I'm reading The Way I See It by Temple Grandin and as far as our situation goes, it is life changing, course-altering information.
She is a grown woman, describing her autism and how she "thinks in pictures" like "Google Images," she says. This sounds very much like AKA, who often closes her eyes and says, "I see pictures. Want to look at pictures with me, Mommy?" She describes dreaming the same way. One time I asked her what pictures she sees and she closed her eyes and rattled off a list that I can't remember except for Mater the Tow Truck was on it. It was a very random list, but now I have a feeling that's how her brain works. She may be experiencing an onslaught of images in her head for every single thought. That would totally suck, as far as I'm concerned. Maybe that's why she seeks constant movement. The only times she's still are when she's standing in front of the tv (literally directly in front of it), or sitting "reading" a pile of books out loud (in jargon).
Temple describes 3 types of thinkers: Visual (like herself), Music and patterns, and Verbal. Most people can cross over between all 3 and will often be dominant in one type. Autistic people are usually dominant in one type, or maybe two, with a stark deficit in one type.
That's what has made communication so difficult with AKA, and just life in general. I am a very Verbal thinker. I think in words only. AKA is mostly, if not completely, visual. However, she is strong with music and patterns as well. Such as her newfound savant trick: she can "blind narrate" things that are music based, like old fashioned Mickey Mouse cartoons where it is all orchestra. Or her Baby Einstein dvd set, that she STILL watches religiously (which is entirely music and pictures). She was in the bathtub the other night and we left her Pluto cartoons movie on accidentally, so it was playing and she was laughing and talking about things happening in the movie like she was watching it, like, "he has a funny hat" or "here come pluto!" I went to the other room to see if she was saying the right stuff--and she was dead on cue. I tried to trick her by fast forwarding--and she was still dead on cue. So we have made it into a game. It helps her to process her speech faster too, besides just entertains me. The Baby Einstein videos are super freaky because some are made up of really fast montage clips of stock pictures and video relating to the theme. Like the Baby Newton: I thought she might not be able to do that one because a few minutes went by before she said something. I was almost going to leave the room when she yelled from the bathtub, "Look at that beaver, scratching his tummy!" And sure enough, there was a 2 second shot of a beaver scratching himself on a log. Keeping track of the music score is the only way she would be able to memorize like this. She must be cataloging the pictures with the music.
Speaking of cataloging, in her book Temple talks about how she keeps information in files in her mind. It's this sort of cataloging that enables her to think from specific to general. She said most people think from general to specific. That explains AKA's extreme concrete thinking, or at least how I used to explain it. She doesn't like words like people, children, and someday. She gets really upset and yells, "NO! Not people! I don't like people!" She doesn't really mean she doesn't like people, but just the word. She doesn't understand what it means. She know specific friends and family, but people is too abstract. Since she thinks in pictures, she can only comprehend and say things that she has seen and cataloged--things that can be labeled. In fact, labeling was her only speech until after age 3 1/2. Now she's speaking in sentences that contain labels surrounded by what the hell ever filler words she thinks make sense. And this is why we have meltdowns about communication because she hears words and her mind can show her a picture of certain words but many words are too abstract to show a picture, or she hasn't yet developed a file of pictures to tell her what that word means, so she doesn't understand the explanation being given. This is why she's very slow or unable to answer questions, because of the time it takes to process the question and the time it takes to find the right pictures to form an answer, and combine that with a sensory trigger to frustration, and there's your meltdown.
More to come on this. I'm still reading.
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