Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism

by Temple Grandin

  Fortunately, none of my siblings are autistic. I have two sisters and a brother. One of my sisters is a visual thinker who is very artistic and extremely good at redecorating old houses. She can look at a dumpy old house and see in her mind the cute place she can turn it into. She had learning problems in school, possibly owing to mild auditory processing problems that made it difficult for her to understand speech in a noisy classroom. Mathematics was difficult for her. My other two siblings are both normal, although my youngest sister has a slight tendency to suffer from sensory overload when too many different noisy activities occur at once. Her eight-year-old son has no signs of autism, but he has had difficulty learning to read and problems understanding some speech sounds. My other nieces and nephews are normal.

  Mild autistic traits often show up in the parents and relatives of children with autism. Another study published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, by G. R. Delong and J. T. Dwyer, indicated that over two thirds of families with a high-functioning autistic child had a first- or second-degree relative who had Asperger's syndrome, the mild form of autism. Based on hundreds of discussions with families I've met at conferences, it is clear that many parents of autistic children are visual thinkers with talents in computers, art, and music. Other common traits in the family histories of autistics are anxiety disorder, depression, and panic attacks. Narayan found that the parents of autistic children, especially the fathers, had a tendency to pursue a special interest singlemindedly, and they were likely to have poor social skills. Parents who were not autistic themselves had some of the traits of their autistic children. In a study conducted by Rebecca Landa and other researchers at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where parents were asked to make up a story, 34 percent made up a rambling, plotless story without a clear beginning, middle, and end. That is the nature of associational visual thinking. It is like putting a jigsaw puzzle together. It is not done in any particular order.

  There is good evidence that autism has a strong genetic basis. Folstein and Rutter reported that in identical twins, when one twin was autistic, the other twin was autistic 36 percent of the time. Nonautistic twins had a higher percentage of learning problems than normal twin pairs had. Identical twins have the same genetic makeup, whereas fraternal twins have completely different genes. When one fraternal twin was autistic, the other was almost never autistic. But the inheritance of autism is complex. There is no single autism gene. Robin Clark speculates in the journal Personal Individual Differences that the disorder may occur if a person receives too big a dose of genetic traits which are only beneficial in smaller amounts. For example, a slight tendency to fixate on a single subject can enable a person to focus and accomplish a great deal, whereas a stronger tendency to fixate prevents normal social interaction.

  People with autism run a greater risk than others of having a child with autism, learning difficulties, or developmental problems. However, family history studies by Edward Ritvoe and his colleagues at UCLA have shown that the siblings of an autistic have almost no increased risk of having an autistic child, although they do run an increased risk of having children with learning disabilities or mild autistic traits.

  Many researchers speculate that a cluster of interacting genes may cause a variety of disorders such as depression, dyslexia, schizophrenia, manic-depression, and learning disabilities. Dr. Robert Plomin and his colleagues at Pennsylvania State University state that autism is one of the most inheritable psychiatric diagnoses. They also maintain that many disorders such as depression represent extremes of a continuum of behavior from normal to abnormal. The same genes are responsible for both normal variations and the abnormal extremes. It is likely that this same principle applies to autism. People labeled autistic have an extreme form of traits found in normal people. Leo Kanner found that in four out of nine cases, depression or anxiety occurred in the parents of autistic children. Recent studies by Robert Delong, at Duke University in North Carolina, found there is often a history of manic-depression in the families of children with autism.

  Genius Is an Abnormality

  It is likely that genius is an abnormality. If the genes that cause autism and other disorders such as manic-depression were eliminated, the world might be left to boring conformists with few creative ideas. The interacting cluster of genes that cause autism, manic-depression, and schizophrenia probably has a beneficial effect in small doses. In her book Touched with Fire, Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison reviewed studies that showed a link between manic-depression and creativity. Manic-depressives experience a continuum of emotions, from moody to full-blown mania and deep, dark depression. When writers experience a mild form of the condition, they often produce some of their best work. When the disorder becomes full-blown, they are no longer able to function. There is a tendency for the mood swings to worsen with age, and this may explain why famous writers such as Ernest Hemingway committed suicide relatively late in life. Studies have shown that artists, poets, and creative writers have higher rates of manic-depression or depressive disorder than the general population.

  A study done at the University of Iowa by N. C. Andreason showed that 80 percent of creative writers have had mood disorders at some time during their life. A high percentage of artists, poets, and writers have to be medicated to control their condition. Thirty-eight percent of writers and artists have had to take medication, and 50 percent of poets have had to receive treatment. The University of Iowa study also showed that parents and siblings of writers have a high rate of mood disorders.

  Dean Simonton, at the University of California at Davis, has studied the factors that make a person a great politician, such as leadership, charisma, and boundless energy or drive. People with these qualities often have had problems with depression and alcohol abuse. Simonton concludes that “in order to be creative, it seems you have to be slightly crazy.”

