Autism and Abstract Reasoning

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Thank you. Best wishes for your son's progress..

I can remember writing a story about Christmas that was awarded first place in middle school, and one in a philosophy class in college. But. in both cases I was shocked at the words on the paper, and wasn't sure how I did it. It was like the words did not belong to me. Now that I understand more about hyperlexia, perhaps in someways they didn't. And can understand better why I had such a hard time finding original creativity in emotional arts like painting, music, and literature.

I could copy someone's handwriting that was beautiful, play the piano from sheet music, and sing along with others as the same, but couldn't create anything I felt like I could call my own, until I was facing burnout from work and copying social mannerisms, and the music started flowing from my fingers on the piano.

That was the only communication that I felt was truly my own, but like the writing, still not sure where it came from. I felt connected to the world in many ways, but rarely in what I could call my own original communication.

But never the less, the parroting adaptation worked well enough for me to feel connected to the world and others, for decades. I don't feel that part so much anymore, but was happy to experience it while I could. Looking back the connectivity with the environment and others was a much greater gift than the original gift of creativity I sought for most of my life:).

Thank you for the links, that was an interesting read.

Yes, I can relate to at least some of the characteristics of hyperlexia. Interestingly, my sister and my father are both dyslexic, and my mother has a form of dyscalculia, where she has good abstract mathematical reasoning abilities, but can't process the reading and writing of numbers correctly.

There is a reason I chose the username unsortable, though - whenever I find a box I might fit in, it seems I'm only halfway there. This goes for NVLD and hyperlexia both. I'll have to ask my mom some questions about my early language development to get a better idea how well hyperlexia applies to me. It's worth looking into, anyway.

I think that btbnnyr fit the hyperlexia profile too, based on what I read on btbnnyr's blog. The hyperlexia profile seems to be a natural pattern of language development for a subgroup of autistic children. Reading words aka seeing pictures without much meaning on the receptive side of communication, writing words aka drawing pictures without much meaning on the eggspressive side. Btbnnyr learned to read and write words early and on her own, but needed a lot of help to translate the pictures into language and meaning aka verbal abstraction. As a result, btbnnyr had lots of communication problems as a child. Verry merry berry telling is btbnnyr's lack of both verbal and non-verbal communication, indicating lack of development of the social brain, not only a language development delay. Perhaps it was the lack of development of the social brain that caused the lack of development of verbal abstraction and language for communication. Not lack, but rather delayed, but not only delayed, but more like delayed and alternative. Not like typical development with delayed milestones following a similar pattern, but more like a specifically autistic pattern of language development.

On the topic of tangential communication, I can't help noticing how much more I prefer to communicate like this. When others complain that I constantly digress, I don't protest but inwardly disagree, because I know that they can't follow my ways of connecting and associating facts and experiences. In my mind the connections are all there, but my attempts at expression almost always fall short, more so in speech than in writing.

Discovering WP, and other people communicating tangentially, has cheered me up no end. I thoroughly enjoy reading threads such as this one in part for that reason (and also for the fact sharing and the high level of intelligence evident in the posts). I have had the good fortune of meeting a few others in 'real' life that I could talk to this way, but those relationships were as transient as most others I've had.

I think the reason I value tangential communication is that it allows for a better approximation in the realm of language of non-linear non-verbal thought patterns, than does the more restricted on-a-narrow-topic verbal mode that many seem to prefer - and which usually leaves me feeling trapped and hemmed in. Tangential communication has a wonderful openness and spaciousness to it that I find deeply satisfying.

And btbnnyr, I for one do not find your writing style at all jumpy. I find it refreshingly sensible.

(change topic)
All this verbal thinking and wordiness make my hands thirsty for work. I need to balance this out and go do some artsy crafty stuff or I'll fly away in a word balloon soon.

I recently came into possession of my mental health records for the past three years.

My latest psychiatrist wrote in one of the reports: "Patient is significantly tangential and requires frequent redirection."

I was diagnosed with ADHD shortly after she made that observation.

Even though I'm a "word person," I have a similar issue with "original creativity."

I can be very creative when writing from a prompt, or working with someone else's ideas, but I'm not particularly good at generating my own.

I know an autistic person who speaks only in facts, jumping from one fact to another when tallking. I like his communication style, because it makes sense to me, and the facts are all connected to each other, even though he never states the connections.

I had it put into my records that I was significantly circumstantial in speech and needed to be redirected to stay on topic. My therapist decided that letting me go on was better for learning about me. Until, that is, last week when she admitted that she had realized that letting me go off on tangents was making therapy harder.

I am circumstantial instead of tangential because I can catch myself and redirect sometimes. Or I spend ages getting back to the point, but I do get back to it.

i remeber a professor before i took test left me a personal note: "write your essay just as if you were talking to me in person" i guess that is what he meant.

I just remembered something from the last year or two:

I found an executive function and verbal memory test online, took the test and scored in the bottom 2% for verbal memory. I was trying to use verbal strategies to recall the words, and failed miserably.

Later on, swbluto linked the test here again and I tried it a second time, this time using visual strategies and selected the words that evoked familiar images. In that case, I scored either 96 or 98%. In other words, the performance difference between verbal strategies vs. visual strategies was fairly immense.

