Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism

by Temple Grandin

Studies of animal responses to stress and fear may provide more reliable evidence that human and animal emotions are similar. Hundreds of studies of rats, cats, cattle, pigs, monkeys, and many other animals have shown that when animals encounter something that scares them, the levels of cortisol (stress hormone) in their blood rise. Adrenalin is pumped throughout the body, and both heart rate and breathing greatly increase to prepare the animal for fight or flight from danger. Research has shown that fear is a universal emotion in mammals and birds. Of course, people have these same physiological responses. A person mugged on a city street and an animal chased by a predator have the same increases in adrenalin, heart rate, and breathing rate. In both animals and people, fear causes fight or flight.

  Fear can have very bad effects on the productivity of farm animals. The Australian scientist Paul Hemsworth found that when sows were afraid of people, they had fewer piglets. Fear was measured by determining how quickly a sow would approach a strange person. Each pig was tested by placing it in a small arena with a stranger. Pigs that had been mishandled by workers took longer than other pigs to walk up and touch the strange person. They also had lower weight gains.

  Further studies indicated that tender loving care improved both reproductive performance and weight gain. Many large Australian swine farms started a training program to improve employees' attitudes toward pigs. As the workers learned more about pig behavior and became more interested in why pigs act the way they do, productivity increased. Farms where the attitude of the employees improved showed an increase of 6 percent more piglets born per sow. Employees who had a good attitude toward pigs engaged in more positive behaviors, such as petting, and fewer aversive behaviors, such as slapping. Hemsworth also found that pigs that had been slapped regularly had learned to stay away from people and still had sufficient anxiety to cause a chronic elevation of stress hormone and decreased weight gain. They clearly felt threatened when people were around.

  Other animals also have the ability to anticipate an unpleasant experience. In one study, dairy cows that had been shocked in a restraining chute had a much higher heart rate when they approached the same restraining chute six months later than cows that had been restrained in the same chute with no shock.

  Anatomical and Neurological Measures

  The best hard scientific evidence that animals have emotions may come from the study of brain anatomy and neurophysiology. This evidence will help convince the skeptics. I had the opportunity to audit an anatomy class on the human brain at the University of Illinois Medical School. I had dissected many cattle and pig brains, but this was the first time I was going to see what a human brain actually looked like. When the brain was sliced down the middle, I was astounded to learn that the limbic system, which is the part of the brain associated with emotion, looked almost exactly like the limbic system in a pig 's brain. At the gross anatomical level, the single major difference between a human brain and a pig 's brain is the size of the cortex. The limbic system in both is very similar in size, but the human 's is covered by a great massive cortex, like an overgrown cauliflower that engulfs the brain stem. The cortex is the part of the brain that gives people their superior thinking powers. The seat of emotion is buried deep beneath it.

  The major difference between the human brain and the brains of other higher mammals, such as dogs, cats, cattle, and horses, is the size of the cortex. Both animal and human brains may get emotional signals from the limbic system, but since people have greater abilities to process information, their expression of emotions is more complex. A sad person may write a beautiful piece of poetry, while a sad dog may whine and scratch on the door when he is left alone. The emotion may be similar, but the expression of the emotion is vastly different.

  The chemical messenger systems in the brains of people and higher mammals are the same. Messages between brain cells are transmitted by substances called neurotransmitters. High levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin are associated with calmness and reduced aggression. Prozac makes people feel better because it increases serotonin levels. Some of the other neurotransmitters are norepinephrine, GABA, dopamine, and endorphins. GABA is the brain 's own natural tranquilizer, similar chemically to Valium. Endorphins are the brain 's own opiates. Drugs such as Naltrexone, which block the action of endorphins, are used in the treatment of heroin overdose and alcohol abuse. Dopamine and norepinephrine have an activating effect. The wild delusions and hallucinations of a schizophrenic are often stopped by drugs that block the action of dopamine.

  The best evidence that human and animal emotions are similar is the study of the effect of antidepressant and tranquilizing drugs on animals. Modern veterinarians are treating dogs, cats, and horses with the same drugs that are used to treat anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder in humans. A recent seminar by Dr. Karen Overall, from the veterinary school at Pennsylvania State University, sounded like a session at the American Psychiatric Association.

  The drug Anafranil, which has actions similar to those of Prozac, is being used to treat obsessive-compulsive behavior in both horses and dogs. A person with this disorder may wash his hands for two hours a day. In dogs, excessive grooming and licking causes open sores. In many cases, a dose of Anafranil will stop the behavior. Judith Rapoport, M.D., an expert on obsessive-compulsive behavior who works at the National Institute of Mental Health, speculates that symptoms in people may come from the older areas of the brain, which we share with animals.

