Animals in Translation (44 page)

I thought about those employees not too long after 9/11 when news reports started coming out about how hard it is for people who work as luggage inspectors to spot weapons on their video screens due to
clutter.
If you're a normal human being and your job is to sit in one place all day long staring at a video screen, pretty soon you'll have trouble separating out the form of a weapon from
all the other junk that's packed in people's bags. The screen is too cluttered, and everything blurs together. But that might not be a problem for autistic people, and I think airports ought to try out some autistic people in that job.

I think we're letting a huge amount of talent go to waste, both in people who aren't “normal” and in animals who are. That's probably because we don't really understand what animals could do if we gave them a chance. We're just leaving it up to animals like the seizure alert dogs to invent their own jobs.

A
UTISTIC
S
AVANTS

I mentioned at the beginning of this book that I think animal genius is probably the same thing as autistic savantry. I've felt this way for years, just from being around animals and observing them, and I mentioned it in
Thinking in Pictures.
But I didn't know why autistic genius and animal genius looked so similar to me, or whether autistic genius and animal genius might come from the same difference in the brain.

It's not that autistic savants and
animal savants
do the same things. Animal savants show brilliance when they learn complicated migratory routes after just one flight or discover how to perceive seizures before they happen. Autistic savants do lightning-fast calendar or prime number calculations inside their heads, or become artistic savants who can make almost perfect line drawings of buildings and landscapes from memory, often starting from a very young age—
and using perfect perspective.
That's especially amazing, because even great artists have to be taught how to draw using perspective. A four-year-old autistic savant just naturally knows how to do it.

Even though autistic savantry and animal savantry seem so different on the surface, the one thing that did jump out was that a lot of these talents involve amazing feats of rote memory. Autistic people are known for their ability to memorize whole train schedules, the capitals of every country in the world, and so on. Autistic savants are the only people who seem like they could give a Clark's nutcracker a run for its money when it comes to remembering where they hid thirty thousand pine seeds. But beyond that, I didn't know why animal genius felt so familiar to me.

Then in 1999 Dr. Allan Snyder, a psychologist at the Centre for the Mind at Australian National University, published a paper that laid out a
unified theory
of all the different savant talents. If his theory is right, it probably explains animal genius, too.
⁷
Dr. Snyder and his co-author, Dr. D. John Mitchell, say that
all
the different autistic savant abilities come from the fact that autistic people don't process what they see and hear into unified wholes, or
concepts,
rapidly the way normal people do.

A normal person looks at a building and his brain turns all the hundreds and thousands of building pieces coming in through his sensory channels into one unified thing, a building. The brain does this automatically; a normal person can't
not
do it. That's why a common drawing lesson art teachers use is to have art students turn a picture upside down and copy it that way, or else draw the
negative space
surrounding an object instead of the object itself. Turning the object upside down or drawing the negative space tricks your brain into letting the image stay in separate pieces more easily,
⁸
so you can draw the object instead of your
unified concept
of the object. People are always amazed at how good their upside-down drawings are.

Autistic people are stuck in the
pieces
stage of perception to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the person. Donna Williams, the autistic woman who wrote the book
Nobody Nowhere,
says she can't really see a whole object all at once. She sees a kind of slide show of the object. If she's looking at a tree, first she might see a branch on that tree, then the screen changes and she sees a bird sitting on the branch, then the screen changes again and she sees some leaves, and so on. Some autistic people have this problem a lot worse than others, and I think it's possible some autistic people have such fragmented sensory systems that they may be almost blind or deaf. I wonder whether some autistic people are so deprived of coherent sensory input that they are like autistic Helen Kellers.

Snyder and Mitchell say that the reason autistic people see the pieces of things is that they have
privileged access
to
lower levels of raw information.
A normal person doesn't become conscious of what he's looking at until after his brain has composed the sensory bits and pieces into wholes. An autistic savant is conscious of the bits and pieces.

That's why autistic savants can make perspective drawings without being taught how. They're drawing what they see, which is all the little changes in size and texture that tell you one object is closer up and another object is farther away. Normal people can't see all those little changes without a lot of training and effort, because their brains process them unconsciously. So normal people are drawing what
they
“see,” which is the finished object, after their brains have put it all together. Normal people don't draw a dog, they draw a
concept
of a dog. Autistic people draw the dog.

It's ironic that we always say autistic children are in their own little worlds, because if Dr. Snyder is right it's normal people who are living inside their heads. Autistic people are experiencing the actual world much more directly and accurately than normal people, with all their inattentional blindness and their change blindness and their every-other-kind-of-blindness. (Dr. Snyder hasn't talked about inattentional or change blindness that I know of, but the research on those concepts supports his work.)

Math savants use this same brain difference to do calendar calculations and prime number identification. An autistic savant who can tell you on what day you were born is seeing time as a sequence of seven different days repeating over and over again going back to the beginning of time. They quickly scan back over the pattern until they come to your day.

Normal people don't experience time that way. To a normal person a month or a year or a decade is one unified time span, not a collection of separate and distinct days. It's a blur. (Dr. Snyder's theory is a little more complicated than I've been making it sound. He thinks the brain has a processor that divides all incoming data—time, space, objects, and so forth—into equal parts. That's why an autistic savant can tell whether a number is prime or not, because a prime number
can't
be divided.)

