Reticulating Splines vs Spoon Theory

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Marybird: A beautiful description.

Greg: Thanks!

I was at an autism support group last night, and two guys were going on about how they were writing appendixes for each others' books, and how the appendixes grew so long, they turned into whole new books. I told them I could relate because I was 6 months in to a 2 month writing project. :)

JSBACH: Plus Groove Theory is very groovy. :D Actually, I don't relate to groove theory much. There seem (with my limited experience) to be two types of special-interest-aspies... one focuses on a single special interest (or only a few) their entire lives. The other will spend a couple of months to a couple of years on an interest, and then move on, sometimes returning, but always gathering new interests. I'm in the latter category. Remembering all the things I'm good at or have learned about itself requires reticulating those splines, so I usually can't list them all in one sitting. I definitely have some major areas of focus, but I love learning about as much as possible in many categories. (And then I like to see what those things have in common and cross-pollinate those different disciplines.)

And NTs are capable of learning topics in-depth for sure. There are also many NTs with a great capacity for detail. Both of my partners spring to mind.. although one is bipolar and the other isn't aspie but he's probably not NT either. Still, there's an element of how they approach those details that is different. And difficult to know because we can't brain-swap to see what it's like. :) It's clear that while they have interests, and some rather in-depth (like computers, video games, and politics), that there's.. hmm I keep trying to define it and when I go to say something, I end up saying, "No, that's not true either."

*shrug*

It's ok, Jammie.

As part of Groovy Theory, NT's learn an expertise by placing their knowledge in a plurality of grooves. That is how they know their subject. For the Aspie, it's just one groove. That's how it would work.

And some Aspies have in reality only one giant groove in their heads. Like Mozart for example. His entire experience was subsumed into music.

On the other extreme, the NT Bach had many grooves, but all of them concerned music. Hence, his life could encompass his children and relating to people, but music touched every aspect of his existence, and he had little difficulty moving from composition to his other dutes as Kappelmeister at Liepzig.

That's my model works. It attempts to explain the diversity of cognitive landscapes.

Put another way: I could get an NT carton of a dozen eggs, or an extreme Aspie carton containing one giant egg.

I'm sorry, I don't relate. :( I feel like I've got 10,000 eggs and I put them in different cartons, but some of them belong in multiple cartons so I have to sit and sort them when I need a particular carton, but the key thing is that every single egg is very precious and I can't lose any of them or I will FREAK OUT.

:D

Oh.

It's because I am not explaining myself well. I live most of my life in one or two grooves: music and theology. But how about this: there are a million tiny grooves around the two big ones. You know, like hygiene, make breakfast, pay the bills, clean the room, go to the store. Those grooves are narrow but deep and I hate them because they are hard to get into and out of. I am happiest when I am dwelling in one of my two giant grooves.

My model of grooves is static. Your model of splines is dynamic.

Oh, I think I see. The grooves are modes of being or tasks or ways to spend time. That makes sense!

OMG, I so relate to that. Every obsession is presious. (I can't spell and am at home, so no spell checker here ).

I'm understand groove theory a lot easier, and spoon theory for that matter, than reticulating splines. Groove theory is a task oriented theory. It describes tasks well.

Lets see if understand:
The more often you do a task and the more familar a task is, the larger (easier) it is to move into and out of the groove (task). It's the narrow ones, the ones hard to see & hard to define are scary, and hard to get into.

Re Mozart. He would have had more than one giant groove. Surely he dated, dressed himself, went to the market and bought food, shovelled snow from the front porch. It's a great theory, don't over simplify it.

I'm trying to relate these theories to NT's that I work with, and I just can't. They are a whole new theory I think. They live in plush space, we live in litteral space.

I'd say that's what it's like for me. I am quite social, so I don't have special interests instead of social contact, in fact one of my special interests requires a lot of social contact, that is my 12 year obsession with hardhouse music

I'm reading this book - very interesting.
I think I have some ideas about Aspie imagination and non aspie imagination.
It's funny because I'm trying to study people who are successful at navigating social stuff and there's a woman who sits next to me a work (yes, her again!). I've never known a person like her before because as far as I can tell she has NO curiosity. I mean NO curiosity. Her mind is completely static. But this woman is HIGHLY successful with social skills.