  The drug Naltrexone, which blocks endorphins, will stop self-injurious behaviors in both autistic children and horses. Just as a few very severely autistic people will cause self-injury by biting or hitting themselves, high-strung stallions confined to stalls will occasionally engage in chest biting. Dr. Nick Dodman at the Tufts Veterinary School, in Massachusetts, found that Naltrexone will reduce or stop this behavior. He is also successfully using Prozac, beta-blockers, BuSpar (busperone), and Tegratol (carben-mazepine) to control aggression in dogs. Beta-blockers such as Inderal (propranolol) are sometimes used by musicians and actors to reduce anxiety and fear before a performance. Inderal has similar fear-reducing effects in dogs. Dogs are even being treated for hyperactivity with Ritalin (methylphenidate). Both hyperactive dogs and hyperactive children become calmer on the drug.

  I would speculate that the most basic emotions in people and animals have similar neurological mechanisms and that the difference between human and animal emotion is the complexity of emotional expression. Emotions help animals survive in the wild, because they provide intense motivation to flee from a predator or protect newborn offspring. Instinct refers to fixed behavior patterns in animals, such as mating rituals, but they are fueled by emotion. It is likely that an animal is motivated by fear to find a secluded place to nest that is safe from predators, but fear would not be the primary emotion in a hungry animal. Hunger and fear are both intense motivators.

  Like a prey-species animal, many people with autism experience fear as the primary emotion. When I was charting my life in the visual symbol world, I did not know that most people are not driven by constant fear. Fear fueled my fixations, and my life revolved around trying to reduce it. I delved deeper into my visual symbols because I thought I could make the fear go away if I could gain an understanding of the significance of my life. It got to the point that everything I did assumed symbolic significance on my visual map. I thought that an intellectual understanding of life 's great philosophical questions would turn off the anxiety. My emotions were primal and simple, but the symbolism of my visual symbol world was extremely complex.

  I replaced emotional complexity with visual and intellectual complexity. I questioned everything and looked to logic, science, and intellect for answers. As a visual thinker, I could understand the world only in that way. I kept striving to turn off the fear until I discovered the powers of biochemistry.

  Both people and animals have temperament traits that are genetic and inborn. A fearful animal and a fearful autistic person are both stressed and upset b
y new routines and strange things. Training and taming can mask flighty temperament traits, but they are still there under the surface, waiting to explode. A bull from a nervous genetic line may be placid and calm on his familiar ranch but go berserk when he is confronted with new surroundings and new people. Likewise, some autistic people are very calm when they adhere to familiar routines, but an outburst of temper or aggression can occur if something unexpected happens.

  Dr. Jerome Kagan and his associates at Harvard University have found that inborn temperament traits first start to show up in children at age two. Their categories of inhibited and uninhibited children are very similar to those of calm and excitable cattle or horses. These basic traits become apparent during very early childhood. Shy or inhibited children are wary of others, and they tend to be cautious and avoid strangers. Uninhibited children are more outgoing and social and less afraid of new experiences. Learning and social influences mask and override most of these differences, but children at the extremes of the spectrum retain the differences.

  In Kagan 's study, the extremely shy, inhibited children had greater physiological reactivity. When they were exposed to new tasks and strange people, their heart rate increased. They also had higher cortisol levels than uninhibited children. Kagan speculates that shy children have a more sensitive sympathetic nervous system, which reacts quickly and intensely, so that novel situations are more likely to cause them to panic. Possibly they are like high-strung, excitable animals. In other words, they are shy to avoid danger. The ancient systems that protected us from predators are working overtime in these children. It is interesting that temperament testing in people and animals is yielding results that have many similarities.

  My ability to think visually has helped me to understand how an animal could think and feel in different situations. I don 't have any difficulty imagining myself as the animal. But to be able to do this without being anthropomorphic, I have spent years observing animals behaving in different situations. I'm always adding additional information to my library of information by reading books and articles about animal behavior. I use the same thinking process I use for designing equipment to visualize how these animals think.

  As Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of The Hidden Life of Dogs, would say, “Dogs have dog thoughts. ” I would apply that to farm animals, too. One of my students remarked that horses don 't think, they just make associations. If making associations is not considered thought, then I would have to conclude that I am unable to think. Thinking in visual pictures and making associations is simply a different form of thinking from verbal-based linear thought. There are advantages and disadvantages to both kinds of thinking. Ask any artist or accountant.

  Update: Animal Behavior and Autism

  You can read Animals in Translation to see my full views on how autistic thinking and animal thinking are similar. Briefly, the most important similarity is that both animals and people with autism can think without language. They think by associating sensory-based memories such as smells, sounds, or visual images into categories. My categorical method of thinking is explained in the Chapter 1 update.

  The second similarity is that both animals and people with autism possess savant-type skills. This idea was first introduced in Thinking in Pictures. Animals and autistic savants can do feats of great memory. Squirrels can remember where they hid hundreds of nuts and birds remember a migration route after traveling it only once. After a squirrel hides a nut he rears up and “takes a picture ” of the location. This is the same way I find my car in parking lots without numbering or lettering for spaces. I look at the buildings, trees, and poles and then “download ” an image into my brain of what the angle of certain buildings looks like. To find my car when I return I walk back through the lot following the same path I used when I left and I stop when the images I am seeing as I walk match the “snapshot ” stored in memory.

