Visual Thinkers

When I talk to other people I translate my pictures into stock phrases or sentences I have "on tape" inside my head. Those kids who called me Tape Recorder were right about me. They were mean, but they were right. I am a tape recorder. That's how I'm able to talk. The reason I don't sound like a tape recorder anymore is that I have so many stock phrases and sentences I can move around into new combinations. All my public speaking has been a huge help. When I got criticisms saying I always give the same speech, I started moving my slides around. That moved my phrases around too.

...

Being verbal thinkers, behaviorists hadn't really thought about the visual environment. When they talked about the environment rewarding or punishing an animal in response to something it did, they usually meant food and electric shocks. That made sense for a Skinner box, where there's nothing much to look at, and if you mess up you get a shock. ... In the wild though, there aren't any electric shocks, and you can't get food by pecking a lever. You get food by being highly attuned to the visual environment. Behaviorists finally started to catch on to the importance of vision to an animal when somebody did a famous experiment showing you could teach a monkey how to push a lever just by letting him look outside a window every time he hit the lever. They didn't need to give the monkey a food reward, just a view. Animals need to see. and they want to see.

...

I always find it kind of funny that normal people are always saying autistic children "live in their own little world." When you work with animals for a while you start to realize you can say the same thing about normal people. There's a great big beautiful world out there that a lot of normal folks are just barely taking in. It's like dogs hearing a whole register of sounds we can't. Autistic people and animals are seeing a whole register of the visual world normal people can't or don't.

...

Visual thinkers of any species, animal or human, are detail-oriented. They see everything and they react to everything. We don't know why this is true, we just know from experience that it is. I've had interior designers tell me, "I see everything." The worst thing that can happen to an interior designer is to work with a sloppy contractor. The designer will see every little flaw in the contractor's work. Tiny mistakes no one else even notices, like grout that's slightly uneven, will jump out at visual people. They go crazy. Visual people feel horrible when little details in their visual environments are wrong, the same way animals do.

Animals in Translation, Temple Grandin, pg 18,24,26

clipped March, 2005

Collection: Philosophy