Aspergers/HFA and Imagination

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Hey there, i was having a discussion with a friend today about Imagination and autism and i was curious for people's opinions/insight on the subject.

I'm aware it's generalised that people with Autism don't have very good imaginations - when younger, their play is drawn from films, games etc and acted out in great detail.

However i'm curious because in order to problem solve (which autistic people are amazing at), it would require some imagination to come up with a solution, especialy when the solution is so 'out of the box'. There's also great novelists like Jane Austen presumed Aspergers, as well as artists.

So is the imagination just slightly different? Or is it just most do not have very good imaginations, but a minority do?

Thankyou .

An interesting opinion about that:

http://autism.about.com/b/2008/09/09/do ... nation.htm

Different imagination.

I've always zoned out into my own imagination as a kid. I did need to have a foundation for it which was TV/movies and life experiences but once it got going the possibilities were endless.

Now my imagination is extremely vivid that I can see it come to life with my eyes open. Also, my movie story-mode imagination is the only method that helps me sleep. It's better if at night it's repetitive because new information keeps my brain awake.

One problem I have with imagination is that I can't always get what I see in my head on paper. Writing it down is no drama at all though. Strange because I am more of an artist than writer. I try to do both and artistic skills come naturally to me, although some areas are limited too.

IMO that's just a misconception based on the fact that our play both as children and even as adults is different than the NT notion of what's 'fun'. I've never had a job that didn't involve comedy, art or creative writing.

While I'd be the first to admit my tastes and sensibilities when it comes to art and humor are noticeably askance from the mainstream, they often work precisely because I come from a place the NT mind doesn't expect, so they're often caught off guard by a joke or intrigued by an image approached from a unique perspective. Oh, they don't hesitate to tell me I'm weird, but they seem to like what I do.

While its true that a lot of my personal creativity often involves combining existing ideas into new patterns, I'm not sure that in some sense that can't be said about nearly everything. There's really nothing new under the sun, no basic idea someone hasn't had before, its what you do with the ideas you're presented with that constitutes creativity. How you reinterpret the archetypal icons.

All of my imaginary friend were from t.v. shows. However, I usually immersed myself in imaginary play with my friends. I remember I used to pretend to be a fairy, a girl with super-powers, and a puppet crafted by a young girl with no friends, and a cat. I stopped playing these games around fifth grade. Before then, I would want to make friends at my new school (I was in 4th grade at the time) through these imaginary games and didn't understand how to simply converse. I was pretty immature as a younger child. Oh well.

As a child, I went through a stage where all I did was pretend play and had a whole circle of imaginary friends. Most kids do this around age 4-5; I did this when I was between 9 and 12 so my "fantasy play stage" was delayed by about 6 years. But it sure was a rich world with elaborate plots and themes that carried on for weeks at a time. Most of my scripts were based on real life experience or books that I had read but I also created my own elements to these situations. I would compensate for the fact that I didn't have ANY friends in real life by making myself the most popular kid and heroine of the my own little make-believe world.

Rather than complaining about my LACK of imagination, my parents complained that I had TOO MUCH imaginative play when I was too old for it and it was causing my problems by keeping me from coping with reality.

I stopped having imaginary friends around 12 or 13ish but I still have a very active inner imagination and like to create stories and scenarios in my head.

Allie Kat
For more about my own Asperger's Experience, go to my website at http://www.myaspergerslifestory.com/

My imagination skills come from current events, history, films, and other arts/entertainment products. I do try making a imagination world where it had nothing involve with the above topics but then I get caught up in a topic of the above and I just become like most Aspies/Auties. Not having a imaginationing mind is one of the common points of autism/aspergers.

Thankyou for the replies!

Yes, i definitely agree that most imaginative ideas are drawn from previous ideas/ things we've seen.

In my mothers words though for example, when i was younger and given a cardboard box, i'd be able to play with it for hours, pretending it was a house, car or watever (I have ADD).

My brother (with Aspergers) would not. As far as he was concerned, the box is a box.

I suppose though it could be as you say - pretending a box was something different may not be deemed as 'fun' to someone with Aspergers.

Generally watching my younger brother play though, he always acted out scenes from TV shows, movies etc in amazing detail. He never created his own to play with. He plays a lot of creation video games where he has to build worlds and again, they are all mimics of movies etc. But he can be inventive when finding ways to mimic these movies in a game with limitations.

