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In my early childhood, I was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). My autism heavily impacted my upbringing, and my ability to communicate and socially interact with other people was not only weaker than my peers but the lack of support I received tied with my diagnosis contributed to a lack of confidence in these skills too. It impacted my ability to learn and pay attention in school, particularly in elementary school where I was pulled out of class constantly, to the detriment of my learning. Yet despite all these impacts, I learnt how to express myself through my art.  Creatively expressing myself was one of the only ways I was able to connect and communicate with my friends and family as a child, and the influence of my creativity rippled into the current day, where I am now seeking to become an artist within the games industry.

I have been an artistic person throughout my entire life, starting in elementary school when I would just draw with lots of markers instead of me doing actual school work. This way of expression made me realize how much I loved drawing and how much I loved coloring my drawings too. Instead of hanging out with my friends, now that I think about it, my time was mostly spent buried in sketches and the characters that I drew. I was also really good at math as well, being in a higher level math class than the majority of my peers, yet it all confused me. Thinking back at it, why was I so good at math and why did I prefer drawing over everything else during my childhood? Because of those thoughts, it makes me question whether autism was a factor that called me down the path that I’m walking down to this day. . I did some research on Google and saw multiple websites and articles saying autism and creative/creative thinking were both related, making me ask the question “To what extent does autism cause creativity?”

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https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1qKUzDbTZkPIJClsWFLrSn4wXCPBWBtQJpMqOGuK-Zkc/prefill

For my Special Sauce, I decided to go down the interactive fieldwork route, in which I conducted a short survey with 19 of my friends.  This survey was made up of 6 questions, 2 of them being general questions about autism in relation to the surveyee and then 4 relating to creativity and autism. The purpose of this fieldwork was to discover how people normally associate autism and creativity and, in the general questions, I first asked whether the surveyee knew about autism. 16 (94.1%) out of 19 participants said they did. This was followed up by a second question, asking whether the applicant was diagnosed with ASD, and the results indicated an overwhelming majority. 14 or 73.7% of respondents said they were not on the spectrum, suggesting that a big portion of the survey’s subjects would be speaking from a neurotypical perspective. Following up from this are the questions concerning the critical question, with the first one being, “On a scale of 1-5, how creative do you think people with Autism are on average?”. 15 associated autism with creativity, with 5 of those suggesting creativity was a strongly  given trait of autism. 2 of the respondents remained neutral on the question.  Contrasting these views, the responses to the next question “How likely would you associate Creative Thinking and ASD together” were very mixed. 6 would associate the two together, while 5 remained in the middle, 3 did not associate them together, and the other 3 would strongly associate autism with creative thinking. Interviewees were then asked two more questions, the first one comparing the creative skills of someone on the spectrum to people with neurotypical development. The results of this suggested that people were leaning towards these skills being stronger, with 8 being neutral and 7 suggesting that those on the spectrum have stronger than average creative skills. 1 person suggested that creative skills were weaker than a neurotypical individual, while another person suggested they were exceptionally strong. The final question asked focused on the way that those on the spectrum express creativity, particularly logical/mathematical creativity or artistic creativity. 7 (47.1%) suggested they were equally creative in both areas. 6 leaned towards being more logically creative while 4 suggested they were more creative in terms of artistic expression.

Analyzing these results, I concluded that a lot of the participants agreed that autism was associated with creativity. Particularly on question 3, a huge majority of my friends agreed that those with autism were particularly creative, and comparing this to the results of question 6, they all seemed to link autism to a different kind of creativity, with a fairly even split on each kind of creativity. As someone on the spectrum, the way you express your creativity does heavily depend on how you grow up. In my case, I grew up to love drawing, but I still have logical creativity at my disposal as well.  The response I was most surprised about was Question #4, regarding how respondents associate creative thinking and autism spectrum disorder. There was a split between all the choices, some saying the two were associated, while others being in between or suggesting it’s a bit unlikely. So this question more or less had mixed responses.

