thinking in pictures my life with autism

All my thinking is bottom-up instead of top-down. When I design equipment, I take bits and pieces of other equipment I have seen in the past and combine them to create a new system. If the teacher thinks about it visually, a butterfly cut of chicken looks like a butterfly. A teacher working with a child with autism may not understand the connection when the child suddenly switches from talking about butterflies to talking about chicken. The memories that come up first tend to be either early childhood or something that happened within the last week. Then my mind gets off the subject and I see a butterfly cut of chicken that was served at a fancy restaurant approximately 3 days ago. The next image is metal decorative butterflies that people decorate the outside of their houses with and the third image is some butterflies I painted on a piece of plywood when I was in graduate school. If you say the word ‘butterfly’, the first picture I see is butterflies in my childhood backyard. My mind is associative and does not think in a linear manner. I was surprised to discover that the other non-autistic equipment designers could not do full motion test runs of equipment in their minds. I did not know that this was a special skill until I started interviewing other people about how they think. When I design livestock facilities, I can test run the equipment in my imagination similar to a virtual reality computer program. All my thoughts are in photo-realistic pictures, which flash up on the ‘computer monitor’ in my imagination. My mind works similar to an Internet search engine, set to locate photos.

Thinking in pictures my life with autism