I think I ended up trying to use verbal strategies with things - despite not really excelling at it - is because I have always felt I was strong verbally due to learning to read at 3 years of age, generally having rather good spelling and at least reasonable grammar, and having had my reading level in first grade measured as college level. However, these things are actually a product of hyperlexia, which does have some advantages in the areas I mention, but does not actually indicate that "verbal" is my best strategy for recall or otherwise functioning.

I think the strangest thing for me is that I never really gave much thought to the fact that I do not think in words. At most, it would irritate me that when I wanted to put my thoughts into words I had to speak or write to translate them, but I never really tried to explain it.

I do not seem to process things like btbnnyr (from reading her blog, and while I know aghogday and I have some similarities I know we have some rather strong differences (I spoke earlier than is typical, he spoke later).

I think the biggest realization for me in the past several years has been accepting that I can have thoughts and ideas and concepts in my mind that I cannot put into words, but that this does not mean I do not know these things. Give me the right language, and I can immediately put these things into words. Until then, I have fairly intense visualizations of these ideas, but no words to translate them. I could draw them, I think.

The big thing was having another autistic person tell me that from reading my writing she suspected I did not think in words, and while I had never given it serious thought beyond what I mentioned above, she was correct.

This kind of thing also reflects a kind of frustration I have with how I think - not in images (or other sensory impressions). But rather which things I question and explore and which things I need explicit prompting to examine in the first place. I do know my brain has some fairly strong aptitudes, but I have to admit that despite my tested IQ in childhood, I do question whether that was an accurate score or a score inflated by the fact that I was at least superficially verbally advanced.

I think people on the spectrum can be underestimated in intelligence but overestimated in some areas of intelligence because of strengths in others.

It's interesting as people judge the intelligence of people so much by the communication they use, particularly vocabulary. But, in school the assessment can be in how attentive a child is to the teacher, while potentially very quiet not using much verbal language. I couldn't remember to turn the lights off as a child, and still can't do it as an adult, but in school and work I could usually develop a type of trance like mind meld with whoever was doing the lecturing. That type of adaptation seemed to work well for the rote memory required for multiple choice tests. Which in a verbal way is like Raven Matrices testing of crystallized instead of fluid intelligence, if that makes sense.

I avoided speaking in front of more than one person at all costs, but when I finally was forced to speak in front of a large group of people, I understood how valuable to a speaker the person giving the speaker their full undivided trance like attention was. But that didn't make it any easier to speak..

Not only do I think people rate other people with their intelligence by communication but how engaged they appear to be in interest in what the other person is saying. Somewhere in my 40's I lost my ability to make the "mind meld" without getting horrible headaches. And it was strange as it would only go away if I was doing the talking, which demanded usage of a skill that I was not well accommodated to.

So I guess, overall, what I am trying to say is that the laser focus can be taken as a sign that sharp coherent language will naturally follow as an expectation, whether or not it follows, in silence.

My mother said I looked like I knew too much as a child, but I think it might have been that I was looking through her instead of at her.

But never the less, I was usually the observer instead of the actor. And every actor, teacher, or mother can appreciate a well behaved attentive audience.. I wasn't so well behaved or attentive at home when the testosterone hit in middle school..

Typing a lot of words on the internet provides me that sense of central coherence I was chasing most of my life, with adrenaline under stress of expectation and performance at school and work. But, a life of words in text can be a very abstract life, in deed. Space intended.

When I make posts for my blog, I have to start with the pictures of what I want to communicate. Then, I make the pictures. Then, I write the words to describe the pictures. If I try to write the words before I make the pictures, it will not work. I don't know what to write.

For me, a big part of development was learning the verbal skills to output my non-verbal thoughts, some visual, others other senses, others not sensory at all. Before I learned the verbal skills, there was no outputting. It was only when I learned language that I understood what communication was.

I seem to lack a lot of central coherence in a lot of areas. It's like my inability prior to diagnosis to see a lot of my "symptoms" (I didn't see them as such before) as being connected or indicative of a particular thing. Or maybe I mean a lack of ability to generalize in many many contexts (and yes I know that is a generalization, but I have to encounter a lot of specifics in order to build a generalization approximation).



Yeah, this was different for me because I was using language to communicate earlier, The earlier development of language led to a different trajectory, but not necessarily one to my advantage. Not necessarily a disadvantage either, just turned out differently.

I should give making pictures before I write a go, though. It might actually help a lot with translating some things I can visualize but not describe. I am not terrible at visual media, and doing such things is actually fun.

You're brilliant, btbnnyr. I'm in love with your blog Thanks for providing us with a glimpse of how the autistic mind works -at least the ones with strong visual skills. I think your mind is beautiful.

My husband has a gift for logic, he thinks in patterns and can solve very complicated problems in matter of minutes, and he's never wrong. The thing is I don't think he can explain how he does it. Just like we -NTs- can't explain how we intuitively know what's going on within a person, and anticipate reactions.

It's like every brain is wired to be good at something different, the visual, the logical or the social, or something else.

My iq tests show high abilities in abstract and visual concepts. These are autistic traits. But reasoning and seeing patterns is not my strength. Here, I'm only average. This is supposed to be the crux of abstract logic or reasoning. I think that sometimes our minds are so open that we struggle with the obvious. Also, neurology shows that we have fewer neurons to and from the frontal cortex. So humility so in order. Or, at the very least, we should try to be aware of the areas that most of us are dumb as a board about. We all have these. It seems to be a bad side effect of an otherwise good evolutionary shift in our direction.