Aspies ARE imaginative

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I write poetry and compose music.
So I guess I consider myself having an imagination.
At other times though, I seem to have no imagination at all and can't seem to get passed reality and imagine things that didn't happen.

The fact that trent has that he's unsure if he has AS may be because some of the symptoms he's been told are givens for AS don't fit him at all... Like imagination. Maybe you do belong here trent, but you might view some things as rules set in concrete that might actually be theories, guidelines or occassional tendancies. Ironically, this makes you seem more Aspie as sometimes we do things like that.



To explain what I think happened with the whole "lack of imagination" thing, is that the person or people coming up with the testing might have imagined something. They tested to see if the AS test subjects could imagine the exact same thing in the same way. They probably couldn't, or if they could, might not have explained that they could. But perhaps the things that the AS subjects imagined were greater, bolder, more vivid and outside of the box. Because they didn't share the imagination of the tester, they were seen as being unable to imagine properly.

Perhaps the "lack of imagination" criteria should be renamed "a lessened ability to share imagined details with NT imagined situations".


Even then, I doubt we ALL MUST HAVE THAT TO BE A.S.! Just as we don't all rock back and forth or repeat everything we hear.

For me, my imagined worlds seem more real than this one.

They mean social imagination, when they speak of Aspergers "lack of imagination", they are talking about MODELLING other persons thoughts, intents and feelings.

That's how I understood it as well. not creative imagination, wjicj my aspie friend has im spades.

I can imagine things. What I struggle with is creativity. I think in pictures and so forth, I have a good visual memory (NOT with faces though). But ask me to brainstorm some visually creative-looking project and forget it.

So why are you here? How do you know that isn't THE real reality?

At times, I was in that area between sleep and full awareness. Sometimes it just happened with me. It is almost like the realities BLEED together. I almost ALWAYS wake up having to do something without all the info, and it takes like an hour to realize it was from an alternate reality. One actually had me tasked with finding a precedent for a court case for someone else. Such a thing could NEVER happen, but I somehow believed it had.

It is odd I have always felt that, when it comes to my mind, I am like a guy with a supercomputer that can only run the calculator program, and play games. Every once in a while I hit the right buttons, and things snap, but I just never learned to use it. 8-(

Still, I can imagine pretty well. I just wish it had better resolution, and I could see it visually. Conciously, my visualization starts out more like a memory recalled than reality. It often doesn't go further than that.

Exactly.

If "lack of imagination" should be understood as "lack of creativity", then it's utter nonsense. Look at how many autistic people are or were talented writers and artists. Donna Williams, David Eastham, Tito Mukhopadhyay, Jasmine O'Neill, Jacques Pillaut and so forth. Some of them are severely autistic and cannot even take care of themselves.

I think "lack of imagination" ended up among the diagnostic criteria because imagination, just like many other things, is not always readily observable in ASD children. If a child sits lining blocks for hours, it's difficult to tell whether they imagine something throughout that time or not. And, of course, when something is not visible, it is all too easy to conclude it is not there. Also, keep in mind that for the longest time, autistic people were judged *only* on the basis of their observable behavior, which led to many erroneous and hugely inadequate notions, such as "incapable of love", "oblivious to surroundings", "having an oligophrenic-like mental defect" etc.; too often they still are even now, after so many have written autobiographies and proved many of these notions to be false. "Lack of imagination" could at least partly belong in here as well.

Also, there are different types of "imaginative".

My own imagination may be quite inflexible. I have a good grasp of comparison/metaphor and am good at visualizing as such, the imagery always being vivid and often fairly detailed (I suppose because I mostly think in pictures), and coming up with descriptions for the images is also fine. But I tend to get "stuck" on separate scenes and go into minute detail too much. As a result, I have trouble arranging my writing into a whole, and can rarely come up with a good plot, much less the various plot twists that are required in certain genres. I also have trouble with constructing dialogues, maybe because my thinking is visual rather than verbal. But this doesn't mean that my imagination is not there, or that I cannot create something.