  The third similarity is that both think in details. As described in the Chapter 1 update, my thinking involves putting details together to form concepts. A normal person forms a concept first and tends to ignore details. Animals and individuals with autism notice details that normal people may not perceive. In my work with slaughter plants, I have learned that cattle are afraid of lots of little visual details like reflections on a wet floor, a wriggling chain, or high-contrast colors such as a yellow ladder against a gray wall. If these distractions are removed the cattle quietly walk up the chute.

  The fourth similarity between animals and autism is extreme sensitivity to tone. I did not perceive eye signals from other people but I did attend to tone of voice. Tone was the only subtle social signal that I perceived. Everybody who has a dog knows that he is very responsive to the intent in tone of voice. From tone of voice both a dog and myself can determine if a person is pleased or angry. People with autism who learned to speak late have told me that they thought that tone was the meaning instead of the words. This is another indicator of primal importance of tone. Animals can also have similar problems with sensory over sensitivity. Dogs that are scared of fireworks may be sound sensitive. Sound sensitivity in both autism and animals can be very pitch specific. A collie was afraid of the vacuum cleaner and barked loudly when it was set for rugs and he had no response when it was set for floors. At different settings the sound had a different pitch. Individuals with autism have similar reactions to different sounds.

  Emotionally, there are both similarities between animals and people with autism and big differences. Dogs are highly social and are easy to train because they want to please their master. The sociability of dogs is totally different from autism, but other aspects of emotion are similar. Among the aspects of emotions that are similar is less complexity. Animals and people with autism have simpler emotions. They are either happy, angry, fearful, or sad. They do not have complicated mixtures of emotion. Another similarity is that fear is the primary emotion in both autism and animals. This idea has already been discussed in detail.

  To finish this summary I would like to answer to people who might be offended by comparing autism to animals. Modern neu-roscience and genetics is showing that there is no black-and-white divide between people and animals. Research on sequencing the genome of people and animals is blurring the line. Long stretches of DNA in the human genome and the genome of animals such as dogs is either the same or similar.

  As a person with autism, I do not feel offended when I compare myself to an animal. In some ways animals such as cattle or dogs have traits that are to be greatly admired. They do not get into horrible wars where large numbers of their species are killed or tortured. I have observed that the animals with the most complex brains, such as chimps and dolphins, engage in some of the nastiest behavior toward each other. They are fully described in Animals in Translation. As brains become more complex, the possibilities of wiring errors may increase. I speculate that wiring errors may create great genius but they may also create individuals who are capable of horrific acts unless they are brought up in a caring environment where they are taught right from wrong.

  10

  EINSTEIN'S SECOND COUSIN

  The Link Between Autism and Genius

  AT AN AUTISM CONFERENCE I attended eight years ago, I met Einstein's second cousin. We had lunch in the hotel restaurant, and I can remember the great difficulty she had in finding something on the menu that she would not be allergic to. She then proceeded to tell me that she had one musically talented autistic child and an intellectually gifted child. As we continued to talk, she revealed that her family history contained many individuals with depression, food allergies, and dyslexia. Since then I have talked with many families and discovered that the parents and relatives of autistic children are often intellectually gifted.

  In the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, Sukhdev Narayan and his colleagues wrote that the intelligence and educational achievements of the parents of an autistic child with good language skills are often greater than those of similar parents without any au
tistic children. I was not surprised when I learned that two Nobel prizewinners have autistic children. Even in families with low-functioning autistic children I have found a high incidence of intellectually gifted parents and relatives. Research studies have not yet shown a definitive relationship between low-functioning autism and increased intellectual ability in family histories. But this may be due to a number of factors, including the high incidence of low-functioning autism caused by factors such as a high fever at age two, premature birth, Fragile X syndrome, or some other readily diagnosable neurological problem. Numerous discussions with such families more often than not do reveal that intellectual ability is present, however.

  Looking at my own family history reveals at least one pattern that has now been well documented. Three different studies reported in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders and one in the American Journal of Medical Genetics indicate that there is a relationship between autism and depression, or affective disorder, in families. My grandfather on my mother's side was a brilliant, shy engineer who invented the automatic pilot for airplanes. For over forty years his invention kept every airplane on course. He worked toward developing this compass in a loft over a streetcar maintenance building, patiently pursuing his theories even though the scientists at all the big aviation companies thought he was wrong.

  My grandmother on my mother's side and my mother both have good visualization skills and are intellectually talented. Granny was always bothered by loud noise. She told me that when she was a little girl, the sound of coal sliding down the chute was torture. Throughout her life she had bouts of depression, which were effectively treated in her later years with the drug Tofranil.

  On my father's side of the family, there was the infamous Grandin temper. Dad would blow up in restaurants if the food took too long to arrive. He also had a tendency to fixate on a single subject. One time he got obsessed with shutting down the riding stable next door to his house. He spent days and days writing letters to the city officials and measuring the amount of manure that was thrown in the dumpster. My father had a lonely boyhood, and it is very likely that he had a mild form of autism.