What we have here is a failure to communicate.

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I am so terrible at verbal communication. My problem is not speech-related; it is a question of forming coherent sentences from the words in my head. I am both a literary and visual thinker. When I hear spoken words, I hear them first, obviously. Then I see the completed thought in my head in sentence form. Then I make sense of the words/sentence (meaning I take each word, file through a bank of words to see if I have heard it before, find the meaning of the word also stored there, and, if I do not know it, take the root of the word and derive the meaning from there). Then I repeat the sentence in my head to see if what I come up with matches with what was said. And finally, I respond to whatever was said. (By the way, this only takes a split second. No wonder I get so many headaches.)
I then form the answer to the question (or whatever) in my head, but I have trouble verbalizing what I thought. Any suggestions? Or did I confuse you completely?

My son, also an aspie, age 11, describes almost the exact same thing. He describes the same process with item recognition. For instance, we saw a cat on our lawn, I said oh what a cute cat. My son said how do you know it's a cat. Well, I just do. He explained he too knows it's a cat, however he knows not just by looking, but by flipping through these "files" and comparing the animals features to these files until he finds an exact match. This also takes but a split second.

I think this is why he sometimes doesn't understand what is really being said to him. He is young, and so his vocabulary and knowledge of the world isn't as great yet. He's told a joke - what do you get when you cross an elephant with a zebra? He's still wondering hours later why you'd want to make an elephant cross (mad).

Two people came in my office and asked me questions after I read your post. Both times I tried to get a feel for what steps my brain is going through when listening and responding. The only analogy I can come up with (since I got nothing on that little experiment) is that it's like the florescent lights. I know many people on the spectrum can't tolerate them because the flickering bothers them, yet most if not all NT's can't see the flickering at all.

Hope I haven't muddied the waters further.

I have no idea what thought processes go on in my brain, but. When I know what idea I wish to convey, it's an immense struggle to put it into words - then once I find the right words, it's a struggle to put them into some kind of coherent order. Unfortunately this does NOT take a split second - it takes as long as it wishes. I have had to tell people I'll get back to them when I've 'got my thoughts together' about a subject (when actually I'm just trying to do what I've said above) and it's taken days. It honestly can take that long before I get it anywhere near coherent Fortunately that doesn't happen often, but generally it takes me anything up to 3, or 5 minutes. *Sigh*

I apologise for going off topic, but I'm not good at jokes, but I don't know what the answer to this joke is, ie what would an elephant/zebra cross be, and I'm not going to be able to get it out of my mind until I know the answer. I usually get my daughter to explain jokes to me but she's out atm. Is there anyone who can put me out of my misery please?

Well I hope this helps - that wasn't the actual joke, I couldn't remember the actual animals involved, so as far as I know there is no answer. I'm sorry.

The joke going around our middle school is:

What do you get when you cross an elephant with a turtle?













Swimming trunks.

(swimming trunks = swim outfit or suit. swimming from the turtle, trunks from the elephant).

Don't know if its your joke or not, Aspiemom.

BeeBee

Yes! See I am terrible at jokes because I can't remember them!

Hey Musical_Lottie,

I get that too. Usually someone will say something witty and it'll be hours, sometimes days before I come up with a comeback. By then nobody cares.

I never would have gotten that if you hadn't explained it...

Well, the time varies depending on some variables, such as how alert/tired I am or if I am distracted or the difficulty of the question. For example, it takes me two weeks to figure out what to write in someone's yearbook because I worry about what to write; I know the person is most likely going to pick up their yearbook years from now and judge my personality from what I have written. I am a very quick thinker. I think it is difficult for me to vocalize these thoughts because my thought processes are so rapid that I am often thinking of something else while explaining the thing I had to think about. Not to mention the fact that my sentence structure is very complex; I rarely write sentences that are a few words long. A normal sentence for me is about one to three typed lines, mostly because I link everything with commas and semicolons. That makes it much worse to get the thoughts out of my head.

Here is the only one I know:

Q: What do you get if you cross an elephant with a zebra.
A: Elephant zebra sine theta.

It is a mathematics joke, a pun based on the definition of cross product.

Sorry for the hijack, Jekyll, but I know how it is to be stuck on an idea until I find an answer.

