royinpink
Well-Known Member
I’d like to discuss how bottom-up thinking impacts your approach to writing and/or work, using Temple Grandin and Michelle Dawson as a reference point.
This will be a 3-part post, so that you can skip to the questions at the end when you get tired of reading
Please do, though, because I'd really value any input you have!:
1: My own experience
In preparation for leaving teaching and returning to school, I’ve been thinking about why sometimes it is overwhelming for me to start or to finish a research paper. In the past, this was a huge problem for me, and the overwhelm I experienced was a big part of why I avoided work until the last minute (or shut down, or faced penalties as the cycle got worse).
I’ve been looking for the ‘answer’ for ages, trying procrastination self-help books (which blamed my perfectionism and fear of failure) and trying to go through my childhood for ways I had learned maladaptive coping strategies and correcting them with positive self-talk, but never quite being able to overcome the problem. I think it’s not limited to one set of issues, and I’m sure a lot of it is accumulated guilt and anxiety over not being able to do things the same way or at the same pace that other people do them—especially since I was labelled ‘gifted’ rather than aspie or autistic and held to high expectations by my parents and, in turn, by myself.
Since receiving the diagnosis and doing research into Asperger’s, I’ve realized that a lot of my anxiety centers around things that place high demands on my executive functioning (processes that involve multiple steps, decision-making, organization, etc.) as well as things that involve uncertainty because I can’t see the outcome.
Of course, the experience of failure intensifies that uncertainty—but this is not unique to aspies or autistics. Everyone is more wary of trying something when they’ve failed before. That’s the purpose of fear—to warn us about potential dangers! This is a big reason why a lot of my therapy has been useless, and my specialist therapist has focused on getting me to communicate my needs and choose an environment that suits me, where I can experience success to reverse the process.
But still, there are some tasks that stress me out just because of the nature of the task, and I find that making a diagram or ‘visual notes’ (traditional notes are useless to me because my memory is good, and I get lost in long lists) helps to lower my anxiety about the task. This is a way of compensating for poor working memory and bottom-up thinking. I relate to what Temple Grandin has said about how bottom-up thinking makes her research process longer and less immediately defined than others’, and I wonder if something similar would work for me.
2: Temple Grandin on her own and Michelle Dawson’s research process (from The Autistic Brain)
Consider Michelle Dawson, the researcher who thought to look for references to autistic strengths that are buried in the literature. She's autistic. I can't say she made her conceptual leap because she's autistic, but I think she was more likely to make it because she herself possessed a fine attention to details. 'Dawson's keen viewpoint keeps the lab focused on the most important aspect of science: data,' Mottron wrote in a 2011 article in Nature. “She has a bottom-up heuristic, in which ideas come from the available facts, and from them only.”
Dawson had always approached her research with the same received wisdom, making the same unthinking assumption, as her mentors and peers—that studying autism means studying deficits. But that assumption was the result of what Mottron identified in himself as a “top-down approach: I grasp and manipulate general ideas from fewer sources.” Only when he’s come up with a hypothesis does he “go back to facts.” Dawson found it easier to free herself of the preconceptions inherent in top-down thinking because she was able to see the details dispassionately and in isolation. When other researchers look at her data about autistic strengths and say, “It’s so good to see something positive!” she answers that she doesn’t see it as positive or negative: “I see it as accurate.”
I completely identify with this attitude. For my undergraduate honors thesis, I wanted to explore the subject of sensory interaction. How does a stimulus to one sense, such as hearing, affect the sensitivity of other senses? I gathered more than one hundred journal papers. Because my thinking is totally nonsequential, I had to develop a way to make sense of the research.
First, I numbered each journal article. Next, I typed the major findings of each study on separate slips of paper. Some studies yielded only one or two strips of paper. Review articles prompted more than a dozen. Then I put all the strips in a box. I’d hung a huge bulletin board in my dorm room—maybe four feet by six feet. I drew the first strip out of the box and I pinned it just anywhere on the board. Then I pulled out the next strip. Let’s say the first strip was about the sense of vision, and the second was about the sense of hearing. So the second strip went on a different part of the board, because now I had the beginnings of two categories. I made labels for those two categories and pinned them to the top of the board so that they headed two columns. I continued to take strips of paper out of the box, one at a time, like drawing lots. I’d pick one, put it with the other strips in a category, create a new category, or throw out all the old categories and rearrange all the strips of paper. In the end, after I had finished sorting all the strips of paper into different categories of information, I began to see how the categories of information fit together to form larger concepts. […]
This process can be extremely time-consuming. When I was in college, it sometimes took me months of reading journal articles and posting scraps of paper on the bulletin board to arrive at the basic principle. Now I have a lot more experience sifting through scientific research. I no longer need an actual bulletin board on the wall, because I’ve got one in my mind. That’s why I trust my conclusions. I feel that my local bias frees me from the global bias that gets in the way of top-down thinkers.
Mottron identified the same pattern in Dawson’s research. “She does need a very large amount of data to draw conclusions,” he wrote in Nature. But, he added, “her models never over-reach, and are almost infallibly accurate.”
3: Questions
This will be a 3-part post, so that you can skip to the questions at the end when you get tired of reading
Please do, though, because I'd really value any input you have!:- My experience that led me to this question
- Temple Grandin on her own and Michelle Dawson’s research process
- Questions for you all!