  A study of mathematical giftedness further reinforces the idea of abnormality and genius. A paper by Camilla Persson Benbour, at Iowa State University, provides strong evidence that mathematical genius and giftedness are highly correlated with physical abnormalities. Three things that occur more frequently in people with high mathematical ability than in the population at large are lefthandedness, allergies, and nearsightedness. Both learning disability in mathematics and math talent are associated with lefthandedness. Young children who show very high ability in verbal reasoning and mathematics are twice as likely to have allergies as the rest of the population. Students with extremely high ability are also more likely to be nearsighted. The old stereotype of a little genius with thick glasses may be true.

  Obviously, not all geniuses are abnormal, but the genes that produce normal people with certain talents are likely to be the same genes that produce the abnormalities found at the extreme end of the same continuum. Back in the 1940s researchers recognized that elimination of the genes that cause manic-depression would have a terrible cost. Researchers at McLean Hospital near Boston concluded,

  If we could extinguish the sufferers from manic-depressive psychosis from the world, we would at the same time deprive ourselves of an immeasurable amount of the accomplished and good, of color and warmth, of spirit and freshness. Finally, only dried-up bureaucrats and schizophrenics would be left. Here I must say that I would rather accept into the bargain the diseased manic-depressives than give up the healthy individuals of the same heredity cycle.

  Twenty years earlier, John W Robertson wrote in his book Edgar A. Poe, A Psychopathic Study,

  Eradicate the nervous diathesis, suppress the hot blood that results from the over-close mating of neurotics, or from that unstable nervous organization due to alcoholic inheritance, or even from insanity and the various forms of parental degeneracy, and we would have a race of stoics—men without imagination, individuals incapable of enthusiasms, brains without personality, souls without genius.

  As I have said, it has only been recently that I realized the magnitude of the difference between me and most other people.
During the past three years I have become fully aware that my visualization skills exceed those of most other people. I would never want to become so normal that I would lose these skills. Similarly, being childlike may have helped me to be creative. In his book Creating Minds, Howard Gardner outlined the creative lives of seven great twentieth-century thinkers, including Einstein, Picasso, and T. S. Eliot. One common denominator was a childlike quality. Gardner describes Einstein as returning to the conceptual world of a child, and says that he was not hampered by the conventional paradigms of physics. It is interesting that autism is caused by brain immaturity. In many ways I have remained a child. Even today I do not feel like a grownup in the realm of interpersonal relationships.

  Some scientists are strictly analytical thinkers. The physicist Richard Feynman denied the validity of poetry and art. In his biography of Feynman, Genius, James Gleick wrote, “He would not concede that poetry or painting or religion could reach a different kind of truth.” Of course, many scientists do value poetry and share traits from both the creative and scientific end of the continuum, just as some scientists, artists, and highly analytical philosophers have some autistic traits. Albert Einstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Vincent van Gogh all exhibited developmental abnormalities during early childhood. By definition, autism is an early-onset disorder, and problems such as delayed speech and odd behavior must show up at an early age for a person to be labeled as having autistic traits.

  As a child, Einstein had many of these traits. He did not learn to speak until he was three. In a letter to a mother of an autistic child, he admitted to not being able to learn to speak until late and that his parents had been worried about it. Bernard Patten reports in the Journal of Learning Disabilities that Einstein silently repeated words to himself until age seven and did not freely associate with his peers. Whereas some prodigies develop at an early age, Einstein did not exhibit any great genius as a young child. Some people thought he was a dullard. He was a bad speller and did poorly in foreign languages. Like many autistic-type children, he was very good at jigsaw puzzles and spent hours building houses from playing cards. He had a singlemindedness of purpose and a poor memory for things that did not interest him, especially things of a personal nature. In Einstein: The Life and Times, the biographer Ronald W. Clark wrote that Einstein's backwardness may have helped guide him in his field. Einstein himself said, “I sometimes ask myself, how did it come that I was the one to develop the theory of relativity? The reason, I think, is that a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time.” He had tremendous ability to concentrate and could work for hours or days on the same problem.

  In Einstein Lived Here, Abraham Pais wrote, “To be creative in establishing lasting deep human relations demands efforts that Einstein was simply never willing to make.” Like me, he was more attached to ideas and work. I don't know what a deep relationship is. His deep passion was for science. Science was his life. One of his graduate students said, “I have never known anybody who enjoyed science so sensuously as Einstein.” According to Howard Gardner, Einstein was interested in the relationships between objects far more than in relationships between people.

  In their book, The Stigma of Genius, the biographers Joe L. Kincheloe, Shirley R. Steinberg, and Deborah J. Tippins puzzled over the dichotomy between Einstein's public charm and charisma and his private life as a loner. He was an aloof observer of people and a solitary child. In The Private Lives of Albert Einstein, Roger Highfield and Paul Garter wrote, “Einstein described his dedication to science as an attempt to escape the merely personal by fixing his gaze on the objective universe. The desire to locate a reality free of human uncertainties was fundamental to his most important work” (referring to the theory of relativity). I can relate to this. On weekends I write and draw by myself, and during the week I give talks and act very social. Yet there is something missing in my social life. I can act social, but it is like being in a play. Several parents have told me that their autistic child has done a great job in the school play, acting like somebody else. As soon as the play is over, he or she reverts to being solitary.

