Lateral thinking is defined as:
‘the solving of problems by an indirect and creative approach, typically through viewing the problem in a new and unusual light’
I wondered whether those of us on the spectrum think of ourselves as lateral thinkers? Have others made observations suggesting this?
Thanks for this I'm generally using an iPad - which probably explains it!
What device are you browsing on, Sunflower.
I've never had a problem using CTRL-X, and CTRL-V, on my PC for cutting and pasting, though sometimes the editor does seem to get a bit confused if there are a lot of quotes or special formatting (the site administrator, WebPM, has been looking into this.)
If you're using a mobile/touch-screen, I have no idea; I'm too Luddite to ever use those things!
Snap! I win :-).
I regret to inform you that there may be some delay before your win is declared official. Some of the judges are suspicious about your ability to edit your post down to only three single-syllable words in under two hours, a feat which many competitors and commentators have alleged is impossible without the use of performance-enhancing substances. You will be contacted about your mandatory doping test shortly.
My engineering solutions are always very 'off the wall'. People struggle to understand how I can create things that simplify such complex technical requirements into such trivial solutions that meet or exceed the expectations.
I once had to create a vacuum system controller for a large complex system that had to work automatically 24/7 unattended, cost no money and be installed and working as soon as possible (the old control system was not mantainable and was dying). I boiled the issue down to a handful of micro-plc modules that talked to each other in a set of identical rack units, Dead simple, really cheap.
So much easier to build & programme. I had my proposed solution ready before the others had even fully analysed the problem.
Norms talk about "thinking outside the box" as if considering things outside what they're comfortable with is somehow some monumental feat of intellectual achievement. Me? I don't have a box. Everything is up for consideration until there is reasonable evidence to suggest something is reliable. I always see things that can be changed and improved. I have things I would stick to and defend, but if evidence or a better argument comes up I let them go and move on always looking to get things better.
The only problem is norms don't seem to like positive change - that's why British Industry have failed to capitalise on all the amazing inventions and breakthroughs made in Britain. They get complacent that their latest whizzy gadget will never be overtaken and will always have the enormous profit margins it currently does. Meanwhile some industrious people in somewhere like China, Taiwan or Japan are trying to copy what you do. They start with something basic and a pale imitation of the "real thing" but they know how to iteratively improve it rapidly and slowly improve quality but with an iron focus on controlling costs. They're not afraid to invest for the future because they know in 10 years time they'll have overtaken you and because you're so poor at incremental improvement that once they've caught up you'll never be able to keep up...
I emailed a colleague yesterday and mentioned to her in passing that I had remembered that I owed her £1. She replied like this:
"I have now been kicked out of my house due to mortgage arrears stemming from the £1 outstanding you owe me… and the children have no clothes…the fridge is bare"
As I began to read the message I had a really strong panic response even though I knew on a rational level it could not possibly be true.
Her email continued:
"…. (I never gave it another thought – please… you don’t either…)"
I would find it really difficult to explain to my colleague why her jokey email was problematic for me.
Oh my goodness, I do all of these things too - perhaps we are triplets!
Sometimes I faff around for ages, drafting and redrafting, only to hit reply and discover that I'm not logged in. Once I ended up losing the content I'd spent ages agonising over.
Talking of editing, if I select and cut a chunk of text I can't seem to find any way of pasting it back in. I'm clearly doing something wrong but I'm not sure what! Any ideas?
I wonder, were you a precocious reader as a kid? I started reading very young, especially considering how I lagged with spoken language, and pretty much taught myself. I'm fairly certain that I fitted what psychologists call hyperlexia, as a child. Here and on other forums, I've spoken to other adults with bizarrely specific similarities in reading and writing, and I suspect that we might be the people who were hyperlexic children. My Mum has some uncannily similar traits, too, some of which I couldn't possibly have learned by copying and only learned about since my autism diagnosis.
Anything to do with words attracts me, from research papers about linguistics to nonsense poetry and terrible puns. I've consciously collected figures of speech and dialect words for as long as I can remember. Written words demand to be read; I have a very strong compulsion to read them and they disproportionately attract my attention. There's no point talking to me in the pub if I just noticed the beer-mats on the wall behind you, and I read the back of the shampoo bottle every time I'm sat on the loo ("sodium laureth sulphate" is burned into my brain.). It often doesn't even matter if I know exactly what the words will say, or know I won't agree with them, and sometimes I even read without any of the meaning of the words entering my head at all - my brain just likes to play with words for their own sake, it seems.
[Two edits: The first edit introduced two mistakes in place of the one I was trying to fix]
Oh my word,,, you just wrote me,,, literally word for word,,, we seem to share many similarities, quite spooky in a really nice way.
absolutely agree with everything you just wrote, freaky or what? Yes take forever trying to make it all seem relevant to then realise I missed the main point, strayed off onto some other detail that I invariably end up explaining why I mentioned it.
Hitting send to see spelling mistakes as I do, then edit it, read it over and!!! Oh,,,I seem to have gone (in ) on a lot, repeated some things twice, then the “ should I bother now?” Dilemma?
Keep on being you Trogluddite,,, or should I say? Keep being me, and I will keep being you! Lol.
still amazed at what you wrote, do you read minds or are you my long lost twin? Joke. Freaky though as I often read your posts and think,,,hang (in ) on he thinks like me.
Take care and just be you... it works for me. ()
(in) edited after posting as should have read as on!
or
If I do manage to actually post the end results, I then notice the couple of incredibly stupid typos that completely change the meaning of what I said within a split second of pressing "reply"; always something introduced at some point during the editing frenzy and which I've proof-read a dozen times already without noticing a thing. More -> Edit -> Wheee!.........
