Weird how one thing leads to another, but I was on Facebook this morning and Jillian Michaels posted something about Maya Angelou, whom Jillian admires a lot, and she asked her fans to post who we admired and people posted names, and one person mentioned Dr. Temple Grandin, who I had never heard of but they said she was an autistic person who had designed equipment used in the veterinary and livestock industries to make things less traumatic for the animals. Yeah, OK, but this idea intrigued me so I Googled her name and came up with this link.

I have often suspected I might be borderline autistic (or Asperger’s or something) given my history, and how my brain works (I’ve often been told I’m a bit uhm … different shall we say hehe.) But her article on how many autistics “think in pictures” just helps to confirm my belief.

When I was a kid, I rarely had to “study” because I would remember stuff visually, so when it came to taking tests, all I had to do was picture the text book in my head to get the answer. Seemed almost like cheating in a way, but I didn’t know that most people didn’t also “see pictures” in their head like I did. When I was in junior high, one day one of my teachers asked me to stay after class after a test. Uh oh. I was a very shy child and thought, “Oh no I’m in trouble, maybe she thinks I cheated” and I was really scared. But the teacher said that she had noticed that I never opened my text book during the tests, but that I always got an A, and she asked if I knew the tests were open book, and I said yes, but that I didn’t need to use my book. And she asked me if I had a photographic memory and I was like “a what?” and she explained what that was, and it was like an epiphany, “Oh! So that’s what it’s called!” And I explained that well yes, sort of, I can see the book’s pages in my head and the pictures from the book on the page, and paragraphs of text and stuff but that I didn’t really see every single word, but I could remember what page certain topics were on so with a test I just had to think of the right page and then I could remember the right answer.

Then as time went by, time and time again I’ve noticed I tend to think in pictures: If someone asks directions, I’ll say things like “go to the next intersection, turn right at the bank, then go a couple blocks until you see a gas station with a yellow sign and turn left, go past the blue bus shelter then just past the pink flowers on the right, turn right … ” and people just look at me like WTF? And sometimes they’ll just politely say thanks and leave, and sometimes they’ll ask “What’s the name of the street?” And I’ll be like uhm … I don’t know. Needless to say, I am not the go-to person for directions. I also have trouble with concepts like “left” and “right,” the only way I can keep them straight is to “picture” them in my head, in my case, I picture myself sitting at the piano, and the “left” is the side with the low notes and the “right” is the side with the high notes. To this day, I still have to stop and picture that in my head before I know right from left.

I also have trouble with things like people’s names, or authors of books (I can give you a vivid, detailed description of the book cover, but ask me who wrote it and I’ll likely be stumped.) I have trouble with product names, but I can tell you exactly what the packaging looks like and which section of the store to find it. And I have horrible trouble with math, with the exception of geometry. Why? Geometry is pictures! Things like algebra, not pictures. I can read because I see “pictures” in the words (which is why I can “read” a street sign long before I can make out the individual letters that form the word.) But numbers are just arbitrary in my mind. I can’t attach them to a picture. And I get some numbers mixed up, like 6 and 9 look the same to me, and 5 and 3 look the same (if you flip a 6 upside down, it becomes a 9; if you flip the top part of the 5 vertically, it becomes a 3.) No wonder I had so much trouble with algebra, memorizing phone numbers, addresses, etc.

There are some advantages to thinking visually though, and I think one of the obvious ones is speed. I can flash through hundreds of images in my head almost instantly, whereas if I thought in words, it would take forever (a picture is worth a thousand words hehe.) It also makes it easy to “rotate” things around in my head, like those puzzles you see on IQ tests, I’ve always been really good at those, because they’re pictures, and I think that’s part of why I’ve always scored well on IQ tests, despite my math handicap (most IQ tests have very little if any real “math”, they might use things like number sequences, but even those are more about the relationship between numbers and generally only use very simple mathematical calculations.)

The main downside of thinking visually though is trying to communicate what you “see” into words for other people to understand. I’ve often wished I could just “transmit” the images in my head to the other person’s brain, and they’d understand instantly. Instead, I’ve had to learn to speak or write in a way that people can picture what I’m trying to say.

A quick question though for my reader(s) … have you ever dreamed where “you” in your dream were watching the dream happen on a movie screen? Or in photographs? Or art? Or even text on a page as if you were reading what’s happening in a book? I often get “ideas” for things by seeing them in my dreams, I’ll get an idea for a story, by reading it in my dream. I’ll get an idea for an art project, by creating it in my dream. Or I’ll get an idea for a screenplay by seeing the finished movie in my dream. Weird, huh?

OK, not here in Los Angeles, but one of my imaginary friends who shall remain nameless ::grin:: made me a snowman after I begged and took a picture of it for me:

I’m so jealous. All we got here was a little fog. But this little snowman made my day.

Tomorrow is the big day where we’ll see if billions of dollars spent on some gizmo thingie-ma-jigger pays off and sends us all into oblivion … or something. Personally I think they’ll start it up, wait a bit and then a bunch of overpaid, overeducated scientists will say “huh.” And that’ll be that. Then they’ll try a few more times and “nothing” will happen and they’ll give up and go about doing something else. But I’m hopeful something exciting and dangerous happens, like a tiny black hole opens up only no one notices for years until someone notices one of the vending machines is malfunctioning and upon further inspection it’s realized the machine has time warped into another dimension and it’s just a matter of erm … “time” until we all get sucked … and not in a good way. Oh well, I can dream can’t I?