Thank you so much woodpeace! I was looking for that for ages and never found it. I'll repaste it here. Just anyone reading it, the references to Temple Grandin's three forms of autistic thought are because I feared people taking it too seriously and trying to forcefit their experiences into her categories. I mean her no disrespect as a whole person (she's done many valuable things) although I don't respect her specific ability to accurately represent the thinking of people other than herself. So here goes, and be aware there were italics in the original that I can't cut/paste:
Temple Grandin is the last person I would ask about the different ways autistic people think. For years she repeated "autistic people are picture thinkers". Mind you her "pictures" are often moving video with sound. So when she says picture she doesn't seem to mean it's entirely visual, probably just that visual is always there but sound is only there sometimes and mostly to supplement the visual parts. She's oddly enough also suggested that another autistic person making analogies to music was talking in visual symbols so maybe I don't get it after all.
Then someone must have informed her that not all autistic people think in pictures. Because she eventually asked hundreds of autistic people and family members (how would even close family know how you think unless you told them??) how they thought. Out of hundreds of autistic people. Hundreds. She came up with only three categories.
One of those was picture thinkers like herself. Another of those was people who think in mathematics-like patterns (totally different than what I call patterns -- these are abstract patterns) and may excel in music or math. And then the last was people who think in words.
At this point I strongly suspect her reason for coming up with only three types of thinking is some kind of cognitive issue on her part (the same kind that led her to think of a music reference as suggesting a visual thought process). It can't possibly be because hundreds of people only told her three kinds of thinking. That's just not a conceivable situation. You can get more kinds of thinking than that on a Wrongplanet thread.
Here are just the kinds of thinking I have heard of off the top of my head. Mind you most of these I didn't even have to interview anyone to hear. I've read them in books, read them on the net, overheard conversations, and had conversations with people. And it was before I heard a dozen let alone a hundred that I heard more than three types. So here are some of those types:
Thinking in pictures. Obviously.
Thinking in words. Obviously. Note that this can be auditory, visual, tactile, or kinesthetic, depending on whether we are talking about heard, spoken, Braille (or similar), or signed. It doesn't have to be auditory.
Thinking in colors moving past each other in different paths and formations (despite the words used this is not what Temple Grandin sees as visual thought, she sees visual and picture as synonymous).
Thinking in pure thought, free of any sensory imagery or decipherable pattern, free even of the sense of being able to pinpoint specific thoughts.
Thinking in schematics. Nonvisually.
What Donna Williams calls "pattern, form, and feel". Pure awareness in a sensing way without any reflection on that awareness. Patterns may be unconsciously formed between those experiences, but there is an absence of what most would call conscious thought (as well as an absence of the way conscious thought orders sensory experiences -- so a table will be experienced as color texture and sound but not as a distinct object-type). Note that the word pattern here bears zero relation to Temple Grandin's use of the word. Many people who have experienced this will refer to it as "not thinking" because there is no conscious experience of what most people call thought. As possibly suspected due to the length of this description, this is my native mode of thinking and the one I always go back to when I halt conscious thought.
Thinking verbally when having a conversation, visually when repairing mechanical devices, abstractly when programming. (That's how I recall my brother describing it.)
Thinking in abstract concepts, in a sequence.
Thinking in abstract concepts, complex multidimensional networks.
Thinking in abstract concepts, flowing all together rather than neatly separated with lines between each one.
Thinking in... sort of webs of information united by synesthetic sensory/personality/gender data that would make zero sense to anyone else because synesthesia is so personalized.
Thinking through one's sense of physical body motion.
Thinking in music. (In my case when this happens I don't think it is at all like what Temple Grandin describes. I'm not thinking in the relational patterns that make up both music and math. What happens is that I have what I call my internal jukebox. It replays songs. But not just like having a song randomly stuck in your head. The songs always have a direct relation to my feelings, my understanding of something, or an association to something in my environment. Often I will notice the song before the feeling, understanding, or objects/words in front of me. Sometimes the song will even go "ahead" of my conscious understanding of something. This is just the easiest conscious thought to describe. Right now the song going through my head is a Donna Williams song related to the kind of "nonthinking" I have in common with her. One thing that frustrates me is that I often effortlessly compose beautiful, flowing music in my head but cannot get it to sit still long enough to find a way to write it down, and can't play piano (or any other instrument that has several tones at once) well enough to even come close to playing it. Plus it's often played by several cellos at once or something else like that. This frustrates me.)
Thinking in those actual abstract mathematical/musical pattern relationships Grandin does talk about, which I forgot to wrote down (and can barely even conceive, except as certain Bach music, which is the concretest form I can understand, and which hurts my brain like language does).
Thinking in visual symbols (but not pictures).
And that's just off the top of my head without straining my brain. FIFTEEN different kinds of thinking. Just from memory. And out of hundreds of people she can only find three. She's got to be either shoving things into categories they have no business in (much like the music=visual thing I spotted), or omitting anything she can't make sense out of. I can't see another way she could miss so much of the diversity of autistic thinking.
BTW I think only some of those types of thinking are more likely to be autistic. Most people in general apparently think in pictures. I suspect the "nonthinking" may be one of the few more common in autistic or highly neuro-atypical other people.
Anyway, please if you're reading this, don't try to force-fit yourself into one of Grandin's three categories. This is one area she doesn't seem to do well at. Don't force-fit yourself into one of my fifteen either unless you belong there. There are probably hundreds of ways to think and discussions of thinking among autistic people (or any other topic relating to our subjective experience) are badly distorted when people think "Gee there are {3, 4, 20, whatever} categories of experience. Which one do I fit the most?" A better way to do it if possible is "Does my experience match anything I see here? If so, what parts? Then what parts don't match? If not, what is my real experience like?" I know unfortunately a lot of us find multiple choice easier than open ended questions. But still, even if you can't come up with words that fit, you can at least say "None of the above" or "some parts don't match but I don't know how to say them."
_________________
"In my world it's a place of patterns and feel. In my world it's a haven for what is real. It's my world, nobody can steal it, but people like me, we live in the shadows." -Donna Williams
21 Apr 2011, 3:24 am
