Grandin, T., & Johnson, C. (2005). Animals in translation: Using the mysteries of autism to decode animal behavior. New York: Scribner.
What is the connection between autistic people and animals? According to Temple Grandin autistic people have an immediate rapport and empathy with animals, but normal people without autism do not share the same bond with animals. For anyone who has seen this miraculous relationship first hand, it is obvious there is a deep level of understanding between the two. After years of research Grandin discovered that autistic people and animals share a visual thinking strategy that most ‘normal’ people, who tend to be verbal thinkers, do not seem to understand.
Unfortunately Grandin’s research excludes the life of an artist. In Gorillas in Our Midst, several people watching a basketball game are completely oblivious when a person wearing a gorilla costume walks onto the screen for a few brief moments. Supposedly the gorilla remained unnoticed to half of the group because they were all ‘normal’ people. If an artist been one of the spectators in this odd study, then she would have seen the kooky gorilla suited person walk across the screen. “Autistic people and animals are seeing a whole register of the visual world normal people can’t or don’t” (p24). Artists are visual thinkers. A visual artist would notice such an obvious visual change in a basketball game.
Perhaps artists are an unmentioned exception to this study and more importantly, should be categorized separately from both the autistic person and the ‘normal’ person. There is difference s between visual and verbal thinkers. Artists should not be thrown into the group of verbal thinkers, as most artists would clearly fit into the category of visual thinkers. If the author had done extensive research on how artists see, then we would find a correlation between artists, animals and autistic people’s way of seeing. Grandin does throw artists a small bone when she explores interior designers who, unlike ‘normal’ people do tend to be detail-oriented species.
If ‘normal’ people have “Inattentional Blindness”, is this why we have car accidents? It seems while operating machinery, people tend to switch over to autopilot and stop paying attention. Temple writes with bias living with autism and an artist’s perspective is necessary to provide balance and another outsider’s perspective on ‘normal’ people.
