Thinking in Pictures: And Other Reports from My Life with Autism by Temple Grandin.

3/5 rating. 206 pages.

Book #22 of 2022. Read May 4, 2022.

This book is truly fascinating. Temple has autism and does an incredible job of explaining some of her quirks she has because of it. The comparisons between how she experiences autism as someone towards the high-functioning end and someone with more severe autism are very informative.

It’s obvious how supported Temple was throughout her life and she is quick to acknowledge how much this has helped her along her path. Her mother got her into an early-education program which is very important in helping children gain some sense of how to interact with the world through autism. She also tells of her aunt being willing to put her in a cattle chute in order to give her the pressure she needed to calm herself after a panic attack. The willingness to approach autism with curiosity and an openness to trying out different ideas has served Temple well.

Maybe the most interesting difference between how Temple thinks and I think is that she thinks in pictures. She creates full 3D models of ideas in her mind. Temple is a trailblazer in the cattle industry, as around a third of all cattle go through her designs. As she works in the industry on slaughter and animal husbandry her ability to think in pictures helps her design entire new inventions in her head. She talks of her frustration early on when engineers would not be able to immediately realize that something wouldn’t work until they drew it out or created it. Only when she realized that not everyone saw the world as she did, was she able to better understand why this happened.

I thought the book was pretty enlightening, but it just wasn’t the most enthralling.

Quotes:

“I get great satisfaction out of doing clever things with my mind, but I don’t know what it is like to feel rapturous joy. I know I am missing something when other people swoon over a beautiful sunset. Intellectually I know it is beautiful, but I don’t feel it. The closest thing I have to it is the excited pleasure I feel when I have solved a design problem.”

“I live each day as if I will die tomorrow.”

“Autistic children have to learn social skills systematically, the same way they learn their school lessons.”

“According to Dawkin’s criteria [who looks at instinctual behavior versus ‘true thinking’ in animals], then, savant autistics are not capable of true thought. Autistic people like myself are able to satisfy her criteria for thinking, but I would be denied the ability to think by scientists who maintain that language [as opposed to visual processing] is essential for thinking.”

“It was then I realized that man believes in heaven, hell, or reincarnation because the idea that after the cattle walk into the slaughterhouse it is all over forever is too horrible to conceive.”

“When your time comes and you are walking up the proverbial stairway, will you be able to look back and be proud of what you did with your life? Did you contribute something worthwhile to society? Did your life have meaning?”

“Maybe immortality is the effect one’s thoughts and actions can have on other people.”

“However, there is one thing that completely separates people from animals. It is not language or war or toolmaking; it is long-term altruism. During a famine in Russia, for example, scientists guarded the seed bank of plant genetics so that future generations would have the benefits of genetic diversity in food crops. For the benefit of others, they allowed themselves to starve to death in a lab filled with grain. No animal would do this.”

“No matter how much we learn, there will always be unanswerable questions.”

#templegrandin #book #autism #bookreviews #read #reading

IG Link.