Who else is very concrete?

Post Reply New Topic

I have always been very concrete so I don't do good on abstract reasoning tests unless they are concrete. I even had a hard time in school because the assignments were too abstract, not concrete. I was told this was due to Asperger's but I have found out it's actually the opposite so it makes me think I have more going on than my diagnosis. Some sort of learning disorder I have that is unknown.

Anyone else who had troubles in school because the school work was too hard and are you also not good at abstract reasoning tests? The only reason why I finished high school was because my school work was modified and I was allowed to read easier books that were less abstract for English. I wouldn't have finished without an IEP and support. But I feel dumb for this reason like I am not very smart because aspies are supposed to be good at these things. That is why they are good at patterns and problem solving and being very analytical because of their ability to think abstractly while I was told the opposite as a kid and it would baffle me how they could be good at math like algebra if they say aspies have a hard time with abstract concepts.

I find it hard to answer questions because of the ambiguity. but I am good at crossword puzzles so it's a bit difficult to answer really.

Really? I always read and was told that being concrete is a common thing in ASDs.

I am good at some types of abstraction/abstract thinking and terrible at others.....all of my abstract thinking is linked to very concrete models/analogies. (Actually, that's probably not true....thinking of analogies is probably abstract thinking and I likely do some abstract thinking without conscious awareness....I don't know what all counts as "abstract thinking".)

Last edited by animalcrackers on 19 Jun 2016, 3:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I had trouble with abstract and figurative stuff at school, though I think I've got it mostly sussed out these days. Numbers gave me a lot more trouble than words, for example. I really struggled with mathematics, especially advanced maths, while I did well in English language. My difficulty with numbers doesn't show up in everyday life because I had a better education than the average person, so when I tell most people I still can't cope with "irrational numbers," they say they've never heard of them. I was much more comfy with concrete English than "flowery" literature, and one teacher was annoyed with me when I couldn't immediately make head nor tail of Shakespeare when I was supposed to be old enough for it. Quite early on, in an English book there was the sentence "John was an eel at play," and although I didn't take all that long to fathom what it meant, I didn't like it, I couldn't see why they didn't just say "When John plays catch, he's very good at being slippery and escaping his friends' grasp, just like an eel."

These days I'm a mixture, I prefer the King James bible to the modern versions, because I like the beauty of old English, and I might tell people that "I am Elmer McFudd incarnate" if I see a rabbit invading my carrot patch and I get angry; on the other hand I'm averse to new abstract concepts such as the Uncanny Valley thing, I immediately feel they've overcomplicated it and I prefer to call it "bait and switch" because to me that's a little more straightforward. Ultimately I usually prefer things to be expressed as self-evidently and concretely as possible, and specific examples teach me a lot faster than the "general case" does.

I didn't know ASDers were supposed to have more of a flair for the abstract than the concrete. Though I noticed a few questions about liking numbers on the AQ test, so my scores for those made me look a bit neurotypical, and the counsellor who checked my results said "it looks like you're on the spectrum but you've probably got something a bit odd going on with numbers."

I can go either way, probably one extreme or the other, very abstract or very concrete. I do have exceptional problem solving skills, I remember it said that on my ADHD diagnosis report. I am great at understanding abstract literary concepts in fiction. But when it comes to poetry I just get impatient, it looks like gibberish and I wish they would just say what they mean.

Definitely have very concrete thinking.

Being good at math has to do with being able to be abstract, all the abstract reasoning tests autistic people are better at than non autistic people. I had looked up the pattern tests online like Matrice and those are also abstract and they say autistic people score higher on them than non autistics but I am sure I score lower on them than non autistics. If they are more concrete, then I can do them. Also being a good problem solver has to do with abstract thinking and analytical but then it's a contradiction to say autistic people are very concrete. So I am wondering if anyone else on the spectrum sucks at all this My ex boyfriend tried to say math is concrete. No it's not. Addition is concrete and so it multiplication and decision and subtraction because the rules are the same and it's direct and straight forward. It's counting and memorization. It's not that in algebra and stuff and I could never do geometry because I cannot fold a pattern in my head and visualize how it would look and I read when I was in high school autistic people are good at geometry due to visual. I'm visual but I just can't fold something into a square and see what patterns on each side would show. I would have to do it psychically to see. I wonder if anyone else on the spectrum has this same trouble too?

Matrices....I couldn't remember what those are called but yeah I score high on those. But I have trouble with folding geometric shapes in my head.

I am, most definitely. Based on what you have noted in the OP, however, I am not sure, as patterns and problem solving are strengths of mine, and I am quite analytical. Hmmm, off to go do some research...

