Thinking in pictures in autistic cognition

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Really interesting this.

I'm not conscious of thinking in pictures but can recognise patterns in things displayed visually very quickly. I also retain memories as pictures.

I'm not sure how far along the autism spectrum I am but I definitely find it easier to understand things when they are put in graphic or visual format.

I spend a lot of time making maps / graphics as part of my research to aid my understanding and often notice patterns in things. I seem to sometimes spot patterns and make connections other can't.

When I'm learning something it's almost as if I have to be able to understand how it's pattern works before I can understand it. My experience of learning to read was particularly like this. I went from reading nothing but having a good verbal vocabulary to suddenly being able to read everything. It was like someone flicked a switch in my head.

I'm more of a picture thinker than a maths thinker but my maths skills have improved as I've worked on them. I've spent the last 5 years improving my knowledge of statistics and recently that seems to have clicked into place much the way reading did when I was small as I finally grasped what the underlying patterns are.

Also My IQ comes out higher on the Raven's progressive matrices test than the standard IQ test too.

Yeah, I heard that that may be the case. How much higher, if you don't mind me asking? I never got the chance to take the Raven test...

I wonder if people who have difficulty visualizing or have NVLD can be taught eggsplicitly to visualize bester?

For eggsample, I had eggstreme difficulty verbalizing when I was a kid, but I was taught to speak eggsplicitly, so I learned to verbalize and think verbally from that. The natural way of learning to verbalize had failed for me. Then, as an adult, I did some creative writing on my own, and that turned on a lot moar verbalizing for me, and I spoke much moar spontaneously after that, and most of my speaking and writing are translations of the visuals that I see in my mind.

So can a similar approach help people with NVLD, eggspecially children in school? Teach visualizing eggsplicitly like teaching language eggsplicitly?

Almost all of my thinking is done in pictures or "video clips", my memories play like youtube video's, I plan out every movement I intend to make so it's done with the most efficiency, everything from going to make myself a coffee to trips across the country. The process happens very fast, most times I'll have multiple "video clips" going at the same time matrix style, showing me possible outcomes of the options available to me. Problem is... my planning is always missing one crucial variable.. HUMANS!

My long term memory is such that if I haven't suppressed the memory I can see everything as I saw it the first time. Like live in HD to incredible detail right down the smells and sounds. My short term memory however is absolute shyte.... Sights, smells and sounds trigger flashbacks from my long term memory all the time, sometimes it's kewl, other times it's pretty traumatic.

So Visual thinking in video clips and pictures a la The Matrix as well as semi - eidetic memory.

I wish i could draw... It would make my life soooo much easier. I get ideas for stuff all the time and I have a hell of a time trying to explain it to my boyfriend. My last idea was for a portable gold sluice that uses fluid dynamics to extract fine flour gold quickly using a fluid bed (my current special interest is placer gold mining). Now imagine someone with asd trying to explain fluid dynamics to an NT who has zero interest in fluid dynamics yet wants to help anyway...

I ended up drawing what I wanted, all measurements, break points etc, took me almost 2 days... It'll be bent up by the end of the week...

That is an interesting idea. I have done a bit of research on a lack of visualization and I only found one person who managed to teach himself to visualize. I would have thought it would be quite difficult to teach visualization to a child as they have no point of reference. With speech it is very noticeable if you have difficulties. Everyone else is talking so there is obviously something wrong. How do you explain visualization? If someone says to me 'imagine a pink elephant' I will have the concept of an elephant and add pink to the description. If asked I could describe that elephant by referring to my internal description of an elephant. How could an outside observer tell that my 'imagination' does not include a picture?

After doing some browsing, NVLD does ring quite a few bells for me, though I have a lot of AS traits as well. On one site I found this quote: Yup, that was me! During break times I used to stand near the entrance to the building hoping I would recognize one of my classmates so I could follow them to the class. I was also very late learning to write though I learned to read very quickly.

Most descriptions of NVLD mention difficulty understanding geometry and diagrams. I have no difficulty there and I can interpret engineering drawings easily. Admittedly I have had a lot of practice with engineering drawings. As I can't visualize parts I have to draw them. Before I draw the part I know what it is supposed to do and how it is supposed to work but I don't know what it will look like.

