Thinking in Words and Pictures

Thoughts are ideas that our brain has to find words or pictures for. I don’t think my brain likes either medium particularly. But as I am so poor at visualisation, words are my only recourse. Occasionally (not often) my brain just gives up, especially if it is a complicated idea. I get the sensation of the thought in my mind, and I recognise ideas or feelings in it and then I try to work out what it was about. But thoughts are so fast, if you don’t get them straight away you lose the original sense it was trying to convey.

I did a degree in Visual Culture, one of the subjects we looked at was semiotics and at the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure said that language (words and other systems of signs) was made up of the signified and the signifier. The signifier was the word or symbol and the signified was the object or idea the signifier referred to. He said the relationship between the two was arbitrary and the result of social consensus. Basically the idea exits in your mind first and then the mind has to find signifiers to communicate that idea.

The strange thing for me is that I can have these thoughts, that don’t have words or symbols and I don’t actually know what they mean. It’s my thought, surely I should know what it means with or without signifiers? It’s a shame, because these thoughts are usually about new ideas or ways of explaining the world and my experience of it. Maybe my conscious mind just doesn’t have the language to express them yet.

Not all autistic people think in the same way. Temple Grandin thinks in pictures, she can visualise complicated designs for farm equipment. I wish I had this ability. Instead I think in words. Not because I’m particularly good at it (I think I‘ve shown my language skills aren‘t very good already). I have to think in words because my visualisation skills are so poor. I find this strange, because I am a visual person. I like drawing and painting and I like watching films.

It means I’ve had to work really hard at getting to grips with language. My reading skills were below average for some of the time I was at primary school. I’d catch up, then fall behind then catch up again. I was doing well in all other areas. I don’t think I had any concept that they were measuring us, or that it was important to keep up with how others were doing. I never thought about how other people were doing. And as it was a lot of hard work for me, I wouldn’t always try very hard. Once you reach a certain level of competency though it ceases to have much impact on your work, so eventually it stopped being a problem.

It’s only now, when I’m trying to express new ideas that I begin to struggle with words again. My problem is that I form sentences mostly by recalling phrases. There are certain sentence structures that I repeat. I’m trying to put these phrases together in a way that conveys what I mean and that is also readable and flows and doesn’t sound like disconnected phrases that I have gathered from different places. Occasionally I get a sentence that I know I’ve created myself, I get a particular pleasure when I’ve achieved this and been able to convey an idea in my own original way.

When you’re talking to someone they don’t usually notice if you repeat words of phrases, but when you put it down in writing it becomes obvious. There is a lot of editing that goes on after I’ve drafted something; the thesaurus is my best friend at these moments. I’ve noticed that I also make jumps between ideas, assuming that the reader will understand how one sentence relates to another. Often in my writing sentences don’t follow very well. Getting the words to flow in a sentence is one thing, getting sentences to flow from one to the other is just as hard. I think my writing must sound very methodical.

One way that I practised my language skills when I was younger was by talking to myself. I can remember the exact moment I began doing this. I was sitting in the back of my parents car. We had been to visit my Nan, and I was talking to myself about what had happened. This monologue when over and over in my head till we reached home. I rephrased parts of it then started again. As I got older I would use this a way of working out how I might feel if an event turned out in a particular way, or how I should respond in certain situations.

All this is very essential stuff, but it did have a negative impact on me, in that my mind was doing overtime for much of my waking hours. And if I hadn’t been born a worrier, it’s probably why I’m one now. I over think everything. I also became very focused on me. Because I can’t imagine other people’s responses these monologues were always about just me and my feelings, of course I didn’t realise this until I was much older. Maybe that’s what causes the stubbornness. I’m inflexible to other people’s opinions because I grew up only ever being aware of my own, I wasn’t even aware that people had different opinions from my own until I was about seventeen. And even thought I’m now aware that other people have their own opinions it very hard to undo this way of thinking. I think all this mental activity while I was a child must have wired my brain in such a way that I now find it difficult to undo.