Archive for Literal Thinking

Thoughts on Visual Thinking and Empathy

August 19, 2011 Rachel Empathy, Literal Thinking, Visual/Spatial Skills

A comment left on one of my posts a few weeks back got me wondering about the connection between visual thinking and empathic response. About the idiom “It’s raining cats and dogs,” Lauren wrote:

I literally see cats and dogs (the animals) falling from the sky along with raindrops. I still ultimately understand that it means very heavy rain, even though that’s not exactly what I see in my mind’s eye.

However, when I was a child, perhaps the first time I head the phrase, I felt very sorry for the poor cats and dogs. I mean, it would hurt to fall from the sky like rain and hit the ground! I would hear the cats and dogs mewling or barking in distress, inside my head. Until someone actually explained what they meant by the phrase, I found it very upsetting because I thought animals were getting hurt. (I’ve heard other people have similar reactions to the phrase “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.”)

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been noticing that certain idioms evoke a strong visual and emotional response in me as well:

There’s more than one way to skin a cat.

You’ll kill two birds with one stone.

Don’t lose your head.

It’s no skin off my nose.

Can you lend me a hand?

You’re stirring up a hornet’s nest!

I know that each of these sentences is idiomatic, and I always have. And yet, I feel varying amounts of physical pain and emotional upset when I see the visuals appear in my mind — probably because the literal meaning of each one implies some form of pain to the body of a living creature.

So, it got me to wondering whether, contrary to popular opinion, the tendency of autistic people to see things visually might engender an intensified empathic response. Like Lauren, who talks about feeling upset at the vivid image in her mind of dogs and cats crying out and getting hurt, I wonder whether other autistics feel that same kind of upset by words that describe pain, or by images that show suffering.

The visual image can evoke very intense feelings, it seems. The idea that thinking visually means that we somehow objectify the world around us and detach ourselves from it seems altogether wrong-headed to me. If your way of thinking is primary visual, wouldn’t the visual images have more emotional power, rather than less?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this question.

© 2011 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg

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For the Young Literal Thinker: Good Children’s Books about Idioms

July 27, 2011 Rachel Childhood, Literal Thinking, Parenting

A few weeks back, my post On Literal Thinking was republished on Shift Journal. In response to it, a commenter made the following excellent point:

I wonder sometimes if all the anecdotes that describe autistic children as literal thinkers may be creating a self-reinforcing stereotype. Any young child, whether autistic or not, who had never seen broken dishes wouldn’t know how fragile they were. The child might reasonably assume that if she had been told to toss them, they must be made of something that wouldn’t break, just like a rubber ball or other toy. In most families, if that happened, nobody would think much about it after the mess was cleaned up. But if the child happens to be autistic, the story ends up on the Internet as an example of literal thinking. That leads to more parents of autistic children posting such stories, and so forth.

She’s right about the dangers of some of the anecdotes that make the rounds on the Internet; after all, not everything an autistic child says or does is atypical. But in this case, there is a difference between the way an autistic child and a non-autistic child might respond to an idiom that he or she has never heard before.

In the example in my post — about a mother asking her daughter to “toss the dishes” into the sink — the child was definitely old enough to know what happens to dishes when you throw them. My guess is that the literal meaning took over in the child’s mind and got in the way of practicalities. When I look back on my neurotypical daughter’s early years, I have no memory of her misreading an idiom in that way.

In fact, I don’t remember her taking idioms literally at all. If she’d never heard the expression before, she’d probably look at me and say, “Mom! What are you TALKING about?” So, for example, if I told her to “shake a leg,” she wouldn’t just shake her leg, as an autistic child might. She’d know that the meaning was figurative and that she didn’t understand it. Similar anecdotes about autistic kids usually don’t reflect that understanding.

The whole conversation got me thinking about a couple of children’s books I once bought to teach my daughter about idioms. They were on one of the homeschooling curricula that we made use of, and they turned out to be a lot of fun. It occurred to me that the books might come in handy for parents who want to teach their autistic kids what idioms mean and how they work, so I thought I’d share a little bit about them.

The ones we have are called In a Pickle and Mad as a Wet Hen, both by the wonderful Marvin Terban. (He’s written two others — It Figures! and Punching the Clock — but since I’ve never read them, I can’t vouch for them.) Both In a Pickle and Mad as a Wet Hen explain common idioms very clearly and succinctly, and both are full of great illustrations to delight the visual thinker. In a Pickle contains fewer idioms than Mad as a Wet Hen, but is still a very useful book. I got them both because, well, the more idioms the better, right?

