The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum (23 page)

Same thing with this problem (see illustration, above): A ball sits at the top of a mast on a cart that is traveling on a straight road. If the ball drops from the top of the mast to the base of the cart, how will the trajectory look to someone riding along with the ball on the cart? It will look like the ball is moving straight down. How will it look to an observer watching the cart from the side of the road? It will look like the ball is moving forward as it travels along with the cart. How did I know? Because I could run the movie in my mind.

When I imagined the ball falling from the mast to the base of the cart, and I imagined myself riding along with the ball on the cart, I immediately saw a pencil falling off a dashboard in a moving car—and I saw that it fell straight down. And then I saw myself standing on the cart watching the ball fall straight down to the base of the cart.

I wrote to Kozhevnikov and confessed my confusion about the results of the spatial tests.
When I do photography,
I wrote,
I can determine from the ground the best place to stand on a roof to get the best shot.
I’ve done just that with professional television and movie crews. “You want the perfect shot of the cattle?” I’ll ask them. “Go up on the corner of that roof over there and face the feedlot.” How can I not be a spatial thinker?

Kozhevnikov wrote back that in imagining the scene from the roof, I’m not manipulating an object in space. I’m manipulating
me
in space. I’m visualizing an object from a new perspective, but I’m still visualizing an
object.
I’m still
thinking in pictures.
When I’m drawing a blueprint, remodeling a plant, or designing a project, my thinking starts with an image of an object. Even the movies in my head start with a still image.

Which is why I scored the way I did on the tests. On the object imagery tests, I had scored high—as high as visual artists, and even higher. On the spatial imagery tests, I had scored low—as low as visual artists, and even lower. I am a visual thinker, and in both sets of tests my scores were remarkably similar to those of visual artists. But how to account for the fact that I’m a scientist, yet where I scored high, scientists scored low, and vice versa?

Richard took the tests too. He scored perfectly on the spatial tests—the paper folding, the mental rotation, the stand-at-the-flower-and-face-the-house-and-point-at-the-stop-sign. But the grain test presented problems for him; he got eleven right out of twenty. Not bad, but not in the category of pulling up images of two objects and comparing them, the way I do. Because he’s a writer, he identifies himself as a verbal thinker. The visual tests showed that he also has superior spatial abilities, similar to a scientist’s. Is it any wonder, then, that even though he’s not a scientist, he specializes in
writing
about
science?

The correlation between how the tests predicted he would think and how he actually does think was simple, direct, clear. Yet the same tests told me I was the kind of thinker that I knew for a fact I wasn’t. Why?

The answer was autism. I found an exercise in one of Kozhevnikov’s papers that showed two abstract paintings. The first consisted of big swooshing splashes of color; the whole impression of the painting was dynamic. The second showed various sorts of geometrical shapes; the impression was static. When I looked at the splashy, dynamic painting, I immediately saw a picture of a fighter jet that I had just seen in a book I was reading. When I looked at the static painting, I immediately saw Mother’s sewing basket.

“What kind of feelings does that bring up in you?” Richard said when we were discussing these paintings.

“Feelings?”

“What kind of emotional response do you have when you see your mother’s sewing basket?”

“None,” I said. “I see Mother’s sewing basket when I look at that painting because it looks like Mother’s sewing basket to me. I also see a salad I ate last week at the restaurant where I sometimes like to have lunch. They put Wheat Chex on their salads instead of croutons. I look at that painting, I see a picture in my mind of Mother’s sewing basket and I see another picture in my mind of Wheat Chex on a salad.”

Still, I understood what Richard was saying. Another person might have an emotional attachment to his mother’s sewing basket, an object he remembers fondly from his childhood. And in fact, Kozhevnikov’s research showed that in describing the two paintings, artists used
emotional
terms
—crash, breakthrough, extreme tension.

I
see
like an artist, I realized, but I don’t
feel
like an artist.

Instead, my emotions work like a scientist’s. When scientists described the paintings, they used
unemotional
words—
squares, stains, crystals, sharp edges,
and
swatches.
I’m not saying that scientists and engineers don’t feel emotions; I’m sure most scientists and engineers would feel some sort of sentiment about their mothers’ sewing baskets. But the scientists in this study didn’t see a mother’s sewing basket, or any other object. They saw geometrical shapes. They saw what was
literally
there, and what was literally there wasn’t the kind of image that would elicit an emotional response. Artists, on the other hand, saw what was
figuratively
there, and what was figuratively there was indeed the kind of image that would elicit an emotional response. I saw what was figuratively there too—only those images did
not
produce an emotional response in me.

Like Michelle Dawson, who described autistic traits not as positive or negative but as accurate, I don’t attach an emotional response to concrete objects. So I am able to handle them objectively—literally
as objects,
and only as objects. I can’t manipulate them in space. I can’t subject them to spatial reasoning. But I can sure design a cattle chute that works.

That’s why there are certain design mistakes that I would never make, even though some engineers make them. Some engineers use spatial visual thinking, but I use object visual thinking, so I’m able to
see
a catastrophe before it happens. Airbags in cars killed many children because the engineers blindly followed a bad specification—that in an accident, the bag must be able to protect an adult man who was not wearing a seat belt. If I had watched videos of the crash-dummy tests, I could have easily seen that babies would not survive the airbag’s impact. During the Japanese tsunami catastrophe of 2011, the Fukushima nuclear power plants melted down because the tidal wave that came over the seawall flooded not only the main generator but its backup. And where was the backup located? In the basement—the basement of a nuclear power plant that is located next to the sea. As I read many descriptions of the accident, I could
see
the water flowing into the plant, and I could
see
the emergency generators disappearing under the water. (This is partly what I do as a consultant: I see accidents before they happen.)

