Thinking in Pictures

A year into the professional world of Autism Spectrum Conditions I wrote a book review on Temple Grandin's 'Thinking in Pictures' for the Action for Autism Journal, 'Autism Network'.

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I watched the movie ‘Iris’ today. Without words, how would I think …is what Iris Murdoch (Kate Winslet) says, on the importance words have for her. And, as brilliant as the movie was, for a while all I could think about, was Temple Grandin, who thought only in pictures.

‘Thinking in Pictures, and other reports from my life with autism’ was the third account of Grandin’s life that I read, and no, it wasn’t tiresome. In fact, I enjoyed it immensely. There is great pleasure in reading a book which discusses, and discusses well, a subject one is interested in.

There is something in it for everyone...…the animal lover, the medical practitioner, the scientist, the Occupational Therapist, the cattle farmer, the families of autistic individuals, the Sociologist, and even the spiritually inclined, to name a few. Of course, a book with a foreword by Oliver Sacks will have already done half the job of getting me hooked!

This book informs theoretically about autism, at the same time giving an insight into Temple Grandin’s personal battles and victories over autism. And victories they most certainly are. The ten years between the writing of her first book ‘Emergence Labeled Autism’ and ‘Thinking in Pictures’, clearly shows how much more she understands herself. More importantly, how much more others understand her and the condition of being autistic. She is now a leading figure in the areas of livestock behaviour, livestock equipment designing...…and autism.

I feel that she has found a wonderful balance in her struggle between her autistic self and her strivings to be her ‘normal’ self, without devaluing either. She shows that she has understood what autistic traits could be made more ‘sociable’, and is constantly working towards that. Thus, she says at the end of the second chapter, that her autism is a part of who she is. She would not like to give up her ability as a visual thinker, which allows her to use her mind like a sophisticated “computer graphics program”, and helps her in her work. At the same time she urges employers of autistic individuals to be aware of their limitations in social settings in the chapter entitled ‘The Ways of the World’. She has managed to improve the way in which she uses and adds to the library of visual images in her head, which she has to scan through when she retrieves information, but she admits that this often takes time.‘

Thinking in Pictures’, unlike her first book, isn’t just an account on what she had to (and still has to in some ways) deal with and how she did it. It discusses thought, sensory issues, emotion, medication, socialization, and religion from her experiences, with examples from experiences of other autistic individuals. Throughout the book there is the ‘I’, but there is also the ‘Many autistic children’ and ‘Tom’s overall sensory processing problems’…or the ‘We’, and she manages to include the entire autistic spectrum in her writing.

Other chapters deal with diagnosis and the different diagnostic categories in the autistic spectrum, the role and scope of emotions in animals and humans, animal behaviour and autistic behaviour, genius and autism, and one of my favourite chapters ‘Stairway to Heaven: Religion and Belief’.

Most of us enjoyed writing compositions titled ‘"The autobiography of a tree"’ or "‘The day I turned into a coin"’ when we were in school. Apart from a better understanding, maybe through biographies, movies about pigs that can talk, or documentaries on the Lives of Otters, we are all fulfilling an urge to identify more closely to the people, creatures and things around us. Grandin seems to have connected herself to so many roles and creatures in the world. She has found links between her life and the geniuses in history, characters in television serials, the grains of sand that she sifted through her fingers, and the cattle she has worked with.

Throughout the book it is as though she takes on a range of roles at various times, giving the reader a large amount of information in a way that is not at all overwhelming. There are some valuable lessons we can all learn from reading this book.