Autism Vox

Thinking Autistically

by Kristina Chew, PhD on January 10th, 2007

This post will take you from thick cortexes to sushi.

Thick cortexes. Michelle Dawson highlights University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology professor, president of the Association for Psychological Science, and autism mother Morton Ann Gernsbacher’s January 2007 column in the APS Observer, The Eye of the Beholder, as well as her September 2006 column, Reaching for Relevance.

“The impact of the Internet on autistics may one day be compared in magnitude to the spread of sign language among the Deaf.” Gernsbacher in Reaching for Relevance quotes this sentence: Indeed,I had just read this post about the development of various new technological devices meant to assist autistic persons in such skills as reading others’ faces and thoughts.

1997. This is the year Gernsbacher cited for the quotation about the “impact of the Internet on autistics” and it stood out to me, as it always does, because 1997 is the year my son Charlie was born. And in 1997, carrying my long-legged, big-head, big-eyed baby in the crook of my left arm, I was not thinking about autism. I barely used the Internet “in those days” though, in hindsight, it would have been a good thing to have had the access to communication and information at the click of a mouse that the Internet now provides.

Accordingly, I went to Google and found Autistics, freed from face-to-face encounters, are communicating in cyberspace in the New York Times. It was by Harvey Blume and it was dated June 30, 1997.

1 1/2 months old. That was my first thought on seeing the date of June 30, 1997: Chalie was born on May 15, 1997. So what was being said about autistic persons and the Internet back when he was a smiling babe (with autism, though I did not yet know this) in my arms?

Plus c’est la meme chose, plus ça change. “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Blume’s 1997 New York Times began by noting that, despite “diverse accounts of autism in books like Oliver Sacks’s ‘An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales (Knopf), the prevailing image of the autistic today is probably still that of the rocking child, prone to tantrums and averse to touch, or of an adult like the character Dustin Hoffman.”

“The prevailing image of the autistic today is probably still that of the rocking child, prone to tantrums.” This still seems to be case, according to some.

Long live the Internet. These are the words of an autistic person from an on-line discussion that Blume cites:

Yet anyone who explores the subject [of autism] on the Internet quickly discovers an altogether different side of autism. In cyberspace, many of the nation’s autistics are doing the very thing the syndrome supposedly deters them from doing — communicating — often in celebration of the medium that enables them to do so.

Autism on the Internet. Indeed, my own discovery of how vast (if not crowded) a resource the Internet can be for information about anything occurred simultaneously with Charlie’s being diagnosed with autism.

Cyberspace and autistic adults. autistics.org. Autistic bloggers on Autism Hub (and in particular Michelle Dawson, whose post got me started on clicking on, and thinking about, all of these links).

Internet and autism. Temple Grandin, professor of animal science, cattle feedlot designer expert, and writer, has famously described how she “thinks in pictures” (in her book Thinking in Pictures and Other Reports from My Life with Autism and in this online essay, Autism: The Way I See It). She has also described how her mind works via an analogy to a web browser:

When I lecture, the language itself is mostly “downloaded” out of memory from files that are like tape recordings. I use slides or notes to trigger opening the different files. When I am talking about something for the first time, I look at the visual images on the “computer monitor” in my imagination, then the language part of me describes those images. After I have given the lecture several times, the new material in language is switched over into “audio tape-recording files.” When I was in high school, other kids called me “tape recorder.” (My Mind is a Web Browser, Cerebrum, 2000)

Portia Iversen in her book Strange Son: Two Mothers, Two Sons, and the Quest to Unlock the Hidden World of Autism further suggests that, with her need to “think in pictures,” Grandin’s mind can be said to function more like Google Image Browser. The Internet, Grandin says, is a metaphor for the functioning of her mind because she thinks associatively:

A Web browser finds specific words; by analogy, my mind looks for picture memories that are associated with a word. It can also go off on a tangent in the same way as a Web browser, because visual thinking is non-linear, associative thinking.

Associations.I see this kind of associative thinking in my son Charlie for sure. Just as one navigates from webpage to webpage by clicking on links embededded throughout a webpage and sometimes connected to an image, so Charlie readily links some object (blue car of a certain shape) to some person (his school speech therapist), or some other thing (sushi) to some event (riding his bike), just because he once happened to go on a bike ride with his dad and afterwards got sushi. In literary terminology, this kind of associative thinking—to the point that, for a year or two (in the case of my son Charlie), saying “bike ride” was the exact same thing as saying “sushi”—is called metonymy. Metonymy is defined as “a trope in which one entity is used to stand for another associated entity” and “more specifically, a replacive relationship” (LinguaLinks).

Sushi. Grandin’s writings and the notion of metonymy lead me to wonder if, when Charlie used to hear “sushi,” he did not visualize pictures of sushi and of his bike simultaneously, but he saw one picture (say, of his bike) and thought “sushi.”

As I review all of these links—associations—I, an NT, have to wonder if I’m starting to think autistically…….

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