The Purpose of Autistic Thinking in a Child's Development

Temple Grandin (2006), who has autism herself, describes autistic thinking as thinking in pictures. She describes her own process of thinking as receiving spoken or written information that immediately transforms into visual pictures. In another article Grandin (2000) mentions that people with autistic thinking can be divided into two broad groups: those who think visually and those who think in audio tapes. She explains it by stating that “audio tape thinking does not have to involve language; instead of using visual images to form memories, these people store very specific audio clips” (ibid.). Grandin (2000) also describes the difference between people with autistic thinking and non-autistic thinking by stating that for people with autistic thinking the schema of how a thought develops in their mind is the following: from specific details to general concepts. Those who do not have autistic thinking generally tend to develop their thoughts from general concepts to specific details (ibid.).
According to Braj Kumar Mishra (2008:353-354) autistic thinking is “a sort of wishful thinking, […] [a person] is completely detached from reality. It is a state of fantasy or daydreaming.”…