Interpreting things differently (long)

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I was just thinking about some stuff and hoping that someone here will know what I’m talking about. Anyways, last night I was in a group discussion and the saying “seeing the cup half full rather than half empty” came up. Now this isn’t going where you’re probably thinking.

When I heard that idiom something hit me and I interrupted the original topic of discussion. I remembered that when I was younger and heard this saying it didn’t make any sense to me. One member of the group asked me if this was because I took the phrase literally.

I thought about it for a moment and quickly concluded that this wasn’t exactly the case – I tend to use analogies and metaphors profusely when I attempt to describe things. I have no problem understanding abstraction and metaphor - to the contrary I think I’m sometimes better at it than most. I couldn’t quite articulate it at the time but now after thinking about it for a while I’ve had a small epiphany.

I notice that when I hear such a phrase I immediately come up with a mental picture, sort of like a platonic form in my head. “half empty” and “half full” conjure up the exact same mental picture in my head – I think of a glass filled half way up with water. My brain must completely bypass the language itself and go straight to the form. The negative connotation of the word “empty” doesn’t automatically jump out at me because my focus immediately goes to the form of a half filled glass.

Another example I remember from childhood was when I wanted one of those two-way hand held radios for Christmas. I was more familiar with the colloquial brand-name term “walkie talkie” but I could never remember the order of the words. I often reversed it and said “talkie walkie”. My mother once gave me a weird look as if she didn’t know what I was talking about and then said “oh you mean walkie talkie”. I couldn’t see why the order was so important.

A third example I can recall was from taking those standardized tests in middle school. I remember those multiple choice questions that asked you to “choose the best answer”. Those questions always irritated the crap out of me. Usually I could figure out which one they were assuming was the best but it always seemed like that the writers had made some unfair assumptions. I felt that, with completely sound logic, I could have easily justified one of the “incorrect” answers.

However there are other cases where this tendency to approach things from a slightly odd angle has helped me see things that were completely missed by others. I sometimes have this strange intuition for things deemed non-obvious. I often have trouble understanding why others can’t understand something that seems incredibly self-evident to me. Yet there are other times when the situation is precisely reversed – everyone else thinks something should be obvious but to me it isn’t.

Yep. I'm with you, exactly.

I don't understand them, therefore I am crazy.
They don't understand me, therefore I am crazy.
I DO understand them, and am offended, therefore I am crazy.
They don't understand me and invent stupid reasons to be offended, therefore I am crazy.

I make an effort to understand them because I care, and am usually successful. They make no effort to understand me because they don't give a damn, and they get me wrong more often than not. But I am the one who lacks "empathy." Basically, they don't really know why they condemn me because they don't understand their own motives. My "theory of mind" is actually better developed than most. It's just that I have to stretch more to understand people who don't understand themselves and lie with every breath.

I am gullible, I will acknowledge that. And I believe their lies.
They say that the rules are about being nice, and I find it easy to believe them because I am nice.
The truth is that most people lie more often than not.
It baffles me even when I fully understand, because their lies are totally irrational and self-defeating.
They say that they don't want me to lie, then condemn me because I do not play.

I could go on and on.

The story of my life. Small-minded people can't look up and appreciate something that's outside of their experience.

Wow, I can definitely relate to just about everything you said, including visualizing the "glass half full." I guess I never realized that not everyone does that. And those questions on tests always drove me crazy too, made me start to feel insecure about the answer I thought they were looking for.

Thank you for replying. I’d really like to see some discussion on this topic. It seems like most people don’t like to read my “dissertation” posts, but I can’t adequately describe something like this in only a few sentences.

I’m most interested in hearing other examples of people seeing things in an unusual way.

I can't come up with any specific example of seeing things in a completely different way, but it's what a lot of my writing is based on. The funny thing is that sometimes the way I see things actually opens other people's eyes, and they're surprised and pleased, as if it's a revelation. But I've also spent long, frustrating sessions trying to get something through to someone, and no matter what angle I approach it from, they just don't get it. Maybe sometimes it's a neurological thing, but I also think there's often psychological resistance to having your view of things changed.

I completely relate to all of Marshall's post.

