The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum (18 page)

8.   Ferris wheel, with seats swinging from the circle

I wasn’t sure if that drawing was legal, but what the heck. I was on a roll. So I drew a:

9.   Hamster wheel—with a base, so that it wouldn’t fall over

Then I wondered if I could use the circle as the center of a larger drawing, in which case I could draw all sorts of flowers.

This test is a variation on an old classroom exercise I often use; let’s call it Thinking Outside the Brick. I ask, “How many uses can you think of for a brick?” Right away I’ll get the obvious answers. You can use it to build a wall. You can throw it through a window. It usually takes the students a while (with the help of a hint or two from me) before they realize that they can change the form of the brick. You can grind it up and use it as a pigment in paint. You can chop it up into cubes, paint dots on the cubes, and play dice.

The trick to coming up with novel uses for a brick is to not be attached to its identity as a brick. The trick is to reconceive it as a nonbrick.

I think that bottom-up, details-first thinkers like myself are more likely to have creative breakthroughs just because we don’t know where we’re going. We accumulate details without knowing what they mean and without necessarily attaching emotional significance to them. We seek connections among them without knowing where they’re taking us. We hope those associations will lead us to the big picture—the forest—but we don’t know where we will be until we arrive there. We
expect
surprises.

Earlier in this chapter, I mentioned that autistic people generally tend to see details better than neurotypicals, and then I said, “Let’s start there and see where it takes us.” It’s taken us here: to a creative leap about creative leaps—specifically, that the autistic brain might be more likely, on average, to make a creative leap. An attention to details, a hefty memory, and an ability to make associations can all work together to make the unlikely creative leap ever more likely.

In his book
Be Different: Adventures of a Free-Range Aspergian,
John Elder Robison described this progression of creativity—one that led to his career creating sound effects and musical instruments and designing laser shows and video games. He wrote that he first became interested in music as an adolescent, because he was fascinated with the patterns that music waves made on an oscilloscope, a device that displays electric signs and lines and shapes on a small screen. “Each signal had its own unique shape,” he wrote. These signals were the
bottom-up details.

He spent eight to ten hours a day “absorbing music and unraveling how the waves looked, and how electrical signals worked,” he wrote. “I watched and listened and watched some more until my eyes and ears became interchangeable.” In other words, he was storing up
memories.

“By then, I could look at a pattern on the scope and know what it sounded like, and I could look at a sound and know what it looked like.” Based on those memories of details, he had taught himself how to make the necessary
associations.

Then he was ready for the creative leap:

If I set the scope to sweep slowly, the rhythm of the music dominated the screen. Loud passages would appear as broad streaks, while quiet passages thinned down to a single tiny squiggle. A slightly higher sweep speed showed me the big, heavy, slow waves of the bass line and the kick drum as wide squiggles. Most of the energy was contained in those low notes. Up higher, with a faster scope setting, I found the vocals. At the top of it all lay the jagged fast waves from the cymbals.

Every instrument had a distinct pattern, even when they were all playing the same melody. With practice, I learned how to distinguish a passage played on an organ from the same music played on a guitar. But I didn’t stop there. As I listened to the instruments, I realized each one had its own voice.
“You’re nuts,” my friends said, but I was right. The musicians all had their own ways of playing, but their instruments were unique, too.

The emphasis is mine. The neurotypical response to his insight was to dismiss it. But Robison could hear what other people missed.

Actually, he could
see
it: “I saw the whole thing as a great mental puzzle—adding the waves from different instruments in my head, and figuring out what the result would look like.” He was, he learned, working in a kind of waveform mathematics, even though he didn’t think of his work as math.

Seeing waves, adding them in his head—that sounded like visual thinking, as in “thinking in pictures.” That’s my kind of thinking. But I definitely didn’t see the kinds of things Robison described. I saw concrete examples from my past, not abstractions. He and I both used our autistic brains to be creative, and the creativity was visual, yet his kind of creativity wasn’t my kind of creativity.

In figuring out how to make the most of the autistic brain’s strengths, I apparently still had at least one more creative leap to make.

7

This is mostly good
[sic]
, well rounded book. However, Dr. Grandin does make some glaring over generalizations, and often seems to assume all autistic people are like herself. While she admits this is not true in place
[sic]
, she will go to the very next paragraph and say something like, “because all autistic people are visual . . . ,” when, in fact, some autistic people have severe visual processing difficulties and are not visual at all. While I can relate to most of what she says as an autistic person, I know many who cannot.

L
IKE MANY AUTHORS
, I read reviews of my books on Amazon.com. This review, from 1998, was one of the first to appear for my book
Thinking in Pictures,
and I admit it really stung. I didn’t exactly treat it like hate mail. I didn’t think somebody was trying to hurt me. But I didn’t take it lightly either. Some autistic people “are not visual at all”? Could it be true?

