Puzzled by the 'spoons' thing-???

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I think of the spoon thing this way - if you want explain something non-tangible - that is something abstract - it can be hard, especially when explaining it to people (think small children) on the spectrum. Some people say "people on the spectrum cannot deal with the abstract - everything has to be as concrete as possible". I even have heard the word "concrete-ify".

I think the statement "people on the spectrum cannot deal with the abstract" is false.

I think the statement "people on the spectrum sometimes have challenges with certain kinds of abstraction" is true.

Numbers are abstract - no one has even seen a "three" - you can see three trees, or three cookies or three children. You can use a corkscrew to pull a cork out of a bottle. The word for this is "extract". You can also pull the idea of "three" out of examples such as three trees, three cookies and three children. The word for this is "abstract". Spoons - specifically plastic spoons, can be purchased in great numbers for relatively little money at a supermarket. You can use them to teach children in school about numbers like "three" - most children already have a context for "spoon" - at least in the USA. You can also use these spoons to teach about something like "money" which can also be hard to learn about at first because it is somewhat abstract - money, three dollars for example, can be used to purchase all sorts of things some big and some small - if you know nothing about money you have to "abstract" the idea from examples - the plastic spoons from the supermarket can be used to teach a class full of students about money.

I similar problem exists with things like "mental resources" or "mental energy". There are concrete things that scientists can see in studies about people on the spectrum - and understand with the use of advanced mathematics - but to the average person who is not a scientist these things can seem very abstract and not very concrete at all.

Now - enter the spoons. It is a way to concrete-ify some difficult abstract concepts - concepts which are real, but hard to grasp - in the same way as numbers or money are abstract - but represents real things.

Spoons help to make abstract things easier to understand by appealing to the brain's ability to abstract from the concrete (spoons).

Carlos55 posted this on another thread:


What this speaker can understand from electroencephalography and advanced math - some other people might better understand from the analogy of the spoons.

It is a way to teach a complicated reality with a simplified, but still instructive, model.

And let's be honest - this speaker probably understands this stuff much better than I do, but even she admits there is still a lot we don't know.

I could wake up with 5 spoons and ended up sleeping for 20 hours a day.
Or a 30+, ended up not sleeping for days.

Or that amount of range at every possible moment. It can be what I ate within few hours, it can be the weather hours from now, it can be interaction of hormones and other stimuli...


... I'm not bipolar. But I'm very sensitive to many fluctuating factors.

Counting spoons won't apply to me well.
In my case, I won't know what I have until it's all gone or that it's over.

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