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This is my original drawing that I've made! I'm an artist so I just had to do a drawing. In this drawing, I tried to draw on how I envision my autism. When I was younger, I use to draw instead of doing my school work and would prefer drawing over hanging out with other people. I was also in a higher math class level compared to my other peers as well. I think because of how my autism was during my childhood, it made the creative person I am today!

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To answer my critical question, I read through 4 articles on the topic of Autism and Creativity (all listed in my Annotated Bibliography), alongside performing some fieldwork in the form of a survey on the topic, and some artwork that I drew for the topic. In my research, I discovered a lot about the general views on autism and creativity.

An interesting factor of the relationship between autism and creativity that I discovered in the research articles I read was how Creativity can be displayed in different ways among autistic folk. At least two of the articles I read indicated that autistic people exhibit some form of “unique” creative thinking pattern, and particularly these unique thinking patterns can be mistaken or go unnoticed. An example of this is when an article that researched the creative skills of autistic children highlighted one’s unique strength in metaphor generation and cross-category insertion. These were two common strengths that enabled Autistic children to be more creative than neurotypical peers on average, a strength that most neurotypical children didn’t exhibit. What’s interesting too, is that there was a lack of correlation between autistic children exhibiting both of these strengths at the same time. The fact that there isn’t a correlation between these two strengths makes sense because autism is a spectrum condition, so it is a given that kids on the spectrum will have a range of different quirks and traits that make them who they are. The positive correlation between autistic children and neurotypical children suggests that autism does enable a higher potential for creativity, particularly in ways that are unique to them, but this also means that you can have an entirely different combination of traits in one person and this makes it very hard to establish a universal measure of discovering creativity in autistic people.

Something I also learnt about autism, but didn’t realize until I did my survey, was that people did associate autism with creativity. Though there isn’t a universal method to assess creativity in autism at the moment, especially given the lack of data gathered by these articles, the results of my own survey concluded that most interviewees associated autism with creativity. However, what was interesting to discover was that the opinions on how autistic folk was perceived to express their creativity were not universal. Almost half suggested that creative expression comes in the form of logical creative thinking while the other half suggested that it comes from a more artistic perspective. To me, as someone on the spectrum, I didn’t even consider that autistic people associated their condition with creativity, let alone neurotypical people.  I always used to be very careful with talking about my condition with other people, but this has really changed my perspective. Maybe if I had known sooner, my ability to connect would’ve been furthered, as I could’ve poured my heart into expressing myself creatively and connected to people as a kid that way. It’s also really interesting to see that the majority of the respondents were neurotypical. The results of my survey might be indicative of how the wider populus feel about autism and creativity.

The final thing I learned about autism and creativity was found in my artwork, which was inspired by my personal narrative. In my artwork, I drew myself in the present, drawing on my iPad. While drawing, there are spurs of rainbow colors bursting out from my iPad. In the rainbow, meant to represent the autistic spectrum, there are 2 white-lined pieces of artwork of my younger self, representing the different strengths my autism brings me. One of them is me drawing a picture of myself with a pencil and surrounding it are sketches of a paintbrush, music note, and a video game controller. Another is me taking a math test, with a ruler and protractor next to my paper. Surrounding it are math symbols, math equations, and shapes. The point of this drawing is to summarize the creativity that my autism brought me, and the ways I expressed it. I would always rather do my drawings instead of my work, drawing rather than hang out with my peers, and as described in my personal narrative, this was a key part of my childhood. Overall, regardless of the research I’ve done for this project, I can confirm that my autism can definitely be associated with my creative expression, and if that’s the case for me, maybe it might be the case for other people, especially during one’s childhood and in further maturity.

Answering my critical question, it could be said that Autism can 100% cause creativity. The science suggests that there are given traits of autism that are associated with creativity, some traits even enabling higher than average levels of creativity lingually and through writing. Additionally, a lot of the articles made claims of those on the spectrum who had particularly immense levels of creativity and were also on the spectrum, so it could also be suggested that there might be a given combination of traits that allows creativity to flourish fully. Autism is already associated with high levels of creativity, as seen by the survey that I did among my peers, and also in the scientific community, but now I’m intrigued about what specific traits lead us to reach that level of creativity. Maybe more can be done to explore this region of research.

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