One interesting point has just occurred to me- how did I think before I learned to talk? Now I have a continuous internal dialog but what did I do before?

Standard IQ 117

Ravens 129

Both were online tests (cheap but not free) so can't be completely certain they're accurate. Ravens was age adjusted.

I have wondered if manipulating objects according to verbal instructions would help children with NVLD learn to build up objects with their hands, then pictorial representations of objects in front of their eyes, then pictorial representations of objects in their minds for visualizing when the objects are not in front of their eyes.

This building up process is how I learned to verbalize, seeing words on a page and putting them together into sentences, then being able to come up with words and sentences in my own mind when there is no page of words for me to see. I have heard people with NVLD say that they cannot visualize a dot in their minds, and that used to be the case for me when it came to verbalizing a word. I did not think of any words in my mind, so naturally, I did not speak any words with my mouth either.

I don't know if it would be possible to go in the other direction, building up visuals from verbal instructions. Recently, a kid had trouble with a geometry problem, figuring out how to find the volume of a figure made of three smaller figures, and I said something like, "This is a cylinder and these two are cones," and he understood the figure from the verbal description but not when looking at it. Can he be taught to see the cylinder and the cone on the page or in his mind?

I'm not convinced it would help visualization ability per se but it would probably help develop techniques to work around the problem. At the end of the day visualization is useful but not essential. Some things may take me longer to do than most people but it doesn't really stop me from doing anything. The only times I really notice a problem are when trying to describe something/someone and navigating around unfamiliar places.

Hmm, perhaps one of the reasons behind my unusual first time speaking was because I was listening to the sounds of those around me. The story goes that I would mumble out sentences by making a grunt for each syllable, and it would make sense to my parents what I was saying (like "I want some milk" would be "Grunt grunt grunt grunt", and I'd point, lol). Then on my second birthday, I started talking in complete sentences.

So maybe I was listening to the sounds around me the whole time? I was also very musically inclined at a young age, and started composing some songs on my own (my mom wrote out the music though, lol, I didn't understand staffs)



I've heard of people diagnosed with both. What site is this? I'd like to look at it.

Do you think you could have NVLD?

I think verbally like most people as well as in pictures, concepts, models, and emotions.

I can mentally walk through nearly any building I've been through in the last 10 years. I'm in college now, and I can still go back through my elementary school. I can also mentally picture a model of something and rotate it, seeing it at any angle.

Thinking in pictures is my only way of thinking. When people speak to me, their words translate into pictures or movies in my mind. If a person speaks to me using slang, figures of speech, or abstractions, I often have a difficult time understanding them. They may as well be speaking Klingon. When I shop, I never use lists. I have the pantry and refrigerator memorized. I also have several supermarkets memorized also, Shopping becomes a movie. I can also see in detail homes, stores, restaurants, and schools that existed 30-40 years ago.

This is very similar to me, although I can't rotate complex shapes, and I think less of emotion and much more verbal (I think anyway, sometimes it's quite hard to tell actually.)

If you do a Google search for nld aspergers you will get quite a lot of information. This page is quite informative. There seems to be a fair overlap between the two.
I have no official diagnosis but I would guess that AS with some NVD traits would possibly be about right

When memorizing lots of numbers, I am average or suck if the numbers are shown one by one like on digit span tests, but I am great if the numbers are shown all at once. The second strategy is visual, I think. Just photograph the page, and I'm fine, but ask me to remember things one by one, and I suck.

Interesting.


TheSunAlsoRises

Another task that I suck at is spatial memory.

Spatial memory is where you see a grid, like four-by-four, and the squares flash one at a time, and you have to remember the order in which they flashed. I suck at this. I can barely remember the order of five flashes. This task was mentioned in the paper that I linked. The researchers said that although spatial memory seems like it would be a visual task, that most people ackshuly use a verbal strategy to remember the squares that flashed in order. Autistic people perform not so good on this task, but on a different task, where they show you multiple specific objects in different locations, then cover them up, then show you one object at a time and ask you to answer the location of that object, autistic people performed well, because the objects, unlike the squares on the grid, were visually discriminable, and it was easier for non-verbal thinkers to remember their locations. And I have always done very well at this type of tasks, but terribly at the other.