Speaking of acting: there are some autistic people who adapt different personas as a kind of coping mechanism, and perhaps partly because they are echolalic/echopraxic and it is all too easy for them to copy the people around them. Donna Williams is one good example. Now, I'm not sure whether she has ever been into acting - I don't think has has, but somehow I feel this is something she would understand and be good at if it were her chosen field of art. I remember her writing in one of her books that many autistic children appreciate taking on other personas as a means of emotional self-defense, and urging their teachers to try dressing up and other things like that in order to make it easier for them to interact with the students. This already shows something about whether autistics can or cannot understand acting.

Last edited by ixochiyo_yohuallan on 10 Oct 2007, 4:31 am, edited 1 time in total.

Normal imagination is limited, and socially directed.

The test question runs something like Jane has $1 and Mary has $2, so what is Betty thinking?

This makes a lot of NT sense.

Some 80+% of people report no inturnal images. They do not have visions of any kind. 15% of people do report seeing things in their mind. What they report is wire frames in black and white.

Less than 5% of the population reports color, or dreaming in color.

The ability to create at will, with color, motion, scale, is very rare, less than 1%. About the same who report being aware when dreaming, and gaining control in dreams. Lucid dreaming, becoming self aware and self directing in dreams brings this reality into question.

There is a gateway to sleep, a time of power. The body falls to slumber, the mind stills, blotches of color are seen, and can be molded. Like seeing the forms in clouds. Learning can prolong the stay in the gateway, and develop the modeling. It is a form of Lucid dreaming.

I do well with machines. Scenes, landscapes, towns, and even clothing, yet not faces or dialog. I gather the overall meaning, but have yet to walk up to someone and say, Why are you in my dream? They do seem to lack a personal identity.

Others come and speak to me, and they have faces, words, are in high detail, with meaning.

I do not imagine, I visit. I used to wander, then became directed. I had a story to tell, I could see it, and it changed as I understood more. I see the story from a floating point, but have to come back and write words. It only told part. Mostly the mechanical.

The visual I had to paint. I do not have that many words. The action between the characters was another weak place for me, script comes hard to me. Even with the chain of facts, drawings of the scenes, character interaction, there is more, clouds come by, day and night flow, the seasons change, just the lighting is a world.

Each is important, but I see in parts. Then with word and image I weave the parts into one story.

As I concentrate on each part it does merge into the others. It becomes a story that is one, and flows well.
Words do produce images within. Stories watched and then written ring true. I feared seeing Lord of the Rings, film has conflicted with what i saw from the book, but it came very close. I did think the Orcs overdone.

Our imagination creates worlds, fully developed, it also mines dreams, crosses the barrior to being an aware dreamer, and can stand in the gateway to sleep, and hold the power of two worlds.

NTs can make up all sorts of stories about what Betty is thinking.

Criteria for diagnosis are necessarily based on those people who have the most noticeable traits. The more you can adapt yourself to your environment the less likely you are to be recognized as autie or aspie either socially or professionally.

I have an extremely vivid imagination. I edit it very carefully so I can do things that won't make me seem strange. Otherwise, as far as I'm concerned everything is equally possible. But I have to fit in with what's going on around me. This means it is easier for me to get by in a situation that's unfamiliar to me. If I'm closer to home, I often seem slightly off because I have to calculate behaviour that's supposed to come naturally. If I'm in an alien environment people don't mind the timelag, they don't notice it, because they know I am out of my element and have to think before I say or do something.

It doesn't take long to calculate, it just needs doing.

I can also do creative things but not at will. I don't seem to develop skills. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

That makes sense. But then why don't they just SAY that? LOL.

Are you defining imagination as creating something new in your mind that you have never seen nor felt nor experienced, or are you defining it as piecing together random experiences to create a new version in your mind?

I have excellent visual imagination but pretty bad a verbal imagination.

Who said it isn't? Who said this one is?

Technically, any imagination, even the most creative, involves piecing together elements which already exist in the world, and which one has experienced in one way or another. Creating something utterly new, which has never existed before or doesn't include elements that have, is quite impossible. (For example, every mythical creature, no matter how phantasmagorical, will have body parts taken from real animals, etc.)

One's degree of creativity boils down to the skill with which one recombines these pre-existing little pieces of experience, and the precise ways in which one does it.

I am an architect. I earn my living by way of architecture (combined with math skills and visual abiliyiesU.

The "professionals" ought to ask a real live aspie about things like this someday instead of treating os like lab rats.