Is Aspie thought Highly Associational?

Post Reply New Topic

I can recall a given knack for making associations, ever since my preadolescence. When my mind is at its best, hyperfocused typing a blog post, my mind seems to work by pulling out dozens of associations.

When writing a blog post about the moral responsibility of a schizophrenic, for instance, I pulled out associations to Adam Curtis's "Century of the Self, Daniel Dennett's idea of intentional stance, and a blog post by Massimo Pigliucci on human irrationality.

Now, I know when writing about fairly complex issues, people tend to come up with all sorts of associations to illuminate the topic. But I am curious whether people with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autistics in general associational abilities above average ("average" as that theoretical fiction, the statistical aggregation of numerous different people).

I have recently had an intuition that my thought process was highly associational. This was supported by reading Thinking in Pictures by Temple Grandin, the extremely visual thinker with some ambiguous variety of high functioning autism. She describe her thoughts as highly associational, in which mental visual images are associated with other mental visual images.

My thoughts, if this act of introspection (or Heterophenomenologically interpretable self-report) is to be trusted, seem to occur through the associations of various facts with the present piece I am writing. The memorized facts usually seem quite verbal, though I sometimes do recall vague and general visual facets to my memorizations of the facts (for example, how I read of "heterophenomenology" in Consciousness Explained in a car during a trip through Toronto). But the details seem to be primarily factual or verbal in my memory, I lack the visual detail Grandin possesses.

To make a long (and certainly ladden with grammatical and spelling errors) post conclude, I am wondering if anyone else has noticed this? Grandin has provided quite a few anacedotes of associational thinking in Thinking in Pictures but I am also wondering if there has been any neuroscientific or psychological research into this area. The first few sites on a Google Search were of limited help. If not, more anacedotal evidence would be fine!

YES.
It is easier to form associations when all facets of a mind are closer.

Well I do something similar as well, I tend when I see something or think about it make associations and spot things which are related to the thing which I am originally thinking of.

I tend to see conections which others tend to miss, some people think I am sometimes going off topic when I am talking to them becuase they do not always see the logical connection between two very different things.

I have a great love of model systems, where one thing can act as a model for another thing. A model system does not always look like the thing being modeled, but it will behave in a similar way. I think it is my ability to make and spot associations which leads to me choosing some models for other things.

_________________
Health is a state of physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity I am not a jigsaw, I am a free man !

Diagnosed under the DSM5 rules with autism spectrum disorder, under DSM4 psychologist said would have been AS (299.80) but I suspect that I am somewhere between 299.80 and 299.00 (Autism) under DSM4.

Yup, I often associate things and make a lot of associations people don't get unless its very carefully explained. Although I do see where their coming from as when my brain is overtired it seems to work overtime making associations that occasionally slide out of the relm of sane and leave me thinking 'what the - ' a minute later once I've properly processed it.

Undiagnosed probable Aspie here.

Yes, so much so that I often wonder whether anything much goes on in my head except association - and until I noticed autism (quite recently), I thought the same was true of everybody. I read a question on this forum, the idea triggers associations, I try to pull out the most useful ones and set them down. There's input, there's association, there's selection, there's output. Mostly I notice that there are too many associations for me to handle at once, and I don't know what to do with them all. When I talk past the point, I'm dumping out every association I can about the original question or comment, or about a derivative of it. Once complete, I have trouble remembering what I said later, though if I read it back, I recognise it all. It's as if I need to pass it all onto others so I can forget it and move on to other things, which might be the same topic from another angle, if another person develops it with a new idea.

Hmm, with anecdotal evidence I would say yes - I do tend to constantly make associations (verbal mostly, not pictures), In my head - which is why I've always had a much above average ability at writing analysis type essays on artworks and stories; where you have to find abstract meanings, and associate them with phrases, analogies, etc. I could go into insane depth and complexity on those assignments.

My memory and thought process is highly associational to an annoying degree.

Yes.

And it makes interaction with others love or hate. Some love your brilliant connections, but others can't understand why you can't just see things for what they are.

My thinking is highly associational, though I prefer to call it contextual. But, reading forum posting over a long period is enough to tell me that many aspies do not have this ability. In fact, many of them seem to be unable to make the most obvious associations, and don't catch on even when other people point them out.

I can see the manifestation of this associating tendency (to accumulate threads and weave them together) as relatable through the hyperlexia and narrow beam of processing avenues; these two things together can contribute to a person with many words, ideas, and concepts available for use, but since there is an issue with seeing how they may all relate on their own, the mind jumps from one thing to the next to the next, often with equal emphasis on each. I think that even more often, the case for an Aspie as you have mentioned will be to start on one issue and then become sidetracked and actually run out of time or energy by exploring the digressive topic, without having any initial intention or vision of relating the thing back to the original. Whereas a talented NT might be skilled with mapping out relatively elegant associations, arguments, digressions, and so forth, a skilled Aspie will be more likely to craft an entirely new synthesis of ideas by making associations and magically arriving back at the start with surprisingly little conscious planning. I'm sure there are counterexamples, but I've always been one to make free associations that either end up consuming significant time and arriving nowhere, or somehow tie many disparate strands together into a mini-tapestry.

Someone once suggested to me that an ability to make obscure connections means your brain has a lot of dendrites... (the forked connections between brain cells)

Yes, associational....but not linear.

In other words, from observation I think many NT's stick to one "box" when thinking.

We are as-if sitting in the middle of a room surrounded by disparate "unrelated boxes" and can reach into any box at will - and so find those associations not discernible to most.

It sometimes passes for brilliance.

.

Jamin; nice description. This is similar to what I experience (which box to choose...uh oh, not enough time for all of them, should I stick with just this one, or that one over there, or maybe this one, hmm...and the boxes always contain more inside than was imagined from external viewing), to the point where significant time may be spent just thinking about what to do rather than actually doing anything; a kind of paralysis. I think this is also why non-NTs often enjoy simply "spacing out" and letting the mind be either very dissolved and unclear or very focused on one thing...it's the scattered kind of mental activity that leads to anxiety.

Associating can be a bit strange. Some times I can make gigantic jumps in associations, so I need to explain them to people. But some small associations I can miss when made by others.

yes. one of the most wonderful aspects of living with autism, in my view. Just a delightful and creative way to experience thinking processes. IT also makes most other people utterly boring, unfortunately.