What do people mean: "Autistics think in pictures"

Post Reply New Topic

I believe it might be to do with melatonin levels. Low melatonin is related to autism.

I've never got that pictures thing. I don't think in 2d static representaions of information. I think in spaces and physical relationships.

• I'm extremely practical because I can assemble a complete model in my head, then quickly make changes as more real world factors are considered.
• I'm very good at packing lots of differently shaped items into containers.
• I can navigate very well almost by instinct. I've got no hope with street names and directions, but if I know were placess are relative to known landmarks (like a certain shop or terrain feature), I can get from one point to another, even though I may not be able to see either of them while travelling between them
• When thinking logically I almost see the indicidual facts and concepts as items, and the relationships they have either draw them together into a new fact, or push them apart into separate things. This goes even further than 3D with the 'space' made up of lots of different scales all meshing together (kind of why I've got the username polarity. A polarity is not just the end points but all the possibilities in between, and how they relate to another polarity). When programming computers I can visualise all the sections of code and how they interact.

One of the downsides to all this is I have difficulty writing normally. Because all the relationships between topics dont fit into a strictly linear representation (one word/concept after another). Putting topics in sentences and paragraphs isn't easy because they may all relate to each other, so have no obvious order in which they should be. I like HTML and wikis in that I can put each topic in it's own section, and link them with what they relate to in a more logical structure. Otherwise I'm stuck splitting things into categories, and not being able to cover all the relationships properly (I end up using a lot of parentheses to refer to other concepts, and that makes the text a little hard to follow).

I'm definitely a non linear random abstract thinker. As for the specific processes involved it very difficult to say given the 'black box' thinking I have.

'A picture is worth a 1000 words' is the axiom... and it is true in computer terms. A simple 25kb image file can provide information that, if written down in text, would take a megabyte of disk space or more. Not only that, but a picture 'links' different 'data sets' into one: emotional, logic (processing of information), sensory (color) and memory (as in if you see an image of a cup with a reddish liquid on it you retrieve the memory that the cup shape + liquid color = some sort of juice ..whereas seeing a wine glass with a red liquid = red wine in the cup).

Applied to the brain, if it worked sort like a computer (which it does), thinking in pictures increases the speed in which many different sets of information are retrieved and processed...as well as providing a far more efficient method of data storage.

Does this mean people with AS are better than NT? Not really, it just means we think differently. There are times when text-thought is better than picture-thought and vice-versa.

Here's some food for thought:

There are cultures whose very language IS pictures/images. Asian cultures which use ideo-pictographic alphabets. NT people from those cultures 'think' in images as well as words because that is how their language is set. And you all know how famous Asians are for being bloody good at maths and other subjects... and why you see some concepts in their arts/movies/folk tales which are never found in western cultures.. and why anime is so freakin' cool

I only have experience with the Japanese language so it's the only one I'll use as an example. The Japanese have 3 different alphabets.

Hiragana - 'pure' Japanese alphabet. Each 'letter' in this alphabet is made up of a 1 consonant+1 vowel. As in, KA KE KI KO KU.

Katakana- Alphabet that is used for foreign words/names. Its a mirror of Hiragana but the drawings are different. Think of it like it was a very evil version of western italics font + western 'signature' type of handwriting.

Kanji - technically its a slightly modified version of a Chinese alphabet. Has like 10 million characters. Unlike the previous 2 alphabets, this alphabet uses pictures to represent idea or items rather than vowels and consonants.

For example, the character for MOUNTAIN is:



And river:



And it gets a lot more complicated when the character is for a concept rather than something you can see.. but the images are used in a logic sense..

for example:




And they mix all 3 alphabets in the daily reading.



So by reading 1 'sentence' they are processing 'letters' in their first 2 languages and every other word is a Kanji character which compresses up to 3 sentences into one little complicated character.

Very nifty if not outright insane at times.

What I mean is pretty much the opposite of 'blind sight' and its cousin Anton's syndrome.

I can see what is in front of me clearly. I'm am not blind in that sense. But I cannot form an image of what something looks like at all. My main thought are not in sound, text, language, whatever. Or at least I'm not connected directly to them. I don't have some much as a sketchpad to work things out on. Nothing.

If I was to remember a place I wouldn't be able to recall what it looks like only a limited definition. However if I was in front of it I may recogonise it, even beyond the level that a definition could bring. This is what I mean by true mind blindness.

The problem is order. basically i don't know when I will recongise something and I need to constantly be recognise things in front of me to get somewhere without a map. If I miss a single thing, like has happened many a time, I will be going in the wrong direction completely lost.

What is surprising is I would expect to be a lot worse than I am, but somehow I get by.

I've always like art, imagery, shapes and colors. I just can see them in my head.

