Book Review: Thinking in Pictures by Temple Grandin, PhD
Recommended by a co-worker, and made into an HBO movie with
Claire Danes, “Thinking in Pictures” is effectively Dr. Temple Grandin’s attempt
to explain how, as an autistic person, she thinks differently. As a computer
science major, I am kind of fascinated by this subject. Had I gone to college 5
years later I probably would have majored in neuroscience (I did a lot with AI).
Also autism and a host of other “chronic”
conditions are a true challenge for our country’s health system.
Dr. Temple Grandin is responsible for designing a large
number of the cattle processing facilities in the U.S., and claims it was her
autism that allowed her to empathize with the cattle and so design facilities
that would be more effective in handling them. She is also famous for her
public relations work for autism. I was disappointed to learn that Ger and I wouldn’t
be in Philadelphia when she comes to speak at the Academy of Natural Sciences
later this month, but I finished the book anyway.
While I was expecting to learn from this book, I wasn’t
expecting some of the things she wrote about to ring so true. For example, she
wrote how she disagreed with a college professor who “speculated that humans
had to develop language before they could develop tools.” I remember learning this
in college too and just couldn’t see it. You don’t need language to build a
tool. (How a person reacts to this statement is actually a good way to
differentiate if a person is a visual or language based thinker).
Also, she writes how she enjoys reading since it is like ‘taking
in information” that she can then access later when necessary. I must admit
this is why I like to read, especially about people who have experiences or situations
I most likely will never be in. Reading her descriptions about her thought
processes made me realize I am a visual thinker as well.
From a health administration perspective, her book
describing autism and what worked for her is very illuminating. The big takeaways
here are that all autistic people associate details into categories to form a concept
and “fear is a dominant emotion in their autism”.
What helps these people function most (and what helped her)
is behavior therapy. For example, she didn’t have a concrete visual corollary
for the abstraction known as “getting along with people.” It wasn’t until she
had enough experiences that she could address this deficiency. She needed to be
taught how to behave in situations because she couldn’t pick up subtle cues.
No doubt part of the reason she couldn’t pick up on subtle
cues is because her nervous system is in a state of always being “on guard”. In
autistics, their “flight or fight” response is always just a hair trigger on. She
writes “my nervous system was in a state of hyper-vigilance”. For her,
prescription drugs helped modulate her nervous system.
One of the reasons a person with autism is always in a state
of tension is that they have sensory differentiations that are very real. People
with autism experience touch, light, smell and sounds differently. This is the one area in the book where Grandin
gets a bit touchy. “I can emphasize with a laid-off worker because I can
visualize his family sitting at the dining room table trying to figure out how
the bills will get paid,” she writes. But she doesn’t understand how people can’t
imagine or emphasize that other people who might process senses differently.
We know from “Blink” that under traumatic situations, a regular
person can become autistic-like. Grandin writes that this is perhaps this
flight-or-fight anxiety is “an old anti-predator instinct that has surfaced?” One
of the keys to truly helping autistics is to help them create a situation that
allows them to feel calmness, since then that becomes tangible and they can
transfer that emotion. If the flight or fight response is on, not much of
anything is going to be happening.
In general this was a fascinating book, which will spawn
lots more reading (I have lots of notes). With autism being such a big topic,
this book should almost be required reading for everyone on the planet. While a
lot of the advice would be relevant to all people (for example she advises taking
autistic children to the science museum and doing experiments with them) it is
good advice nonetheless. I really have
an improved understanding how “animals and autistic people think without
language”. I’m eager to see the Claire Danes movie now and see how it compares.