Here are couple of interesting examples from In a Pickle:

White elephant: A totally useless possession that you’d like to get rid of.
As the book explains, the expression derives from ancient Siam (now Thailand). In days long ago, a white elephant was considered sacred. When the king was angry at someone, he gave the person a white elephant. Because it was sacred, the beast could never be made to work. It would simply lounge about until its owner ran out of money caring for it.

To get up on the wrong side of the bed: To be grumpy
As Terban tells it, the ancient Romans thought that it was unlucky to get up on the left side of the bed. (The Latin word for left is sinister.) So if you got up on the “wrong” side, you’d probably have a very bad day, which would make you grumpy!

And here are two of my favorites from Mad as a Wet Hen:

To pull the wool over someone eyes: To trick someone
According to the book, in the days when judges wore big woolen wigs, a judge’s wig might sometimes slip over his eyes so that he couldn’t see. A lawyer who thought he had tricked the judge might brag that he had “pulled the wool” over the judge’s eyes.

Are you pulling my leg?: Are you trying to fool me?
Terban explains that, in bygone days in England, a robber would use a cane or a wire stretched across the sidewalk to catch a person’s leg. Of course, after the person fell, he was robbed.

Neither book explains the derivation of each and every idiom, but there is enough information in each one to keep things interesting.

I especially like both books because most of the idioms and their explanations are accompanied by humorous illustrations that reflect the literal meaning of each expression. While I tend to think in text, the text usually brings up a strong visual image, and reading these books sometimes feels like looking at a (very stylized and artistic) reflection of what goes on in my own mind. So, whether your child is a text-based thinker, a visual thinker, or both, these books may very well reflect the ways in which his or her mind works and, as such, may provide a good introduction to the world of idiomatic meaning.

© 2011 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg

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On Literal Thinking

July 7, 2011 Rachel Literal Thinking, Word Pictures

I’m always very interested in the observations of parents regarding the literal nature of their autistic children’s thinking. I’ve read many tales of children who take idiomatic expressions literally, with some very humorous outcomes.

Consider, for example, the experience of Fiona, who blogs at Wonderfully Wired and writes this post about her children’s literal interpretations. In one scenario, she talks about her daughter Ella:

“I asked her to help me clear the breakfast bowls off the table and because the dishwasher still needed unpacking from the night before, I asked her to just “toss” the dirty bowls in the sink and I would deal with them later.

So she did.

From almost a metre away.

And they ALL broke.

She couldn’t understand what the problem was, I had said to toss them!”

(google image)

Now, I don’t know about you, but I think that the whole scene is incredibly cute and completely hilarious. (Of course, I didn’t have to clean up the broken dishes…)

The thing is, though, that I don’t remember ever taking idioms literally as a child. I had other forms of literal thinking. For instance, I tended to take people at their word. When people spoke, I’d see the word pictures in my mind, and the words became living, breathing entities. It took me a while to figure out that I had to wait for follow-through, and that people might not always mean exactly what they say.

I also remember an occasion in which I broke down in tears of disappointment after my father used a word in a different way than he’d ever used it before. My parents always used to refer to cupcakes and other baked goods as “goodies.” Then, one day, when I was about five years old, my father brought a box home and said, “Look at all the goodies I brought for you!”

I had images in my mind of chocolate cupcakes with multicolored sprinkles on top. My mouth was watering.

Imagine my surprise to find toys instead! Now, you’d think I’d have been thrilled, but I’m sorry to say that I broke down and cried inconsolably. My parents, who were not the most sensitive people on the planet, just laughed and told me that I was being ridiculous. They didn’t realize, of course, that they had switched the meaning on me, and that the picture in my mind was so vivid — and so scrumptious! — that I felt as though I’d been had.

But even as a child, I loved metaphor and wordplay. They gave me great delight. And I know other autists who do, too. So I began to wonder whether understanding wordplay stands in opposition to literal thinking.

I’ve discovered that, for me, it doesn’t. In my mind, the literal meaning and the figurative meaning work together. In fact, it’s the combination of the two that makes wordplay so much fun.

Take, for example, the expression, “It’s raining cats and dogs.” When I asked my non-autistic husband what he saw in his mind when he heard this expression, he said, “Nothing. I just experience it as a metaphor for heavy rain.”

In contrast, when I hear the expression “It’s raining cats and dogs,” I literally see the word “cats” and the word “dogs” falling down like rain. I also see the literal rain — in fact, the words are falling with the rain and splashing into puddles — but I don’t see visual images of cats and dogs.

