can anyone help me understand the files system my son has???

Hi Natalie

I could be wrong here but sounds like your son is a visual learner and therefore when he recalls something from his memory he does so by visualising it on a piece of paper with the picture as the visual clue. I think this is really clever!!!

I think its really hard for us to know exactly what being on the spectrum is like for our kids, much the same as it will be very difficult for our kids to understand why we dont have to do these things. We dont really give a lot of thought to how we remember things; how we get them from our memory bank.

I find my son is a very deep thinker and as a result over the years I have become a little like him, although to nowhere near the same extent .... I find I get a headache if I try to go as far down the road of reasoning things out as my son does, but he needs to do this and I dont.

The bottom line is I think it is his version of our memory recall; he just needs that visual system and I think it is absolutely genius!!!

Josie - Community Champion

Yay for your son!

As someone on the autism spectrum with a highly visual mind, I have a fairly perfect memory for where things are, because my brain records the world in pictures and thinks in pictures. Finding words is SO slow, though. I can see a picture of what I'm thinking of, but finding a word that goes with it takes ages sometimes.

Hello all,

Interesting analogy - I used to say that my head was like a massive filing cabinet and that sometimes it takes me a while to find the relevant information (which could be a visual metaphor for executive functioning difficulties?). Interestingly, I gave up on this one as it was not accurate enough. I would say that my brain is more like a web or a map now with interlocking locations and patterns. Although - both these analogies are visual intepretations to attempt to translate what seems to be happening to other people. I think that actually I am largely unaware of how my brain does what it does. I can become aware by conciously monitoring myself, yet this slows processes down, so sometimes I just let parts of my brain get on with it. The map analogy is more like my frontal lobe attempting to deliberately find a piece of information (like answering a question in a pub quiz). It is much more fun to see what my brain will come up with without really thinking about it (in the conscious sense)!

Interestingly, I was using the software package 'Dragon Naturally Speaking' the other day and the training tutprial asked me to read aloud a script about how people process language and how computers do. Funny thing was, I related more to the description of the computer.

Damian