Aspies ARE imaginative

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Christophe Pillaut. I have no idea why, but I keep mixing his name up with someone else's.

It's hard for me to come up with pictures in my head when reading however I can come up with plots, skits, comedy type situations even though the comedies are considered "demented" to some.

I'm not good at drawing though so maybe people that are good at drawing have a better time paining pictures in their minds. I do however see images of things I've seen with my own eyes.

The term imagination can be confusing. Is it one of those things where one person finds their imagination great while another person's imagination is different so it's considered not using their imagination?

I think I can be imaginative, not so much with writing and stuff, but I think very well with pictures, like a movie or photograph in my head. I guess it depends I voted 'sometimes'

Right-- I think it also stems from the idea that people with Asperger's "lack imaginative play" when they are little, i.e. they do not "play pretend" socially with other children, or at least they do not do it in the same way or to the same extent as NT children. I was a very imaginative child but I could not/ would not play socially with other children

An example-- one of the tests for my daughter was if she would mimic behaviors of the clinician. The clinician took out a play cup of tea and pretended to drink. She then said to my daughter, "You drink," and handed her the cup. My daughter just stared at her blank-faced, did not take the cup, did not pretend to drink. They probably determine from this that she "lacks imagination" because she would not mimic social play. It's almost a TOM issue. My daughter definitely has a rich inner world, though, likes music and will play on her own a lot, where it's clear she's imagining something. But she has to do it alone.

I just checked the DSM IV criteria and lack of "symbolic or imaginative play" is a criteria for Autistic Disorder but NOT for Asperger's Disorder. So this looks more like our misunderstanding, not theirs. The criteria for 299.80 Asperger's Disorder are:

It doesn't say anything about imagination. So you can all breathe!

i'm an artist with Hyperlexia. imagining is my life blood. i draw comics and i honestly think having HFA made me a natural artist and writer. my screenwriting teacher praises me all the time for having an ear for "natural dialogue".

does anyone know where this crap came from? The idea what we lack imagination has to be the biggest load I've ever heard. Everyone tells me I'm a creative person. I can create something in minutes that would take others days to work out, if they could at all. To me, a good imagination is a sign someone has AS

I didn't vote 'cause I'm not sure what I have but I do know I have a lot of creativity and imagination. I tend to stand out for having my own way of doing things; it's like one of my defining traits. During the last decade I have wandered between writing, making music, game design and even photography. During my childhood years I avidly worked on my own designs with all sorts of building blocks, I drew and had a little "comic book" project I began developing on my own.
I do not excell at everything; for example: I'm rather bad a drawing and I'm not too good at imagining melodies but my videogame modding and my writing (in my first language) were always particularily good. Overall, everything I do including those things I'm not too technically skilled/knowledgeable at, seem to have an originality and complexity trademark aspect to them - for example, my music has a lot of changes; loops going on and off at different parts, atmospheric sounds backing up a certain riff, drum fills; maybe someone properly acquainted with music theory could find a lot of reasons to bash it but generally people find it interesting.

I don't think it's up to us to decide whether aspies are creative or not; I find that silly. I think, instead, that it's up to psychiatric theory (or whatever) to come clean and tell us what's their "lack of creativity" definition and whether it is or it isn't part of this AS construct of theirs.
That whole more rote than meaning thing. . .

Geez, I remember being in kindergarden and being a bit annoyed when playing pretend with a friend 'cause, since we were acting up MazingerZ and he had fired a "heat ray" on me, I had acted up the resultant "melting" but he kept shouting attack names at me oblivious to the fact that I supposedly lay defeated.
. . .bet that guy had no problems dating in high school. . . whatsoever.

I write fiction, draw and am a musician (even have a bachelor's degree in instrumental music ed to prove it).

And then look at this guy's site:

http://urvillecity.free.fr/index.Urville-ENG.htm

Woah. He created his own city from his imagination?

I think it's a standard mix up for people to think that AS people follow the criteria for Autism. They are prolly overgeneralising with a mentality of all autistics are AS rather than the correct assumption of all AS is autism.

I go through this with my ex alot. He constantly tells my son that he doesn't have AS becuase he's looking at the criteria for autism and assuming that we all follow that to a T. Whereas, the reality is, we don't fit that and that's why AS is now a diagnosis possibility. It would be sad if I found out that I can't have AS because I

(gulps loudly and looks quickly around in fear) have friends, have meaningful relationships, and (ohmygod!gasp!choking cough!disbelief! awe!) have sex occasionally!

I clicked yes on the poll; I do lack imagination

I'm in art college, and I've noticed that I find it EXTREMELY difficult to come up with something creative or imaginative when told.

When given homework, or a project in class, and not told exactly what to do right down to what colours to use, I stuggle and it's mentally draining to figure out what to put on that blank sheet of paper. The rest of my class mates, within 10 minutes they've gotten their basic idea down already, chosen the colours, patterns and styles and are ready to begin painting or to start the next step.

I find that the best I can come up with is old ideas that I've seen done many times before and it takes me longer than it takes the other students. It's like I can't think outside the box. I'm trapped by this set of specific rules that only I care about. I find I focus too much on detail, perfection and the familiar. I care too much about order and perfection to be creative, and because of this, I find it hard to even imagine something that isn't orderly, so this limits my creativity.

