Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions

by Temple Grandin

I had a disturbing discussion with a doctor who was training interns. Some of them had great difficulty learning how to sew up cuts because they had never used scissors. Dr. Maria Siemionow, a transplant surgeon at the University of Illinois, has trained many surgeons. She credits their dexterity to hands-on activities in their early years. But lots of kids no longer have experience working with their hands. Dr. Siemionow crocheted as a child. She also used scissors to create elaborate collages from pictures cut out of magazines. New York Times reporter Kate Murphy profiled a brain surgeon whose piano playing may have helped develop his superior manual dexterity. Grades may not be the best way to choose doctors

A report called “Why Field Trips Matter” cites a survey by the American Association of School Administrators that found that more than half of planned field trips were eliminated as early as 2010. The report also mentions that museum visits promoted critical thinking, historical empathy, and interest in art. The benefits were two to three times greater in students from less advantaged backgrounds. Lack

Campbell’s Law, which says that any metric used to determine social decision-making will become corrupted by people who want to affect those decisions.

Hovering is bad for neurotypicals, but it is even worse for kids with disabilities. I have observed many children held back by the label. Some parents embrace the disability mindset so fully that they fail to teach their child useful skills that they could easily learn. I’ll never forget meeting a couple, both computer programmers, who wanted advice for their autistic son. They described him as brilliant at math but content to spend all his time in the basement playing video games. I asked if they ever thought of teaching him coding. It had never occurred to them. I’ve met parents of fully verbal children with an autism label who are so overprotective that the children never learn basic skills such as shopping and having a bank account. In a book I cowrote with Debra Moore, Navigating Autism, we call this “label locking,” which is a failure to see the whole child. This may also keep parents from exposing their kids to things that could develop their abilities, such as tools, math books, or art materials. I recently met a young autistic adult who had figured out how to make accurate working replicas of vehicles from Legos. Neither his teachers nor his parents thought to expose him to tools or a machine shop class. They were locked into the label. I see it all the time: the child is pathologized and never given the opportunity to explore the world or potential gifts. So many object visualizers (neurotypical and neurodiverse) can build the most complex Lego structures. These ...

I would prefer to call it a behavioral profile instead of a diagnosis. I agree with those who propose to eliminate the terms high- and low-functioning autism. I would prefer to call them verbal and nonverbal. There are some nonverbal individuals who have significant artistic, mathematical, or musical abilities. Autism is a truly continuous set of traits, with infinite variations.

Goldberg breaks down the essential elements of creativity as salience, asking the right questions, and having relevance, an interest in novelty, the ability to apply old knowledge to new problems, mental flexibility, and the flexibility to apply multiple solutions. Also on his list are drive, doggedness, and mental focus, and mental wandering as well, which he describes as the brain’s ability to flow and find solutions almost mysteriously.

Chlorpromazine (Thorazine) was originally used to improve anesthesia’s effects for surgery; a doctor observed that when it was administered to schizophrenic patients, they stopped hallucinating as much. Sildenafil (Viagra) was originally developed to treat high blood pressure and coronary heart disease; then an unexpected side effect was observed that turned the little blue pill into one of the most popular (and profitable) drugs in history.

The American Society of Civil Engineers in 2021 released the following astonishing national averages: dams, D; bridges, C+; energy, D+. These are the worst report cards I’ve ever seen. Seven and a half percent of bridges in the United States are structurally deficient.

If you look up at the big electrical towers that transmit high-voltage power over long distances, it is easy to understand the effects of the lack of maintenance. The brackets and connectors that attach insulators to the towers and cables to the insulators need to be designed to pivot and move. If a cable breaks free and hits the metal tower or another wire, the high voltage will cause a spark that will likely start a fire, especially in a region with so much dry terrain and vegetation. When the brackets get rusted or worn, they need to be replaced.

