Visual Thinking Read online

  ALSO BY TEMPLE GRANDIN

  Emergence: Labeled Autistic (with Margaret M. Scariano)

  Thinking in Pictures: And Other Reports from My Life with Autism

  Genetics and the Behavior of Domestic Animals (editor)

  Livestock Handling and Transport (editor)

  Animals in Translation (with Catherine Johnson)

  Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships (with Sean Barron)

  Developing Talents (with Kate Duffy)

  Humane Livestock Handling (with Mark Deesing)

  The Way I See It

  Animals Make Us Human (with Catherine Johnson)

  The Autistic Brain (with Richard Panek)

  Temple Grandin’s Guide to Working with Farm Animals

  Calling All Minds (with Betsy Lerner)

  Navigating Autism (with Debra Moore)

  The Outdoor Scientist (with Betsy Lerner)

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  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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  Copyright © 2022 by Temple Grandin

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  library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

  Names: Grandin, Temple, author. | Lerner, Betsy, author.

  Title: Visual thinking : the hidden gifts of people who think in pictures, patterns, and abstractions / Temple Grandin ; with Betsy Lerner.

  Description: Hardcover edition. | New York : Riverhead Books, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2022006436 (print) | LCCN 2022006437 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593418369 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593418383 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Visual perception. | Art—Psychological aspects. | Thought and thinking.

  Classification: LCC BF241 .G683 2022 (print) | LCC BF241 (ebook) | DDC 152.14—dc23/eng/20220210

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022006436

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022006437

  International edition ISBN: 9780593543115

  Cover design: Tyriq Moore

  Book design by Alexis Farabaugh, adapted for ebook by Maggie Hunt

  pid_prh_6.0_141468764_c0_r0

  To all the people who think differently

  Contents

  Introduction

  One

  What Is Visual Thinking?

  Two

  Screened Out

  Three

  Where Are All the Clever Engineers?

  Four

  Complementary Minds

  Five

  Genius and Neurodiversity

  Six

  Visualizing Risk to Prevent Disasters

  Seven

  Animal Consciousness and Visual Thinking

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  References

  Index

  Drawings by Temple Grandin

  Introduction

  We come into the world without words. We see light, recognize faces, differentiate colors and patterns. We can smell and start recognizing tastes. We have a sense of touch and start grasping things and sucking our thumbs. Soon we start to recognize songs, which explains the universal existence of lullabies and nursery rhymes. Babies make lots of sounds. “Mama” and “Dada” are more random than anxious new parents want to believe. Gradually, language gains ascendancy: By one and a half, most toddlers will have a bunch of nouns and verbs under their belts. By two, they start to make sentences. By the time most children go to kindergarten, they can speak in complex sentences and understand the basic rules of language. When it comes to communication, language is the water we drink, the air we breathe.

  We assume that the dominance of language forms not only the foundation of how we communicate, but also the foundation of how we think—and in fact for centuries, we have been taught to believe just that. The seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes cast a long shadow when he wrote, “I think, therefore I am.” Specifically, Descartes claimed that it is language that separates us from “beasts”: our very humanity was predicated on language. Flash forward a few hundred years, and we are still describing theories of mind based primarily on language. In 1957, linguist Noam Chomsky published his groundbreaking book Syntactic Structures, which claims that language, specifically grammar, is innate. His ideas have influenced thinkers for more than half a century.

  The first step toward understanding that people think in different ways is understanding that different ways of thinking exist. The universally accepted belief that we are all hardwired for language may be why it took me until I was nearly thirty to understand that I am a visual thinker. I am also autistic, and I didn’t have language until I was four. I didn’t read until I was eight, and that was only with considerable tutoring in phonics. The world didn’t come to me through syntax and grammar. It came through images. But unlike what Descartes or Chomsky might have expected, even without language my thoughts are rich and vivid. The world comes to me in a series of associated visual images, like scrolling through Google Images or watching the short videos on Instagram or TikTok. It’s true that I now have language, but I still think primarily in pictures. People often confuse visual thinking with vision. We will see throughout this book that visual thinking is not about how we see but about how the brain processes information; how we think and we perceive.

  Because the world I was born into did not yet distinguish between different ways of thinking, it was disconcerting to discover that other people didn’t think the same way I did. It was like being invited to a costume party and discovering I was the only one wearing a costume. It was difficult to fathom the differences between most people’s thought processes and my own. When I figured out that not all people think in pictures, it became my personal mission to discover how people do think, and to find out if there were other people like me. I first wrote about this in my memoir, Thinking in Pictures, twenty-five years ago. Since then, I’ve continued to investigate the prevalence of visual thinking in the general population through research of the literature; close observation; conducting informal surveys at the hundreds of autism and education conferences I’ve addressed; and talking to thousands of parents, educators, disability advocates, and people in industry.