When I had my Asperger's assesment, my psychologist commented on my imagination saying that I had "inflexible thinking patterns" and found it difficult to "think up new ways of solving problems", which is very true.

So I would say I'm definitely very limited when it comes to imagination and creativity. I always have been for as long as I can remember. It's something I've struggled with all my life, especially in school.

I don't understand why so many people here say they are imaginative, since I thought lack of imagination/creativity was an aspie trait? My psychologist told me the same thing when he commented on my inflexible thinking. So, if Aspies ARE imaginative and creative, why aren't I? I'm sorry if that makes me sound skeptical. I do believe everyone here who says they are creative/imaginative, but I'm wondering why I'm so limited in ths area. I put it down to being an aspie, but it seems that isn't so?

I'm sorry for such a long post, too,

It seems like aspies are either over or under creative, or somehow both. It can be hard for me to make up something - I'd rather write an analysis - yet I live in a fantasy world half the time imagining scenarios with different characters. Lots of aspies do that - I think that's a creative process. But at the same time, I'm not a real artsy creative person either.

Problem one is almost everything writen was about children, and their differance from their age group.

Social creative is what they are looking for in four year old's.

It is a new field, and what limited resources there are have been focused on little children, who can most use some help.

Millions of adults have gone before, and no one hunted them down for a study. It is all about a delay in social development, not an excuse to never develop, which I am afraid it has become.

At four they might not benchmark, they might take till seven. Some seem to be over influanced by what they read, the report, but not the study, and who were the subjects.

My view, that humans are simple minded twits, is constantly reinforced.

The child is not developing, means only compared to other children that age. Of course the child is developing, but in other ways. They will get around to that other stuff in time.

Forcing a child to make eye contact to cure it of failure, can cause a lifetime of failure, for all other normal, if by a different route, development is blocked in the process.

All of the terms used are loaded. This modern silly science of the mind, is mindless. They try to use common terms, but never asked what people think these terms mean. Everybody knows what they mean, right!

There is a reason that Real Medicine, invents terms, then defines them with exact meaning.

This sixties storfront science religion never had the brain power to define it's self. It was taken from Scientology.

It seems a lot of people have latched on to what was written about delayed development in a four year old, a several year delay, as an excuse to be a four year old forever.

2,000,000 of us grew up found a way to survive, had homes, families, and were good law abiding hard working folks before the Psychobabbling pill priest opened their first storefront church of new science.

It is pure BS! They have strung out a generation on expermental drugs and sucked a living from pushing dope.

Leave the kids alone, no dope experiments, no forced growing up, and they will turn out like we did, not perfect, with some extra talents too, but not living on pills.

Grow up!

Yes, I'm imaginative, but not as much as I used to be.

I am imaginative. I imagine things that I think are reality but later find out they are not.

I feel similarly about my own creative process. I feel on a block more often than not. Also I feel bound by obsessive compulsive type of restrictions giving me a sense of lack of freedom - a clunky sort of weight to the whole process. That said, the best things end up coming out of situations that seemed stalled.

Having to write a story in a short time tends to be a problem for me. I think I have learned ways to cope and be creative under time restrictions but it's still stressful for me - I need to have something worthwhile to say and even then I need to plan my best possible way of saying it. When I was about middle school - and a bit earlier - I ended up having to finish my stories at home because I went for things with scenery descriptions, dialogues, battle descriptions, whatnot. . . I wouldn't be too quick to call this "lack of creativity"; I know for sure of at least one serious and significant writer that says that writing shouldn't be taken lightly and that writers should refrain from writing for the fancy of it - opting instead to restrain themselves until such restraint is no longer possible.

One of the reasons why I feel and have obsessive compulsive traits messing with my creativity is that I feel that, if unchecked, whatever I try to do will spiral into chaos - something not too crazy considering my early behavioural problems, my handwriting, my general impulsivity. . . I fear losing coherence; which can happen because half the time I don't have formal knowledge of what I'm doing.

Creativity does progress naturally with things that obsess me in an adictive way at a given moment. Otherwise I have an idea I took from someone else: to use my previous stuff as the basis for new things; to have the same but transposed; to re-arrange the concepts of an old idea that may or may have not been succesful back then and give it a second shot.
Once I gain some momentum it's not so stressful.

After all this I still think I'm creative. This is because I look at the final results.
First thing: most people just come back from work and have a beer while watching some typical sport - and that's all they ever do - and no one says there's anything wrong with them.
Second thing is that, regardless to how excruciating my creative process may have been, I can notice that in a given group I'm usually ahead in some way. For example, my guitar teacher used to tell me that I was one of the only three students of his that tried to come up with anything himself. In a community modding a certain game I could tell I was amongst the best in both quantity and quality - and that while not being the one who put the most detail in his work my designed areas stood out for their hovering fortresses of steel, their netherworld skies, their baffling statues, their echoing lovecraftian vaults. . . while almost everyone else just repeated the urban or military settings of the original game. . . over and over.
. . .but the point I want to stress is that even though I don't exactly find being creative an easy task - I'm not sure that in itself can be addressed to a lack of creativity.