowering standards and accepting mistakes.

At a literary festival, they had a seminar on playwriting and the lady wrote on the blackboard "permission to be stupid." which I loved. And I think that's a good way to do it. It might be the 4th, 5th, or 6th pass before it starts becoming good and that's perfectly okay. It might need to sit for a while and that's fine, too. School kind of advocates an artificial way.

Those statements are assumed by lots of people about AS & I defiantly meet both of them. However I think the majority of members I've gotten to know here do not seem to met either one. I was officially diagnosed with Schizoid Personality Disorder when tested for AS thou I'm sure I have AS because I have most all the common AS issues & quirks that cant be explained by anything else but anyways I think both those statements are generally more true for Schizoids than Aspies