Are People with Asperger Syndrome Creative?

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Whilst I do not particularly see it, I am seen as creative because I excel at thinking 'outside the square’ - a major advantage of AS is being able to look at things differently than more 'normal' people. The difficulty is finding a place where that difference is appreciated and understood - I am lucky I work at a place where it is seen as a strength - it only took 25 years in the work place to find such a position.

The funny part is that what others see as thinking outside the square I see as normal and obvious – sometimes we do not see our own skills.

Lacking imagination... I think people say that for two reasons. Meant is not the imagination you discuss...

For one, autistic people lack social imagination, the ability to imagine accurately what another person is feeling or to imagine the correct reason behind another's actions eithout having experienced this or a similar situation before. I think this is true fore every human. NT children learn immensely quicker, especially because they can read nonverbal cues, whereas autistic people cannot.

The other reason that I can think of that may make people say autistic people lack imagination is because sometimes autistic focus can be extremely narrow and gives the person an inaccurate inner image of reality.

I believe the cause for this is the lack of social imagination/understand too.

A NT child doesn't need to be caught by a car to understand that a car can be a potential danger when running onto the street. It learns that this is a possible outcome by the parents that say so. It listens to them, because it has long understood that the parents have their own thoughts, feelings and experience and thus, have a reason to say what they say.

An autistic child won't listen to their parents, because it cannot understand that its parents have a reason to forbid running onto the street. The child cannot understand the parents' experience and thus cannot accurately imagine what happens, when it runs onto the street until a car catches it. Unlike the NT child, in order to grasp the concept of 'on street = car = death', it has to experience it first hand.

I believe this is the reason why people say autistic people lack imagination.

Not imagination in the sense of fantasy, of experience or of creativity.
There are some horribly uncreative Nts out there too, but they don't lack social imagination/understanding and nobody goes around asking them to imagine situation XY or pay pianting YZ, because that's not a 'must' in our society. You can live without fantasy and creativity.

The issues with not understanding the danger of a car on the other hand... well, you get it.

My son is extremely imaginative. When I explained his diagnosis to him, he wondered if there were other people out there like him. I told him that some of them are famous (i was thinking bill gates, etc....). I didn't get a chance to name any famous people's names. My son said, "Like C.S. Lewis." I've never heard of C.S. Lewis as being described as autistic in any way....but, my son thought autism meant a vivid imagination because that's the way he thinks.

I have a pretty good imagination and can often piece seemingly unrelated events together, but I doubt I would make a good artist because I would have trouble imagining which facial expression fit which emotion. So I guess there is a mix there in imagination and creativity.

Sora pretty much got it. Aspies can be imaginative, dull, or anywhere in between, same as everyone else. This notion that we "lack imagination" is a load of BS that seems to have started from people not understanding what is meant by "social imagination." I spend a large part of my time daydreaming, and IIRC how much a person daydreams is generally correlated with how imaginative someone is.

We are so creative! In fact, at the age of 15, I became totally obsessed with Pokemon that I kept on creating new ones of my own, and drove my sister off the wall with it.

Yes, I did that too, even when I was a child. I dreamt up whole worlds, including speaking animals.
But at the same, I did not understand that the people around me had feelings, thoughts and experience of their own and I did not understand what happened to anybody who'd run onto the street unsupervised until I experienced someone having an accident. Then I was aware that street = possibly car = accident.

That's why I love using the street-car example...

This topic was really interesting and there were some fantastic insights here. In particular, Mikomi and Sora really shed some light on the subject for me. I'd always read that autism = decreased creative abilities. But then, my best friend, who has AS, is an amazingly creative person. He writes poetry, for instance. It's amazing, quirky, brilliant, and unique poetry. I should ask him if I can post some of it on here... I bet he'd be up for it! Not only that, but he also thinks in a very imaginative way, just on an everyday basis. He sees interesting shapes in the clouds and watching the sunset is a profound experience to him... Most people aren't like that, at least not in the NT world which I'm accustomed to. (In fact, until now, I'm the only person I've known to be like that.) If all people with AS react with such intrigue and wonder to the world around them, I'd say they're very imaginative people indeed.

On a similar topic, I must ask if people with AS in general have trouble with creative visualizations, say, creating imagery in the mind's eye. I'm asking this because my friend Erik and I are studying shamanic journeying which requires that we picture imagined scenerios in our minds. He, being the very imaginative and creative person I have already described, has a terrible time doing this. Does anyone have any idea why? We would really like to know!

Perhaps it's because these imagined scenerios are too made up to make sense to his very orderly mind? Poetry and cloud shapes are real concrete things... By contrast, imagining that you're inside an orange, perceiving it with all of your senses, may seem too unreal and almost ridiculous to someone so logic based. Do you think that could be it?

I'm good at visualizing anime characters, but I have a lot of trouble trying to visualize anything else. I'm especially bad at trying to picture scenery and landscapes.

I have creativity, and all the people here have a degree of creativity too, so the former is false. I don't think we are abnormal or above others with our creativity (so the latter is false), but we do have it!

I don't know where the myth that creativity and AS are mutually exclusive came from. In fact, our eccentricities tend to make us creative, possibly without even realising it. Giving a personal example, I daydream a lot, probably too much, and I can create vivid visual scenes in my head without thinking twice about it. The daft thing is, when it comes to being able to visualise something useful, like flat-pack furniture or a house plan, my mind goes to pot. But I suspect that's to do with my terrible spatial awareness - it's so bad, I kept driving onto the kerb when I took driving lessons, but that's another story.

I'm nothing but creative. The imagination thing is more to do with the level of variety seen in your activities, I think; since none of the other explanations make any sense whatsoever.

I am creative. I don't see how Aspies and NTs can be different in this regard.

I like to write. I wrote a book about my cat, Samantha, and all the pets in my life.

You wrote a cat book? That's cool!! Did you get it published yet? It's always been one of my goals to become a writer, but I tend to lose interest after I've written a few chapters.

I think ALL people are creative in some way...just everyone in different ways. In my opinion,without creativity, you wouldn't be considered human.
Think about it...without creativity, you wouldn't be able to post on a discussion board. When making a reply, you think of something original to write, is that creativity? I think so.
Not that posting on a discussion board makes someone human...but everyone who posts on one MUST be creative to a certain degree, whatever that may be.

Without creativity, you wouldn't be able to decide which way you like your furniture placed in your bedroom and lets face it...everyone has a preference for that!

If you think about it...so many human functions rely on creativity of different sorts...or maybe i'm just over thinking.

In anycase...I'm creative to some extent. I write quite a bit of poetry.