Well, I am very concrete too, but perhaps less so than you are describing. I can read fiction, though it it not my first choice, and I also enjoy a good, silly and implausible disaster movie now and again. I have been described as totally unromantic though, and pretend play is just scripting from things I have been exposed to. I used to play army men with my son, and I just did episodes of MASH. He never knew. Do you like any pop culture?

I have always done pretend play like rocking a doll to sleep, ironing my clothes, pushing a doll around in the stroller, playing school, pretending to make cookies with my toy stove and I used cookie cutters pretending they were cookies. I never thought of it as being abstract but that I what I did. I notice lot of my pretend play was reenactments and stuff I saw on TV. Like I used to play Rugrats with my Barbies and Stacie was Angelica and the rest of the babies were the Rugrats. Mattel used to make these little baby dolls that were Disneyland kids that came with their own vehicle and I had everyone one except for the Barbie one with the little kid. I used to organize my stuff too just for fun like I would look at all my barbie outfits I had and put them away back in the wardrobe. But one thing I have done with these kids was cut their hair because it got in the way of me playing so I took care of it.

I have always read fiction too and liked it. I didn't know that was abstract. I have always been very imaginative but I was never good at being creative so I couldn't like just draw a picture and other kids always seemed better at it than me and I couldn't just free write and I could never do poems and it was always a drag when our teacher would want to make us create something of our own like our very own word search or crossword. My mom has always had to help me with these things like helping me writing a poem in 8th grade for a class and helping me with my word search in sixth grade and I once had to draw something in 5th grade so my mom told me what to do on a piece of paper and it was a ship after I had followed her instructions. But yet I can write stories but they're all based on fantasy and personal experience and my feelings. I remember creating my own board game once when I was ten and I made it a soccer one. It was part of the class assignment our student teacher gave us, we all had to create a board game. But my board game was just rolling the dice and moving spaces. That is why I don't have any career that makes you design your own thing rather it's video games or clothes or web pages, etc.

I have also enjoyed movies always. I remember being happy that Terminator and Lethal Weapon were make believe because I couldn't imagine living in a world that was filled with violence and places getting destroyed and people getting hurt and places being blown up and someone going after you to kill you.

My thinking is very concrete, very black and white. I don't do well with abstract thinking and things like philosophy. Fortunately in autism special ed they don't make us suffer too much over that stuff.

I'm cement. I'm not sure if I'm concrete.

Was more likely to accused of the opposite: being too into abstract thought, when growing up.

The studies I have read say that autistic people vary in their scores -- there is no single cognitive profile for ASDers (or for subcategories like Asperger's or HFAutistic Disorder).

But, it's common for ASDers who do really well at visual abstraction do poorly at verbal abstraction, and vice versa.



Okay.



Well, technically even addition and subtraction are abstract.....at least when you start writing stuff out as equations -- math has its own language, made up of the symbols that represent quantities (i.e. "1" "2") and actions ("+" "-") and analytical concepts ("=" "<" ">") and directions and spatial positions and all sorts of things.

My psychologist gave me a useful way to define abstract (because it is one of those things that's sort of vague and wispy....I could never formulate a solid concept for it) as meaning "far away". This helped me to see that abstraction comes in degrees. My psychologist also pointed out that the word "abstract" can be used in a subjective way: You can say something is very abstract for a specific person, based on what that specific person knows and what they can perceive compared to other people.



I can do the flipping around/folding of objects but I had trouble with more advanced algebra. I'm not sure how much of it was abstraction and how much was being required to show my work. I had a hard time learning some of the concepts and a lot of times they never did stick because they were never applied to anything in real life..... but I also struggled massively to keep track of the symbols in complex equations and would make little mistakes all over the place because of my ADHD (I would sometimes do a problem without showing my work and get it right, then try to show my work and get it wrong repeatedly because of little mistakes in copying out all the damn numbers and symbols -- with multiple different wrong answers).

With the literary stuff in high school, where you're supposed to see all these metaphors in classic novels, I never saw them. It all seemed bizarre and ridiculous to me. (Now, I'm somewhat better at seeing possible metaphors, I think just because I am more familiar with some of the cognitive and emotional associations people make, but I still think a lot of it is ridiculous....especially when you're talking about authors that are long dead and never said anything about hidden meanings in what they wrote, you can't actually know for sure what hidden meanings they may have put into their words or whether or not the rhythms they chose for poems had any significance or what that significance was.) Thankfully I was never expected to see these metaphors on my own, and mostly just had to repeat what I was told.....otherwise I'm pretty sure I would have failed high school English literature.

I don't know how concrete I am compared to others.....I tend to need examples and specifics to understand things properly or problem-solve, and I often have a hard time if I can't picture something or otherwise relate it to sensory information.