Unicornio

Temple Grandin on a New Approach for Thinking About Thinking

When I was young, I assumed that everybody thought in photo-realistic pictures the way I do. When I think about a church steeple, I see many specific steeples in my imagination. They pop into my mind like a series of slides projected on a screen. My concept of a church steeple is based on putting many examples in a file in my brainlabeled “church steeples.” It was a mind-expanding experience for me to learn that other people process information in a different way.
As a person with autism, I have the typical profile of an area of great skill and an area of difficulty. Algebra was impossible because there was nothing to visualize, but I excelled at art. Thinking in pictures has been a great asset in my business of designinglivestock facilities for cattle. I can visualize projects in my mind before they are built. I observed that cattle often refused to walk over shadows, and they were spooked by sparkling reflections or shiny metal on wet floors. These things were obvious to me, but many previous designers had failed to see them.
Autism is a developmental disorder that ranges from very severe, in which a childremains nonverbal, to mild, including in highly intelligent people with specialized talents. After I wrote my book Thinking in Pictures, I talked to many people and I learned that there are three types of thinking styles that are common in people with autism. In addition to visual thinking, there is pattern thinking and word thinking. Each of the three types of thinking is a continuum. People withoutautism may have some specialization, but people with autism are often on the extreme end of a continuum.
A pattern-thinking child typically has great ability in math and difficulty reading. Children who think in mathematical patterns have given me fabulous, complex origami creations. When I asked an astrophysicist with a mathematical mind about church steeples, he saw abstract patterns of motion,people making steeples with their hands. There were no generalized or realistic pictures. (To learn more about the pattern-thinking mind, read Daniel Tammet’s book Born on a Blue Day.)
The word thinker may be poor at drawing but have a huge memory for facts such as sports statistics or film stars.
Different kinds of minds should work together. When they do, they complement each other’s skills.For example, I leave it to the pattern thinkers to design a nuclear power plant, but I think a photo-realistic visual thinker would have spotted a fatal flaw in the safety systems of the Japanese Fukushima nuclear reactors. The emergency generators for the cooling pumps were in low areas. When the tsunami hit, the generators were submerged and the reactors melted down. A visual thinker would havebeen able to imagine water cascading into the basement.
I used to think that stupidity was the cause of people not being able to see things that were obvious to me. Today I realize it was not stupidity; it is just a different way of thinking.
Pay attention to:
The different way Temple Grandin processed and stored information.
The ways in which her autism helped her succeed in her field.
Thethree thinking styles common in people with autism and what each one means.
How she believes this different styles should complement each other.

When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink?
Little Franklin Delano Roosevelt sits primly on a stool, his white skirt spread smoothly over his lap, his hands clasping a hat trimmed with a marabou feather. Shoulder-length hair and patent leather party shoescomplete the ensemble.
We find the look unsettling today, yet social convention of 1884, when FDR was photographed at age 2 1/2, dictated that boys wore dresses until age 6 or 7, also the time of their first haircut. Franklin’s outfit was considered gender-neutral.
But nowadays people just have to know the sex of a baby or young child at first glance, says Jo B. Paoletti, a historian at the...