Imagination and asperger's?

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Nan
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16 Apr 2008, 3:38 pm

annotated_alice wrote:

As DH and I read more about Asperger's, most of it fits my son all too well, but there are a couple of things that don't seem to apply at all. I realize that it is a spectrum and that not all people with AS exhibit all features of the description, but there is one area where my son differs dramatically-he most definitely does not have "an impairment in imagination". Having a huge, vivid imagination is really one of the defining characteristics of who my son is. He is extremely creative and has spent a huge amount of time pretending to be different characters (playing "dress up"), drawing, building with Lego, making up stories and playing with various action figures etc. These activities usually centre around his special interest at the time. For example last year when life was all about Star Wars (particularly the Fett family of bounty hunters), he dressed in a Boba Fett costume, played for hours with his Star Wars figures (not just lining them up and organizing them, but imagining elaborate scenarios and enacting them with his figures), made his own Star wars comic books and even drew up plans for a bounty hunter video game. He wasn't just repeating scripts from the movies and books, but was creating his own new scenarios and ideas, using George Lucas' characters and settings for a jumping off point.

He gets so wrapped up in his own imagination, that he can play on his own for hours and hours at a time and has a really, really difficult time wrenching himself out of his own world and back into reality. When he was a preschooler, we used to sometimes worry about him being able to distinguish between what was imagined and what was real.

So I see my son as being way more creative than the average kid, and I'm not quite sure how this fits with his difficulty with executive functions? Or lack of social imagination?

I was interested to read through this old thread and poll in the General Autism discussion. 78% of responders said that they had vivid imaginations? So is lack of imagination an AS misconception?

I'd love to hear from other parents about whether or not their AS children participate in pretend play? or are imaginative or creative in any way? Or from adult aspies about their own creativity?

Could be. I had such a vivid imagination as a child that I literally lived in it a good part of the time. I still do, when I need to.

My daughter was the same. As a young child she used to run around the house in her underwear and wearing a green cloth cape, being invisible and walking through walls, quite often. I couldn't ask, as she was invisible.... (you do have to play along for it to work). By the time she was 7 I had her in a gifted enrichment program run by the psych dept (once a week three hour sessions) at the local university. She floored them all by writing, directing, and doing all the sound-effects for a play about a dragon who had a sense of humor. She made all the props, too. They wanted to study her in detail, but she didn't want to - so we didn't.

She's a hell of an artist these days. Does mostly crafts stuff, but can do just killer charcoal on paper portraits of faces.

AngelUndercover
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17 Apr 2008, 5:59 am

I definitely don't have a problem with imagination. I'm a writer; I've been writing fiction since I was five. My creativity never worked quite the same way as other kids' though. I was never interested in doing things like playing house, for instance - I wasn't at all interested in imitating the things the adults around me did. And when kids did convince me to play games like that with them, it made me nervous, because I was worried I would get it wrong somehow. I preferred to play pretend games by myself; that was often how I would occupy myself at recess in elementary school, but I'm sure it looked like I was just wandering aimlessly. I invented a world in my head, and pretended I was living in that world. Instead of an imaginary friend, I created countless inhabitants of this world; I don't think any of them were the same from day to day though. And once someone gave me a set of toy cars; I had no interest in cars, so I gave them all personalities and created a community for them, because it didn't occur to me that they had to be cars instead of some sentient species. (I don't think this is exclusively an Aspie thing though. Plenty of kids make their toys into things they aren't. But clearly I did, and do, have imagination.)

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annotated_alice
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17 Apr 2008, 8:39 am

Yay for imagination!

I appreciate all of your input.

My son is currently writing a Bionicle story on his blog (he dictates and I type). He is using one character that he invented himself (a Toa named Hacka) and the Pirahka. The story has both elements that he is "regurgitating" from the existing stories/movies/video game etc. and his own original ideas (at one point Hacka is distracted by a crazed Matoran who is trying to eat a wall?!?).

