The Autistic Brain, by Temple Grandin and Richard Panek
Subtitle: Thinking Across The Spectrum (printed in a colored font that starts out in red on the "T" end, and fades across orange, yellow, green, blue, and indigo into violet at the "m" end).
I am not going to pretend that I am able to be objective when writing about Temple Grandin. She is, quite frankly, too cool to be skeptical of. I first heard her in an interview on public radio, many years ago, and it was my first exposure to the idea that someone who was autistic could be capable of living an independent, self-supporting life. Since then I had read a few articles she had written, and seen her TED talk (http://www.ted.com/talks/temple_grandin_the_world_needs_all_kinds_of_minds.html), but I haven't read any of her books until now. I suppose I would have been a bit crushed if she had turned out to be bad at bookwriting. However, she is quite good at it.
Partly, of course, this is because she is wise enough to pair with Richard Panek, an accomplished science writer. Unlike others with a famous name who pair up with a professional writer, however, she puts his name on the front cover, and even mentions him several times in the book (for example, contrasting his and her ways of thinking about how to write a book as an example of different brain types).
She is also, of course, an example of the Right Person At The Right Time. Autism's prevalence has been on an exponential increase for a few decades now, for reasons which are still debated. Grandin was one of the first people diagnosed as autistic who was able to speak for herself in public about what it was like, and as the number of non-autistic parents with autistic children has skyrocketed, the demand for Grandin as a public spokesperson has gone up with it.
The purpose of this book, I think, was to allow Grandin to revisit (and in some cases correct) what she has said publicly about autism previously. For example, Grandin is a very visual thinker, and at one time thought that this was true of most autistics. More recent research, and her own experience communicating with many other less well known autistic people, has shown that this is common but not at all universal.
Moreover, the very definition of autism has gone through several iterations, either as used in plain English or as specified in the DSM. Whether or not Asperger's is a milder version of autism, or a separate syndrome, is just one part of the maelstrom of controversy which has erupted around autism in recent years (in some cases fueled by government or insurance policies which will pay for treatment for autism, but not for other less recognized conditions). Much is still unknown about autism, but much has been learned, and Grandin takes us on a tour through the subject.
In large part, figuring out how the autistic brain works involves figuring out how the non-autistic brain works. We get an entertaining history of how the medical community's recommendations to the parents of autistic children has changed over the decades, from her own childhood diagnosis as simply "brain damaged", to the nadir of psychoanalysis (the mother is the cause, for being cold and unfeeling toward her child) to the gradual recognition that there is something different in the physical brain. Brain scans are part of how this change has come about; Grandin says "every time a new [brain] scanning method becomes available, I am the first in line to try it out". She shows us several scans of her own brain, and talks about how what they show differs from a "neurotypical".
The last part of the book is, essentially, a discussion of the fact that we are all good at some things, so find out what that is and practice it. Grandin believes we can usefully be divided into word-fact thinkers, picture thinkers, and pattern thinkers. She gives her reasons for this, and takes us through the work of a few different researchers who have developed tests of the different capacities for rotating objects in our mind, etc.
You either find all of this fascinating (as I do), or you don't. Grandin talks on occasion about events in her life, but this is primarily a book about brain science, not about her life. If you are the kind of person who prefers to hear about one person's mind in particular, rather than how brains can give rise to minds in general, it may not be your thing. Speaking for myself, it's a topic on which I could probably spend any amount of time reading and thinking. We are just now, as a society, hitting the steep part of the learning curve on how the brain works, and what's happening right now is the equal of the period in physics from Einstein to Feynman in the early 20th century. Every new (well designed) study is giving us crucial new pieces of the puzzle, and we are just starting to make the connections to understand our own minds. I can't imagine a more exciting topic. But then, I'm a pattern thinker (I think). Twenty years from now, our very idea of who we are and how we exist, as minds with consciousness and emotions and dreams, is going to be as different from what we have (always) had, as the world of quantum physics is from Newton's world of levers and blocks. Temple Grandin is a self-proclaimed image thinker, and she paints a detailed and vivid picture of how these pieces are starting to click together.