The design of the Golden Gate Bridge is far superior to that of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, but an entirely different kind of disaster was averted in 1987, when the Golden Gate celebrated its golden anniversary. To commemorate the occasion, San Francisco allowed 300,000 people to walk across it, with 500,000 more hoping to do the same. The turnout was ten times what had been expected, and people were packed shoulder to shoulder for the entire 1.7-mile length of the bridge. As a result, the bridge deck sagged a full seven feet until the people were removed and the overflow crowd was, thankfully, turned away. The problem wasn’t poor maintenance; the bridge had been well maintained, which certainly helped to avert disaster. And it wasn’t a problem of design. As a suspension bridge, the structure was engineered to bend and move, and while this was the biggest load the bridge had seen, “it did not exceed the design load capacity of the bridge,” as engineer Mark Ketchum pointed out. In this case, the problem was the math. According to Stephen Tung of the San Jose Mercury News, while the weight of the individuals on the bridge was unknown, “if the average person weighs 150 pounds and occupies 2.5 square foot in a crowd . . . that’s more than double the weight of cars in bumper-to-bumper traffic.” Had the additional people been allowed access, there would have been a catastrophic tragedy.

According to the PBS program Nova, your chances of dying in a car accident are 1 in 7,700, while those of dying in a plane crash are 1 in 2.067 million. And yet most people think nothing of getting in a car, but flying can cause a great deal of anxiety.

Every industry has its jargon and acronyms, but engineering has many more acronyms than I’ve encountered in other fields. EPM stands for “engineering product manager” and PD for “product design.” Too many initials and acronyms make it easier to separate oneself from reality. Matrix charts employ such endpoints as very low severity to very high severity, or axis words such as rare, unlikely, possible, likely, and certain. The problem with jargon and scientific terms devoid of human connection is that they hinder problem solving and reduce motivation to fix serious problems. I think it is important to discuss this, because vague language emotionally distances engineers from the consequences of their mistakes. It is easier to talk about an anomaly or impact with terrain than to admit that something blew up, was flooded, or crashed, injuring or killing people. To the visual thinker, disaster is never abstract. As I write this, I see the wreckage, the pulverized bodies, the pieces of busted-up plane all over the ground.

One of the earliest pieces of legislation forbidding animal cruelty was enacted in Ireland in 1635. It prohibited hitching plows to horses’ tails and removing wool from sheep by pulling it out, which is akin to pulling hair out of your head.

In 1789, the English philosopher, social reformer, and jurist Jeremy Bentham argued that animals should be given legal protection. He did not concern himself with the question of animal consciousness. Instead, he framed the issue this way: “The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? But, Can they suffer?”

All networks form nodes; it’s in their nature, whether we’re talking about Facebook or an airline. As flying became more popular, nodes formed organically, connecting points for flights going to many different cities. As certain nodes started getting more traffic, like Denver, they became hubs. In the nervous system, the process is called encephalization, the evolutionary brain growth that marks a shift from non-centralized neural networks to the formation of the cerebral cortex. These centralized hubs with many incoming and outgoing circuits

Michelle J. Redinbaugh in the department of psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, explains that to be conscious requires a centralized hub that has both feedforward circuits and feedback circuits within it.

Chimps and gorillas who have learned to use sign language have invented creative new words such as “cry hurt food” for a radish

Seeking is “the basic impulse to explore, search, investigate, and make sense of the environment.” Studies show that it is pleasurable for mammals when the seeking part of the brain is stimulated, and they will continue to press a lever that stimulates that part of their brains.

Neuroscientist Gregory Berns at Emory University trained dogs to voluntarily enter an MRI scanner and lie very still while the caudate nucleus, a major reward center in the brain, was scanned. “Many academics rejected the idea that we could know the mind of an animal, even with modern neuroscience techniques,” writes Berns. He declined to restrain the dogs; he believed this would violate basic principles of self-determination. The dogs could leave the scanner at any time. Like people, they exhibited huge individual differences. Some were easy to train to lie still and got used to wearing industrial ear protectors to guard their hearing. Others could not learn to tolerate the scanner noise, and a few were too frightened to even try it.

The main fear center in the brain is the amygdala. If the amygdala is damaged, a wild animal will sometimes become tame. Rats will lose their fear of cats, and monkeys will approach people and novel objects without hesitation. When the amygdala and the brain structures around it are removed, fear is abolished. Current research is now showing that the amygdala has other circuits that are not related to fear, but overall its function is biased toward fear.

Further studies have shown that fearfulness in cattle and friendliness in dogs are associated with genetic factors associated with autism and Williams-Beuren syndrome in humans.

Each animal has its own individual personality. Twenty-five years ago, I was not allowed to use the word fear in a scientific paper. I had to call it “behavioral agitation” because scientists were not supposed to give animals human emotions. Today, the word fear is allowed. Science is slowly pointing toward the conclusion that the one thing that separates us from other animals is the huge computing power of our brain. Where emotions are concerned, we are similar.