Verbal thinking Aspergians

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I have read Grandin talk about how there are Verbal thinking autistics aka someone who gets a 0 on the IQ block design test? I didn't know that was possible with aspergers.
though that is nld.

I have known lots of autistic people of all sorts including nonspeaking ones who think in word either visual or auditory.

It's also rather normal for people diagnosed with AS to be good at verbal things and bad at nonverbal parts of tests and stuff. Because they are selected out for having at least decent early speech.

Some autistic people do well at block design and others do badly. And some do both depending on when you test them.

Really there is huge amount of variation among autistic people and you will find thinkers of all kinds.

I am hyper-verbal, can also be selectively mute and was much moreso in my youth - and went through phases of months and months where I did not talk except for basic yes no and factual info.

I have met many other ASD people. I have met quite a few who are hyper-verbal and the issue is with language pragmatics and communication regulating - knowing when to start and when to stop talking, where it is appropriate to talk and where not etc. hyper-verbal ASD people can be the monologuers...the ones who go on and on about their favourite subjects. I am very much like this.

There is also a qualitative difference in terms of content and detail.

I have learned so much social scripting over the years - the hello and goodbye and the little comebacks which are now stored on file... and the light and boring patter of normal conversation. I do that in the context of my son's school in order to help him and his life there. It exhausts me as it requires more reciprocity than is comfortable or easy or natural for me, but i CAN do it...not all the time...but here and there. I have to WORK HARD at it and it takes all my concentration.

I also think in pictures - thousands and thousands, which often take precedence over the material world. I watch movies in my brain, and I see words as spelt words sometimes and as pictures one after the other.

I also know my sensory channels are out of the ordinary and there is a sensory blurring that impacts me.
I also see shards and shapes when overloaded - like a clatter and clanging of white shapes as well as lots of patterns.

My brain is a mystery to me. It is also a lot of fun, and I would not want to have it any other way, in spite of the difficulties.

Last edited by millie on 31 Mar 2010, 4:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.

i watched a talk by Grandin also on Youtube. I think i am more a verbal thinker. I don't think in pictures and I scored quite lowly in those blocks IQ questions that you mentioned.

The results of my cognitive and achievement testing on the various neuropsych evals i've had are all consistent with NVLD. While I also demonstrate a qualitative impairment in social interactions, I do not engage in repetitive and stereotyped patterns of behaviors, interests and activities. Thus...I don't quite meet the diagnostic criteria for Asperger's.

Nonetheless...there are many (professionals and non-professionals alike) who consider NVLD and Asperger's to be one and the same.

I have never scored above 7 ("low average") on the block design subtest....but I never scored 0 either. My own visual-spatial deficits are very profound. Even though i'm not good any type of math....geometry seems absolutely impossible for me. Ditto for any of the sciences which involve alot visual-spatial reasoning and concepts like chemistry and physics. My mechanical aptitude is pretty much nonexistent as well. Interestingly enough....I can drive and even parallel park quite well though.

Most of my performance IQ scores aren't lower than 100 and my PIQ even tested as high as 111 (high average) on the last WAIS I had.


That said....i'm equally perplexed by the Aspies/NLD-ers whose PIQ scores are within the borderline/impaired range and STILL manage to be better at visual/spatial reasoning, geometry, mechanical tasks, etc....than I am.

My verbal IQ scores are always within the superior-very superior range and my "relative weakness" (usually still average or high average) on the VIQ subtests is arithmetic.

All of the aforementioned would indicate *classic* NVLD according to Dr. Byron Rourke's criteria. But I seem WAY more impaired than most with "classic" NVLD.

Also...I usually always obtain a squarely average score (around 100) on the Raven's Progressive Matrices and similar tests. I think this is pretty common for NLD-ers as well.

As i've pointed out in almost everyone of my threads on WP.....my brain is a total mystery. In terms of both quality and quanity...the cognitive deficits I seem to have are very inconsistent with all my IQ results.

I'm not saying ENTIRELY inconsistent mind you, but based upon all my neuropsych results, I don't see why they should be AS severe as they certainly appear to be.

Nobody has any clear answers to these questions either. I have an appt. with a neurologist on Fri and though it's unlikely, I can only hope he'll be able to provide me with some further insight.

I spent all week thinking in pictures. I can switch. Picture thinking is well-difficult for sustained lengths of time, and so silent. Burn-out stuff if intense. Have to go and slap paint on houses for break .

