Learning

 Learning as an autistic person seems to have unique difficulties.

I’ve always described the way I learn as spherical. That is to say I try to ingest the whole of a subject as opposed to learning in a lineal manner , like learning one step then the next and so on. The problem with this is similar to when a child is eating a hotdog and tries to ingest the whole thing at once. As the child gets choked on the hotdog I will get choked on the amount of knowledge I am trying to consume at one time. The pathway that allows for knowledge to enter my memory banks will become clogged and I must regurgitate what I’ve tried to consume and start anew. Just like the child, I have to learn to take smaller bites of what it is I’m consuming.

Even with that it can feel like I’m beating a square peg through a round hole when learning something new.

Learning is a visual thing for me. If I can’t picture a thing in my mind or see it with my eyes it feels like I have little to no hope of learning it. Once I have learned something I can see it in my mind. I can look at it from different perspectives. Top , bottom , from the side. Ofcourse what I’m describing is of a physical thing like the machines I service at my work.

Learning rules or others ideas is an entirely different story. I can’t picture others thoughts or ideas in my mind so I very often have no clue what the words a person is saying mean. I can understand the individual words but not the ideas or thoughts behind them. 

Many times I’ve had people get very frustrated with me because I don’t understand what it is a person is trying to express to me. Be it instructions ,directions or any information that I can’t link to an image in my mind.

I push through. Fake it till I make it or burnout and run away from my latest failure at learning something. I’ve had many failed attempts at learning in my life. Most ,if not all, of those attempts have failed because I literally can’t understand what it is a person is trying to tell me. It's always been my perception that the person trying to tell me something that I’m just not getting thinks I must be of a lower intelligence. This isn’t the case. I have an IQ of 132. I’m no genius but I am of above average intelligence. Very often when in a group presented with a problem I am the 1st to come up with a solution and that solution is usually born of a perspective that no one else has considered.

Imagine not knowing Spanish (I don’t) and trying to learn a thing from Spanish text or verbal direction. You wouldn’t have a clue what it is you were looking at or being told.

That’s what learning from another person is  like for me. I have to try and find a mechanism or mental “Rosetta Stone” to translate what most people I encounter are trying to tell me. Transversely, if I understand a thing very well I have to find the same type of mechanism to translate my thoughts so that another person may understand me. 

The immediacy of live conversation causes me a lot of problems with comprehension and recall. That is if I’m trying to translate others thoughts. It’s like I can do one thing better than most anyone. That one thing can be an any number of things but I can’t do two things at once. I cant swap back and fourth between different subjects in my mind, what most people call multitasking , and be efficient at either of them.

Reading…… wow, this may be tough to explain in an understandable manner. If I have a good mental picture about the subject of the text (like one of my special interests) I can research a thing online endlessly. I will go total googlecon 1 on a subject I have interest in. I yearn to know more about special interests. If it’s something I have no interest in or I’m unable to form a mental picture I will not retain much from what I read. I’ve never read any book from start to finish in my life. It’s been suggested that I may be dyslexic as well as autistic but I’m not sure that’s true. I read and retain at an exceptional level when interested in the material.I will scan through research and reference material very fast only stopping to pull out the information needed to further my mental picture of the subject. If it’s not a subject I have any interest in ,reading is so painstakingly slow for me. I recognize this must seem like I’m just lazy when it comes to studying written language but that’s not the case. What I’ve described about my reading abilities is beyond my control.

As I’m sure a person can gather from my description, learning can be  terribly exhausting for me. I burn a lot of mental calories when attempting to add knowledge to my mind. This often leads me to a state of heightened agitation when dealing with anything outside of the scope of what I’m trying to learn.

I’m sure there are many more differences in the way I learn than than that of  neurotypical people . But that’s kind of what being autistic is like. I’m just being me,it’s not like I’m struggling through every thought, just every thought I’m trying to share with someone 😊

My thoughts are fluid and not restricted by words. It’s when I have to slow my thoughts to the speed of language that I run into trouble.

When I learn I absorb the sphere of a thing, not just the description of that thing.