I really hope that someday he can channel his creativity into a career for himself, because he is never happier than when imagining and creating something.

ster
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22 Apr 2008, 8:29 am

this topic is quite bothersome to me............you see, the doctor who dxed my daughter as ADHD-hyperactive/impulsive type, said that she couldn't possibly have aspergers because she had an imagination........the doc gave her items to play with-she was supposed to make up a story about the items. she made up a story....the doc said that because she didn't call the sponge a sponge during her story, that she couldn't possibly have aspergers.

Kaleido
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22 Apr 2008, 9:11 am

ster wrote:

The meaning of imagination in AS is a bit complicated.

From what I understand, a child can seem like they have an imagination when in fact they are only piecing together patterns of life from what they see everyday. I couldn't make things up as a child, when we had to write stories in school, I either copied and adapted from the person sat next to me or I looked for something that had happened in my life during the week and just changed the names or something. I didn't make it up, it only looked like I did. I didn't have the imagination to create, it was just chunks of things stuck together.

Now, it would be true to say that that must be the case for everyone since we have all learned from life and gotten names of things from our own languages and our own experiences; what I think the difference is is the ability to pick original things from everything we have learned as children and piece them together in an original way. That is the bit I believe to be lacking. Don't quote me on it though! I am speaking from my own experience of what I remember about my own struggles and you do get very creative aspies too but maybe that comes later in adulthood, I am not sure about that.

annotated_alice
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22 Apr 2008, 9:56 am

ster wrote:

This is why I am very curious about imagination and asperger's...my son definitely has a well-developed imagination. He participates in pretend play (and has since he was a toddler) and is able to create his own original ideas for stories, art or play. His new art teacher was just gushing about how creative he is on the weekend. The children are doing clay sculptures of bugs (imaginary ones that they have invented). Most of the children's sculptures look very similar (all NT as far as I know). They took the semi-circle lump of clay that they were given and made some changes, but left the shape essentially the same (semi-circle). But my son (and one other little boy) made bugs that look completely different, he molded a completely new shape out of the clay, with no reference at all to the original semi-circle.

So after reading a bunch of stuff online that states pretty definitively that "impairment of the imagination" and "no pretend play" are a usual part of asperger's, I was wondering about possible mis-diagnosis for my son :?:

Although the asperger's description fits him like a glove in all other areas, he definitely has a rich imagination and also exhibits empathy (toward the people in his family and animals...but that's a whole 'nother thread I guess :wink:

). So it has been good to hear from other aspies who are creative/engaged in pretend play as kids.

MartyMoose
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22 Apr 2008, 10:05 am

ster wrote:

That doctor is a nutcase. He has no Idea what he's talking about. BTW I have ADHD and Asperger's.

gbollard
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22 Apr 2008, 4:21 pm

Kaelido wrote:

From what I understand, a child can seem like they have an imagination when in fact they are only piecing together patterns of life from what they see everyday. .......

Sorry, I completely disagree.

While I'm well aware that much of my language is pieced together from everything else - quite literally, I tend to pull sentence construction from books. I might make a paragraph from phrases in 12 different books. I think this isn't so much a lack of imagination as a long-term memory that is just a bit "too good".

Use of Imagination can be learned.

I was always fairly imaginative as a child but I remember the major turning point for me. My sister, three years above me, had done a school exam in English. The question had been simple;

There was a photo of two elderly ladies sitting on a park bench and you had to write a story about them.

She told us her story - which was particularly dull, about them just having gone shopping or something. Then she told us some of the stories that the teacher had read out. She said that the best ones were "outlandish" where students had taken the story in unexpected directions.

From then on, that became my role model and whenever I was stuck for creative writing, I'd either imagine that picture, or find an alternative hanging on a classroom wall. I'd start my story with the picture and try to write as outlandishly as possible.

Prior to this, I had imagination but didn't know how to use it in a creative writing sense.

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Kaleido
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23 Apr 2008, 4:29 am

gbollard wrote:

Prior to this, I had imagination but didn't know how to use it in a creative writing sense.

I didn't have this at all but recently with ritual and meditation practices, my imagination has started to open up a bit more, not in words, but in pictures of things that I don't think I have seen before, so I think they are probably actually original now and I definitely could not do that before, so it seems like a breakthrough for me.

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