  It wasn’t exactly a eureka moment, because it dawned on me gradually rather than all at once, but I came to see that there were two different kinds of visual thinkers. Though I couldn’t prove it at the time, I recognized a kind of visual thinker who was distinct from me. This is the spatial visualizer who sees in patterns and abstractions. I first became aware of this distinction while working with various kinds of engineers, machinery designers, and welders. Later, I was ecstatic to see my observations confirmed in the scientific literature. The work of the researcher Maria Kozhevnikov showed that there are object visualizers like me, who think in pictures, and, as I suspected, a second group of mathematically inclined visual-spatial thinkers, an overlooked but essential subset of visual thinkers, who think in patterns.

  The impact was powerful. I knew I had to scale up my personal experience as a visual thinker to meet the larger story of visual thinking in our culture, f
rom schools to safety to work and beyond. This book explores these two kinds of thinking, how they impact people personally and impact our world. Along the way, I’ll introduce you to what I call the “clever engineering department”—stories drawn from my professional experience over nearly fifty years, working with both kinds of visualizers: the people who are object visualizers like me, who see in pictures, and the spatial visualizers, who see the patterns. Think of it this way: the object thinkers build the trains, and the spatial visualizers make them run.

  This book also grows out of two major revelations—true eureka moments—I had over the past few years that were game changers for me. In 2019, I set out to tour three state-of-the-art US poultry- and pork-processing plants. This is a regular component of my job as a consultant in the food-supply business. I am brought in basically to make sure plants are operating according to code and not violating any protocols. I look for signs of mistreatment of animals, equipment failure, and employee misbehavior. I’m in demand in my field because of the way I see things. Details, no matter how small, jump out at me. I’m known for spotting something as insignificant as a piece of string that may halt the progress of cattle in a chute, causing expensive delays. At one plant I visited, something else entirely caught my eye. Until then, nearly every plant I’d ever worked on or consulted with used equipment made in America. The parts were manufactured here, and there were workers at the ready who could put together new components and repair any malfunction. At this plant, the equipment was brand-new. It was beautiful, meticulously crafted and made of gleaming stainless steel, with many intricate moving parts. Looking at it, I imagined the highly skilled, high-wage workers who had designed and installed the equipment. Then I discovered that it had been transported from the Netherlands on a container ship, in more than one hundred shipping containers.

  I stood on an overhead catwalk and looked at all the complicated conveyors and exclaimed to no one, “We don’t make it anymore!” This is the price we have paid for removing most hands-on classes from our schools, such as shop, welding, drafting, and auto mechanics. The kids who should have grown up to invent this equipment are often considered poor performers, academically or behaviorally, and are shunted into special education. But many of them are simply visual thinkers who are being screened out because the current curriculum favors verbal, linear thinkers who are good at taking tests. The hands-on classes where some of these “poor students” might have shown great ability are now gone.

  My second eureka moment arrived later that year when I visited the Steve Jobs Theater at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California. It looks like a pristine glass disk from another galaxy. The twenty-two-foot walls are sheer glass. There are no support columns. The electrical wiring, the sprinkler, audio, and security systems are invisible, concealed inside the seams between the glass panels. It is magnificent. As I often do when something interests me, I drilled down, researching how it was constructed. I discovered that the entire roof is supported by those structural glass walls, and that the glass is manufactured by the German company Sedak, which has become a state-of-the-art industry leader in producing large glass sheets. The fantastic lightweight carbon-fiber roof was imported from Dubai. And the glass cladding and roof of the theater were designed, engineered, fabricated, and installed by the Italian company Frener & Reifer. The theater was empty when I visited. I stood in the middle of the lobby and again cried out, “We don’t make it anymore!”

  What I quickly came to realize was that those two instances were not the exception. Instead, they were evidence of a seismic shift in American industry. By the spring of 2021, I was discovering brand-new meat-cutting and packaging equipment from the Netherlands, Denmark, and Italy at another pork-processing plant. Some weeks later, the latest issue of a meat trade magazine featured a gigantic foldout spread of equipment made by a huge Dutch company. I was witnessing a tipping point in the crisis in American ingenuity.

  We are losing essential technical skills, for three main reasons. First, the people who had manufacturing expertise are not being replaced at the same rate at which they’re leaving the job market. Second, we’ve ceded the manufacture of not only volume goods such as clothes and toys and appliances to foreign companies but high-tech goods as well (about 30 percent of iPhones are made in China). Last, and this is my main area of focus: we’ve screened out visual thinkers. When we fail to encourage and develop the talents and skills of people who think in different ways, we fail to integrate ways of learning and thinking that benefit and enrich society. Imagine a world with no artists, industrial designers, or inventors. No electricians, mechanics, architects, plumbers, or builders. These are our visual thinkers, many hiding in plain sight, and we have failed to understand, encourage, or appreciate their specific contributions. One reason I was driven to write this book is that the loss of skills in this country terrifies me. And it is entirely preventable, if only we stop screening out the very people who could save us.

