Is Aspie thought Highly Associational?

Post Reply New Topic

I've read that ADHD people can be highly divergent thinkers.

http://borntoexplore.org/addexp~1.htm#Divergent

This fits with my real life experience of people who exhibit these traits.


The person will say something like:

"I picked a carrot from the garden today. You remember that snowman I built last January I used a carrot just like this for his nose. That ring I'm wearing that's 16 caret or something. Is it spelled the same as carrot? Kind of rhymes with Abbot in a funny way doesn't it? I used to give the vicar Abbot Ale for Christmas ha ha! Too many mince spies, got a bit tubby like the snowman...Anyway I got married in that church, you know the ring? Never read Lord of the Rings though. The wizard man who's name I can't remember looked a bit like Santa Claus didn't he? Well I found the ring under the pot, you know by the carrots and I've now found it. Which reminds me, I have to find that new fishing rod, the one with the glow in the dark rings so I can fish at night. This carrot might help me to see in the dark anyway. I wonder if Bug's Bunny could see a lot in the dark, he ate carrots didn't he? Anyway, my new fishing rod is entirely made out of carrot fibres, better than carbon fibre: makes the rod more flexible without shattering, see? Used to leave a carrot out for Rudolf, which reminds me: I need to feed the rabbit..."

You get the idea...

I might as well mention that I think this way also. Sometimes, it drives people crazy. On here, you may have seen how I can relate things to movies and series. I do that with a LOT of things.

Do NTs do this at all? I HAVE seen some evidence for it, but not as widespread as what I do.

Yes I do that too, often getting those 'wtf are you talking about' looks from people.

I'm sure they must do - after all, memory is nothing without association, and advertising and propaganda are (it seems to me) little more than methods of associating one concept with another, so association must surely be pretty fundamental to the thinking process.

I think the difference may be that NTs are adept at filtering out or otherwise avoiding what might be seen as spurious association....my own view is that they do that at the risk of losing some valuable insights, in the same way as not succumbing to the "impairment" of compulsive checking can lead to expensive errors, depending on the particular task in question.

I guess it's hard to fully analyse the way the mind works - we're too close to it, thinking about how we think, and perhaps if the human mind were simple enough to understand, we'd be too simple to understand it. Whenever I think about how my mind works, I get insights but I also get a strong feeling that I can't see, and will never see, the whole process clearly. But we can try.

There's two ways I got the impression that Asperger's and High-Functioning Autistic thought is highly associational...

1) In Thinking in Pictures Grandin often discusses associative thinking as being characteristic of autism spectrum disorders. She even discusses the instance of one father of a perhaps low-functioning autistic whose thought was "associational, not logical".*
2) Daniel Tammet, the High-Functioning Autistic with an enviable talent for mental computation (and natural language acquisition), ascribes his abilities to a "highly associative form of thinking" rather than the misconception that he has a "supercomputer" in his head in the video below.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIDMCC2SJek[/youtube]


NOTE
-------------
*Grandin's book described how the boy made some conclusion like "Since I fly on the plane, it will not fall" or some phrase analogous to that. The association was not very logical or even rational (rationality incorporating both abduction and induction in addition to deduction).

We are not particularly associational relative to non-autistic people.

The tasks we struggle with rely on association as much as the tasks we excell at. As ToughDiamond correctly points out, human thinking is associational.....autistic or otherwise.

I'd agree to it.

I think in concepts (not words) and associate stuff in pictures.

You could say its the story of my life when, while in a group, an issue or problem is being discussed and in the first 10 minutes or so I've already figured out why it happened, when it happened, where it happened and how it happened as well as how to fix the error that propped up in the process before it reached this point and the errors that will be caused later on in the process (and how to prevent them from happening by fixing the issue at that future step).

but.. its almost impossible to explain all that to them.. not because im not capable but because they dont seem to be able to see the entire process as a whole and as individual, interlinked steps all at once. All they see is step by step and end up making things worse as they try to fix them.

no offense to NT's anywhere but heck, I feel like im dilbert and the others are the pointy-haired boss

Ditto on the Dilbert thing.

I see analogies everywhere, if that's what you mean.
People often miss the point, when I think it's obvious.

Like the time I mentioned my favorite quote during a conversation about Big Brother: Will Durant, concerning the prohibition, said that it "...shows the amaturish weakness of a government that cannot control the fools without making fools of us all." My husband didn't get the connection and thought I was randomly changing the subject to favorite quotes, so he shared one from some stupid comic strip -- no connection at all to politics or anything important. I wanted to strangle him.

Or when I see a dog chase a squirrel up a tree, I think of abusive/competitive people who can't understand why I don't want to play their sick games, at my expense, and actually get mad. (If I don't play, they can't win, which is the worst crime of all.)

Movies are great, too, like the Matrix...

Am I anywhere close to the topic of this thread?

I'm curious what others think about "intuition" of people, especially their pasts, food interest, etc?

A random thought: James Burke show Connections I always find stimulating - but that's the point, but he weaves things with some odd pivots. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)