I wrote the following in response to a posting about Do thoughts have a language of their own?
As an autistic mathematician
who began intense mathematics research in third grade I often experience
unusual visual images associated with my significant mathematical
epiphanies. When I "got" group theory in an epiphany I saw an ocean of
small beautifully colors dots. This is a visualization I could
potentially paint, but most of my mathematical "visions" do not remotely
correspond to anything that could possibly be communicated or even
exists in the ken of the population at large. Just as using arrays of
GPU's or Graphical Processing Units are a critical breakthrough in
mathematical computing, I have the sense that the mathematical software
my brain uses to process mathematics has expanded in a virus like manner
into large parts of my visual cortex. The visual cortex integrates
thirty or so different subsystems and my mathematical "visions" are
consistent with the idea that I am invoking unusual subsets of the
different visual subsystems in unusual manners in order for me to
process abstract mathematical thought.
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