Thinking is pure pleasure
I’m not a box. I don’t think in one or outside of one because with autism/Asperger’s, the thinking runs through a different maze in the brain than neuro-typical people. Oh, I haven’t a study to quote to “prove” this, because the proof is all in my head.
Before I was diagnosed (as an adult) I knew, and other people said, that my thinking was unusual. I spent time analyzing how I think and mentally observing myself thinking.
“Observing” is the right word, not “hear” or “knowing” or “feeling” because I see my thoughts in pictures. Temple Grandin had it right with the title of her famous book, Thinking in Pictures. Often I don’t see the thoughts as they are coming together, but the end result is always a visual. I’ll give examples.
I go to an adult spelling bee once in a while at the 331 Club in Minneapolis. The emcee always calls me The Speed Speller because I spell the word so quickly. The reason is that I see the word in my head then just read off the letters.
Doing art is a passion of mine I wish I could indulge in more. I already see in my mind what the next picture is going to look like, even with the new medium I will be using. When I do the art, it’s like connecting the dots or paint by numbers on a blank canvas. It’s very satisfying to see with my eyes what I have enjoyed in my mind.
When the concept of mind mapping became popular in the eighties, it made sense to me because I already thought that way. People said I was creative with my wild ideas that worked. I didn’t put two and two together because it didn’t happen that way in my mind.
I have taken in so much information from my intense drive to find out and understand when I don’t know something. I have read the gamut from poetry to engineering. So my creative ideas are really concepts and pieces of information that clang together in my mind. For example, what if we took an idea from poetry and applied it to engineering or vice versa?
I don’t think about it; it just seems to happen, and the result is a picture.
I don’t know if I should write this, but I spend hours thinking up scenarios, which I call “meandering,” but I end up applying the new ideas and connections to something in the real world.
I saw this article last night and wrote it this morning. I came up with the idea for the blog post as I was drawing in my mind the design of a new kind of weighted blanket for my business, Cozy Calm–my mental meandering.
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