The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum (17 page)

I completely identify with this attitude. For my undergraduate honors thesis, I wanted to explore the subject of sensory interaction. How does a stimulus to one sense, such as hearing, affect the sensitivity of other senses? I gathered more than one hundred journal papers. Because my thinking is totally nonsequential, I had to develop a way to make sense of the research.

First, I numbered each journal article. Next, I typed the major findings of each study on separate slips of paper. Some studies yielded only one or two strips of paper. Review articles prompted more than a dozen. Then I put all the strips in a box. I’d hung a huge bulletin board in my dorm room—maybe four feet by six feet. I drew the first strip out of the box and I pinned it just anywhere on the board. Then I pulled out the next strip. Let’s say the first strip was about the sense of vision, and the second was about the sense of hearing. So the second strip went on a different part of the board, because now I had the beginnings of two categories. I made labels for those two categories and pinned them to the top of the board so that they headed two columns. I continued to take strips of paper out of the box, one at a time, like drawing lots. I’d pick one, put it with the other strips in a category, create a new category, or throw out all the old categories and rearrange all the strips of paper. In the end, after I had finished sorting all the strips of paper into different categories of information, I began to see how the categories of information fit together to form larger concepts.

I later applied this principle in my professional life. When I began to develop my livestock-handling designs, I first went to every feed yard in Arizona—maybe twenty—and then to a bunch of feed yards in Texas. I worked cattle in about thirty feed yards altogether, but what I was actually doing was observing. I would notice that one feed yard had a really nice curved lead-up chute and another had a nice loading ramp but terrible sorting pens. When I sat down to draw a design, I threw out all the bad bits and kept all the good bits.

This process can be extremely time-consuming. When I was in college, it sometimes took me months of reading journal articles and posting scraps of paper on the bulletin board to arrive at the basic principle. Now I have a lot more experience sifting through scientific research. I no longer need an actual bulletin board on the wall, because I’ve got one in my mind. That’s why I trust my conclusions. I feel that my local bias frees me from the
global bias
that gets in the way of top-down thinkers.

Mottron identified the same pattern in Dawson’s research. “She does need a very large amount of data to draw conclusions,” he wrote in
Nature.
But, he added, “her models never over-reach, and are almost infallibly accurate.”

This feeling of certainty is probably what has fed the reputation among mathematicians and scientists who have Asperger’s or are high-functioning autistics as being rigid and unswerving. Once they arrive at a proof, their attitude toward it becomes inflexible, because they have experienced the piece-by-piece, painstaking logic that went into creating it. Mathematicians and scientists even speak of the beauty of an equation or proof.

For a top-down thinker, however, that certainty is
not
necessarily earned—not without a lot of supporting evidence. I had one client who insisted that he could build a meatpacking plant in three months. Well, no. That’s absolutely not going to work. But he couldn’t be persuaded otherwise. He
knew
he was right, and all the deadlines the contractor missed because they were impossible to meet, all the unforeseen delays that normally get padded into the schedule in advance, meant nothing. In the end, his was a twenty-million-dollar screwup.

For a bottom-up thinker like me, however, getting a detail wrong when I’m trying to solve a problem doesn’t have implications for the whole solution, because I haven’t reached the whole solution yet. If someone shows me a part of a project where I did something wrong, I say, “Change it.”

Associative Thinking

Not long ago I was walking through the United Airlines terminal in Chicago, which has a glass roof. I looked up, and in my mind I saw pictures of the greenhouse at my university, the Crystal Palace from the 1851 World’s Fair in London, a botanical garden, and the Biosphere in Arizona. These structures weren’t the same shape as the airline terminal, but they were all in my glass-roof file.

Then when I saw the Biosphere in my mind, I noticed the turrets in the structure. They reminded me of the turrets on the Hoover Dam. So I started seeing pictures of turrets: on a castle in Germany, on the Disney Fantasyland castle, on a military tank.

At that point, I could have gone either way. I could have continued to root around in my glass-roof file. Or I could have stayed in the turret file. To an outsider, my thoughts might appear random, but to me, I’m simply selecting which file folder I want to explore.

I’ve often said
that my brain works like a search engine. If you ask me to think about a certain topic, my brain will generate a lot of hits. It can also easily make connections that will get off the original topic pretty fast and go pretty far. The similarity between my brain and a search engine, though, shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. Who do you think designed the original search engines? Very likely it was people whose brains work like mine—people with brains that have trouble with linear thought, brains that ramble, brains that have weak short-term memory.

Remember the HDFT scan of my brain at the University of Pittsburgh in 2012? It revealed that my corpus callosum—the neural highway that stretches the length of the brain between the left and right hemispheres—has an unusual number of horizontal fibers branching off to either side. My fibers bunch up back in the parietal area, which is associated with memory. I think all those extra circuits in the parietal area of my brain might well be what allows me to make a lot more associations than people with normal brains. “Oh,” I said when Walter Schneider showed me images from the scan, “you found my search engine!”

Still, in order for a search engine to come up with hits, the database needs to be full of information to hit upon. In human terms, it needs memories.