Perhaps it is just Aspergers play that is unimaginative, rather than them being actually unimaginative? But then maybe it's just percieved as unimaginative play? Does anyone have any idea why those with AS/Autism prefer to act out scenes from movies? I am generally interested/curious for the reasoning and understanding =).

Basically all the workings of my imagination come from what I've seen on tv, movies, or video games. I can't really think of anything original I suppose, but I imagine things pretty often. I don't really consider myself very capable of "thinking outside of the box" but still consider myself pretty good at general problem solving, if that's possible.

Thank-you very much for the reply =).

My younger brother with AS is only 10, so perhaps i'll be seeing a burst of imagination in the next few years .

Hmm...in order to problem solve though, don't you need to be able to be creative? Aka if one idea doesn't work, coming up with a new one to try?

Well, if one has seen many ideas from other sources and can use those to problem solve, that makes that person good at suggesting right? It's not necessarily a matter or creativity but maybe of recall? I mean, there's more to problem solving than just imagination, wouldn't logic and experience be significant factors too?

My imagination:

Most of my "imaginitive play" involved taking my favorite books and TV shows, usually the ones I was obsessed with, and either inserting myself into those worlds, or working and reworking certain scenes into new ones, or ones with different outcomes. This is generaly what I'm doing when I'm "stimming."

My "toy" play was fairly conventional, except I prefered to play with toys that were animals, not people. I ignored dolls and action figures for dinosaurs and farm animals. I'd spend hours building the animals their own societies and inventing trade routes, class divisions, and styles of government. As I got older, I eventually began to play with human action figures.

I could play with other children, but only if they let me direct the play and had a good understanding of what I was pretending. If they didn't, or, worse yet, attempted to change anything, I would leave and play by myself. For example, if I was pretending to be a winged tiger who lived in the jungle, they weren't allowed to change the jungle to the desert, or suggest that we play "tag" instead. Also, I always pretended to be an animal and, rarely, if ever, a human. If we were playing house, I was pretending to be the family dog.

As an adult, I love sci fi/fantasy novels, and have been told I'm very creative. I prefer writing creative non-fiction to fiction because I suck at coming up with my own worlds (unless the protagonists are animals like in WATERSHIP DOWN).

I agree with the first comment on that.



In that sense, I really don't have any imagination at all. Everything I see is exactly as it is. I have never been able to get into roleplaying; the whole idea of it seems stupid to me. But if I see something, I can imagine it. Even though I know that lasers would not interfere with one another, I can still imagine a lightsaber fight because I've seen it before in a movie. I just can't look at a stick and pretend it's a lightsaber. To me, it's just a stick.

I would say that my imagination is quite good. It's quite inspired from movies and alike though.

When I was younger I was quite into imaginative play. I would use my stuffed animals as my characters and act out TV dramas that I created myself (loosely based on what I had seen before). It was mostly intense dramas were common themes were love triangles, stuffed animals getting stalked etc. This was when I was still in elementary school which seems to point towards the direction that I was quite mature for my age, with a drop of immaturity left in me (the stuffed animals).

I have ever since been a huge fan of movies with a heavy dramatic theme, and I tend to make movie plots in my head, mostly while taking a walk or sitting in a lecture being extremely bored.

When I was younger I also got extremely obsessed with Pokémon like every other kid at that time. I would sit with all my Pokémon cards and look at them while imagining characters in a Pokémon world with different and exciting plots each time. Probably inspired by the TV-series.

I would with all of the stated above conclude that I am not a person with a weak imagination, but I am reliant on the multimedia as my muse.

My imaginative play involves taking an alter ego of myself and different characters from movies/TV shows I'm obsessed with and having them all live and interact in my own imaginary world. I invent a new storyline with them, usually one involving themes heavily borrowed from anime. I change the characters' backstories and sometimes personalities to better fit in with the storyline I want to create with them. Once I get it all set up in my mind, I go "live" that storyline in my imagination whenever I'm alone and/or stimming. Everyone says I should write the stories I come up with, but I never do out of fear of ridicule. Oh, and copyright, because I have a lot of trouble coming up with my own characters (I'd rather borrow them from the movies/shows I'm obsessed with).