I wrote
Thinking in Pictures
because I had come to understand that the way I saw the world wasn’t the way other people saw the world. Even after I learned that I’m autistic, I didn’t think about whether autism affected the way I saw the world. When I started designing livestock facilities in the 1970s, I couldn’t understand why other designers didn’t see obvious mistakes—mistakes that I could see at a glance. I thought those people were stupid. Of course, I understand now that we were just looking at the world through very different sets of eyes—or, I should say, through very different kinds of brains. So I had been mistaken. Not everyone thinks in pictures? Okay. But people with autism do.

I’d had good reason to think that all autistic people were visual thinkers and only visual thinkers. As far back as 1982, when I was writing a paper
that later appeared in the
Journal of Orthomolecular Psychiatry,
I came across several pieces of research that supported these assumptions. One study reported that autistic children scored normally on the Wechsler block design and object assembly tests. Another study reported that autistic children seemed to “perform badly on tests which require verbal or sequencing skills, even if the tests do not involve the use of speech.” On the basis of this research and my own experience of seeing the world, I felt comfortable with my conclusion: “Studies of autistic children by many different researchers indicate the visual spatial nature of the autistic mind.”

Well, I was right. That’s what those studies did indicate. But what about that Amazon reviewer—and other Amazon reviewers who came along to echo the complaint?

Ever since the first review appeared, I’ve given a great deal of thought to the topic of different ways of thinking. We can reconceive the autistic brain as a repository for certain strengths—the ability to pick out details, maintain a large database of memories, make associations. But of course, autistic brains don’t all see the world the same way—despite what I once thought. Autistic brains might tend to have these strengths in common, but how each individual uses them varies. What kinds of details? What kinds of memories? What kinds of associations? The answers to these questions depend on what type of thinker you are, because a brain that focuses on words is not going to reach the same conclusions as a brain that focuses on pictures.

In fact, my pursuit of this topic has led me to propose a new category of thinker in addition to the traditional visual and verbal. At this point, this third category is only a hypothesis.
But it has transformed my thinking about autistic people’s strengths. And I’ve even found scientific support for this hypothesis.

For years I had been giving lectures, and I had made an assumption without even knowing it: I think in pictures; I’m autistic; therefore, all autistic people think in pictures. Made sense to me. If you say the word
train
to me, I automatically see a subway train in New York; a train that goes right through the campus of the university where I teach; a coal train in Fort Morgan, near my home; a train I rode in England that was standing room only, full of soccer hooligans who took up all the seats and wouldn’t let anybody else sit for the whole, miserable four-hour ride; a train in Denmark where kids teased me until the newsstand lady made them go away.

But now I wanted to find out whether the autistic people in the audience actually did think the same way I did. So I started asking the audience members who introduced themselves to me after my lectures, “What was”—or “is,” if I was talking to a child—“your favorite subject in school?” Often the answer wasn’t art class, as you would expect from a visual thinker. Instead, a lot of the time it was history.

History?
I thought.
History is full of facts, and facts are full of words, not pictures.

So, okay. People with autism can think in visual terms or verbal terms, just like neurotypicals. That Amazon reviewer was right.

But then one day in early 2001 I got an advance copy of a book
in the mail,
Exiting Nirvana: A Daughter’s Life with Autism,
by Clara Claiborne Park. The publisher wanted to know if I would write a blurb for it—a quote recommending the book that would appear on the back cover. I already knew about Clara and her daughter Jessica, or Jessy. Jessy was born about ten years after me, when the medical consensus about autism had shifted toward the psychoanalytic search for psychic wounds. Since Jessy is younger than me, Clara Park had to battle the medical establishment constantly in an effort to get people to understand that the source of her daughter’s behavior wasn’t in her mind. It was in her brain.

I had written about Jessy a little bit in
Thinking in Pictures
; I referred to a 1974 paper that examined the elaborate system of symbols and numbers that Jessy had invented in order to navigate her life. Things she considered very good, like rock music, she labeled with four doors and no clouds. Things she considered pretty good, like classical music, rated two doors and two clouds. And the spoken word deserved zero doors and four clouds—the worst rating.

So when I received that advance copy of
Exiting Nirvana,
I was eager to read it. What I found, though, shocked me.

I knew Jessy was an artist, but nothing prepared me for what I saw in this book. Her art was unlike anything I’d ever seen. It was full of psychedelic colors—vibrant, almost neon shades of orange and pink and turquoise and chartreuse and tangerine and plum. But she applied these to objects that would never have those colors. The cables of a bridge. The windows of an office building. The siding of a house.

What category did this kind of mind belong to? Visual or verbal? Visual, obviously. But that couldn’t be the whole story, because I’m a visual thinker, and I sure didn’t think like
that.

She painted the objects in her artwork in photorealistic detail from memory, so she clearly could think in pictures, just as I do. But her artwork wasn’t like my drawings; the pictures she saw in her mind weren’t my kinds of pictures. When Jessy drew a building, the emphasis was on colors and patterns. When I drew a structure, the emphasis was on the details of the different surfaces—round pipes, concrete grooving, metal gratings. Jessy might have had files full of images in her mind, just like me, but she could manipulate those images in ways I couldn’t begin to imagine.

So what kind of mind
was
hers? How was her brain wired? Did my system of dividing the world of autism into picture thinkers and word-fact thinkers deserve a rating of zero doors and four clouds?