Thinking In Pictures Part 6

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 a.s.sociated 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 a.s.sociation.

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 Inst.i.tute 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 Ma.s.sachusetts, 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 a.s.sumed 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 by 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 a.s.sociates 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 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 a.s.sociations. If making a.s.sociations is not considered thought, then I would have to conclude that I am unable to think. Thinking in visual pictures and making a.s.sociations 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 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 a.s.sociating sensory-based memories such as smells, sounds, or visual images into categories. My categorical method of thinking is explained in the Chapter 1 update. 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 a.s.sociating 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 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 s.p.a.ces. 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 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 S SECOND C 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 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 autistic children. I was not surprised when I learned that two n.o.bel 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 doc.u.mented. Three different studies reported in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders and one in the and one in the American Journal of Medical Genetics American Journal of Medical Genetics indicate that there is a relations.h.i.+p 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 compa.s.s 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. indicate that there is a relations.h.i.+p 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 compa.s.s 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.

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 cla.s.sroom. 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 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 a.s.sociational 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 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. 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 cl.u.s.ter 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 cl.u.s.ter of genes that cause autism, manic-depression, and schizophrenia probably has a beneficial effect in small doses. In her book Touched with Fire 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 leaders.h.i.+p, 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 a.s.sociated 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 gla.s.ses 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 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 Creating Minds, Howard Gardner outlined the creative lives of seven great twentieth-century thinkers, including Einstein, Pica.s.so, 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 relations.h.i.+ps.

Some scientists are strictly a.n.a.lytical thinkers. The physicist Richard Feynman denied the validity of poetry and art. In his biography of Feynman, Genius 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 a.n.a.lytical 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 Journal of Learning Disabilities that Einstein silently repeated words to himself until age seven and did not freely a.s.sociate 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 that Einstein silently repeated words to himself until age seven and did not freely a.s.sociate 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 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 s.p.a.ce and time." He had tremendous ability to concentrate and could work for hours or days on the same problem.

In Einstein Lived Here Einstein Lived Here, Abraham Pais wrote, "To be creative in establis.h.i.+ng 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 relations.h.i.+p is. His deep pa.s.sion 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 relations.h.i.+ps between objects far more than in relations.h.i.+ps between people.

In their book, The Stigma of Genius The Stigma of Genius, the biographers Joe L. Kincheloe, s.h.i.+rley 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 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 relations.h.i.+ps 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 const.i.tutes 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 a.s.sociations between some of the specific examples he gave and general principles. The a.s.sociation 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 a.s.sociative 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 sweats.h.i.+rts and leather jackets. Nor did Einstein's hair meet the norm for men's hair fas.h.i.+ons. 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 establis.h.i.+ng 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 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 for 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 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. 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 Time magazine was the first to make the connection, comparing Oliver Sacks's magazine was the first to make the connection, comparing Oliver Sacks's New Yorker New Yorker article about me with John Seabrook's article on Gates in the same magazine. Some of the traits that were similar were repet.i.tive 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 pa.s.sages 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. article about me with John Seabrook's article on Gates in the same magazine. Some of the traits that were similar were repet.i.tive 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 pa.s.sages 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.

Mild autistic traits can provide the singlemindedness that gets things done. Hans Asperger stresses the value of people with Asperger's syndrome, recognizing that they often achieve success in highly specialized academic professions. Individuals with Asperger's syndrome who are not r.e.t.a.r.ded or afflicted with extreme rigidity of thinking can excel. Asperger concludes that narrowmindedness can be very valuable and can lead to outstanding achievement.

There are few Einsteins today. Maybe they all flunk the Graduate Record Exam or get poor grades. I had to get through school by going through the back door, because I failed the math part of the Graduate Record Exam. My grades in high school were poor until I became motivated in my senior year. In college I did well in biology and psychology but had great difficulty with French and math. Most of the great geniuses have had very uneven skills. They are usually terrible in one subject and brilliant in their special area. Richard Feynman had very low scores on the Graduate Record Exam in English and history. His physics score was perfect, but his art score was in the seventh percentile.

Even Einstein, after graduating from the Zurich Federal Inst.i.tute of Technology, was not able to obtain an academic appointment. He annoyed big important professors when he told them that their theories were wrong. He had to take a job at the Swiss patent office. While he was a patent clerk, he wrote his famous theory of relativity and got it published in a physics journal. Today it would be extremely difficult for a patent clerk to get a paper published in a physics journal. If Einstein had lived today, his paper probably would have been rejected and he would have stayed in the patent office.