Part of what made Michelle Dawson such a formidable researcher and collaborator, Mottron said, was that she possessed an exceptional memory: “Most nonautistic people can’t remember what they read ten days ago. For some autistics, that’s an effortless task. Autistic people are also less likely to misremember data.”

Is that true? Is long-term memory generally better in people with autism?

I know that my
short-term
memory is horrible, which isn’t unusual among high-functioning autistics. We’re not good at multitasking. We have poor memories for faces and names. And sequencing? Forget it. A 1981 study
showed that high-functioning children with autism remembered significantly less about recent events than normal age-matched and mentally handicapped age- and ability-matched control subjects. In a 2006 study
of thirty-eight high-functioning autistic children and thirty-eight controls, the most reliable and accurate test to distinguish between the two groups was the Finger Windows subtest—a measure of spatial working memory in which the experimenter touches a series of pegs on a board and the subject has to duplicate the pattern sequence. The controls easily outperformed the high-functioning autistics. When I took this test, I trashed it; it placed too much of a workload on my working memory.

But what about long-term memory in people with autism? To my surprise, the scientific literature in this area is exceedingly thin. I spent two hours searching the Internet for peer-reviewed papers on the topic; the most recent
was from 2002, and it was basically asking if long-term memory was
impaired
in autistics.

Still, whether long-term memory in autistic people tends to be better or worse than it is among neurotypicals is almost beside the point. The fact is, you need memories. You need data.

When I was in college looking at my bulletin board, I didn’t have a lot of experience in research, and because I was still relatively young, I didn’t have a lot of experience in life. As I’ve turned forty, then fifty, then sixty, my ability to make associations—to see connections between details—has become more and more acute, and my need to use a bulletin board has disappeared, because I have more and more details in my database. Think of it this way: If you can’t see the trees, you’ll never see the forest.

Creative Thinking

The forest that the autistic brain winds up seeing, however, might not look the same as the forest that the neurotypical brain sees.

I recently read a definition of
creativity
in the journal
Science
that really made an impression on me: “a sudden, unexpected recognition of concepts or facts in a new relation not previously seen.” That’s what happened when Michelle Dawson challenged the whole history of autism research based on identifying deficits. She had the same concepts and facts as everyone else, but she saw them in a “new relation not previously seen.”

I can think of plenty of examples of this sort of creativity from my own life. I remember when I was a student at Franklin Pierce College, and I took a course on genetics. The professor, Mr. Burns, taught us the usual model of genetics developed by Gregor Mendel in the nineteenth century—that each parent contributes half the genes in an offspring and that the way species gradually change is through a long series of random genetic mutations. That didn’t make sense to me. Sure, it was part of the explanation. But it couldn’t be the whole explanation. How do random mutations explain that when you take a Border collie and a springer spaniel and breed them, you get puppies that look like they’re a mixture of the two breeds, but they’re not
exactly
half and half? Some puppies look more like spaniels, and others look more like collies. I actually went up to Mr. Burns and asked him: “How does Mendel explain that?”

He was surprised, to say the least. But today we know that random mutations are not enough to produce the diversity within species. Evolution also needs copy number variations. What Mendel’s genetics tells you is that you have genes. But the concept of copy number variations tells you that you have either a lot of copies or just a handful.

A few years ago I went to a reunion at Franklin Pierce and I saw Mr. Burns, who was by then retired. “You asked some questions that were really deep,” he told me. They didn’t seem deep to me. They seemed like common sense. But now I understand I wouldn’t have been able to make the association between Mendel’s genetics and crossbred dogs if I didn’t already have enough crossbred dogs in my database. In fact, when I confronted Mr. Burns, I had in mind a particular Border collie and springer spaniel that I had known back when I was in high school. They were the parents of a litter of puppies. I could still see the mom and dad in my mind, and I could see the puppies, and I could see what the dogs looked like when they grew up.

I like to look at the usual materials for any project and imagine a potential application or construction that wouldn’t occur to most other people. I wouldn’t say that all autistic people are creative, or that creativity is a happy byproduct of autism. Whole-genome studies
have indicated some de novo copy number variation overlap between autism and schizophrenia, and highly creative people have demonstrated elevated risk for schizophrenia and other psychopathologies.
This area of research, however, is still preliminary. But I will say that I think being autistic makes a certain
kind
of creativity more likely to arise. To illustrate what I mean, I’m going to show you a test I recently took.

The challenge in this test, which originally appeared in a brain study and was reproduced in
New Scientist,
was to use a circle to create as many drawings as possible in five minutes. That’s all the illustration showed: a simple circle. The two examples the article gave were a smiley face, which was “among the most unoriginal,” and a man reclining in an airplane seat (so that the circle was the porthole window, looking into the plane from the outside).

The drawings I produced were:

1.   The rifle target iris from the opening credits of James Bond movies

2.   Camera iris

3.   Bike wheel

4.   Periscope image of a boat

5.   Round bison facility (which I had actually designed)

6.   Merry-go-round (seen from above)

7.   Rotating milk parlor

At this point, I began to wonder about the ground rules. Could I go outside the circle? I drew a: