3 Neurodiversity

Dr. Temple Grandin on Visual Thinking in an Autistic Child or Adult

Dr. Grandin is one of the first autistic individuals to document the insights she gained from her personal experience of autism. She is a Professor of Animal Sciences at the College of Agricultural Sciences at Colorado State University: Dr. Temple Grandin.

She believes that there are three major kinds of thinking in humans: Photo-realistic visual thinking, pattern thinking, and word-fact thought.

Of the first kind, “I can see everything in my head and then draw it on paper,” but such individuals are often poor in algebra but much better at geometry and trigonometry. Of the second kind, “pattern thinkers see patterns and relationships between numbers,” but reading and written composition are poor. Of the third kind, such “individuals have a huge memory for verbal facts” but are poor at visual thinking such as drawing.

While small, compact circuits may explain savant-like abilities including remembering detailed information in autistic adults, fewer long-distance connections between distant brain regions that facilitate complex social behaviors may be compromised. That is, while the frontal lobes are poorly connected the exact opposite occurs in the visual and auditory areas of the brain.

We might thus ask, do autistic individuals have an intellective disability or are they simply neurodivergent?

Neurodiversity is a framework for understanding the human brain and the function of the central nervous system that examines diversity across differences among humans with regard to sensory processing, motor abilities, social and emotional intelligence, cognition, as well as inborn or acquired neurobiological differences.

The framework grew out of the disability rights movement in the 1960s and partly arose from societal barriers as well as differences in person-environment mismatch, rather than inherent biological deficits. Instead it situates human cognitive variation in the context of the larger framework of biodiversity.

Original article: How does visual thinking work in the mind of a person with autism? A personal account. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (2009) 364, 1437–1442, How Autists Think.

New York Times article: Temple Grandin: Society Is Failing Visual Thinkers, and That Hurts Us All. Dr. Temple Grandin on Visual Thinking.