The fact that I think in text may account for why I understand the wordplay. Words are symbols, so I’ve already made a partial translation toward the metaphor before I’ve begun. The words falling like rain are what make the wordplay so enjoyable, because my mind is literally playing with the words. I’ve been seeing words in this way for as long as I can remember.

However, despite my understanding of metaphor, I sometimes find myself becoming impatient when people are speaking and using sarcasm, irony, and any humor that involves a meaning the opposite of what is being said. It’s not that I miss the double meaning. I know it’s there. The problem is that I have to work so hard just to keep up with the literal meanings of the words that I sometimes don’t have the energy to switch cognitive circuits and address the figurative meanings. And because I see word pictures in my mind when people speak, and I have to read them in my mind and then respond, my processing is delayed. I therefore find it difficult to switch circuits into the figurative meaning and keep up with the rest of the conversation, too.

It’s as though I’m always working on two levels. The nature of my auditory processing means that I have to work very hard at simply parsing the literal meaning of speech, and that I’m working overtime just to keep up. And my love of wordplay means that I intuitively understand when the literal meaning is not what is meant.

So, when my husband lovingly teases me at dinner by saying something the opposite of what he really means, it can feel very tiring. I understand that he’s being loving. I really do. It’s just that I have to listen so intently that I’d prefer he just come out and tell me what he means.

But if he writes things with irony, with sarcasm, with teasing, with double meanings?

I love it. I thrive on it. It’s like eating chocolate cupcakes with multicolored sprinkles.

So, I wonder how much of the literal thinking of autistic people comes from difficulties with auditory processing, rather than a failure to understand metaphor. For people who think in visual pictures (seeing actual cats and dogs falling, for example), is the problem that they don’t understand the metaphor? Or is the problem that they have to work so hard to keep up with speech that it’s difficult to switch between the literal words, the pictures they call up, and the intended meaning?

I’d love to hear what you think.

© 2011 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg

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Words, Truth, and Literal Thinking

June 9, 2009 Rachel Communication, Literal Thinking, Marriage, Perseveration

I’ve never really considered myself a literal thinker. Most Aspies seem to have many childhood memories of taking idioms and metaphors literally. I have just one or two, and I usually have trouble bringing them to mind. I’ve often wondered why I don’t have lots of childhood stories about literal thinking. It bothers me, because I want to sit by the campfire and make all the other Aspies laugh, too.

In the last couple of days, though, it’s occurred to me that I have a major piece of literal thinking that derails me time and time again: I take people at their word. Or, to put it another way: When people say things, the picture that their words paint seems so real to me that the image takes on a reality of its own, even when I know that the words aren’t true. And worse than that, I believe that other people will be taken in by these words. That’s when I start to worry, big time.

Part of the problem is that I don’t really understand deception. I don’t understand why people would say things that are patently false. I can come up with all kinds of reasons for this phenomenon, from self-deception to outright cruelty, but viscerally, I feel a deep loyalty to words and what they represent. Just as I would never use a saw to cut an apple, I’d never use a word to signify something that I know isn’t true. I can’t fathom why other people don’t see it that way.

But what really gives words their power over me is that I see them spelled out in my mind when people speak. When someone tells me his or her name, for instance, I see the name spelled out in my head. Multiply this example a few million times, and you’ll get a good picture of how my mind sees information on a daily basis. It’s as though the words themselves, because they are so vivid in my mind, have actual, living substance, rather than being inert, disposable objects.

This way of seeing trips me up in a couple of ways. For one thing, it can make me very inflexible. For example, when my husband says that he is going to be home at 8 pm, I see the words so clearly in my mind that it’s as though what they signify has already happened.

Time and again, my husband and I have knocked heads over this issue. He’ll tell me that he’s going to put Plan 1.0 into action, and I’ll get ready for Plan 1.0. Then, Plan 1.0 changes to Plan 1.1, or Plan 1.13, or Plan 1.13A or, for reasons I can’t even begin to imagine, Plan 5.0. I mean, how can you go from Plan 1.13A to Plan 5.0 without going through Plans 2 through 4 first?

If there is an external, objective, unchangeable reason for the plan to be modified, I can adjust—not always gracefully, but I can get there within a reasonable amount of time. After all, it’s not my husband’s fault if there’s a backup on the highway or the store doesn’t carry my daughter’s favorite brand of cereal.

