Thinking About Thinking

Temple Grandin on a New Approach for Thinking about Thinking
Temple Grandin was diagnosed with autism, but that didn’t stop him from progressing. During his school years, he realized many thingsabout his thought process. “When I was young, I assumed that everybody thought in photo-realistic pictures the way I do”, he relates. Young Temple visualized everything, like church steeples, whichdenied proficiency in subjects like algebra, but enhanced his abilities in arts.
He has found his ability to think in pictures to be a great asset in his business of designing livestockfacilities for cattle. He observed the behavioral patterns in different animals and visualized many facilities, from which he selected ones that could provide the most beneficial environment for them,despite less effective contributions made by people who possessed the same degree of knowledge as he did.
The answer to this peculiar observation was, as he later came to conclude after investigationon many autistic and non-autistic people, the existence of three types of thinking styles that were common in people with autism, each of those thinking styles bringing amazing results separately.Grandin, then concludes, that in order to complement a thinking style (not necessarily of an autistic person), another one must be put to use at the same time, that is, teamwork. He shares theexample of the disaster at the nuclear plants in Japan, where the reactor meltdown could have been avoided if a visual thinker (Grandin’s type of thinking style) had been involved in the constructionof the plant by imagining water cascading into the basement, thus, preparing countermeasures against a hypothetical submersion, which happened when a tsunami hit Japan last year.

“I used to thinkthat 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.” – Temple Grandin