Metaphors, and a leap of logic
I have Anna, one of my regular contributors to thank for this one.
A wrote a couple of days ago about how I’m sometimes at a loss for words when I’ve experienced too much sensory input. I used a throw-away metaphor in the article about how my brain goes away and decides whether it needs to use a stock answer:
This is the pattern matching bit of my brain that says, “So the question was this, do we have an easy/obvious/logical answer to use, or do I need to fetch something out of the stock cupboard?”.
I like metaphors – they have a wonderfully simplifying effect on me. I usually coin them to make something easier for me to understand, and I often find it easier to describe a tricky concept using metaphor rather than describing the concept itself.
It looks like other Aspies find this sort of trick useful too. Anna expanded on my metaphor:
I think it is the same for me. The more tired I am, the longer the walk to the stock cupboard seems, and sometimes I just can’t walk that far at all, and so no words are forthcoming. Does that make sense?
Brilliant. I really couldn’t have put it better myself. And then she said this:
Do you suppose that for the more severely autistic people who don’t speak, it might be because they reach sensory overload much sooner than us, and their stock cupboard of words is even further away than ours?
Well. I think it’s great when we amateur psychologists come up with little leaps of logic like this.
I can’t say whether the trait behind this metaphor actually works like this in those with more pronounced autism. It sounds however, to be both a logical and plausible extension of what happens in those of us with the more high-functioning variants of autism.
This is one of those “you won’t find this in a book” leaps of logic that I’ve written about before. But then again, could you write about the way this sort of trait works without resorting to metaphor? I’m sure I couldn’t, and metaphor isn’t used much by those non-autistic people who write the books.
Great stuff, Anna – thanks for the insight.
Related posts:
- A lack of words I get this problem frequently. I run out of words...
- An allegorical story Perhaps the most visible aspect of my Asperger’s – if...
- Logic wins every time My interaction with the world is governed absolutely by logic....