Last edited by 0_equals_true on 11 Feb 2008, 3:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.

IMO there are 4 different ways of thinking and everyone uses all 4 at least occasionally though people usually use only 1 or 2 of them.

Verbal-Linguistic: thoughts are spoken language
Imaginal: thoughts are mental images
Symbolic-Spatial: thoughts are patterns and abstract symbols
Kinesthetic: thoughts are based on an intuitive sense of one's body position in space and time

IMO what is commonly called "visual" thinking is Imaginal thinking and the patterns aspect of Symbolic-Spatial thinking. Temple Grandin's "thinking in pictures" and the ability of autistic savant kindergarteners to draw very accurate drawings is an extreme form of Imaginal thinking that has little or no back-up from Verbal-Linguistic or Symbolic-Spatial thinking. The reason that most little kids find it hard to draw accurately is because of the "gestalt" aspect of Symbolic-Spatial thinking that identifies whole objects.

I'd guess Symbolic-Spatial thinking dominates in the majority of autistics.

I'm not going to add much...just going to say WOW

I only think with one of those and a blind (flakey) intuition.

Numbers and words have always been pretty useless to me... especially in literature and math... i cannot do much with words and numbers... you can tell already by my horrid grammar... the only reason my grammar is good on my website is because the computer program has a SUPER checker...

ive always been one to think in pictures and AAC systems really surprise me... if i ever loose ability to speak thank god AACs uses pictures instead of letters hahaha...

What about these?

But Arabic is much simpler than Japanese because it's an alphabetic sound-based language like most languages and not symbolic-based.

I think there's a difference between thinking in patterns and thinking in abstract symbols. A very big difference. I excel at one and can barely sustain the other.

The method you learn to communicate/think can have life long effects on what you're capable of. I've met very few Japanese people who can say the letters/sounds V or F, because they just aren't used at all. In fact they gave difficulty with consonants, as in hiragana/katakana all the consonant sounds (except n) are associated with a vowel sound. Hearing Japanese people try and pronounce english county names is a prime example:

Worcestershire - wusesutashiru (consonants except n have a vowel pronounced, although the vowel sound may be quiet/short)
Herefordshire - hereporudoshiru (the only f sound is FU, the rest of that vowel group has an H consonant, so the P group is often used for the other F/vowel sounds).
Gloucestershire -gorosuteru-shiru (R/L sounds are made by flicking the tip of the tongue forward lightly against the roof of the mouth, instead of holding it behind the teeth).


My name, Duncan, is a particular problem, as there is no 'du' sound (D vowel group has Z paired with U, and u is more like oo). I'm usually called tankan/dankan (no Cs). I'll probably just take the literal translation of my name 'Chief Warrior', Omosenshi, and just use Omo if I have to go back for a long time.


Comparing the visual and phonetic complexity of western and eastern languages to certain skills may be interesting for example:

Western languages - Simple alphabet, moderately complex phonetics from wide range of consonants.
Japanese - vastly more complex character system with hiragana/katakana/kana/romaji (western symbols used to describe h/kgana sounds), simpler phonetics from less consonants, consonant/vowel pairing.
Chinese - character system is complex (kana), phonetics also complex, as very subtle variations in tone and pronounciation change the meaning of words completely.

Someone who has learned to write and speak Chinese well since childhood is likely to have gained related abilies from the complexity of their language.

Japanese wasn't originally symbol based, it just had hiragana/katakana. They started using the symbols through trade with the Chinese. All of the kana symbols have a strict correlation to h/kgana, and you can write perfectly understandable Japanese using just h/kgana. The phonetics used for what are largely the same characters aren't anywhere near as complex as the Chinese ones, as they're limited by the Japanese phonetics.

Similarly Duncan is often translated as 'brown warrior'. In Celtic 'dunn' is brown, but has a harder drawn out n than 'doon', chief. It probably ended up being written as 'dun' because of the new languages spoken/written by all the cultures that have invaded throughout history. Chief warrior is a much more likely name than brown warrior (when practically everything was brown), and in several historical stories Duncan is the name of an advisor to the king. If it really was brown then that would apply to someone with darker skin, which for the Celtic people would be a foreigner/invader, and definately not someone who'd be trusted by kings/cheiftains.


I guess I have a capacity to think temporaly too, considering the changes to a thing over time

Exactly


I have never met or heard of any Japanese person that could not draw decently. Their alphabet is literally a complex drawing. The way they think in concept + phonetics opens up a whole new point of view on things.

And every language has that. I'm fluent in english and spanish..both are like native languages to me. I've been trying to learn Japanese on my spare time for some years now..not very successful but I'm getting there.

Each language has its own thought-pattern if you could call it that.

