How do you visualize how your brain works? probably long.

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I'd only visualized my mind-mechanics when trying once to understand why socializing was difficult for me compared to others.

Imagine a circular thing... a wheel or cylinder, and from the entire perimeter extends many filaments or wires - a central core with peripheral filaments, and all the filaments are curved in the same direction. From a side-view it would take on a spiral appearance, with all the filaments curving outward from the central, circular hub. The hub is representative of the 'core' of my brain, while the filaments are the senses or cognitive 'feelers' with which I interface with the environment.

Everyone else's mind is like this, too, the difference being that others' ("NTs" as I've come to consider them) filaments curve the opposite direction from my own - the spiral is reversed, by extension from the 'core' itself, which has an orientation 180 degrees opposite my own. Their cognitive feelers are in a position receptive to interfacing with others', while my own (and the hub from which they exend) are in a position which is antagonistic to interfacing, and instead draws away from it.

Only much later did I see how this could be a metaphor for a PDD - having a fundamental difference (the hub's orientation) which affects every subsequent extension of cognitive activity (the filaments or 'feelers').

Ha... if you thought your way of visualizing your brain was wierd --->

Tho only way I can decribe my brain is by saying that I need things to click into place or make sense, otherwise I have no idea of what is going on. Memory is more patterns and comes back to clicking. A friend of mine's phone number I broke down into 3 parts and had something clicked into place and I still remember it to this day. Further my understandig helps me in solving problems as I am able to understand what is going on and step back and then see the big picture, same with my dancing, same with my other activities.

My brain works (more or less) according to the principles of combinatory logic.

My thoughts are inchoate. Then there's a voice, a single main voice, parsing them into English. Sometimes it fractures into several voices, each slightly out of sync., saying the same thing. Sometimes the grammar is not English but a compound of possible grammatical styles. Usually my thoughts will slip into song. Actually singing clears my head.

I delight in finding correlations between things. I do not visualise things at all (this is an, er, audio-ising). I am not very imaginative. I can be slow to react and confused by conversation.

Much of the time the only things in my brain consciously are the things I am experiencing or have experienced, and the patterns between them (people seem to use "patterns" in different ways: I mean it in the least abstract way possible, and doesn't have to do with "logic" or other such things). Sort of flowing together in both a synaesthetic way, and just in terms of how they connect to each other. I don't experience things as separate from each other, I just get a huge mass of sensations, which slowly filter into place somewhere in my memory.

I can sometimes build idea-thought on top of those experiences, but it's hard and it doesn't last long. And it feels like death if I get too engrossed in it. All those flowing experiences get 99% chopped into pieces and discarded in favor of things that are teeny and insubstantial, but that think they're all the world. (shudder)

One way I do describe this though, is in terms of climbing cliffs, or trying to fly in the clouds. Abstract idea-thought (which even the most "concrete" concepts, like "cat", are part of) is in the clouds, and I can't stay there without crashing to the ground (direct experience). Or building towers of abstract thought on top of abstract thought trying to reach the clouds, but finding that often I fall down. The problem is that most people seem to live in the clouds, and they don't know there's anything beneath the clouds, so they assume I must do things the way they do. And if they know I don't, they often presume my world is frighteningly empty. When it's rather the opposite. The only reason I continue to deal in abstraction-land is because it's the only way to communicate things to people who have different systems than mine, which is most people everywhere including possibly most autistics.

For me, you need to imagine a box of photographs, notes, loveletters, interesting facts, notes to friends and family... shake the box so that it is sort of messedup but still in a sort of chronological order. Tiny fragments of the notes and little pieces of images are percolating and coming out of the box. At the base of the box there is a sort of music player which plays music in and around the box and shakes it in that rhythm.

Boxes. I start to feel uncomfortable and out of control when things are put in the wrong boxes or the contents of different boxes start getting muddled up together. Dividing, organizing and compartmentalizing is a big and pleasurable part of my life.

Some days I also feel that my brain is like a planet, with an NT-like crust and an autistic core. Normal behavior can be faked to an extent, but there is always the awareness of the 'true' nature buried beneath it. Sometimes there seem to be NT and autistic thought patterns happening simultaneously, with each puzzled by the other.

My brain is filled with files. Memory files, talent files, people files, and all that. Everything I've ever known or thought is stored in nice files. That reminds me of a neat little story relating to my talent files.

I think or hear something, and the appropriate memory shows up. That's the best way I can explain it, as my mind is rather complicated, since I'm half in it and half outside it most of the time.

The way beebee describes her son is VERY much how I described my own access of info. It is like I am in a BIG room, a HUGE room, with fast computers all over that can do who knows what? But there is only ONE SLOW SPEED terminal at a flimsy desk in the center of the room, and THAT is what I am using to access all the info. As things get more complicated, it is like some part of my mind learns how to do things a certain way, etc... Conciously, my ability to do things might be limited, but that other part doesn't seem to have much of a problem.

HOWEVER, after thinking about this, I thought of the PERFECT example! It is like NEO in the matrix! OTHERS had to start things for him, that could happen only after he was hooked up, and THEN he accessed ONLY what he needed and it took a while to sink in, but THEN he did GREAT!

So you have the ONE terminal, etc... I spoke of, because OTHERS had to start it. You have the fast computers, etc... and it might have taken a while to sink in. For a simple thing I did within the past year, it may take a split second. If it is something I haven't done for a decade, it may take hours to get up to speed, although I can usually do ok within minutes.

Steve

An idea, over time, has the tendency to manifest/materialize. It can help to have a definite completion date attached to the idea too. An alarm clock and a good work ethic is needed also. Often a written idea on a piece of paper works a little better than only a mental idea kept only in the brain/mind/head.

Regarding visualization, here's some eye candy/websites which touch upon the topic: - http://www.grove.com - http://christinekane.com/blog/how-to-ma ... ion-board/ - Henry Ford said: Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it. Cartoonists have often used a small cloud near a person's head in which to place the mental words a cartoon character is thinking/saying. Cartoon storyboarding.