Thinking in Images

Many autistic children communicate using picture cards or sign language, before they are able to use words. My son was able to make the transition from pictures to words fairly quickly, but observation of his behavior over time has given me the general impression that he thinks primarily in series of visual images.

He’s watching a Pink Panther cartoon at the moment. He’s moving his hands as if he were a character in the cartoon, using a large paintbrush to paint pink stripes. I know that he may walk around later, repeating these gestures, and he will be “seeing” the cartoon sequences in his mind’s eye.

The other day, he walked up to a kitchen cupboard and pointed to lines in the grain of the wood, saying: “Spring. Fall. Winter. Warm. Cold.” He must have been re-enacting a calendar session from one of his programs.

He knows that I am a constant invader of his visual games. When he gets the “look” on his face, I ask him, “Are you a train?” Yesterday, he said, in his sing-song voice, “No. A tanker truck. Has no two tankers.” I asked how many wheels it had. He counted, pointing with his fingers to the air. “Eight,” was what he came up with. Then he continued the series, because I always want to know if there are other people in the game. “Mom is a Fire Truck. C. is a Dump Truck. S. is a Container Truck for Chips at Fred Meyer. P. is a Garbage Truck.”

I see his games as an opportunity for him to interact with others, and I also think he needs them to help him to process all of the information that he is barraged with during his therapy sessions. It is as if he needs to translate all of the concepts into his own language, play with them a little, then he can spit them back out to the world upon demand. His therapists and I are able to make use of his current obsession with transportation, as a teaching tool and as a motivation for good behavior.

Yesterday he was so upset that his sister had gone through the door first at a speech therapy office, he lay down on the floor and wouldn’t move. The therapist came out and I explained the situation to her. She said, “Who is going to come and play with the dump truck toy with me?” That got his attention. He looked up, and then she asked him which door he wanted to go through. Choices like this are also motivating to him. This is a therapist who doesn’t just play around, either. She makes him work, hard. In my son’s speech progress she has been the “fine tuner”. He sees her every Friday, and she and he have concentrated mostly on plurals, pronouns, verbs, and prepositions, using books, pictures, cut-and-paste worksheets, and games. When she began studying with him, she began where he had left off with the last therapist at that office. She is very attentive when I request that she work on a certain concept with him, such as plurals.

My son’s eldest sister read Temple Grandin’s book Thinking in Pictures over a year ago, and it revolutionized her relationship with her little brother. She and he play a game in which he is Cherry and she is Bagel. He will go and snuggle with her in the evenings, although he doesn’t usually do that with anyone but me. Sometimes he falls asleep in her arms.

The more my son’s siblings understand about autism, the more patient they are with him. One of his latest “things” is to construct images of traffic lights all over the floor using dry spaghetti noodles. The noodles crunch unpleasantly underfoot. I ignored the noodles for about a day, then we cleaned them all up.

Since we are almost always on the go, and my son has become accustomed to walking around familiar public places like stores and libraries without too many problems, I sometimes forget his sensory challenges. The other night, I needed to meet a woman at a coffee shop and sign some paperwork for Girl Scouts. As I scribbled my signature several times, my second daughter (in charge of her brother at the time) ran up to me and said, “Mom, he is running in circles.” I said, “It’s too much for him. We need to leave.” I finished as fast as I could and made my excuses and escaped. I had been to that coffee shop with him once before, but it had been in the morning, when only a few people were present. The chattering evening crowd was too overwhelming for him.

Donna Williams, another famous autistic author, writes that she doesn’t think in pictures or images, like Temple Grandin and (probably) my son. Her thinking processes are uniquely hers, and depend upon her own sensory distortions and sensitivities.

One reason I mention autistic authors, is that reading their work has made me think very carefully about all human thinking processes. Just as a great artist’s work, such as Leonardo da Vinci, may have benefited from dissecting bodies, good communicators benefit from the dissection of communicative processes. We are all constantly sensing, processing, and communicating to those around us. Communication includes behavior, words and gestures. What does someone really mean when they say something? The answer to this can be quite complex.

Poetry and other creative endeavors may be an attempt to express and interpret our own inner worlds to others (autistic or not), in a way which reaches beyond the limitations of everyday speech. What do you think?