As for half-empty/half-full, I only know the negative/positive association as a memorised fact. To me, half full means you're pouring something into the glass and you've reached 50% of capacity. Half empty means you are removing the glass's contents and the glass now contains half of what it could hold. Neither is necessarily positive or negative. Absent a "direction" indicator, both phrases represent the exact same image - a 2-unit-capacity glass with one unit of content inside it. No emotion, no mood, just an objective measure.

I also have the same water-in-the-middle-of-the-glass image for both "half-empty" and "half-full", except that the image is "shifted", in a way, so that either the full half (the bottom) or the empty half (the top) is "in focus". So I understand what people mean by these phrases. What I don't get is why the glass is necessarily half-anything. Surely the glass can be three-quarters full, or nearly empty?

It's a convenient number. Plus, it's sound better to say half empty or half full than it would to say something like "3/4 empty or 1/4 full". Plus, it doesn't require math to figure out that half empth and half full are the same, the way it would with other fractions. Some of us aren't very intuitive with math, including I think most NTs.

When I explain something people often remark "that's a creative way of putting it, I never thought of it that way". The funny thing is that I'm not purposely trying to be clever or novel - my explanations seem very plain and logical to me. I like making my arguments from scratch, not using some canned saying from a famous author / intellectual figure. Other aspies are not like me either. Many like using quotes and aphorisms from other sources. I always put things in my own words.

I think it's the parsimony principle. If possible always use the simplest example.

I do that too or people often say to me 'I never noticed that before.' It's one of the traits I like about having AS, because as my psychologist puts it: It's having a deeper knowledge of things.

This reminds me of a large ship i see while traveling to work. My dad always says that this ship always seems to get taller everytime he sees it...

...until I told him about the tidal effect caused by the tidal forces of the Moon and the Sun .

When I visualize a half empty glass I see a glass with the empty stuff on the bottom and the liquid on top. When I visualize a half full glass I see a glass with the liquid stuff on the bottom and the empty part on top.

I also get into trouble on some aptitude tests. Consider the following sequence: 3, 1, 4, 1, 5 ....

What is the "next" item? The test makers claim 1 is the right answer. Bzzzt. Nyet! Look at the decimal expansion of pi 3.1415962. So I answered that problem with 9. According to the test maker that is wrong. Horse puckey, I say to that.

ruveyn

I remember I had trouble understanding the half-full/half-empty glass thing when I first heard it, although I don't remember the way I misinterpreted it back then, although I do remember not taking gravity into consideration (so... like misted water?...). It wasn't until I came across this joke when the meaning became more apparent to me:

Optimist: "The glass is half-full."
Pessimist: "The glass is half-empty."
Computer Scientist: "The glass is twice as large as it needs to be."

Thus the reasons for "half" instead of some other ratio: at a strictly rational level, one side is no larger -- no "better" -- than the other; two equal opposites (there's a tendency for language to "default" to the larger side in a balance, e.g. sports scores are in terms of the leader first, US presidential election tickets list the names P-VP, color balance of a picture in terms of too much of one color ("too much cyan" instead of "not enough red")). The two statements are equally valid descriptions of the situation. The phrase concentrates on the focus of the matter, whether you describe in terms of the existence (and expect continued growth?) of something, or the absence (and expect continued loss?) of something. Apparently what words you use imply what your expectations are. I think it's supposed to be a commentary on perspective, but I take it as a commentary on how the words you use get interpreted to mean more than what you say .

I now translate "half-full" as codeword for "optimist", as in "I'm a half-full glass type of person" to mean "I am an optimist" (why?!?!? ); likewise for "half-empty" and "pessimist." It's gotten to the point where if I have to describe a literal glass with fluid at the halfway mark, I go to lengths to describe it in absolute units ("half liter", "three-quarters of a pint", "half of whatever that container is"), or otherwise avoid the words "full" and "empty" ("the cup is at the halfway mark", "it's at the 50% mark", "fill it up to half").

Personally, I like the third phrasing. Logical, provides a solution, cuts out ambiguity, and still a perfectly valid description of the situation . It was also this phrasing that shed some light for me on the original empty/full phrasings, when I "got" the original phrases.