English is very technical and to the point and leans more towards logic & actions.
Spanish is very descriptive and links objects and activities with emotions.
Japanese is very structured and channels thought to take into consideration several aspects of the subject at hand. Its hard to describe but its like it makes you think of both ends of the spectrum with you being somewhere in the middle. You dont find that in English or Spanish unless you consciously try to do that. In Japanese its simply part of the language structure, it comes automatically.

I've found that when trying to think of a solution for something and i'm having a hard time getting it done, I think of the problem in Spanish.. then in Japanese.. and I find that each language gives me a new insight or a different approach to the problem. 'Running' the problem in my head in english gives me the technical side, in spanish the ability to better describe/understand it and its emotional content and japanese pops in new ways to see the problem (which are re-run in english and spanish for processing).

It all depends on how abstract the symbols are. In a way they're a pattern to which concepts can be attached. The western alphabet has no easily discernable visual representation of the things it's used to represent. When I had a nervous breakdown though I was experiencing a lot of the symptoms of schizophrenia, including the increased pattern recognition, and reading a huge amount about hings like astrology/tarot and the use of the alphabet, in particualr in ancient languages like Hebrew. I ended up looking at the characters in the western alphabet as representations of objects and movement, and suddenly they make an astounding amount of sense when looked at visually, eg:

Udder - shows the thing with the cappital, the action that is performed by hand milking with the dd e is something coming out downward, and r is it hitting the ground/bottom of a bucket and splashing.

cat - c is the sharp claws (contact/catch for similar 'c's), a is reaching out, t is the paw on top of something.

dog - d is the act of moving away, o is an object, g is the retrieval of that object

cow - c is the contact (this being an animal/thing you interact with, in going out to milk it), o is the thing, w is the 4 legs, although o and w could also represent the udder shape and bucket of milk shape.

horse - h is a representation of the shape, in this case o is the rider, r is used to represent motion (as in return and roll, in this case the temporary joining of h and o the horse and rider), s is also motion (as in speed, step, slide), e is the action of going to a place.


In the visual system the bottom is generaly the self, while the top is other, circles are things, crosses things interacting, lines actions, curved lines as in c,g,e usually have the progression of the motion in a clockwise direction. It's a lot easier to see in older words, but I think somehow the brain is using the visual context in a way that isn't part of conscious thought, as a lot of the shapes/actions can be seen describing newer things (mostly as parts of words are put together to make new words) for example:

Computer - c being the use of your hands (the c represents them the same way as the cat's claw), o is again a thing, probably the whole computer here, m symbolises all the parts (as many). p is putting something into it, the data, u is where you put the data into (like the shape of a bucket), t is the data interacting, and e is data being removed (the r being the in and out of data).

Very interestingly the French don't use the word computer, because it sounds rude. Putain is French for whore/prostitute, and pute f**king. But the actions are the same as for computer. You put something in (semen into uterus) and get a result of their combination out (a baby).

Here's some more (some as parts of words):

an - living thing, like in man, angel, satan (sat is like satisfaction, what you're tempted with). 'a' is the first letter in the alphabet and represents one or wholeness compared to 'b' being 2 parts (binary/both, the production of something new, in the case of 'b' an object represented by the circle moving away on a new path, the line). The a is as it is in Allah and aum, and is the sound of breath that is in all living things the combination of circle and line here represents a thing that can change/perform an action (the path to other things/places).

god - here the symbols are reversed compared to dog, as we give ('g'), something (ourselves), and then can recieve (no examples of the d here, but the path coming down from the right hand side comes in a clockwise direction, bringing the circle at the bottom).

man - the m is like in many, because you're a round a lot of them (and they kind of look like an m when stood in groups, what people and monkeys (another m word) do.

woman - the w represents the breasts, and the o either the genitals, shape when pregnant, or the production of a child.


I hope by now you've noticed that in describing the way a letter is used the describing word very often starts with that letter.

Ever wanted to know what the reason for clockwise bieng considered more lucky than anticlockwise? It's taking something offered to you with the right hand, passing back to the other person's right hand (our left), like in trade and creative interation. If the right hand isn't crossing over to the left side (or putting something into the left hand so it can pass it to the other person's right hand) to make the circle of the action clockwise, then it's more likely to be used for hitting on the right side, and being hit back, the antclockwise direction. (like in a swastika, astological chart, what determined the north pole being top and the motion of planets being clockwise from that perspective).

Progression of time for humans, evolution is about creative clockwise interaction, as opposed to the regression of fighting.

Last edited by polarity on 11 Feb 2008, 5:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Pretty much summarises my last post.

Being an aspie I didn't really look for emotional contexts in the symbols, but I suppose they could be there as representations of attraction/repulsion.