The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum (22 page)

The first test I tried, each question began with a series of illustrations that showed a sheet of paper being folded. Let’s say the first illustration showed a square piece of paper, then the next showed the paper being folded in half top to bottom, then a third showed the half sheet being folded in half again, left to right. The final illustration showed a pencil poking a hole in the half of a half of a sheet. The challenge was to imagine the sheet being unfolded back to its full size and then to compare the unfolded sheet in your mind with five illustrations on the page. Which illustration showing a sheet of paper with a hole or holes in it matched the one you were seeing in your mind?

This time I scored below average—four out of ten. Again, though, this score was consistent with visual artists’, and it was the opposite of what scientists and architects scored.

Next I tried another spatial test. It showed a series of Lego-like blocks in various three-dimensional formations full of right angles. I do well at block design tests; I aced one recently while participating in a study at the University of Utah.
Aced it.
And in the allotted time. But that was a test that allowed me to touch the objects and manipulate them myself. The challenge with Kozhevnikov’s test was to rotate each object
mentally
and then “see” which of the five accompanying illustrations it matched. I couldn’t even
do
this test. My short-term memory is nearly nonexistent, so by the time I started rotating the object in mental space, I forgot what it looked like originally.

I have done a lot of thinking about the spatial relations test,
I wrote to Kozhevnikov.
I can do well in certain types of visual spatial tests.
I explained that I could rotate a two-dimensional object—a flat drawing—in my mind. You show me the outline of Texas upside down and ask me what it is, and I won’t hesitate: “That’s Texas.” But in my work, I actually don’t have to rotate an object.
When I visualize a large cattle handling facility in my mind,
I wrote in my e-mail,
I move my mind’s eye around it.

Kozhevnikov considered this response, then sent back another test and asked me to take it. Again it was a test of spatial abilities, but this time it didn’t require me to imagine rotating an object. Instead, it asked me to change my perspective in relation to a landscape.

Spiral Oriention

Example:

Imagine you are standing at the
flower
and facing the
tree
.

Point to the
cat.

The test used one drawing over and over. It showed an assortment of various objects in random locations as if seen from above—a flower, a house, a stop sign, and so on. My job was to imagine myself (for instance) standing at the flower, facing the house, and pointing to the stop sign—then to render the angle of my pointing arm on a circular graph, with myself at the center. Now, I know I’m good at judging angles. I can look at a ramp in a cattle facility and say, “That’s at a twenty-degree angle,” and I’ll be right. Guaranteed. But this test required me to imagine myself hovering above the scene and see the angles from the perspective of a person standing below. Let me tell you, that’s not the same as standing on the ground and looking out of my own two eyes. Anyway, at least I could complete this test. Not that it mattered: I scored zero.

These results made no sense to me whatsoever. When I taught myself how to draw blueprints, years and years ago, I walked around an entire Swift meatpacking plant matching every line on the plant’s original architect’s blueprints with its corresponding real structure. For example, a big circle on the blueprints was the water tower, and a little square was a concrete column that held up the roof. This exercise taught me how to relate the abstract lines on the blueprints to the actual structures. When I do remodeling jobs and I have to figure out how to fit new equipment into an existing place where some parts have to be torn out, I spend fifteen to twenty minutes just looking at the site, until I feel I’ve fully downloaded all the visual details into my memory. When I test-run equipment in my mind, I can move myself around the image. I can fly over it, walk through it, walk around it. I can see it from the point of view of a helicopter looking down at the whole facility, and I can see it from the point of view of an animal walking along at ground level.

When I’m consulting on or designing a project that doesn’t yet exist, I scroll through my memory bank looking for similar images. To demonstrate how this process works for me, I asked Richard, my collaborator on this book, to suggest something for me to design in my mind. He said, “A fence.”

“A fence?” I said. “What kind of fence? For what? A cattle fence? A fence alongside a highway? A privacy fence at a house? Barbed-wire fences? Picket fences? Wooden-plank fences, plastic fences, fake white-plank fences? Wrought-iron fences? Pipe corrals? Solid sides on cattle handling facilities?” These were all coming up as pictures in my mind. “There is no
fence.
”

Needless to say, Richard is not autistic.

He tried again. He said that he’d recently seen on television a design for a bridge between Hong Kong and China. In Hong Kong, cars drive on the left side of the road (because it’s a former British colony), and in mainland China, cars drive on the right side. How would I design such a bridge?

“I’m seeing roadways crossing,” I said. “I see my little brother’s slot-car track. I see a woven hanging basket with a flower pot in it. Now I’m seeing freeway ramps—specific freeway ramps. I see roads. Okay,” I said, ready to give my answer. “It would have to have an underpass and an overpass, and the roads would cross and switch sides.”

Richard told me to Google
flipper bridge.
The image that came up on my computer screen was the one I’d seen in my mind.

Sometimes when I’m consulting, company executives will take me to a meeting room and show me the specifications on the project, and I’ll just sit there and run the “movie” in my head. I’ll see exactly how the design is going to play itself out, and I’ll say something like, “That’s not going to work. It’s going to jerk on the chains too hard and rip ’em right out of the ceiling.”

I used this technique on a couple of exercises in a paper by Kozhevnikov and collaborators. The topic of the paper was how different kinds of minds handled problems in physics. One exercise (see illustration, below) asked you to imagine a hockey puck traveling in a straight line until it received a single kick from a foot striking it at a right angle to its path. Where will the puck go? The answer, I immediately saw, was a straight line angling away from the kick. And I saw it because I could run that movie.