Revisiting how adult autism thinks

I have adult autism. I probably think differently than you do. Even if you have autism.

Sometimes my partner asks what it means when I say, “I love you”. I don’t know if I have words to express this concept. In fact, I often struggle to translate my thoughts into human language. I call what goes on in my head the “Music of the Hemispheres”. At best, I can offer a rough translation into English from what bounces around inside my noggin.

Temple Grandin concurs that folks with adult autism often think in a different manner than other people. From my understanding, many neurotypical people think verbally. Their thought process about going to the closet to get a box is, quite literally, “go to the closet and get the box”.

In the early, Wild West days of autism, researchers believed folks with autism thought in a combination of visual and mathematical processes. Now, it is understood that visual and mathematical thought models are usually two separate ways of thinking. From my own experience, I would add three-dimensional, spider web thinking as a superset of visual thinking.

I am a combined spider web, visual, and mathematical thinker. I struggle when writing because I will often translate images and mathematics into language using lines and parentheses to organize thoughts. When I play cards, I usually don’t name the cards as I play them; I use symbolic references and mathematical representations. I can read backwards and upside down because the words make transformative shapes and patterns.

To help illustrate autistic thought models, I would like to reference a number of popular movies and TV shows.

Extraordinary Attorney Woo and The Good Doctor portray visual thinking. Woo Young-Woo’s memory of legal documents is depicted as mentally flipping through a stack of papers. When Shaun Murphy encounters a medical situation, the series presents his hypervisualizations of the anatomical structures and functions as his mind moves through the body. In Sherlock, Benedict Cumberbatch’s portrayal of Sherlock Holmes often uses a photo and yarn metaphor to illustrate spider web thinking. Lengths of yarn are pinned between photos, map places, and items to demonstrate the multiple, complex three-dimensional linkages between them. Numb3rs shows mathematical thinking as Charlie Eppes assist his FBI-agent brother in solving crimes.

When I travel from one location to another, I envision a mental map and path of the route. In my head, I see road conditions, construction sites, possible traffic or weather, and will visually reroute as needed. My previous mother-in-law needed a turn-by-turn list of written directions to get anywhere new. Neither of us could understand how the other ever arrived anywhere.

When I see a car drive down the road, I can envision the pistons moving up and down in the cylinders as fuel and air are mixed and injected into the engine. Everyone else around me just sees a car go by.

We’ve had a number of visitors to the channel share their mental experiences. Like Sherlock Holmes, one visitor’s thinking is associative where one thought reminds them of something else, which can lead to a completely separate visualization. They share that the connections are not always obvious to other people. Another visitor thinks in pictures and videos, with the ability to mentally rotate objects as if they were using CAD software.

We have a mathematical thinker in our midst. Their thoughts take the form of mathematical patterns. Another visitor doesn’t do numbers; numbers don’t make sense at all. Neither do emotions. They utilize a narrative thought model reminiscent of story writing. Another visitor to our channel thinks verbally and follows what feels right— an experience that I described as listening to their gut. Our guts are as capable as our brains in deducing the world around us… to the extent that “what does your gut tell you?” is a part of our language.

Some folks with autism experience aphantasia— an inability to create mental imagery. One visitor to the channel has commented that their inner world is completely devoid of realisticly imagined perceptions— it's dark and silent in their head. Even when they’re working out how to manipulate something visually, they don't actually mentally experience a visualization. Everything needs to be manipulated in the physical world.

Not only does each of the thought models have its own strength and limitations, none of them directly translate into another. And even two people with adult autism who think in the same paradigm will not utilize it the same way. After all, if you’ve met one person with adult autism, you’ve met one person with adult autism.

As an adult autism specialist, I look to build communication bridges between our various thought models and the neurotypical people we interact with.