So my test results were consistent after all. The correlation between how the tests predicted I would think and how I actually do think was simple, direct, clear—once I factored autism into the equation: high object imagery plus autism equals scientific mind, at least in my case.

Now that I’d satisfied myself that the three-kinds-of-minds hypothesis makes sense, I had to ask: Could it be useful in helping the autistic brain?

8

R
EMEMBER JACK?
He was the boy who could ski better after three lessons than I could after three years, because I was the one with the cerebellum that’s 20 percent smaller than normal. But you know what I
could
do? Draw. Design.

And so sometimes while Jack was getting in a lot of ski practice, I stayed at the top of the slope and got to work—my kind of work. I refinished the ski-tow house. I installed knotty-pine boards and stained them; I added white trim; and I made a nice sign showing the insignia of my school. I took an ugly plywood shack, and, because of who I am, I made it into a thing of grace—a grace that my physical movements, also because of who I am, would never be able to match.

That experience was an early lesson in how I can play to my strengths. I didn’t think of myself as a picture thinker back then, of course. But I knew that drawing was not only what I could do, it was what I could do best. And so I did it. I took what nature gave me, and I nurtured the heck out of it.

In recent years, the relationship between nature and nurture has been getting a lot of attention in the popular press. In particular, the 10,000-hour rule seems to have captured the public imagination.
New Yorker
writer Malcolm Gladwell didn’t invent the rule, but he did popularize it through his best-selling book
Outliers.
The principle actually dates to a 1993 study, though in that paper
the authors called it the 10-year rule. Whatever name it goes under, the rule essentially says that in order to become an expert in any field, you need to work for at least
x
amount of time.

I don’t know what all the fuss was about. After all, the old joke goes, “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” “Practice, practice, practice,” not “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” “Be born with talent, then do nothing.” But I guess a big round number brings the equation to life or makes a formula for success sound scientific in a way that simply saying “Practice, practice, practice” doesn’t. Still, that interpretation of the rule seems reasonable to me. Talent plus ten thousand hours of work equals success? Talent plus ten years of work equals success? Sure!

But that’s not how the rule often gets interpreted. Consider an article
about the 10,000-hour rule in
Fortune.
It was published in 2006, but it’s still widely posted all over the Internet. The article opens with the example of Warren Buffett, one of the wealthiest people in the world. “As Buffett told
Fortune
not long ago, he was ‘wired at birth to allocate capital.’ . . . Well, folks, it’s not so simple. For one thing, you do not possess a natural gift for a certain job, because targeted natural gifts don’t exist. (Sorry, Warren.)”

Maybe the issue here was the word
targeted.
Was Warren Buffett born to be a CEO
specifically?
Was he born to run a behemoth corporation like Berkshire Hathaway rather than, say, to work as a day trader? No. But was he born with a brain for business—a brain that would lend itself to number-crunching and risk-taking and opportunity-identifying and all the other skills that go into becoming the leading investor of his generation? I say yes.

Certainly Buffett put in his ten thousand hours or ten years of work. He bought his first shares of stock at the age of eleven, founded a successful pinball-machine business with a friend at the age of fifteen, and before he graduated high school, he was wealthy enough to buy a farm.

But this is not the career trajectory of someone who’s interested in business and is putting in his ten thousand hours. This is the career trajectory of someone who lives to do business. You might say it’s the path of someone who was born to do business. You might even say it’s the path of someone who was wired for business at birth.

By putting such an emphasis on practice, practice, practice
at the expense of
natural gifts, the
Fortune
interpretation of the 10,000-hour rule does a tremendous disservice to the naturally gifted.

But wait. It gets worse. Some interpretations of the 10,000-hour rule leave talent out of the equation altogether.

Here is the description of the 10,000-hour rule on a website called Squidoo (a worldwide community that, like Wikipedia, allows users to create brief entries on popular topics): “If you want to become an expert in your field, be that art, sport or business—you can. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not always innate genius or talent that will make you a success, it’s the hours that you put in, which means that ANYONE can do it.”

Well, no. Not
everyone
can do it. Let’s go to Gladwell’s example of Bill Gates. In the late 1960s, when Gates was still in high school, he had access to a Teletype terminal, and his math teacher excused him from class so that he could write code. Computer code became something of an obsession with Gates, and ten thousand hours later—well, you know the story.

Now let me tell you the other side of that story. In the late 1960s, when I was a student at Franklin Pierce College, I had access to the same terminal as Gates—the
exact same
Teletype terminal. The school’s computer system tapped into the University of New Hampshire’s mainframe. So I had as much access as I wanted, and I had as much firepower as I wanted, and it was all free. And you’d better believe I wanted to spend as much time as possible on that computer. I love that sort of stuff; I love to see how new technology works. The computer was called Rax, so when I turned on the computer, a message would type out on paper:
Rax says hello. Please sign in.
And I would eagerly sign in.

And that was it. I could do that much—but that was all.

I was hopeless. My brain simply doesn’t work in a way that allows me to write code. So saying that if I’d spent ten thousand hours talking to Rax, I would be a successful computer programmer, because
anyone
can be a successful computer programmer, is crazy.

I say:

Talent + 10,000 hours of work = Success

Or to put it another way:

Nature + nurture = Success

Squidoo says:

10,000 hours of work = Success

Or to put it another way:

Nurture = Success

Stated so baldly, this interpretation of the 10,000-hour rule looks ridiculous. Like
Fortune
’s analysis of Warren Buffett’s success, Squidoo’s interpretation does an injustice to the naturally gifted. But it also does a tremendous disservice to the naturally
ungifted.
It raises hopes to an unrealistic level. All the hard work in the world won’t overcome a brain-based deficit (like a cerebellum that’s 20 percent smaller than normal).