My Cognition: ...I Believe
 ... yet another work-in-progress ...
Rather a lot of autistic people, including Aspergians, seem to be "visual-spatial" thinkers. They "think in pictures". Yet just a very few autistic people have been able (or willing?) to describe how they do that. For example:
Temple Grandin (autistic) has written of mental "pictures", famously describing her thinking as "like a movie". But she doesn't describe how the movie is made, nor betray the script.
Daniel Tammet (savant) describes the "colors" of numbers he uses for calculation, and how his results "simply" coalesce from the colors/numbers. Which doesn't help to understand the process.
An internet-friend (autistic) writes his thinking involves a "highly fractal" tree, with a variable but large number of branches and twigs growing both outward and inward to almost any extent. But that does not describe the process by with growth occurs, nor the nature of what he visualizes.
Obviously enough, each of those descriptions are metaphors.; fairly cryptic ones at that! I've yet to read any decent description of the details - the process - of "picture thinking".
But I can't much fault what those autists offered. It's hard to describe in NT terms what I and they know is the reality we "visualize" everywhere, every day. ...Which I and they know with hard-earned certainty most NTs simply do not understand! I know it's hard because I've spent decades, almost from childhood, trying to do just that! First with my mother, who may have understood a very little (my AS probably came from her). Later with teachers; still later with colleagues.
Like most adult autists, eventually I stopped trying; began to pretend at "normalcy". After all, too often hearing "That's crazy" or "You're nuts, Loughman!" is a powerful incentive to just shut up!
Still, privately I pursued the matter. Far less concerned about other people, I had to understand me! I stumbled across, and studied many plausible metaphors. Invented my own too, like what I called "parallel thinking". I was pretty proud of that one, until I discovered others had considered it before me. However, they didn't apply it to autism (too early?) and you'll read more of that later. It remains a useful adjunct to thinking about "how it all works".
My Cognition
Here I'm attempting just such an NT-friendly description as others haven't managed. That hard thing so needed and so often not given. By providing NT-world analogies (metaphors!) to my AS-world thinking, I hope to foster a better understanding of the "autistic mind". The neurology I leave in hands more capable than mine.
At any rate I offer an approach to understanding one autistic mind: mine. It's my picture-thinking.
I can't generalize to all autistics. Not on this page anyway. I can't, and don't, make claims for or against the way other autists (or "gifted" NTs) do "their thing" which might be entirely different.
DO Remember: all that follows is metaphor; all is hypothesis for which there is scant evidence beyond anecdote from autists. I make no apology for that; who better than autists to describe what only we can see?
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| Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2 |
| Marcel Duchamp, 1912 |
This painting, adjacent, caused quite a stir when first exhibited. Art mavens everywhere were aghast at such unrealistic representation.
However I marvel at the artist's insight! It's a very nice representation of an object - the nude - moving through time! That's not something 2-dimensional graphics do well. Or at all: Many artists draw a series of short horizontal lines behind an object to indicate speedy movement. That's an indication of movement, ...not part of the object itself.
But Duchamp, clever man, put the movement into the object. His is a clear depiction of his subject, the nude, transmuting from one instant's shape to another an instant later. Her upper body moves rightward and down. As do her legs, seen both overlapping and swinging past each other downward onto each step.
His nude is a metaphor. The motion depicted is a metaphor. The entire study is a metaphor both for motion and the passage of time. Ultimately it's also a metaphor for the (unseen) surroundings and subsequent/prior events to be imagined.
At an entirely different level of abstraction there are metaphors for the combinations of metaphors: nude, staircase, surroundings and events all separately and independently considered.
When I observe the painting, the metaphor, I see the meaning of it! Directly. Rather, I build in my mind, from small parts, small clues, a "visualization" of what his real world offered directly to the artist.
He abstracted a real nude and staircase (or an imagined one), and provided the painted metaphor.
My entire world appears to me as metaphor; many metaphors all complexly linked in every conceivable direction. My friend's "fractal tree"? The painting (metaphor) is only another among many I meet with daily. What is strange to you (an NT?), I interpret easily enough. It only requires a process; a familiar one I've been using and honing all my life.
This is an extremely important point! Both for me and, I believe, for a correct understanding of the autistic mind.
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| Nude Descending a Staircase |
| Jim Beaman, mid-20th cent.? |
Notwithstanding the fact this nude is carrying a "Nude Descending ...", I like this spoof because it conveys rather well what I visualize when viewing Duchamp's original. I see easily the room (bedroom(?) garret(?)) at the head of the stairs, the shapely real woman, the sharply defined staircase, treads, carpeting over darkly finished wood, and so forth.
