A Different Kind of Thought

I just finished reading a book so remarkable I’m not sure what to say. The book is Temple Grandin’s Thinking in Pictures and Other Reports from My Life with Autism. I had heard a lot about this book—my sister works with autistic children, for one thing—and when the chance came to evaluate it for next year’s Campus Community Book Project, I leapt at it.

I have always thought I had a visual mind… When people talk, I immediately render what they’re saying into pictures. When the topic is very abstract, this is hard, which is why it’s hard for me to get my head around REALLY abstract concepts. I couldn’t have been a philosophy major, for instance.

But I have NOTHING on Temple, a woman so courageous it leaves me humbled. She thinks only in pictures. Every thought she’s ever had is an image, and they get stored in her head, sequentially, so she retrieves them as though from a hard drive. This method of thinking has allowed her to be an amazing designer of facilities for livestock, with whom she identifies and is able to “see as”: thinking like a cow, she calls it. So she’s been able to design chutes, insecticide vats, vaccination restraints, and even restraints for slaughter that are humane and dignified, cutting down on the amount of unnecessary stress on the animals. When the book was written, a third of all livestock facilities in the United States were designed according to her principles. All of which are done in her head, visually, from every conceivable angle, like pieces of neurological Meccano.

Yet it is Grandin’s account of growing up autistic, of the tantrums, the isolation, the terror of being an adolescent and not fitting in, unable to communicate, yet miraculously tumbling on two or three mentors who didn’t mind that she was different (understatement of the year) and finding her calling as a designer-the journey is quite spiritual. And that she is able to articulate all this, an experience that is usually perplexing and completely opaque to non-autistics-no wonder this woman’s such a heroine in those circles.

My hope is that she’ll be a heroine in other, much bigger, ones. She has so much to teach us all about difference, tolerance, other ways of seeing.