In thinking about this in relation to Aspie curiosity and special interests, I think curiosity is a function of imagination. This woman is Catholic (you'd love her BachLover!) Her entire personality is built around her religion, but I always thought that in order to be religious you had to have imagination. Not to imagine something that's not there, but to have faith in something that is unprovable.

It's the same kind of imagination that is needed in science I think. For instance in order to figure out how atoms work, you have to be able to imagine some scenario that you can test, and in order to imagine a scenario you have to be curious to begin with.

But when you get to Aspie curiosity/imagination it becomes something else. It's more a function of self preservation/emotional comfort than answering a question and making use of that answer (which I think is how non aspie's function in regards to curiosity). So we have these special interests that go almost nowhere except to our hearts and minds and we are sort like hamsters on a wheel trying to feed our hearts and minds with those SIs. We get all excited if somebody lets us talk about them for five minutes.

Maybe there's a way we can find to help Aspies take their special interests out into the world in a productive way. Would that help some Aspies who are dependent on others find a way to be more self sufficient, because if we are good at anything, it's our special interests.

I hope this isn't too rambly, I've been trying to think of how to say it clearly.

Ps, the reason the book brought this up was because at one point she mentions problems with Aspie imagination, but she didn't go into detail and I wasn't sure what she meant.

I think this is very possible. I've spent my life trying to make my aspie skills useful. Fortunately, I was interested in computers, and I turned that into a marketable skill. It wasn't my favorite interest, but I was able to channel enough interest into it to make a comfortable living at that.

It's harder to make a living as a writer, but I'm trying to do just that. It's easier to sell nonfiction books than fiction, especially now that selfpublishing lets you put something out there and sell it to a small but supportive niche. The trick with writing is that to be successful at it, it takes a ton of lead time (you don't make money until long after the work is done), and it requires a huge set of skills. Aside from your area of research, you've got to be a decent writer, and a marketer, layout designer, cover designer, editor, (or at least the ability to hire these tasks out), and some misc. skills, and you do need to be enough of a people-person to make connections. (Thankfully lots of people in the writing world are easy to talk to and are also hermits.) It takes patience and multitasking and a willingness to face criticism and rejection.

That aside, it's one possible venue for aspies who have writing skills.

I think I heard of a new company that started that is hiring autistic people, specifically in the computer field I think. So those ideas are being developed. I suspect some aspies have made an art out of their special interests on the internet and managed to make livings at being artists, comic artists, bloggers, and experts in various fields by having a web presence and just talking about it constantly. Again, lots of work and at least a slight need for skill-diversity.

Nate Silver is a great example. I'm not sure if he's aspie or not, but he has certain traits that aspies have, like an obsession with numbers. It doesn't matter the subject, he just wants to run statistical analysis on it and make predictive models. And he's very successful because he's applied it to sports and politics. (He also has a burrito analysis blog on the side, where he analyses burrito restaurants, which is whyI know it's the numbers themselves he loves, not the topics of politics and sports.)

I could go off now on a tangent about how society rewards people poorly and under-values work, and how we like to imagine that it's all fairly done, and that anyone who produces "real" value will be rewarded for it, and how maybe we should consider some kind of political remedies to balance the fact that people will never be rewarded fairly according to what they produce rather than how good they are at butt-kissing and schmoozing, but that's only a semi-related topic. :)

In a nutshell, it would be nice if we had a way to give aspies (and other creatives) an easier way for putting their work into the public for all to benefit from, I think it would be better all around. The web and Kickstarter and Kindle and other technologies are helping do this, but that doesn't help everyone. It still usually requires holding down a low-wage job while also promoting a side career, or at least getting into a relationship of someone willing to support that career (like I've managed to do). Not everyone can do that.