Poetry is good for switching between verbal and non verbal images, very fiddly though
to get right, and don't bother with it anymore, because to get right requires same intensity hence not relaxing.

Too many layers to condense, require software like Photoshop for verbal image layering, blending
, inverting meanings in poetry to take brain strain out of it.

Here is question- blocks of language generate visual imagery, how would software recognise them?

I have virtually no ability to visualize anything.


Recently I had to LOOK at a cube in order to know how many sides it has.


Obviously....i've seen cubes a million times in my life and I STILL couldn't couldn't say how many sides they have off-hand.

This is also a bit mysterious because although my visual memory is poor (according to both my own observations and my neuropsych evals) I don't seem to have much trouble with facial recognition.

Horus when you read a book do you ever "see" the images as you are reading. If not how does the meaning express itself to you.


This is totally fascinating btw.

Have met people who hear language like music and feel meaning through it.


This is a beautiful poem full of sounds, more sound than visual.

The Rain Stick

Up-end the rain stick and what happens next
Is a music that you never would have known
To listen for. In a cactus stalk

Downpour, sluice-rash, spillage and backwash
Come flowing through. You stand there like a pipe
Being played by water, you shake it again lightly

And diminuendo runs through all its scales
Like a gutter stopping trickling. And now here comes
a sprinkle of drops out of the freshened leaves,

Then subtle little wets off grass and daisies;
Then glitter-drizzle, almost-breaths of air.
Up-end the stick again. What happens next

Is undiminished for having happened once,
Twice, ten, a thousand time before.
Who care if all the music that transpires

Is the fall of grit or dry seeds through a cactus?
You are like a rich man entering heaven
Through the ear of a raindrop. Listen now again.

Seamus Heaney

I should mention that even though Temple Grandin no longer thinks we all think in pictures, she still has a very limited grasp of how many different kinds of autistic thinking there are. She certainly never mentions anything resembling mine.

And Horus I still think you put too much stock in IQ tests. Once you realize they are not an accurate measure of anything other than the ability to take IQ tests, and even less accurate than usual in neuro-atypical types, all that great mystery of why peoples skills including yours don't seem to match our IQ scores, why people with lower IQs than you are better at some things, etc... all that mystery just vanishes entirely.

I think I've written about this to you before concerning memory....I do think we have some cognitive similarities. You often write things which are similar to me but then go on to describe and even greater degree of difficulty. I'm wondering if we have some cognitive similarities but the problems you have are to a greater degree so that the workarounds I developed throughout life aren't enough for you.

Like you, I have some memory difficulties. I wrote a long post or PM or something at one point describing the workarounds I developed to force things from short term memory into long term memory such as making up songs about the things or watching documentaries that correlate with the textbooks books I was reading. I just bring it up because it's a thing we have in common. I also am not particularly good at visulaization. I always do very badly on visualization tests too but have avoided major problems by always carrying pen and paper to write directions and landmarks so I don't get lost. Now there's GPS so I'm lucky there. I also carry a calculator so I can go shopping without letting my dyscalcula muck things up too much. I suppose I have avoided being impaired because the technological fixes for my difficulties are so widely available...like a person who wears glasses probably doesn't think of themselves as visuallly impaired.

So I'm wondering if we have similar brains but yours is just....more. So that my workarounds wouldn't work for you. I don't know. It's just a guess.

The IQ test doesn't seem to help all that much in your situation. The scores haven't shed any light on your brain for the various evaluators. But maybe they are just not being thorough enough. Perhaps the clue is not in the scores themselves but in the particular answers you got right and wrong in each section and on each test. There may be a pattern in what you get right and what you get wrong that gets lost when a raw score is calculated. Maybe you can convince the next expert to look at the actual questions rather than just the raw scores and see if there is a pattern that other experts have missed. If a true pattern can be found, that makes a highly specific workaround more possible.

Or it may be that you get things right in a test situation but then can't translate that ability to real life applications. Which is also important to know. If you consistently get right on paper something that you consistently get wrong in real life application, there is a block somewhere between your knowledge and your ability to apply it. This needs to be discovered for there to be a workaround devised.

But I think that it will be hard to tell if experts just look at scores and don't look at exactly what questions you get right and wrong to look for a pattern obscured by raw scores. It's worth bringing this up to the next expert.

