YouTube Video about an Autistic Alaskan Scientist

I thought this was great:

Language and Thinking in Pictures

I think in visual images andwhat I call conceptual "mental diagrams" , not in words like in most Neurotypicals. Temple Grandin famously called it "thinking in pictures", which was also the title of her most well known book. My thinking is like 3-D computer graphics with a Hi-Def monitor with surround sound, only many times more realistic. I only have words in my thinking when I am remembering what I or someone else said, or are engaging in mental echolalia of some quote, I don't have purely internal "self-talk", there is always some degree of actual talking to myself, even if it is not audible.

When I do math in my head I see and manipulate the problem or equation in my head. The same happens with many things, I can visualize things and mentally manipulate these visualizations very easily. This is very useful for learning cell biology, anatomy, and molecular biology. My interest in Paleontology from an early age, beyond the typical kid's interest in dinosaurs, is in large part based on that fact that I can very easily see how these extinct creatures "worked" just by looking at the bones

My first indication that this was not how most people thought was when I ran into completely serious philosophical and neuro-psychological writings suggesting that "Consciousness" requires language, which struck me as ridiculous, or even that language evolved not for communication but to enhance cognition, which made me wonder what that person was smoking after I got myself to stop laughing at the absurdity of it. Apparently other autistics have had similar reaction after reading about such language-centric nonsense.

An odd result of this visual way of thinking is that I will very often not be able to recall the word for a perfectly common, mundane thing. At work on Friday, for example, I could not recall the word "Broom" so I did the motions of sweepings to recall the word and to get my job coach to understand what I meant. I am also notoriously bad at remembering names, which can be extremely embarrassing.

Autism/AS and Accidentally Regularizing Irregular Verbs.

I have noticed recently that I seem to have a tendency to accidentally regularize many irregular verbs a lot more often then other people do. I'll say "flied", "choosed", "catched" "throwed", "teached", "freezed" "sweeped", "costed", "beated" , hurted, shutted, etc. 

Though it was very odd.

"No, Mom, I'm Not Deaf"

My hearing is just fine, so before I was diagnosed with Asperger's nobody understood why I constantly asked people to repeat what they said several times for me to understand it. In addition I would drive my parents nuts when I would turn up the TV volume when they started talking in the kitchen.

Turns out this is par for the course for Central Auditory Processing Disorder (CAPD), a condition common among autistic people in which the in-brain processing of speech is out of whack, resulting in unusual difficulty in understanding speech in many situations. I had the misfortune of often accidentally offending people who are not native English speakers and have a strong accent because my problems understanding them were taken the wrong way (and my typical aspie issues with non-verbal communication just exacerbated the incidents).

Incidentally this has become a big problem with my attempt to learn Spanish. I have the basics of the grammar down, but understanding speech is almost impossible.

Related to this is that I have great trouble understanding complex directions given to me orally, I much prefer them to be written down.