There are many examples of great scientists, artists, and writers who were poor students. Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary theory, was not able to master a foreign language. When he left school, he was considered only an ordinary student. Darwin wrote in his autobiography, Life and Letters Life and Letters, which was edited by his son Francis, "I was considered by all my masters and by my father as a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard of intellect." He found life at Cambridge University dull and did poorly in mathematics. Darwin's saving grace was his pa.s.sion for collecting. This provided the motivation to go on his famous voyage on the Beagle Beagle, where he first formulated the theory of evolution.

Gregor Mendel, the father of modern genetics, was unable to pa.s.s the exam to get a high school teaching license, according to Guinagh Kevin in his book Inspired Amateurs Inspired Amateurs. Mendel failed the exam several times. He conducted his cla.s.sic experiments in the corner of a monastery garden with pea plants. When he presented the results at his university thesis defense, he failed to get his degree. n.o.body paid any attention to his wild theories, but fortunately 120 copies of his paper survived and were recognized as the works of genius that they are after his death. Today his principles are taught in every high school science cla.s.s.

During my career, I have met many brilliant visual thinkers working in the maintenance departments of meat plants. Some of these people are great designers and invent all kinds of innovative equipment, but they were disillusioned and frustrated at school. Our educational system weeds these people out of the system instead of turning them into world-cla.s.s scientists.

Autistic savants who can accomplish amazing feats of memory, drawing, calculation, or reproduction of musical compositions usually have almost no social skills. Until recently, many professionals a.s.sumed that savants could not be creative. They thought that their brains acted as tape recorders or photocopiers. But close examination of savant drawings and music shows that there can be true creativity, and these skills can be developed. In Extraordinary People Extraordinary People, Darold A. Treffert cites two cases in which savants' social skills and musical and artistic talents have both improved. These abilities will grow if the person is encouraged and supported in this work by a good teacher. Stephen Wilts.h.i.+re, the famous autistic savant from England, draws fabulously detailed pictures of buildings and also has great musical ability In his book An Anthropologist on Mars An Anthropologist on Mars, Oliver Sacks describes how Wilts.h.i.+re's ability to improvise musically has steadily improved and how when he sings all signs of autism disappear, only to reappear when the music stops. Music transforms him and may temporarily open the door to emotion. When he does his detailed beautiful drawings of buildings he acts autistic. Contrary to popular belief, savants do not always have an absolute photographic memory. When Dr. Sacks asked him to make several drawings of his house there were mistakes such as an added chimney or a window in the wrong place. This was partly due to not having enough time to fully study the house. When Stephen makes drawings of imaginary cities he takes bits and pieces of building from his memory and puts them together in new ways. This is the same way I do design work.

It's clear that the genetic traits that can cause severe disabilities can also provide the giftedness and genius that has produced some of the world's greatest art and scientific discoveries. There is no black-and-white dividing line between normal and abnormal. I believe there is a reason that disabilities such as autism, severe manic-depression, and schizophrenia remain in our gene pool even though there is much suffering as a result. Researchers speculate that schizophrenia may be the evolutionary price that has to be paid for abilities in language and social interactions. Tim Crow, of the Clinical Research Centre in London, points out that the incidence of schizophrenia is the same in most societies and that it is not decreasing, even though schizophrenics are less likely than others to have children.

The genes that cause schizophrenia may confer advantages in a milder form. This may also be true for manic-depression and autism. In my own case, I believe my contributions to humane slaughtering of cattle and improved treatment of animals have been facilitated by my abnormality. But none of my work would have been possible had I not developed a correlative system of belief.

Update: Thinking with the Subconscious Mind The Asperger's Syndrome diagnosis was not used much in the United States when Thinking in Pictures Thinking in Pictures was written. One of my biggest concerns today with the Asperger's diagnosis is that students who should be in gifted and talented programs get shunted off into the special education track where they do not belong. I have seen students with IQs of 150 where nothing was being done to develop their intellects and prepare them for careers. Dr. Simon Baron-Cohen at the University of Cambridge in England conducted a study that showed that there were more engineers in the family histories of people with autism. Another study showed that scientists and accountants were overrepresented in autistic family histories. Many famous scientists and musicians such as Carl Sagan and Mozart were probably Asperger's. Famous people on the autism/Asperger spectrum are profiled in books and on Web sites. was written. One of my biggest concerns today with the Asperger's diagnosis is that students who should be in gifted and talented programs get shunted off into the special education track where they do not belong. I have seen students with IQs of 150 where nothing was being done to develop their intellects and prepare them for careers. Dr. Simon Baron-Cohen at the University of Cambridge in England conducted a study that showed that there were more engineers in the family histories of people with autism. Another study showed that scientists and accountants were overrepresented in autistic family histories. Many famous scientists and musicians such as Carl Sagan and Mozart were probably Asperger's. Famous people on the autism/Asperger spectrum are profiled in books and on Web sites.