Yes.....I guess you could say I "see" the images in my own idiosyncratic fashion. The images are all quite "misty"...rather vague and they would really be very difficult to explain in any meaningful way. All of my dreams are visually very rich, but far too surreal and "psychedelic" to ever explain.

For one example....I can somewhat visualize the characters, places and things in a work of fiction like the The Lord of the Rings.

But the images never seem to take on any solid or definitive form. They are just like shadowy flashes in my brain and they never seem to be defined in the same sense that an actual picture is. Nonetheless....I derived profound meaning from the LOTR and found myself weeping through much it.

I have trouble visualizing numbers and letters in my head as well. Aside from single digit numbers or larger numbers that end in zero...I can't add, subtract, multiply or divide in my head because the the visual image of the numbers rapidly fades.

I've also heard that a poor visual memory can manifest itself in spelling difficulties. There are many words (especially fairly common ones it would seem) I can't remember how to spell no matter how many times i've seen them.

That was a beautiful poem BTW. I can't honestly say I personally relate to it because I don't hear language as music either.

All I can say is that I simply "hear" language as language....though the meaning I derive from it depends almost entirely on the words themselves and their delivery.

Temple Grandin seems to be a bit of an elitist IMO who seems to think "high functioning" (for want of a better term) autistics are some sort of Nietzschean ubermensch. She seems to think human civilization would've never made it out of a barbarous and benighted hunter-gatherer stages were it not for the Promethean gifts of autistics.

At any rate....I think you may have misunderstood me Anbuend and I will bear the entire blame for that. I really don't place much stock in IQ tests. Still...as unreliabe as they are....there is no better measurement of this vague, relative and incongruous quality we call "intelligence".

Thus....I just don't know what else to go on and I am very tired of living with a neurological mystery. Partially because I still believe my "neurological deficits" MIGHT have more to do with something PSYCHOLOGICAL. Something rooted deep within my subconscious mind perhaps. I'm not saying I have NO neurologically-based learning disabilities. I just think my perception of them MAY have been exagerrated to a monstrous degree.

Hmm. That reminds me a bit of my brother. He thought the same thing about how some of his problems might be psychological. Even though they seemed neurological to those around him. Other things remind me of him too but I'd be hard pressed to say what. He and I are both autistic but he is my opposite completely in a lot of ways.

Sorry to get you wrong about the IQ tests. It just seemed like you were puzzled why they didn't say much about how people functioned.

Have you read the book Finding Ben? It can be grueling to read the author's initial depiction of her son but he was diagnosed with a very severe NLD and had massive problems functioning and got a lot of psych labels and stuff. And the author does get less awful towards the end, she was just describing her initial impressions of him before she accepted him. It was hard for me to read because some of her descriptions of his appearance reminded me of me.

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Yes you have...that much I remember

We may have some cognitve similarities and considering the circumstances (both past and current) of my life nothing has worked for me thus far. I really wouldn't even know where to begin with "workarounds". If any would be beneficial to me in the first place, i'm pretty sure they'd need to be "tailored" to my own idiosyncratic cognitive profile. And that would be a very difficult thing to do since no one, myself included, seems to know what my cognitive profile is exactly.





Yes I remember that. It all sounds very time-consuming though and since you mention textbooks....i'm assuming you utilized these mnenomic techniques in school. At least when it comes to courses like psychology, sociology, history and philosophy, I don't seem to have much of problem recalling enough material to PASS TESTS....even pass them with flying colors. But my brain is cued or prompted by the tests. So for example....if somebody asked to write a paper about everything I learned in chap 2 of a psychology text STRICTLY FROM MEMORY, I could never do it. Or someone wanted to have a conversation about everything learned in said chapter, well, I could never do that either. I seem to recall only very isolated and general facts in regards to ANYTHING I read or study. This seems to be the case no matter how well I comprehend the material, no matter how many times i've read it and even if it's a subject i'm very interested in. I don't know if the workarounds you've used would work for me. It's possible but I don't know exactly HOW you went about all this. Again....it seems incredibly time-consuming considering the vast amount of material we need to remember in the academic setting and short period of time we have to do so. I mean I could see doing this with recreational reading when you have all the time in the world. I can't imagine doing it while taking 12 credit's worth of courses more demanding than the "little engine that could".