How is this possible, you ask? That detail simply isn't there! Ah, but you see, ...that's the point of what I see! ...Of what I visualize.
From Duchamp's original metaphor I draw on detailed memories of similar real scenes: Real-life staircases in real-life rooms. Living nude women; and yes, some of them descending stairs. Real experiences both with bedrooms and garrets; real experience of the uses to which they're put. I've no problem extrapolating reality out of any part of the metaphor: I've built staircases personally, likewise sanded and polished treads, laid carpeting, painted rooms, and so on. I've a rich experience of life, and more importantly I remember it all in surprising detail. Of course my first clue is the painting's title. If it were less explicit, I might well have been as perplexed as any naive viewer.
However, I'm pretty good in all the areas of life and work that are important to me, and a few that aren't. I make mistakes, but not often. The quality of my perceptions does rise or fall in proportion to having had prior experience, and on the quality of those.
Therein is another clue to how I can live in my metaphor-filled world: a very good (though unusual) memory. From childhood my intense natural curiosity made me the bane of everyone around me: always asking "Why?" and "How?" and all the other questions that so exasperate adults. I never forgot the answers. My curiosity about things grew as fast as I did, and I never outgrew the habit of questioning (and remembering) everything.
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Under certain conditions (usually, in fact) my own cognitive process is very, very fast. ...In particular when multiple relationships between objects and actions are involved. This does not mean that I necessarily reach difficult decisions or come to hard answers any faster than anyone else. Sometimes in fact I think I'm slower; perhaps the result of mulling a very large number of possibilities.
It does entail that however long it takes to amass the input I need, the resultant final output - a decision or answer - is reached extremely rapidly. The mental "click" described elsewhere occurs sooner or later; the resultant seems instantly to just (as Tammet puts it) "coalesce from" my accumulated information.
Mind you, I am a "visual" thinker. I visualize both my input and the methods with which I process it. My result - my output- also is a visualization - a "picture" of sorts. But only "of sorts"!
Actually, it's a metaphor; a single mental entity representing a complex mass of external realities. Like all metaphors, it can be understood most meaningfully, or at all, in the circumstances wherein it arises.
Much like a fine-arts painting, my mental result is composed of many "pictorial" elements. As with a painting, I can focus on any element, any detail - even several at once.
I can "stand back" (in my mind) and see much more or much less of the picture. Or even all of it complete and entire. Re-focusing my mind from one viewpoint to another is the merest mental flicker - "instantaneous".
Or so it seems to me. And so it seems to the people with whom I've worked throughout my life, even as a child.
Now: What is the mental basis for claiming to "see" extended reality?
At its root of course, animal cognition ("thinking", ideation) is a neural process. It relies on electrical impulses along the axons and dendrites of neurons in the brain, and chemical flow between them across synapses. I've always wondered how my mental speed could "square" with the relatively slower(?) neuronal transmission speed. I've addressed that issue, in part, on another page: "Autism" » "AS cognition", top left.
Here I want to describe the very visual things I perceive in my mind. ...In my "mind's eye".
What follows isn't anything like an exercise in logic; I'll play fast and loose with "Time, Place, and Manner" and with syntactical "person", tense, ...maybe more.
Also in what follows, please always remember: NONE OF THE DIAGRAMS REPRESENT "REALITY"! Neither my reality nor yours. They all are themselves metaphor. Think: "It is as though, AS IF, " my mind behaved in this way. The realities as I've known them from earliest childhood are both far less simple and far more bizarre.
What I want to give my reader is a "feel" for an idea. Actually, an idea about an idea - an idea about how my ideas are formed. A feel for why my autistic mind is so different from that of other minds (NT?).
Let's say I've a problem of some sort, a mental task. It could be math; a car that won't start one cold morning; a social situation that's really "sticky" or even just understanding an unfamiliar and puzzling work of art. It doesn't matter; seems to me I approach all problems the same way.
First I riffle through things I know about already that might apply. Not a ready-made solution - a "script". I wouldn't be puzzled if I had the answer already!
Rather, something that looks a little familiar; something that might be "adapted". Not finding even that, I scan the floor of my mind looking for anything else. A bit like wondering if a heavy wrench might serve as a hammer, or a thumbnail do for a screwdriver. Here though I'm not looking to adapt objects to new tasks; I'm looking for new ideas.
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| Fig 3. Possibilities? |
The adjacent graphic can represent those things strewn around on the floor of my mind. Maybe insignificant things I learned years ago when I was small, now half-forgotten. Think of the oval things as chain-links - pretty solid, even dependable "things that I know already". Think of the colored bars as actions, methods succesfully used before for some mental task. Most here have no obvious relevance to the task at hand. Nor even do all the links.