Baron-Cohen asks an important question: is Asperger Syndrome a disability? Where is the dividing line between normal and abnormal? He is referring to mild Asperger's with no speech delays where the student is working at normal or above school grade levels. Brain scan studies have shown all kinds of abnormalities in the amygdale (emotion center), frontal cortex, and many other parts of the brain. At what point do these differences in the sizes of different brain structures become just variations on the more extreme end of the normal range?

In the updates of previous chapters I discussed the research on the lack of connectivity between different parts of the brain. Sections that are far apart are underconnected but local areas in the brain may have overconnectivity Dr. S. F. Witelson in the Department of Psychiatry at McMasters University in Canada studied Einstein's brain. He found that the area responsible for mathematical reasoning was 15 percent larger. The mathematical area also had more extensive connections to the visual parts of the brain. It was like having the "math" and "art" departments fused together. Local overconnectivity may explain Einstein's genius.

I Think with My Subconscious In most people, language covers up the primary sensory based thinking that people share with animals. Sensory based thinking is subconscious in most people. I think with the primary sensory based subconscious areas of the brain. Reading through the scientific literature on different types of memory, I came to the realization that depending on the type of psychology one was studying, there are different names for conscious and subconscious memory. There are two types of long term memory and they are probably the same thing, regardless of what they are called. Below is a chart showing the different pairs of names that mean the same thing.

Conscious memory Unconscious memory Unconscious memory Verbal (word memory) Sensory based memory (visual, motor, auditory, etc.) Sensory based memory (visual, motor, auditory, etc.) Explicit memory Implicit memory Implicit memory Declarative memory Procedural memory Procedural memory More easily forgotten Resistant to forgetting Resistant to forgetting

Since I think with the subconscious, repression does not occur and denial is impossible. My "search engine" has access to the entire library of detailed sensory based memories.

My memory is not automatic. I have to push the "save" b.u.t.ton to store a memory in my database. Things which are of little interest to me such as hotel room decor are not remembered unless the place was really unique. To push the "save" b.u.t.ton requires either conscious effort or a strong emotion. The brain circuits that connect emotions to my "save" b.u.t.ton are intact. However, I can search through old memories of really bad events, such as being fired from a job, with no emotion. At the time I was fired I cried for two days. The emotion was experienced in the present but the memory in my database of being fired can be accessed without emotion. It took me a long time to figure out that most normal people cannot open a "bad experience file" in their brain without experiencing emotion along with the memory.

Privileged Access People with savant skills are often able to perform tasks better than normal people because they have direct access to primary areas of the brain and experience no interference from language. Simon Baron-Cohen's research showed that people on the autism spectrum are superior to normal people on the "hidden figure" test. In this test a person has to locate a figure such as a triangle hidden in another larger figure. When this task is done in a brain scanner, the autistic person's brain is most active in primary visual systems for object features. It is like a direct line to the "picture department." In the normal person, the frontal cortex and other areas are activated and may interfere with the visual task.

A. W. Snyder at the University of Sydney found that savantlike drawing skills emerged when the frontal cortex of a normal person was impaired with low-frequency magnetic pulses. Turning off the frontal cortex also enabled normal people to be better proofreaders. The frontal cortex is connected to everything in the brain and it interferes with perceiving details.

Work by Dr. Bruce Miller at the University of California provides hard evidence that primary visual thinking and musical parts of the brain are sometimes blocked by the frontal cortex. He studied patients who have a type of Alzheimer's disease called frontal-temporal lobe dementia. As the disease destroys language parts of the brain, art and music skills emerged in people who had no previous interest in art or music. One patient created paintings that won awards in art shows. As language deteriorated, the art became more photo-realistic and the person's behavior resembled autism. One person who lost all language designed a sprinkler head.

Since I think with my subconscious I can see the decisionmaking process that is not perceived by most people. One day I was driving on the freeway when an elk ran across the road. A picture flashed into my mind of a car rear-ending me. That would be the consequence for putting on the brakes. Another picture flashed up of an elk cras.h.i.+ng through the winds.h.i.+eld, which would be the consequence of swerving. A third picture came up of the elk pa.s.sing in front of the car. That would happen if I just slowed down. Now three pictures were on the computer screen in my mind. I clicked on the slowing down choice and avoided an accident. I think what I have just described is how animals think.

11.