But if the plan changes just because people decide that they’d rather do Plan 1.13 than Plan 1.0, I’m lost. Utterly lost. Ultimately, I throw my hands up in resignation at the desecration of all that is high and holy, wander in a wilderness bereft of logic, and send the following unanswerable question into the void:

Do WORDS have ANY meaning AT ALL anymore?

I have spoken that question so many times in my life, I can’t keep count.

Now, if inflexibility were the only problem that results from the vividness of the words in my head, I wouldn’t mind. But there is a much worse problem. When someone says something that I know isn’t true, I get so confused that I start to panic. I can adduce all kinds of reasons why a person would lie, but the cognitive dissonance causes me so much physical, mental, and emotional pain that my current context fades out, and a brave new world comes into being, hewn from the stone containing the lies, as though the previous context had never existed.

And if this entire new reality hinges on someone saying something untrue about me, dear G-d in heaven, I’ve got to clear my schedule so that I can perseverate on it for several days and drive my husband nuts with the catastrophe going on in my head:

WHAT? Oh no! How can anyone SAY that about me? It’s not fair! It’s so untrue. And here are all the REASONS it’s untrue. [Insert numerous reasons here, repeat them, increase volume with each repetition.] And oh, yeah, I just thought of another reason. [Add new reason, repeat entire sequence, increase volume with each repetition.]

This is bullshit. How can anyone say SAY such things?

Oh. My. G-d. Maybe they’re right. Maybe everything they’re saying is true. Maybe the sky really is red at noon and we all walk on our hands to the store on Tuesday. I mean, if it wasn’t true, why would they say it?

And maybe it really is all my fault. Maybe the sky was blue and we all walked upright until I came along and fucked it all up.

No, no, no. It’s not my fault. I know that. I know it, I know it, I know it. [Insert numerous reasons here, repeat them, increase volume with each repetition.] And oh, yeah, here are twelve more reasons.  [Add twelve more reasons here, repeat entire sequence, increase volume with each repetition.]

But no one else knows it’s not my fault. Oh, crap. Everyone’s going to believe that I turned the fucking sky red. My life is toast.

It goes on like this until I get a migraine. Then, somehow, if the Sumatriptan kicks in fast enough, the hard drive with all this crap on it melts like the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz—except that the flying monkeys scoop up some of the best bits and bytes and scatter them hither and yon into my poor, tired brain. After all, the witch must be avenged. 

At that point, I figure, I’d better keep busy and have some ice cream. So what if dairy isn’t good for me? Holy shit, the world is ending, and it’s all my fault. Give me my chocolate.

© 2009 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg

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Life as a Child on this Strange, Strange Planet

June 8, 2009 Rachel Childhood, Friendship, Girls and AS, Literal Thinking

When I was six years old, I made my first friend. Her name was Debbie, and she lived across the street from my house. We were the same age and immediately bonded over riding our bicycles together. I’d like to be able to say that we had an idyllic time, but the other neighborhood kids made sure to initiate us into the harsh realities of living on planet Earth.

There were some older boys at the end of the block who liked throwing sticks at our tires. I couldn’t understand why. What kind of fun is that? I figured that whatever their reasons for this absurd game, they’d get sick of it after awhile. So Debbie and I just kept going around the block, gamely riding through the gauntlet of flying sticks, until it was time to go home for dinner.

But the game continued, day after day, and showed no signs of stopping. I began to feel frightened—frightened not by the boys, but by my inability to understand what they were doing. When I told my parents what was happening, they became upset and told me that the boys were trying to knock us off our bikes. When I heard that, it was hard for me to fathom. It was the first time I’d ever experienced another child being cruel to me, and it just made no sense.

I am still that way today. I have been through so much cruelty in my life, and yet, any kind of cruelty shocks me. In fact, the shock is worse each time. The revulsion I feel is physical.

There was another boy who liked to scare me while I was riding my bike. He would stand out in the street and say “Stop in the name of the law!” So I stopped. Why? Because he said so. Literal me. I wasn’t any better at understanding deception than I was at understanding cruelty. I just took him at his word.

Once I’d stopped, he’d say “Can I see your license, please?” When I told him I didn’t have one, he’d say, “Well, then the police will come and throw you in jail!” I’d be so scared that I’d run into the house, shaking.

The game went on for a few weeks before my mother figured out a solution. She got a key chain with a replica of a small license plate and told me, “Next time he stops you, show him this.” So I did. And it worked. He never bothered me again. I was quite pleased.

But I still don’t understand. I don’t understand any of it. I’ve heard every explanation in the book, but I’ll never be able to feel inside me why someone would try to knock a six-year-old kid off a bike, just for fun.

© 2009 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg

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