Calendar calculation is the hidden figure talent all over again. I believe most or even all of the savant talents autistic people have are variations on the hidden figure ability.

I also believe that most or even all of the savant talents animals have are variations on the hidden figure ability, and in just the past couple of years Dr. Snyder and Dr. Bruce Miller, a physician at the University of
California at San Francisco, have supplied some hard evidence that I may be right. Dr. Miller works with patients who have a disorder called
frontotemporal dementia
in which the front part of the brain progressively loses its functions. In frontotemporal dementia the frontal lobes and the temporal lobes, which are at the side of your head, are affected.
⁹
Neither of these areas is working well in autistic people either, and as I've been saying throughout this book, the biggest area of difference between the animal brain and the human brain is that an animal's frontal lobes are smaller and less well developed than a human's. Serious frontal lobe damage is worse than being autistic. If your frontal lobes are badly damaged you can have symptoms of practically all the psychiatric disorders—autism, ADHD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, severe mood disorders, you name it.

You're probably going to have at least
some
autistic symptoms. We know that Dr. Miller's patients do, because some of them start to develop savant talents. A few of these people have become artists in their fifties and sixties, even winning awards in art shows. Others have developed musical abilities; one patient invented a chemical detector and got a patent for it. When he made his invention he could name only one out of fifteen objects on a standardized word test. A patient who had lost
all
his language ability designed sprinklers! These patients had
sudden-onset
talents.

I suspect what's happening with these people is that all of a sudden they're able to have the same kind of hyper-specific perception that underlies an autistic savant's ability to do a calendar calculation or make a perspective drawing without being taught.

Dr. Snyder has now begun to test the proposition that savant talents come from conscious access to the raw data of the brain. When he uses magnetic stimulation to interfere with frontal lobe functioning in his subjects, they start to make much more detailed drawings than they could just moments before.
¹⁰
They also get better at proofreading. Before he turns on the magnetic stimulation, Dr. Snyder has his subjects read this poem out loud:

Almost all people look at the poem and say, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”

About five minutes after he turns on the magnetic stimulation some of his subjects suddenly read, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the
the
bush.” The duplicate “the” pops out at them as their left frontal-temporal lobes go down, and they start turning into hidden figure specialists, perceiving detail they didn't perceive before. One of them even told Dr. Snyder that he felt more “alert” and “conscious of detail.” He was so intensely aware of the details around him that he said he wished they had asked him to write an essay, something he normally didn't like to do.

T
HE
D
EVIL
I
S IN THE
D
ETAILS

I don't know whether extreme talents in animals work the same way Dr. Snyder thinks they work in people with autism, but we have a lot of evidence that animals at least
see
the world in sharper detail than regular people do. I've already talked about how important visual detail is to animals, but we also have some fascinating research on ant navigation that goes along with Dr. Snyder's experiments.

When ants walk through an obstacle course they use landmarks to remember their route the same way people do. If they pass a gray pebble going one way, they'll look for that same gray pebble coming back.

But there's one big difference. When an ant reaches a landmark, he does something normal people don't do. He passes the landmark, stops, turns around, and
looks at the landmark from the same spot where he saw it on the trip out.

He has to do that, because to an ant a gray pebble probably looks different coming and going. He has to see the pebble from the same vantage point where he saw it first to make sure it's still the same gray pebble he saw before. This says to me ants probably don't automatically combine separate pieces of sensory data into wholes in the same way or to the same degree normal humans do.

For a nonautistic person, a landmark looks the same coming or going. When a normal person sees a big red barn on the way to someone's house, he automatically sees the same big red barn on the
way back. It looks the same to him, even though he's seeing it from a different side.

That's because a normal person's nervous system gets rid of a lot of detail and then fills in the blanks with whatever he
expects
to see. If he were consciously seeing what's really in front of his eyes, he'd see a slightly different red barn coming and going, because the south side of a barn doesn't look exactly like the north side of a barn, and the east side doesn't look exactly like the west side. Even if the builder designed all four sides to be identical, in nature there's always a difference in light and shadow.

I do the same thing ants do, which is one more thing that makes me think hyper-specificity is a key link between animals and autistic people. When I drive someplace I've never been before I look for landmarks along the road the same way everyone else does. But then when I'm driving back, the landmarks I've picked out all look different to me. I have to drive past each landmark until I reach the spot where I was when I first saw it; then I turn around and look at it from the original angle to make sure it's the same thing I saw on my way out. For animals and for people with autism, different sides of the same object actually
look different.

T
HINKING
A
BOUT
W
HAT
A
NIMALS
C
AN
D
O
, N
OT
W
HAT
T
HEY
C
AN'T

I hope we'll start to think more about what animals
can
do, and less about what they can't. It's important, because we've gotten too far away from the animals who should be our partners in life, not just pets or objects of study.

You always hear that humans domesticated animals, that we turned wolves into dogs. But new research shows that wolves probably domesticated people, too. Humans
co-evolved
with wolves; we changed them and they changed us.