Stairway to Heaven Religion and Belief AS A TOTALLY LOGICAL and scientific person, I continually add data to my library of knowledge and constantly update both my scientific knowledge and my beliefs about G.o.d. Since my thought processes use a series of specific examples to form a general principle, it makes logical sense to me that general principles should always be modified when new information becomes available. It is beyond my comprehension to accept anything on faith alone, because of the fact that my thinking is governed by logic instead of emotion. On June 14, 1968, while I was a soph.o.m.ore in college, I wrote in my diary: I develop my views from the existing pool of knowledge and I will adapt my views when I learn more. The only permanent view that I have is that there is a G.o.d. My views are based on the basic fundamental laws of nature and physics that I am now aware of. As man learns more about his environment I will change my theory to accommodate the new knowledge. Religion should be dynamic and always advancing, not in a state of stagnation.

When I was ten or eleven, it seemed totally illogical to me that a Protestant religion was better than the Jewish or Catholic religion.I had a proper religious upbringing, with prayers every night, church on Sunday, and Sunday school every week. I was raised in the Episcopal church, but our Catholic cook believed that Catholicism was the only way to get to heaven. The psychiatrist that I started seeing in the fourth grade was Jewish. It made no sense to me that my religion was better than theirs. To my mind, all methods and denominations of religious ceremony were equally valid, and I still hold this belief today. Different religious faiths all achieve communication with G.o.d and contain guiding moral principles. I've met many autistic people who share my belief that all religions are valid and valuable. Many also believe in reincarnation, because it seems more logical to them than heaven and h.e.l.l.

There are also autistic people who adopt very rigid fundamentalist beliefs and become obsessed with religion. One girl prayed for hours and went to church every day. In her case, it was an obsession instead of a belief, and she was kicked out of several churches. Low doses of the drug Anafranil allow her to practice her faith in a more moderate and reasonable manner. In another case, a young man had disturbing obsessive thoughts that ran through his head. Intensive prayer helped control them.

People at the Kanner end of the autism continuum may interpret religious symbolism in a very concrete manner. Charles Hart describes his eight-year-old son's reaction to a film in Sunday school about Abraham's being willing to sacrifice his son to G.o.d. Ted watched the film and pa.s.sively said "Cannibals" at the end.

For many people with autism, religion is an intellectual rather than emotional activity. Music is the one exception. Some people feel much more religious when their partic.i.p.ation is accompanied with extensive use of music. One autistic design engineer I know said that religious feeling is utterly missing for him, except when he hears Mozart; then he feels an electrifying resonance. I myself am most likely to feel religious in a church when the organist plays beautiful music and the priest chants. Organ music has an effect on me that other music does not have.

Music and rhythm may help open some doors to emotion. Recently I played a tape of Gregorian chants, and the combination of the rhythm and the rising and lowering pitch was soothing and hypnotic. I could get lost in it. There have been no formal studies on the effect of music, but therapists have known for years that some autistic children can learn to sing before they can talk. Ralph Mauer, at the University of Florida, has observed that some autistic savants speak in the rhythm of poetic blank verse. I have strong musical a.s.sociations, and old songs trigger place-specific memories.

In high school I came to the conclusion that G.o.d was an ordering force that was in everything after Mr. Carlock explained the second law of thermodynamics, the law of physics that states that the universe will gradually lose order and have increasing entropy. Entropy is the increase of disorder in a closed thermodynamic system. I found the idea of the universe becoming more and more disordered profoundly disturbing. To visualize how the second law worked, I imagined a model universe consisting of two rooms. This represented a closed thermodynamic system. One room was warm and the other was cold. This represented the state of maximum order. If a small window were opened between the rooms, the air would gradually mix until both rooms were lukewarm. The model was now in a state of maximum disorder, or entropy. The scientist James Clark Maxwell proposed that order could be restored if a little man at the window opened and closed it to allow warm atoms to go to the one side and cold atoms to go to the other side. The only problem is that an outside energy source is required to operate the window. When I was a college soph.o.m.ore, I called this ordering force G.o.d.

Many of my heroes, including Einstein, did not believe in a personal G.o.d. In 1941, Einstein wrote that the scientist's "religious feeling takes the form of rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that compared with it, all systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection." When he was eleven years old, he went through a religious phase and practiced the Jewish dietary laws and adhered to a literal interpretation of Scripture. A year later this came to an abrupt end when he was exposed to science. When he read scientific books, he concluded that the Bible stories were not literally true.

In his later years, Einstein wrote: "Out yonder there was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking. The contemplation of this world beckoned like a liberation." He felt that he was right to switch from fundamentalist beliefs to a broader view of religion. He went on to say in the same paper: "The road to this paradise was not as comfortable and alluring as the road to the religious paradise; but it has proved itself trustworthy, and I have never regretted having chosen it."