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| Fig 4. It's a beginning |
But some of the links and bars have just evough relevance to trying putting some of them together.
In the graphic I've presumed to string together several notions, testing an idea. Perhaps it appears relevant, maybe marginally, and maybe not. But I keep it anyway, at least for awhile. Continuing my search, I may find more ideas (links and bars) and may connect some and discard others. Maybe re-arrange the whole thing. In this way I build toward potentially useful ideas.
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| Fig 5. Better and better |
From a few scattered memories and half-forgotten ways to make them work, I've got now a promising way to approach my task. Indeed, some of this seems already to be a partial solution. Importantly, the partials usually are known to have worked for their own related problems sometime in the past. Working through the chain of ideas, one end to the other, it seems possible to approach the task/problem with which I'm faced.
There is a problem with this. I believe any chain of ideas will have both stronger elements and weaker. Working through this chain doesn't allow for circumventing, for bypassing, the inevitable weak links. In any event it may be dependent on the actual task or problem: Weak links in some situations may be strong, and/or/but in others the strong links may be weak.
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| Fig 6. Wow? |
At this point, I've got a bunch of ideas (the ovals: elements in a chain) sort of held together by methods (colored bars) which allow multiple individual ideas to work together as a team, as a larger, better derivative idea.
Like "A" implies "B" and "C" implies "D". IF we can find another method, another bar, such that "B" implies "C", THEN we can claim logically that "A" implies "D". This is important: We've connected small ideas, small observations, together to produce a big new idea - something we may not have known before.
One trouble with that: it's "linear" thinking. Working through a big idea, validating it, then using it surely must be slow. In a real world of neural electricity and chemical transmitters - certainly it must be costly.
But look at the way I've drawn the bars: some connect to ovals already connected to other, different bars. Multiple methods can connect to multiple ideas. That is, some bits of our linear chain are "cross-linked"! I'll return to this later on.
There's another problem: The chain isn't secured anywhere; the ends are methods with nothing attached. Our "implies" method has no "A" with which to start. Ideally, we'd like one of the dangling methods to hook up to our hypothetical mental task. THEN if the other dangling method could connect with a good solid starting point (known fact; prior similar solution), we'd have found a way to solve our original problem. ...A way to do our original task.
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| Fig 7. Hmm. Possibly...? |
Here's a way to have no dangling ends; no imperfect connections. Yet it still lacks relevance. I need something to give it relevance, something to connect it with my problem, my mental task.
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| Fig 8. ah-HAH! |
"CLICK!" While Fig 7 lacked relevance, that to the left does not. That near magical coalescence - CLICK! - of smaller ideas, facts and methods into a single cohesive whole has occurred. The solution to my task is at hand!
We're not done yet...
Indeed we're still just beginning. The "sine qua non" of my cognitive style still is over the horizon -- not quite yet in sight.
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| Fig 9. A network! |
Putting enough "chains" together, folded and interconnected, produces a complex network. In effect it's memory composed of very many ready-linked worked-out solutions for very many situations.
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| Fig 10. Another one! |
I might have another such network kicking around on the floor of my mind. Also ready-made and pre-tested as it were. Not used for the task just discussed, because it just missed being "appropriate". Yet joining these two would double the available. umm ...memory(?) items, while vastly multiplying the inter-connection possibilities. I would have a multi-purpose tool ready to use in a wink. Residual deficiencies in Fig 9 might be compensated through interaction with the additional structure.
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| Fig 11. Joined! SUPER-linked! |
And so it turns out. I've now got a massively complex BIG network! Diagrammed here as being 3-dimensional, it's this kind of mental structure at the core of my "cognitive style".
Imagine now this concept, these "structures" multiplied many, many times over. Literally everything in my mind being inter-connected and cross-linked. Redundant information and multiple alternate access to it all. It is the core of my ability to use mental metaphors. Ultimately, this is the heart of my "picture thinking". Which I believe is thinking in metaphors, not pictures.
This is not a trivial thing; it explains a lot.
Yet here too we're not yet done...
You see, my mind never seems to be at rest. I go to sleep with some niggling problem; I wake with the answer. I leave a crossword puzzle half-done, stuck at some point; I return in a day or so to complete it - rapidly and without error. That mental power in some fashion is working overtime.
Let me repeat what I warned way above: It is only as though, only AS IF there were structures in my mind that worked the way I've described. None of this is reality - all of it is analogy. It's all metaphor.
[...to be continued]
While not generalizing to all autists, the foregoing does amplify a current notion that autistic people really do live in another reality. But it's a reality not entirely separated from yours. Mine and yours do overlap to a considerable degree. And while mine is very different from yours, it's no more abnormal!!
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