I am not going to pretend that I am able to be objective when writing about Temple Grandin. She is, quite frankly, too cool to be skeptical of. I first heard her in an interview on public radio, many years ago, and it was my first exposure to the idea that someone who was autistic could be capable of living an independent, self-supporting life. Since then I had read a few articles she had written, and seen her TED talk (http://www.ted.com/talks/temple_grandin_the_world_needs_all_kinds_of_minds.html), but I haven't read any of her books until now. I suppose I would have been a bit crushed if she had turned out to be bad at bookwriting. However, she is quite good at it.
Partly, of course, this is because she is wise enough to pair with Richard Panek, an accomplished science writer. Unlike others with a famous name who pair up with a professional writer, however, she puts his name on the front cover, and even mentions him several times in the book (for example, contrasting his and her ways of thinking about how to write a book as an example of different brain types).
She is also, of course, an example of the Right Person At The Right Time. Autism's prevalence has been on an exponential increase for a few decades now, for reasons which are still debated. Grandin was one of the first people diagnosed as autistic who was able to speak for herself in public about what it was like, and as the number of non-autistic parents with autistic children has skyrocketed, the demand for Grandin as a public spokesperson has gone up with it.
The purpose of this book, I think, was to allow Grandin to revisit (and in some cases correct) what she has said publicly about autism previously. For example, Grandin is a very visual thinker, and at one time thought that this was true of most autistics. More recent research, and her own experience communicating with many other less well known autistic people, has shown that this is common but not at all universal.
Moreover, the very definition of autism has gone through several iterations, either as used in plain English or as specified in the DSM. Whether or not Asperger's is a milder version of autism, or a separate syndrome, is just one part of the maelstrom of controversy which has erupted around autism in recent years (in some cases fueled by government or insurance policies which will pay for treatment for autism, but not for other less recognized conditions). Much is still unknown about autism, but much has been learned, and Grandin takes us on a tour through the subject.
In large part, figuring out how the autistic brain works involves figuring out how the non-autistic brain works. We get an entertaining history of how the medical community's recommendations to the parents of autistic children has changed over the decades, from her own childhood diagnosis as simply "brain damaged", to the nadir of psychoanalysis (the mother is the cause, for being cold and unfeeling toward her child) to the gradual recognition that there is something different in the physical brain. Brain scans are part of how this change has come about; Grandin says "every time a new [brain] scanning method becomes available, I am the first in line to try it out". She shows us several scans of her own brain, and talks about how what they show differs from a "neurotypical".
The last part of the book is, essentially, a discussion of the fact that we are all good at some things, so find out what that is and practice it. Grandin believes we can usefully be divided into word-fact thinkers, picture thinkers, and pattern thinkers. She gives her reasons for this, and takes us through the work of a few different researchers who have developed tests of the different capacities for rotating objects in our mind, etc.
You either find all of this fascinating (as I do), or you don't. Grandin talks on occasion about events in her life, but this is primarily a book about brain science, not about her life. If you are the kind of person who prefers to hear about one person's mind in particular, rather than how brains can give rise to minds in general, it may not be your thing. Speaking for myself, it's a topic on which I could probably spend any amount of time reading and thinking. We are just now, as a society, hitting the steep part of the learning curve on how the brain works, and what's happening right now is the equal of the period in physics from Einstein to Feynman in the early 20th century. Every new (well designed) study is giving us crucial new pieces of the puzzle, and we are just starting to make the connections to understand our own minds. I can't imagine a more exciting topic. But then, I'm a pattern thinker (I think). Twenty years from now, our very idea of who we are and how we exist, as minds with consciousness and emotions and dreams, is going to be as different from what we have (always) had, as the world of quantum physics is from Newton's world of levers and blocks. Temple Grandin is a self-proclaimed image thinker, and she paints a detailed and vivid picture of how these pieces are starting to click together.