I often over think what I write as well, going into minute detail! Lol. The above is a shortened version
Oh yes, that rings a lot of bells. When I'm responding to a post here, it often takes me five or ten minutes to write a post...
...then another 20 or 30 minutes to edit it down to quarter of its size (which still seems a bit too long), twiddle with sub-clauses to try to make things clearer (which I then decide it doesn't), piddling about with a thesaurus because I committed the capital crime of using the same adjective more than once, and much other pathological pedantry. Then I proof-read and repeat several times over until I can't quite tell whether its genius or gibberish. Then I might just scrap the whole thing and decide not to reply because I can't tell if I got the tone that I intended, or whether the tone that I intended would have been the right one anyway. If I get that far, the forum then usually tells me that someone has added another post while I've been farting about, the reading of which completely changes what I was originally wanting to say, and "wheee", off I go again...
If I do manage to actually post the end results, I then notice the couple of incredibly stupid typos that completely change the meaning of what I said within a split second of pressing "reply"; always something introduced at some point during the editing frenzy and which I've proof-read a dozen times already without noticing a thing. More -> Edit -> Wheee!.........
I often find ways of improving an already know procedure or way of doing something, using geometry and experience , for instance, if I tell someone to use a lever to lift something on site they always push the bar under and lift the bar quite often so far under they lose any effect, so I then show them the principles of true leverage, creating a fulcrum or point of leverage, not to high or low, to high and you effectively are pushing against not lifting, too low and any ability to lift high and efficiently is lost, when the correct fulcrum is used and placed correctly massive forces can be achieved by simply using your wieght plus gravity, no grunting or bad backs involved.
So a prime example of my brain looking for the seemingly complex solution to an issue that most just grunt at and often manage to complete the task in hand, I just shake my head and walk off mumbling.
I only settle for perfect, at school my practical ability was way beyond other kids, everything so perfect, but! It often took me so long I struggled to complete things, often building anxiety as everyone else would be finished, but mine even if incomplete was perfect in every way.
I often laugh when watching tv programmes showing how the academics think stone henge was constructed or the pyramids, they know maths and geometry, but they lack experience and tried and tested methodology,
As I am rambling a lot,,, another example, when trying to move a very heavy block of stone for instance!
Yes you can work out it’s mass, how many men it takes to pull it, how thick a rope and how many ropes, but it won’t move? Basically you need to first create momentum, so a sudden jolt or impact breaks the friction and as it moves it becomes easier to keep moving, they surmise it needs to be on grease first or rollers, no one has ever considered snow as a means of moving such a mass, snow when compacted by say a very large block of stone will become ice, although liquid is created between the stone and ice, it then moves very easily. So wait until winter to move the stones!
My brain never stops, it exhausts me, I often think things work well but could work better if a little more thought was added,
I often over think what I write as well, going into minute detail! Lol. The above is a shortened version of leverage and principles of mechanical energy he he,
And yet academically I fall short, dyslexia effects my working memory, basically forget things to quickly, my hand eye coordination when writing is slow as my hand cannot move fast enough to keep up with what I want to write, I struggle as writing left to right seems backwards? I can only write using capitals as they never vary, small joined up letters vary depending on which letter they have to be before or after, each letter in my head is a single picture,
I hope if you have read this far it has helped you to gently fall asleep,,,I often have that effect on people, night night sleep well. ()
I find my lateral thinking rather paradoxical very often.
On one hand, I can find myself stuck in a rut of behaviour that I'd like to change sometimes, waste an inordinate amount of time procrastinating about it and devising all sorts of hypothetical scenarios, yet not see the ridiculously simple answer that's staring me in the face. I frequently have face-palming "d'oh" moments when people point out the blindingly obvious to me after hours of pacing in circles, stimming, and mumbling away to myself, all the time working up huge levels of anxiety.
On the other hand, I am great at using whatever is to hand to bodge a solution to a practical problem, improvising tools and finding unintended uses for objects, devising ad hoc experiments to test ideas, and seeing refactoring* opportunities in my computer code.
It seems there are two extremes. When there are immediate, concrete results that can tell me I'm on the right track, lateral thinking helps me immensely to find the answer. When trying to solve something for which the consequences are not entirely predictable and which may affect things for an unknown amount of time, my lateral thinking only ever gets me further and further from reaching an answer; any answer, never mind a good one.
I'm reminded of one of my favourite quotes by surrealist artist Francis Picabia: "Our heads are round so that our thoughts can change direction". I think my thoughts are fitted with wonky castors from broken shopping trolleys!
* programmer jargon: refactoring = rewriting a computer program so that it does exactly the same thing but in a different way that's more efficient or stable.
Yes very much, I also have dyslexia to add to the mix, so I see many other ways of recreating things, why accept something just because it works,,, make it work better or completely reinvent it.
dyson reinvented the vacuum, although really he took old known technologies from industry and made it work in the domestic market, dust extractors for wood processing factories had the same technologies, so he expanded a known technologies to fit another, thinking outside the box,
Literal thinking also, I hadn’t really noticed it in myself, but others have commented, also I take everyone’s word as the truth,,, often making myself vulnerable to liking my enemies, even not recognising they mean me harm either by teasing or out and out trying to make trouble for me. I just cannot see why they would play a practical joke on me, or indeed get me into trouble? I don’t upset anyone, maybe they see my ability to do everything I do well as a threat to them being shoddy?