I have a similar problem. I have thoughts and ideas that are difficult for me to put into words in such a way that I can make them understandable to another person. I am a very fast thinker but a very slow writer.

I have this same problem. I usually cannot come up with too much witty when the time is right...it takes a little bit of time to think something up. I've had a few good ones lately that just seem to pop up in my mind. I was in the sound booth at church practicing for a musical back at christmas. The choir director said "We are going to need to rehearse more for this" I came back with "Rehearse...isn't that what happens when a funeral home wears out their car???" Everyone in the sound booth couldn't stop laughing at that one! Another one came to me when i was playing music with the band. One of the guitarists needed a place to sit. One of the roadies bought a stool up, and handed it to the bassist, and then it was passed to the guitarist that needed it. I blurted out " Hey, he just passed a stool!" to the guitartist. At first, I didn't even get it...the audience burst out in laughter!

That's SO immensely frustrating, isn't it?! Though I've often committed social suicide by bringing it up later - as in 'you know [whatever it was] you said? well [comeback]' and I have to try not to laugh. But then it completely backfires because it's 'weird' to do that I just try to keep my mouth shut now!



Yes, I know exactly what you mean. I've got better at it recently, but a lot when I was younger the teacher would read our work out in class, and they'd end up looking red because I put no rests in - as in, full stops ... ! Places to breathe. That's what I meant *headdesk* It really bugs me on things such as MS Word, when it underlines it in green and says 'Long Sentence; no suggestions.' - I've always thought 'why tell me if you won't suggest anything?' But then I guess that's because I hate having to change anything unless I want to change it.

Oh dear; I've rambled - profuse apologies everyone

What's even worse is talking on the phone, especially leaving messages. I always worry about leaving messages. After I hear the beep, I always think, "This person could play this message back and laugh at it," or something like that, so I always sound nervous on answering machines. I used to stutter on them, too, but now I try not to. It's not a good thing.

It also prevents me from scheduling an appointment with my psychologist; she told me that if I want to come back (she thought I was doing better so she asked if I wanted to schedule another appointment and I said not right now), I should call her office and leave a message. She gave me her business card; I have it right here in my wallet, which is in my right pants pocket. I keep staring at the card and worrying about leaving a message on her machine. My mom says I'll eventually have to get over that because leaving messages on answering machines is now a part of life.

I heard Temple Grandin talk about this. When she was young she saw a dog and asked what it was. Then she saw a different dog and asked what it was. She was confused because they were both dogs but looked completely different. She looked at a lot of dogs, and eventually realized that the one thing they have in common is their nose. From then on, when she saw an animal she would look at its nose to see if it was a dog or not. That worked well until she saw a bear. (Bears have the same nose as dogs.)

This is the autistic "parts of a whole" problem. Some people see only details and can't integrate the parts into the "big picture" neccessary for understanding. Without access to several different versions of the "big picture" to compare they can't generalize. Without a generalized representation in memory, it's difficult to recognize a previously unseen version. Your son has presumably seen many different cats and remembers what each one looked like. When he sees a new animal he runs through all of the images in his head to see if it resembles something he's seen before. The NT child would have also seen many cats, and would have a "generic cat" memory. Recognition would be much faster because he would only have to ask himself "is it a dog or a cat or a cow or a pig?" instead of "is it a white cat or a black cat or a calico cat or...?"

When I read that I didn't misinterpret the word "cross" because the definition meaning "angry" is not the common usage where I live. Instead I initially thought of the question in literal terms: what *would* you get if you crossed an elephant with a zebra? It didn't take long to realize that I couldn't imagine such a combination. I was briefly distracted by the question of which animal would be on top when mating. Then it occurred to me that those two species would probably be incapable of having offspring (unlike a horse mating a mule to create a donkey). Last but not least, childhood memories surfaced and I recognized that the sentence followed the template for a joke. All of this took probably two full seconds.

For what it's worth, it really bugs me when I hear a joke and don't get the punch line. It's even more frustrating when I don't *hear* the punch line. I've been thinking about the joke Judd Nelson was telling as he crawled through the ceiling in "The Breakfast Club" for 20 years now. He never got a chance to deliver the punch line in the movie, and nobody else involved with the movie would say what it was.

I panic at the sight of birthday cards, etc. I never have anything intelligent to say. Often I just sign it and feel guilty for not being entertaining or dramatic or whetever...