I have mentioned before how interesting it is to me to see the different "flavors" of AS. After reading Temple
Grandin's book, Developing Talents, I've moved on to
Daniel Tammet's book
Born on a Blue Day. On the back is a quote from Temple
Grandin, talking about how "fascinating" it is to read about a the mind of a mathematical savant whose mind is "both similar to and different from my visual brain." I have to say that I agree.
While my visual brain is nowhere near the pinpoint accuracy of Temple's, I would say that my way of relating to the world is similar to hers. I have always related to the world in a visual way - and really, until lately I didn't realize that others did not do the same.
Just as Temple describes in her many articles and books, I see things in "photo-realistic images." As a child, this made me a crack-whiz at spelling, because as long is I studied the words long enough (and/or intently enough), my brain would form a "snap shot" of the word which was stored in my memory for quick retrieval. Then, when asked to spell the word, all I needed to do was pull up the "snap shot" and read it back, just as if I were reading it from the page.
Reading about Daniel's experiences is very interesting to me. The way he experiences the world is similar in some ways, others not. While he also relates the world in a visual way, it seems that it is in a more symbolic way. Letters and numbers have their own colors and textures, with their own "feel" as well. While it sounds very unusual to me, I actually have heard something similar before.
My possibly
aspie co-worker, which I mentioned in
Aspies, Aspies Everywhere and
Groups (The Horror!), described something very similar to me and another friend. He writes quite a bit in his role at work, and we all got to talking about writing in general (specifically, how shocking it is that in a corporate environment, how many highly educated people can't seem to do it well). Eventually that led to talking about school.
It turned out that all three of us at the table had excelled in spelling in school, all for different reasons. Me, for the reason I mentioned above. My NT friend had an entirely different way of managing it (which generally involved sounding things out). Our PAC (potentially
aspie co-worker), talked about how he could tell how a word was spelled by how it appeared in his mind. He described certain letters appearing in his mind in a certain color, so he would always know the spelling of the word by the sequence of colors that appeared in that word as represented in his mind.
Daniel
Tammett describes a slightly more nuanced and complicated phenomenon. For him, the letters don't remain the same color if consolidated into a word. He describes:
"I can even make the color of a word change by mentally adding initial letters of the word to turn the word into another:
at is a red word, but add the letter H to get
hat and it becomes a white word."
Daniel
Tammet and my PAC both share this manner of relating to the world that is different, I also find that there are similarities as well. For example, one of Daniel's savant talents (which I've seen impressively demonstrated on TV) is an incredible facility for foreign languages.
While I'm nowhere near as talented as he is, this is also an area which I excelled. It has always stricken me as strange, given that language is an often highlighted area of difficulty for many people on the autistic spectrum. But for people like me, and Daniel
Tammett - it comes uncommonly quickly and easily.
I find myself wondering - what is it in our individual makeup that causes these differences? Why is it that my PAC and Daniel
Tammet have this unique way of seeing letters and words, but I don't? And why do I find it easy to pick up foreign language, but others on the spectrum struggle with language altogether? What are the similarities and differences that make this possible?
Neither of these ways of being are necessarily NT, but are very different from each other. As much so as some of the accounts of people on the spectrum that I've read who don't think visually at all. What is the commonality that causes such a range of symptoms? Is it all about what area of the brain is wired differently? And, at what point does a different way of being
aspie transform into being something completely different altogether?
Posts
