One of the Myths About Autism:

‘Autistic people don’t do metaphors’

Because of their literal interpretation, autistic children do experience difficulties in understanding figurative language. However, figurative language is a wide concept which means the use of words or phrases that deviate from their literal interpretation to achieve a more complex or powerful effect. It includes, for example:

- simile (a figure of speech that a simile compares two similar things using ‘like’ or ‘as’): many autistic children have no problems with that;

- idioms (expressions whose meaning is not predictable from the usual meanings of its constituent elements, e.g., “barking at the wrong tree”, “it’s raining cats and dogs”) are very difficult for them, especially culturally-based idioms, but not the ones grounded in human experience (Chahboun et al. 2016).  

- metaphors (a figure of speech that implicitly compares two unrelated things, stating that one thing is another; it makes the description of somebody/something as if it was literally true, e.g.: “eyes are the windows of the soul”, “life is a rollercoaster”) can be difficult, especially for verbal thinkers (‘autistic/AS left brain’ thinkers), whose experiences are very different from those autistic people whose inner language is non-verbal, categorically state: “Metaphor is autism unfriendly concept.” Or “Those on the autism spectrum don't understand metaphors.” Or “I am dismayed to find this [book] (‘Build your own life: A self-help guide for individuals with Asperger Syndrome’ – written by an autistic author W. Lawson) so choked with metaphors.”; “If you know anything about AS, you know that metaphors can confuse us.”

However, metaphors are not only useful but also necessary for autistic (right brain) perceptual thinkers, who often create their own metaphors to express their feelings and experiences. Perceptual thinkers have trouble with words that cannot be constructed into a mental picture and often struggle to learn abstract concepts that cannot be visualized as 'mental images.' (How could you describe in sensory language the meaning of 'fear,' 'anger,' 'love,' or 'kindness'?)

The methods perceptual thinkers develop to overcome these challenges bring certain advantages and can explain a seeming paradox: that such concrete thinkers may develop a highly poetic language, full of beautiful metaphors and similes. To translate abstract ideas into mental images, they must employ the 'vocabulary' available to them, i.e., concrete notions. For example, a dove or an Indian peace pipe for 'peace,' or placing one’s hand on the Bible in court for 'honesty' (Grandin 2006); the abstract concept of 'anger' can be represented by 'liquid exploding from a container,' a strategy some autistic people use.

When these concrete notions are used to describe abstract ideas, they transform into the original metaphorical and poetic expressions so typical of autistic writers.

When these concrete notions are used to describe abstract ideas, they turn into the original metaphorical and poetic expressions characteristic of autistic writers. This is logical, because how else can those whose first language is sensory-based express their emotional states or describe their appreciation of the beauty of nature or the intricacy of abstract phenomena? For example:

Spoken language is a blue sea. Everyone else is swimming, diving and frolicking freely, while I’m alone, stuck in a tiny boat, swayed from side to side. Rushing towards and around me are waves of sound. Sometimes the swaying is gentle. Sometimes I’m thrown about and I have to grip the boat with all my strength. If I’m thrown about and I have to grip the boat with all my strength. If I’m thrown overboard I’ll drown – a prospect is so disturbing, so laden with despair, it can devour me.[1] (Higashida 2017)

Perhaps, those ‘autistic experts’ who are verbal thinkers at the opposite end of the autism spectrum would be confused with the beautiful metaphors used by a non-verbal autistic man to express his feelings.

Now the research is catching up with these abilities: Recent research study showed that autistic teenagers generated a greater number of creative metaphors and greater creativity on the figural creativity task than their typically developing peers. Verbal creativity and figural creativity are two separate abilities relying on different cognitive resources and those with and without ASD differ in the cognitive abilities they use to perform the metaphor generation task. The research points to a unique creative cognition profile among autistic children (Kasirer et al. 2020).

Another (wrong) assumption of one of the ‘autistic researchers’ is “Autistic people don’t relate to symbols.” But:

(1)   It’s important to forget that you are an ‘expert in autism’ because you are autistic and to listen to (and learn from) other autistic people, especially those who are ‘right brain’ thinkers (in the past century, they represented ‘classic (Kanner’s) autism’). For example:

-          Park and Youderian (1974) reported the use of visual symbols by 12-year-old autistic girl Jessy Park. Jessy used symbols of doors and clouds to represent such abstract concepts as ‘good’ and ‘bad’. For example, ‘pretty good’ in Jessy’s interpretation was seen as two doors and two clouds; ‘very bad’ as zero doors and four clouds.

-          “It would be misleading to say that I didn’t understand symbols. I had a whole system of relating which I considered ‘my language’. It was other people who did not understand the symbolism I used, and there was no way I could or was going to tell them what I meant… Everything I did, from holding two fingers together to scrunching up my toes, had a meaning… Sometimes it had to do with telling people how I felt, but it was so subtle it was often unnoticed or simply to be some new quirk that ‘mad Donna’ had thought up” (Williams 1999).

There is hope for those autistic individuals who believe that ‘autistic people don’t do metaphors’ They can achieve understanding of metaphors (that come naturally to 'right brain' autistic people ) through training: Chahboun et al. (2017) show that, though autistic individuals have problems with understanding figurative language, highly verbal autistic individuals perform similarly as age-, intelligence- and verbal comprehension-matched controls on the processing of metaphors, i.e., the mechanisms underlying metaphor processing are still developing in high-functioning autism, very much like in typical children.  These findings suggest that there is a delay in developing sensitivity to figurative language, rather than sheer inability and that a timely training programme can be implemented to improve figurative language abilities in autism.

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[1] This is an example of an extended metaphor, also known as a conceit or sustained metaphor – the use of a single metaphor or analogy at length. It differs from a mere metaphor in its length, and in having more than one single point of contact between the object/phenomenon described and the comparison used to describe it.