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Thinking In Pictures
P157 ...Savants memorize huge amounts of information but have difficulty manipulating the material in meaningful ways. Their memory skills far exceed those of normal people, but their cognitive deficits are great. Some are incapable of making simple generalizations that cattle and other animals make easily.
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P158 What interests me most about autistic savants of the extreme type is that they do not satisfy one of Marian Stamp Dawkins’s chief criteria for thinking. Dawkins, a researcher at the University of Oxford, is one of the few specialists who studies thinking in animals. She makes a clear distinction between instinctual behavior and true thinking... Some instincts are hard-wired like computer hardware, and others can be modified by experience... Numerous studies reviewed by Dawkins clearly indicate that animals can think and are capable of using previously learned information to solve problems presented under novel conditions. Animals have the ability to generalize, even though they do not use language.
P159 Dawkins’s work begs the deeper question [sic] of whether a child with autism who is unable to generalize can think. For example, a person with classic Kanner autism can be taught not to run out into the busy street in front of his house because it is dangerous. Unfortunately, he often fails to generalize this knowledge to a street at somebody else's house...
I also have a problem using "begs the question", so I'm sensitive to when it is misused. It seems like it should mean that the real question is avoided but it is more accurately described as "arguing in a circle." Here's a good example of begging the question, "Chocolate is healthy because it's good for you."
...I have observed that the people who are most likely to deny animals thought are often highly verbal thinkers who have poor visualization skills. They excel at verbal or sequential thinking activities but are unable to read blue-prints.
P160 It is very likely that animals think in pictures and memories of smell, light, and sound patterns. In fact, my visual thinking patterns probably resemble animal thinking more closely than those of verbal thinkers. It seems silly to me to debate whether or not animals can think. To me it has always been obvious that they do. I have always pictured in my mind how the animal responds to the visual images in his head. Since I have pictures in my imagination, I assume that animals have similar pictures. Differences between language-based thought and picture-based thought may explain why artists and accountants fail to understand each other. They are like apples and oranges.
Can animals think? Here’s a proof that they can: Take a small barrel of oats. Pour some molasses over the oats where horses can see and smell what you’re doing. Hide the barrel of oats in a secured tack shed. Now move off to a position where you can observe the horses as they take apart your tack shed to get to the oats. I mention horses simply because I’ve been outsmarted by them any number of times. People often talk about training horses but mostly, in my experience, horses train people.
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P163 At the University of Illinois farm where I worked as a graduate student, the pigs in one pen learned to unscrew the bolts that held the fence to the wall. As fast as I could screw the bolts back in, their little tongues were unscrewing them. All five pigs in that pen learned to unscrew bolts. My aunt had a horse that learned to put its head through a gate to lift it off the hinges... The vast majority of cattle are content to stay in the pens and don’t try to get out, but a bull that has learned how to break barbed-wire fences is impossible to keep in, because he has learned that he will not get cut if he presses against the posts. Fences only work because cattle do not know that they can break them.
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P165 ...When a pigeon is transported from its home loft to the release point, it remembers smells along the way, and it uses these cues to get back home... It appears that visual landmarks are the preferred method of homing, but a bird will switch gears and use olfactory cues when it finds itself over strange territory where familiar landmarks are absent. It may be using “smell pictures.”
A fairly high percentage of people with autism have a very acute sense of smell and become overwhelmed by strong odors. I am embarrassed to admit it, but when I was a young child, I liked to sniff people like a dog... The scents of different people were interesting... Many people with autism share... hyperacute senses [with animals]. They are unable to concentrate in the classroom because they can hear talking in three other rooms. I have often observed that the senses of some people with autism resemble the acute senses of animals.
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