I think I know the part of Bogdashina's book you're talking about. I just read that part.

She starts out by saying what some scientists think about aspie imagination (that we don't have any), and that researchers are observing our creativity, but calling them pathologies rather than imagination. Then she talks about two kinds of aspie imagination: That based on reality (like Temple Grandin, where all of her designs are based very firmly in the real world), and that based on fantasy and abstract concepts (like many poets, fiction writers, and artists). She says that often researchers don't think of reality-based imagination as being actual imagination, though clearly it is. I don't think she says why researchers don't recognize the second type, except perhaps the implication that it's too unlike NT creativity for them to really understand it, or that perhaps researchers are simply ignoring it.

What I love about Bogdashina is that she presents the science, but she clearly understands the flaws in science that has completely ignored the inner world of autists. She relies heavily on first-hand accounts written by autists, and research that is more qualitative and internal than quantitative and external.

That must be further in the book than I've gotten. I was talking about one line near the front. That's very interesting and I was thinking along the same lines.

I think that when science or psychologists use the term Special Interest, they may think it's (as she said) pathology. Not always, as you pointed out some put it to use, but generally it seems to be seen as an excuse to avoid reality or a replacement for human contact. That's where I was thinking we could find ways to turn it around. Publishing is a great idea.

I think even people who have special interests like My Little Pony might possibly be able to find a niche to publish in. But not everyone is interested in writing or publishing. Still there's other options like art, etc.

I had this vision though of all these Aspies all over the world and all the thoughts in their heads from their special interests, I could see all the thoughts like things and they just go to waste. But if there's a way to use that energy the way electricity is used to power things - I'm trying to come up with more ideas. What I also think goes to waste is not just the information but the passion. Like I remember reading someone here who said their special interest was bus drivers - now I find that really interesting - I'd love to know her feelings surrounding the schedules of the drivers. And whether you are Aspie or not, those are the things that help you connect with other audiences - the passion.

This is a great thread - you are really helpful! And i love the book - I also appreciate how she knows the science but isn't mired in it.

I got that book and started reading it. Chapter 1 was fantastic, and "proved" my own diagnosis to me, because I do not think in English, I think in funny geometric dashes that have proportion, relation, motion which form concepts.

I consider myself to be a very visual thinker - I can visualize much easier than I can speak for sure. But I am nowhere near as visual as Temple Grandin as illustrated by that elk story. I would have had a mixture of pictures and sentence thoughts in that situation.

I don't understand this. Do you have pauses between your sentences while you think?
Can you type out a sentence (or maybe write it out and post a picture)?

She is talking about how babies think without language - maybe you maintained and expanded your baby language.

The assertion in Bogdashina's book is that all autists are non-verbal thinkers, that we think first using non-verbal senses, and then maybe translate to words later, like if we want to talk.

I disagree with Bogdashina, since I lean heavily on words when I think. However, as she and studies have observed, many autists use non-verbal thinking. She says that for these autists, language is a second-language. It then follows, she claims, that we are less of what she calls "conceptual" or "absract" thinkers, and rely more on what can be sensed. This effect is experienced to different degrees among autists.

Much of what she says rings true to me, with exceptions. Like I said, I often think in words, but there are also images, videos, shapes and patterns, feelings.. All going on to different degrees depending on the subject and other factors. The times I struggle to speak are those moments when none of my thoughts are words. Or worse, when I have the color of the word (I'm a synesthete) but not the word itself.

So what JSBach says makes total sense to me. There are many thoughts I have which have no words, sentences, pauses. It's just shapes and senses, symbols, even places which have nothing to do with the thought. If it's a thought I really want to think harder about or explain to someone, then I get really super verbal with it, I talk aloud (with no one listening) or I write it out, or think in streams of words to sort of "lock it in" or "sort it out" or "put it in order". Otherwise, the thought just sort of happens all at once and I just "know" it. Without words.

The pinkish purple image on my splines blog post really captures what this "looks" like, tho not the feelings and audio and movement and other non-visual senses that go with it. :)