But my favorite of Einstein's words on religion is "Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind." I like this because both science and religion are needed to answer life's great questions. Even scientists such as Richard Feynman, who rejected religion and poetry as sources of truth, concede grudgingly that there are questions that science cannot answer.

I am deeply interested in the new chaos theory, because it means that order can arise out of disorder and randomness. I've read many popular articles about it, because I want scientific proof that the universe is orderly. I do not have the mathematical ability to understand chaos theory fully, but it confirms the idea that order can come from disorder and randomness. James Gleick, in the book Chaos Chaos, explains that snowflakes are ordered symmetrical patterns that form in random air turbulence. Slight changes in the air turbulence will change the basic shape of each snowflake in random and unexpected ways. It is impossible to predict the shape of a snowflake by studying the initial atmospheric conditions. This is why weather is so hard to predict. Weather patterns have order, but random changes affect the order in random, unpredictable ways.

I hated the second law of thermodynamics because I believed that the universe should should be orderly. Over the years I have collected many articles about spontaneous order and pattern formation in nature. Susumu Ohno, a geneticist, has found cla.s.sical music in slime and mouse genes. He converted the genetic code of four nucleotide bases into a musical scale. He found that the order of the bases in our DNA is not random, and when the order is played, it sounds like something by Bach or a Chopin nocturne. Patterns in flowers and leaf growth in plants develop in mathematical sequence of the Fibonacci numbers and the golden mean of the Greeks. be orderly. Over the years I have collected many articles about spontaneous order and pattern formation in nature. Susumu Ohno, a geneticist, has found cla.s.sical music in slime and mouse genes. He converted the genetic code of four nucleotide bases into a musical scale. He found that the order of the bases in our DNA is not random, and when the order is played, it sounds like something by Bach or a Chopin nocturne. Patterns in flowers and leaf growth in plants develop in mathematical sequence of the Fibonacci numbers and the golden mean of the Greeks.

Patterns spontaneously arise in many purely physical systems. Convection patterns in heated fluids sometimes resemble a pattern of cells. Scientists at the University of California have discovered that silver atoms deposited on a platinum surface spontaneously form ordered patterns. The temperature of the platinum determines the type of pattern, and order can be created from random motion. A small change in temperature totally changes the pattern. At one temperature triangles are formed, and at another temperature hexagons form, and further heating of the surface makes the silver atoms revert to triangles in a different orientation. Another interesting finding is that everything in the universe, ranging from amino acids and bacteria to plants and sh.e.l.ls, has handedness. The universe is full of self-ordering systems.

Probably within my lifetime, scientists will determine how to create life from basic chemicals. Even when they have accomplished this task, though, they will not have answered the question that has plagued people for all time: what happens when you die?

Questioning Immortality and Life's Meaning As a young college student I had never given much thought to what happens after death, but then I started working with cattle in the Arizona feedlots. Did the animals just turn into beef, or did something else happen? This made me uneasy, and my science-based religious beliefs could not provide a satisfactory answer. I thought it must be very comforting to have the kind of blind faith that enables one to believe that one will have an afterlife in heaven.

Prior to going to Arizona State University, I had never seen the outside of a slaughterhouse and I had never seen an animal slaughtered. It wasn't until I first drove past the Swift meatpacking plant that I began to develop a concrete visual system for understanding what would become my life's work. In my diary on March 10, 1971, I wrote about a dream I had: "I walked up to Swift's and put my hands on the outside of the white wall. I had the feeling that I was touching the sacred altar." A month later I drove past Swift's again, and I could see all the cattle out in the pens, waiting for the end to come. It was then I realized that man believes in heaven, h.e.l.l, or reincarnation because the idea that after the cattle walk into the slaughterhouse it is all over forever is too horrible to conceive. Like the concept of infinity, it is too ego-shattering for people to endure.

A few days later I got up the courage to go to Swift's and ask if I could go on a tour. I was told that they did not give tours. This just heightened my interest in this forbidden place. Being denied entrance made my holy land even holier. This was not a symbolic door, it was reality that had to be faced. I was attempting to answer many of life's big questions. I made many entries in my diary at that time.

April 7, 1971: "It is important that the animals not be defiled at the slaughterhouse. Hopefully they will be allowed to die with some sort of dignity. The animals probably feel more pain when they are put through the cattle chute to be branded or castrated."

May 18, 1971: "What is really significant in life? I used to think being a great scientist would be the most significant thing in the world that I could do. Now I have some second thoughts about it.There are many different paths that I could follow right now and I do not know which one leads to significance."

For me, religion was a