Again...I have little problem recalling information for TESTS. But it's obviously not possible to become a history teacher or physics professor unless you can recall most of what you learned about those subjects during your formal academic training. A nursing student who remembers just enough from their A & P, Pharmcology, etc.... texts/notes/lectures to pass tests IN THOSE CLASSES would never become a nurse. Such a person would never be able to pass the NCLEX or probably never even make to clinicals. I don't really have that much of problem with directions myself. Initially, I do write directions down....but if i've been somewhere once I generally can find my way back a second time with no problem.







Very true...the IQ tests i've taken have only served to intensify the mystery...they've done nothing to diminish it. The evaluators seem to THINK the results shed light on my brain, but i'm afraid they may have been very wrong. For example.....i've asked them fairly direct questions like; "Based upon these results Dr. X, do you think I could pass a Calculus course"? Well..."Dr. X" told me i'd probably struggle with such a course, but that they could see no reason why I ultimately wouldn't be able to pass it. My own experiences with higher math did not bear this out however. I couldn't even pass introductory Algebra after taking and dropping it twice. It is possible they weren't thorough enough....I really don't know. Many here on WP (Callista is the first one who comes to mind) have said that the individual subtests are far more telling when it comes to those with Autistic Spec Disorders. There is every reason to believe this and i've always paid more attention to my subtest scores rather than the VIQ/PIQ/FSIQ. I really don't know if evaluators are ever thorough ENOUGH to take particular right/wrong answers on a given subtest into account though. Surely there is a pattern in that respect and I imagine this pattern does get downplayed, if not entirely overlooked, often enough. If and when I do undergo another neuropsych test, I certainly will emphasize the potential importance of this to the proctor.


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I suppose anything is possible, but I have doubts about this. For example.... I would THINK the subtests on verbal IQ (as opposed to those on PIQ) might be more reflective of one's ability at logic puzzles and how they might do in a formal logic course. Aside from arithmetic....my subtest scores on VIQ are very high...usually in the 90-something percentiles. Nonetheless....I am absolutely horrible at logic puzzles and I bombed my logic course in college. But according to my VIQ subtests....my abstract reasoning ability and reading comprehension is very good. There is really little or no non-verbal reasoning involved in the sort of logic puzzles (or the college course I took) i'm referring to. So I don't know see what the difference is between some of the tests on Weschler which supposedly measure one's logical thinking ability and what you'll encounter in logic puzzles/courses. BTW....we could say that logical and mathematical reasoning are similar, if not identical, cognitive abilites. If this is so...my arithmetic scores on VIQ are not THAT low. I always score average-high average on the arithmetic subtest. My performance on logic puzzles and the course I took is/was anything but average. But again....this might have something to do with the individual answers I got right/wrong on the arithmetic. Or....perhaps some of the PIQ subtests (block design is the first one that comes to mind and I ALWAYS get low average scores on that) are more relevant in terms of one's performance at logic puzzles/courses.

I'd LIKE to believe my learning/memory problems are extremely exagerrated by my psychological problems (which aren't insignificant). I have been DX-ed with schizotypal personality disorder, and in my case at least, I think there may be a fine line between this and "Simple" Schizophrenia. To be clear...I don't exhibit any of the positive or "hard" symptoms of schizophrenia, but many of the negative and cognitive features ARE present. I have always dealt with severe depression, anxiety and panic attacks as well but there's no reason to believe any of this is more than a secondary and "natural" manifestation of my learning/memory difficulties. Everyone else, including my immediate family and, based upon what they seemed to be implying in the "personality and emotions" sections of my neuropsych evals, the psychologists who've tested me, believes i've exagerrated my learning/memory problems.

Idk....it's alot more comforting to believe there's a genius inside of me trapped by severe psychological problems. There is more hope involved in this sort of belief. After all....if my learning/memory problems have simply been grossly exagerrated by a severely psychologically/emotionally disturbed mind, it MIGHT be comparitively easy to "unexagerrate" them. Perhaps alot easier than creating a new Corpus Callosum or Hippocampus that is. Nonetheless.....I am realistic and rational enough to know this is likely nothing more than desperate wishful thinking on my part.



No apologies necessary in regards to my feelings about IQ tests. I take full responsibility for giving you that impression. I admit that I once place too much faith in IQ tests, but no longer. I have read and heard far too much to give much credence to these tests. Especially when it comes to individuals "on the spec".


I haven't read "Finding Ben" and never even heard of it until now. It sounds like a worthy read though and maybe I will order it from Barnes & Noble.