  Most people don’t fully comprehend the way their mind works. Most scientists don’t know, either. I’ll begin by describing what we know about visual thinking and how visual thinking works, in a way that both visual and non-visual thinkers can recognize. From there I’ll identify what we’re doing wrong in education, from imposing uniform curricula to relying on a biased and outdated testing system, and in the process screening out talented kids in both the short and the long term, to our collective detriment. It turns out that algebra is a barrier that keeps some students from completing high school or a community college technical degree. These are the visual thinkers who can invent machinery but can’t solve for x, and we are screening them out. Next, we’ll look at how the crisis in education leads to an unemployment or underemployment crisis, abetted by prejudices about the trades and community colleges. We mostly agree that maintaining and improving infrastructure is critical, but are we identifying, encouraging, and training the builders, welders, machinists, and engineers to manifest it? In other words, where are today’s clever engineers?

  From there we’ll look at the brilliant collaborations between verbal and visual thinkers, including the work of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and architect Rem Koolhaas and engineer Cecil Balmond. We’ll look at studies that show how diverse thinkers advantage teams. Then we’ll explore the intersection of genius, neurodiversity, and visual thinking. Here we’ll describe artists and inventors, among them many visual thinkers and some on the autism spectrum as well. Their towering contributions to art, science, and invention have changed the course of history.

  Then we’ll turn to the sometimes life-and-death, real-world consequences of not having visual thinkers on your team. We’ll see how disasters such as the devastating failure of the Fukushima power plant in Japan and the twin Boeing 737 MAX crashes that took the lives of hundreds of people might have been averted by someone with a visual skill set. While visual thinkers are not seers, enlisting our perspective can help avert not only small mishaps but larger catastrophes. We’ll look at studies that show how teams consisting of one kind of thinker underperform compared with mixed groups of visual and non-visual thinkers. Having a visual thinker on your team could make all the difference.

  Last, I’ll return to a subject I’ve written about extensively. As an animal scientist, I’ve spent a lifetime teaching, studying, and consulting on the behavior of animals. Here I want to focus on animals precisely because they are non-verbal; what can they teach us about the ways we think?

  How can you tell if you’re a visual thinker? You probably know if you are musical, good at art, or good at putting mechanical things together, or if you’d rather draw than write. These are clues. It’s important to remember that visual thinking, like most traits, exists on a spectrum. Most people use a combination of verbal and visual thinking to navigate their world. Through the stories, research, and ideas I present in this book, you should be able to find your place on the spectrum. I also aim to h
elp parents guide their kids according to their strengths. It’s super important to set up kids for success, and that starts with understanding how they think, and therefore how they learn. I also want to encourage employers to assess their workforce and to look beyond résumés to see what visual thinkers and neurodiverse people can offer. I hope visual thinkers will see themselves in these pages and non-visuals will recognize the possibilities and opportunities that come from different ways of thinking. And, finally, I want us collectively, as citizens of the world, to reclaim our ability to create and innovate in a rapidly changing world, recognizing what we gain by harnessing the power of every kind of mind.

  ONE

  What Is Visual Thinking?

  When I was born in 1947, the medical profession had not started applying an autism diagnosis to children like me. I was exhibiting most of the behaviors now fully associated with autism, including lack of eye contact, temper tantrums, lack of social contact, sensitivity to touch, and the appearance of deafness. Chief among my symptoms was late speech, which led the neurologist who examined me when I was two and a half years old to conclude that I was “brain damaged.” I’ve since learned that a good deal of my behavior at the time (tantrums, stuttering sounds, screaming, and biting) was connected to the frustration I experienced due to my inability to talk. I was fortunate that a lot of early speech therapy eventually helped me gain speech, but I still had no idea that not everyone thought like me, or that the world could be roughly divided into two kinds of thinkers: people who think in pictures and patterns (more on the difference later), and people who think in words.

  Word-based thinking is sequential and linear. People who are primarily verbal thinkers tend to comprehend things in order, which is why they often do well in school, where learning is mostly structured sequentially. They are good at understanding general concepts and have a good sense of time, though not necessarily a good sense of direction. Verbal thinkers are the kids with perfectly organized binders and the adults whose computer desktops have neat rows of folders for every project. Verbal thinkers are good at explaining the steps they take to arrive at an answer or to make a decision. Verbal thinkers talk to themselves silently, also known as self-talk, to organize their world. Verbal thinkers easily dash off emails, make presentations. They talk early and often.