Talking with Dr. Temple Grandin, Author of "Animals in Translation"

Dr. Temple Grandin is probably the most well-known person with autism today. She is an author as well as a successful livestock handling equipment designer. Welcome to Futurehealth.org, Temple. Thank you for joining us. Thinking in Pictures tells about your life with autism. It's a fascinating glimpse into another world, another language, another way of seeing and processing the world.

Your success, and your willingness to talk and write about it have offered us an opportunity we've never had before. Speaking for myself, I have not had much if any contact in the past with anyone with autism. That may hold true for many of our readers at Futurehealth.org as well. Can you tell us a little about how people with autism process information differently than people without it?

Well, people with autism tend to be very, very detail-oriented. And autism is a very big continuum. It goes all the way from people that are going to remain non-verbal and have a lot of handicaps to brilliant geniuses like Einstein and Mozart and Van Gogh and many musicians and scientists. So, in other words, a little bit of the autism trait can give some advantages and too much of the autism trait gives a severe handicap.

Can you talk about that a little bit?

I'm a visual thinker. I think totally in pictures. Anything I think about is sort of like Google for images. The thing is, autistic brains are specialized. I think in pictures. There's another type of specialized brain that tends to think in mathematics and in patterns, sort of more abstract images. And then there's a third type that's more of a word specialist. And it tends to be a specialist brain: good at one thing, and bad at something else. In fact, there's 2 1/2 times as many engineers in the family history of people with autism. If you didn't have autism genes, you probably wouldn't have any phones, computers, or electricity.

That's a radical thought. Did your visual way of thinking make it easier to write your books?

Well, it makes it very easy to design equipment because I can test-run equipment in my head, like a 3-D, virtual reality computer. I thought everyone thought like that way. But when i wrote my book Thinking in Pictures, I was shocked to learn that most people think in a more generalized way. Like for example if I say "Think about a factory," they get kind of a generalized image of a factory. While I only see specific ones, there is no generalized image of a factory, there's just a whole lot of specific factories.

So when did you first discover that the way you thought was different than other people around you?

Well, I didn't fully discover it until I wrote Thinking in Pictures in the mid "90s and I started interviewing people in detail. Now, if I ask you, "Think about your own house or your own car," most people are so familiar with that, that they can see that. But when I start asking you about stuff you see everyday but you're less familiar with - church steeples, post offices, factories, ferry boats, you know, things that are less familiar - then, you tend to see a generalized image. There's now been research that explains why this happens. I'm actually thinking with primary, visual cortex and when you think of the more generalized image, you're thinking in the association cortex. Now there are certain kinds of jobs that I can do extremely well with this kind of thinking.

And to give your readers out there a sense of what visual thinking is like, I want you to pretend that I'm Google for Images and give me a key word and I'll tell you how my mind brings it up in a kind of associational manner. But don't ask me something that I can see in my office right now.

How about a tree?

Okay, well, I'm seeing the tree that's right outside my apartment. I'm seeing a tree with a tree-house we built when I was a kid. I'm getting a lot of pictures from my childhood of different trees that we played in, trees we had in front of our house. I'm seeing a tree that the horses chewed off half the bark and wrecked it and that makes me very unhappy. Now, I've gotten into the Horses file. Now, you're seeing how I could get from trees to horses, so I'm now seeing the horse that chewed the tree. Now, I'm seeing a horse that I rode when I was in high school. Okay, see how the logic goes? It's associational. I went from the Tree file into the Horse file. Now I could get into the High School file when I start thinking about riding in high school.

When did you realize that your thought processes had more in common with animals?

Well, animals don't have language. So, as I gained more and more insight into how my thinking was different, I'm going "well, this must be how an animal thinks. An animal is going to be a sensory-based thinker. And I talk about this in my book Animals in Translation. The animal is going to store its memories as pictures, as smell whiffs, as sounds, as touch sensations. And they're all going to be very, very specific.

And one of the indications that animal memories are specific, is that they get very specific fear memories. Like for example, maybe white saddle pads are bad. And they're only bad when they're naked and there's no saddle on top. You see, when there's a saddle on top of a white saddle pad, that is a different picture than a naked white saddle pad. and why would he always be afraid of a naked white saddle pad? Because maybe someone was always sacking him out with one and really scaring him with it.

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