  Like Einstein, I am motivated by the search for intellectual truth. For me, searching for the meaning of life has always been an intellectual activity driven by anxiety and fear. Deep emotional relationships are secondary. I am happiest when I see tangible results, such as giving a mother information on the latest educational programs that will enable her autistic child to achieve in school. I value positive, measurable results more than emotion. My concept of what constitutes a good person is based on what I do rather than what I feel.

  Einstein had many traits of an adult with mild autism, or Asperger's syndrome. Kincheloe and his colleagues reported that Einstein's lectures were scattered and sometimes incomprehensible. Students would often be confused because they could not see associations between some of the specific examples he gave and general principles. The association was obvious to Einstein's visual mind but not to his verbal-thinking students. Students reported that Einstein would lose his train of thought while writing a theorem on the blackboard. A few minutes later he would emerge from a trance and write a new hypothesis. The tendency for scattered thought is due to associative thinking.

  Einstein also did poorly in school until he was sent to one that allowed him to use his visualization skills. He told his psychologist friend Max Wertheimer, “Thoughts did not come in any verbal formulation. I rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I try to express it in words afterwards.” When he developed the theory of relativity, he imagined himself on a beam of light. His visual images were vaguer than mine, and he could decode them into mathematical formulas. My visual images are extremely vivid, but I am unable to make the connection with mathematical symbols. Einstein's calculation abilities were not phenomenal. He often made mistakes and was slow, but his genius lay in being able to connect visual and mathematical thinking.

  Einstein's dress and hair were typical of an adult with autistic tendencies, most of whom have little regard for social niceties and rank. When he worked at the Swiss patent office, he sometimes wore green slippers with flowers on them. He refused to wear suits and ties in the days when professors dressed for teaching. I wouldn't be surprised if his dislike for dress clothes was sensory. The clothes he preferred were all soft, comfortable clothes such as sweatshirts and leather jackets. Nor did Einstein's hair meet the norm for men's hair fashions. Long, wild hair that was not cut was definitely not the style. He just did not care.

  It has been suggested by Oliver Sacks that the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was probably a high-functioning person with autism. He did not talk until he was four years old, and he was considered a dullard with no talent. It is likely that his family history included depression, because both of his brothers committed suicide. He had great mechanical ability, and at age ten he constructed a sewing machine. Young Wittgenstein was a poor student, and he never wore a tie or hat. He used formal, pedantic language and used the polite form of “sie” in German to address his fellow students, which alienated them and caused them to tease him. Overly formal speech is common in high-functioning autistics.

  Vincent van Gogh's artwork reveals great emotion and brilliance, but as a child and a young man he had some autistic traits. Like Einstein and Wittgenstein, van Gogh showed no outstanding abilities. Biographers describe him as an aloof, odd child. He threw many tantrums and liked to go in the fields alone. He did not discover his artistic talents until he was twenty-seven years old. Prior to establishing a career in art, he had many of the characteristics of an adult with Asperger's syndrome. He was ill groomed and blunt. In his book Great Abnormals, Vernon W. Grant describes his voice and mannerisms, which also resemble those of an adult with autistic tendencies: “He talked with tension and a nervous rasp in his voice. He talked with complete self-absorption and little thought for the comfort or interest in his listeners.” Van Gogh wanted to have a meaningful existence, and this was one of his motivations fo
r studying art. His early paintings were of working people, to whom he related. According to Grant, van Gogh was forever a child and had a very limited ability to respond to the needs and feelings of others. He could love mankind in the abstract, but when forced to deal with a real person, he was “too self-enclosed to be tolerant.”

  Van Gogh's art became bright and brilliant after he was admitted to an asylum. The onset of epilepsy may explain his switch from dull to extremely bright colors. Seizures changed his perception. The swirls in the sky in his painting Starry Night are similar to the sensory distortions that some people with autism have. Autistics with severe sensory processing problems see the edges of objects vibrate and get jumbled sensory input. These are not hallucinations but perceptual distortions.

  Bill Gates, the head of Microsoft and the inventor of Windows, is another person who has some autistic traits. Time magazine was the first to make the connection, comparing Oliver Sacks's New Yorker article about me with John Seabrook's article on Gates in the same magazine. Some of the traits that were similar were repetitive rocking and poor social skills. Gates rocks during business meetings and on airplanes; autistic children and adults rock when they are nervous. Other autistic traits he exhibits are lack of eye contact and poor social skills. Seabrook wrote, “Social niceties are not what Bill Gates is about. Good spelling is not what Bill Gates is about.” As a child, Gates had remarkable savant skills. He could recite long passages from the Bible without making a single mistake. His voice lacks tone, and he looks young and boyish for his age. Clothes and hygiene are low on his list of important things.