1: My own experience
In preparation for leaving teaching and returning to school, I’ve been thinking about why sometimes it is overwhelming for me to start or to finish a research paper. In the past, this was a huge problem for me, and the overwhelm I experienced was a big part of why I avoided work until the last minute (or shut down, or faced penalties as the cycle got worse).
I’ve been looking for the ‘answer’ for ages, trying procrastination self-help books (which blamed my perfectionism and fear of failure) and trying to go through my childhood for ways I had learned maladaptive coping strategies and correcting them with positive self-talk, but never quite being able to overcome the problem. I think it’s not limited to one set of issues, and I’m sure a lot of it is accumulated guilt and anxiety over not being able to do things the same way or at the same pace that other people do them—especially since I was labelled ‘gifted’ rather than aspie or autistic and held to high expectations by my parents and, in turn, by myself.
Since receiving the diagnosis and doing research into Asperger’s, I’ve realized that a lot of my anxiety centers around things that place high demands on my executive functioning (processes that involve multiple steps, decision-making, organization, etc.) as well as things that involve uncertainty because I can’t see the outcome.
Of course, the experience of failure intensifies that uncertainty—but this is not unique to aspies or autistics. Everyone is more wary of trying something when they’ve failed before. That’s the purpose of fear—to warn us about potential dangers! This is a big reason why a lot of my therapy has been useless, and my specialist therapist has focused on getting me to communicate my needs and choose an environment that suits me, where I can experience success to reverse the process.
But still, there are some tasks that stress me out just because of the nature of the task, and I find that making a diagram or ‘visual notes’ (traditional notes are useless to me because my memory is good, and I get lost in long lists) helps to lower my anxiety about the task. This is a way of compensating for poor working memory and bottom-up thinking. I relate to what Temple Grandin has said about how bottom-up thinking makes her research process longer and less immediately defined than others’, and I wonder if something similar would work for me.
2: Temple Grandin on her own and Michelle Dawson’s research process (from The Autistic Brain)
Consider Michelle Dawson, the researcher who thought to look for references to autistic strengths that are buried in the literature. She's autistic. I can't say she made her conceptual leap because she's autistic, but I think she was more likely to make it because she herself possessed a fine attention to details. 'Dawson's keen viewpoint keeps the lab focused on the most important aspect of science: data,' Mottron wrote in a 2011 article in Nature. “She has a bottom-up heuristic, in which ideas come from the available facts, and from them only.”
Dawson had always approached her research with the same received wisdom, making the same unthinking assumption, as her mentors and peers—that studying autism means studying deficits. But that assumption was the result of what Mottron identified in himself as a “top-down approach: I grasp and manipulate general ideas from fewer sources.” Only when he’s come up with a hypothesis does he “go back to facts.” Dawson found it easier to free herself of the preconceptions inherent in top-down thinking because she was able to see the details dispassionately and in isolation. When other researchers look at her data about autistic strengths and say, “It’s so good to see something positive!” she answers that she doesn’t see it as positive or negative: “I see it as accurate.”
I completely identify with this attitude. For my undergraduate honors thesis, I wanted to explore the subject of sensory interaction. How does a stimulus to one sense, such as hearing, affect the sensitivity of other senses? I gathered more than one hundred journal papers. Because my thinking is totally nonsequential, I had to develop a way to make sense of the research.
First, I numbered each journal article. Next, I typed the major findings of each study on separate slips of paper. Some studies yielded only one or two strips of paper. Review articles prompted more than a dozen. Then I put all the strips in a box. I’d hung a huge bulletin board in my dorm room—maybe four feet by six feet. I drew the first strip out of the box and I pinned it just anywhere on the board. Then I pulled out the next strip. Let’s say the first strip was about the sense of vision, and the second was about the sense of hearing. So the second strip went on a different part of the board, because now I had the beginnings of two categories. I made labels for those two categories and pinned them to the top of the board so that they headed two columns. I continued to take strips of paper out of the box, one at a time, like drawing lots. I’d pick one, put it with the other strips in a category, create a new category, or throw out all the old categories and rearrange all the strips of paper. In the end, after I had finished sorting all the strips of paper into different categories of information, I began to see how the categories of information fit together to form larger concepts. […]
This process can be extremely time-consuming. When I was in college, it sometimes took me months of reading journal articles and posting scraps of paper on the bulletin board to arrive at the basic principle. Now I have a lot more experience sifting through scientific research. I no longer need an actual bulletin board on the wall, because I’ve got one in my mind. That’s why I trust my conclusions. I feel that my local bias frees me from the global bias that gets in the way of top-down thinkers.
Mottron identified the same pattern in Dawson’s research. “She does need a very large amount of data to draw conclusions,” he wrote in Nature. But, he added, “her models never over-reach, and are almost infallibly accurate.”
3: Questions
- Do you have any similar experiences with anxiety about tackling long projects (or other tasks made difficult by impaired EF)?
- Do you have any strategies you use to visualize or help you in some other way to go from bottom-up thinking to the big picture?
- Do you think you would find Temple’s strategies (bulletin board, etc.) at all useful? Are there ways to improve on it or make it less tedious?
- At what point does such a strategy transition from being an external, tangible process, to an internal, visual one? (Unlike Temple, I have always relied on visualization, but I need to feel 100%--no anxiety or distractions--for it to be a painless process)
- Any other thoughts you have on the research process she describes (I honestly don't get how people can do research any other way).
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The other common location is outside, on a patio/balcony (which is where mine is now). 