As for walkie-talkie, I didn't recognize the root words of "walk" and "talk", even in print, until many years afterwards, so I only knew the devices by the four-syllable sequence /wa-ki-ta-ki/. That was just me.

Other phrases I had trouble interpreting upon first hearing:

"Turn that frown upside-down" -- uh... I prefer my eyes to be above my mouth...

"The grass is always greener on the other side" -- why should I care about grass? Shortly after the explanation, it became an infinite loop/regress problem: I jump the fence, now the the other side is greener, so I jump the same fence, so that makes the other side greener, jump the fence, and...

"That went over my head" -- your ears are on the sides of your head...

"Went in one ear and out the other" -- I was fully aware of ear anatomy, made me wonder if there were actual physiological conditions where a tube did run fully from one side of the head to the other. At some point, I remember wondering how the ear(drums) could be made to generate a sound going out the ear.

In the Korean language, four of the ten vowel sounds have their written form based on the relation of the sun to the earth (from a geocentric flat-earth view): rising, noon, setting, and night. While taking a Korean language course in university, the instructor described these as "rising out of the ground", "above the ground", and "going into the ground", leaving the last one for us to figure out and cite out ("under the ground"). In my mind, I was seeing the Earth as the sphere it is, and the Sun as the ginormous ball of fusing gas that it is, and trying to resolve how this gigantic ball of gas can go "under" this tiny ball of rock (any spatial relation would have some point of Earth seeing the Sun as overhead). Then I turned to an alternate view of "underground" as being on the gravitational well side of the surface (i.e. "inside the Earth"). But the Sun can't fit inside the Earth... you would have to have some kind of "little Sun" just barely smaller than the Earth. Well, "little sun" happens to be a description applied to nuclear fusion reaction (particularly in a thermonuclear warhead). So a "little sun" that is "underground" would be a staggeringly monumental underground thermonuclear reaction, with attendant problems thereof (i.e. nuclear winter). So before anyone got a chance to chant the obvious/expected, I piped up that the fourth vowel represented "thermonuclear holocaust". Everyone started laughing, myself included (I personally was laughing at the implication that anyone 500 years ago could have even thought about a thermonuke).

On standardized math (geometry) tests, there was the phrase "Drawing is not to scale," for example an acute scalene triangle with numerical dimensions that clearly define an obtuse isosceles. Drove me nuts, because I could not think of a valid real-world situation where people would deliberately make drawings/images as distortedly irrelevant to the subject represented. I know the point was to test our geometrical reasoning abilities, but that was ALL I could think of for drawing right angles that looked like needle points.

One time, when I realized I boarded the wrong shuttle bus (after it passed my intended destination), I asked the driver where the bus is headed, and was told (sarcastically) Cleveland. The shuttle is powered by CNG (Compressed Natural Gas), so my first thought was how the bus could get from Los Angeles to Cleveland on a single tank of CNG, which it can't. It would have to refuel at some place, like way back at the bus terminal with the CNG-labeled fuel pumps I keep seeing. But then why couldn't CNG refueling points be elsewhere as well? Maybe there were strings of CNG fuel stations at periodic intervals between LA and Cleveland. Maybe all over the nation that I never noticed. Could a CNG-powered passenger car make it across most of the nation without resorting to gasoline or tow trucks? By that point, the bus driver probably thought I was taking the comment seriously and told me the real destination (university apartments), which broke me out of my train of thought. After sitting back down, my thoughts went towards how I had simply assumed there weren't any other CNG refuel points, and how one sarcastic crack opened up my mind to the possibility of a whole network of alternative-fuel stations. Made me wonder about my other assumptions.

I guess that last one was more of unintended consequence than interpreting differently.

All perfectly true. For all that we're supposed to be the ones trapped inside our own minds and largely unable to understand other individuals, I believe that I've come to understand many things about NTs quite well - the only difference being that the understanding has come from analytical logic rather than intuition. On their part, though, any different thought pattern they encounter is immediately dismissed as beyond comprehension with a kneejerk, "Weird!" and the majority of them make no effort to truly understand, only to hastily try and obliterate the 'incorrect' thought by literally or metaphorically shouting it down.

That's awesome! Can I use that story? I'll even credit you.

I know I said that I always prefer to use my own arguments but you force me to take that statement back. You're just too good.