The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum (27 page)

When I was in high school, I was an unmotivated student who seldom studied. I saw no point in studying until Mr. Carlock instilled in me the goal of becoming a scientist. I’ve talked to many successful individuals with Asperger’s syndrome, both diagnosed and undiagnosed, who say they became successful only because they had either a parent or a teacher instructing them—and maybe even inspiring them. For instance, young people with Asperger’s or high-functioning autistics might fool around with computers, but they’ll need a mentor to focus them and to help them learn programming.

Okay, let’s say the autistic child has gotten an education that identified and developed his or her strengths. And let’s say that child has grown up to enter a marketplace that appreciates his or her particular skill set. That’s great for that person. But you know what? It’s also great for society.

Not only can you have different types of thinkers doing what they do best, but you can have them doing what they do best alongside other types of thinkers who are doing what
they
do best.

When I recall collaborations in which I’ve participated, I can see how different kinds of thinkers worked together to create a product that was greater than the sum of its parts. I think about the work I did with a student (nonautistic) who was good at everything I was bad at. Bridget was an ace at statistics, very organized, and a wonderful data collector and record-keeper—someone I could trust to run the experiment right. One experiment we did together correlated the excitability of cattle in the squeeze chute with their weight gain. We used two observers, and they rated the cattle’s behavior on a scale of 1 to 4, with 1 being calm and 4 being berserk. One day Bridget came up to me and said, “Dr. Grandin, I’m afraid we’re not getting any useful results.” So I reran the “film” of the experiment in my mind, and I saw that the observers seemed to have two different standards about what constituted berserk behavior. Sure enough, Bridget and I found that one of the observers had a much higher percentage of 4 ratings. I can design experiments, and I can detect flaws in the methodology, because my picture thinking allows me to see what I want the experiment to do and what the experiment has gotten wrong. But I need a pattern thinker like Bridget to run the statistical analysis and do the meticulous record-keeping of the experiment.

I think about livestock construction. The pattern thinker—the degreed engineer—does not lay out the plant. The picture thinker—the draftsman—does. Only when the draftsman has finished laying out the packaging floor and the slaughter floor and so on does the engineer get to work, calculating the roof trusses, spec’ing out the concrete, figuring out the rebar spacing. The one part of the plant that this one particular draftsman I know—me—doesn’t design is the refrigeration. Why? Because it requires too much pattern thinking for me to design it properly—too much mathematics and abstract engineering. I know just enough about refrigeration to stay away from it.

And I think about Mick Jackson, the director of the HBO movie
Temple Grandin.
If you look at an earlier movie of his, the Steve Martin comedy
L.A
.
Story,
you’ll see that it doesn’t have much structure. That’s because Mick is a picture thinker, not a pattern thinker. By the time he was working on my movie, he knew what his strengths were and where he needed help, so every time Mick wanted to change something in the script, he would consult with one of the writers, Christopher Monger. He was a word thinker, of course, but he was also a pattern thinker who could tell what effect each little change was going to have on the overall structure. The movie benefited enormously, I think, from being created by all three kinds of thinking.

In the previous chapter I said that once I recognized pattern thinking for what it is, I started seeing it everywhere. The same is true of examples of the way the three kinds of thinking work together. Now I can see them not only in my own experience but everywhere I look.

Reading an interview
with Steve Jobs, I came across this quote: “The thing I love about Pixar is that it’s exactly like the LaserWriter.”
What?
The most successful animation studio in recent memory is “exactly like” a piece of technology from 1985?

He explained that when he saw the first page come out of Apple’s LaserWriter—the first laser printer ever—he thought,
There’s awesome amounts of technology in this box.
He knew what all the technology was, and he knew all the work that went into creating it, and he knew how innovative it was. But he also knew that the public wasn’t going to care about what was inside the box. Only the product was going to matter—the beautiful fonts that he made sure were part of the Apple aesthetic. This was the lesson he applied to Pixar: You can use all sorts of new computer software to create a new kind of animation, but the public isn’t going to care about anything except what’s on the screen.

He was right—obviously. While he didn’t use the terms
picture thinker
and
pattern thinker,
that’s what he was talking about. In that moment in 1985, he realized that you needed pattern thinkers to engineer the miracles inside the box and picture thinkers to make what comes out of the box beautiful.

I haven’t been able to look at an iPod or iPad or iPhone without thinking about that interview. I now understand that when Apple gets something wrong, it’s because they didn’t get the balance between the kinds of thinking right. The notorious antenna problem on the iPhone 4? Too much art, not enough engineering.

Contrast this philosophy with Google’s; the minds behind Google, I guarantee you, were pattern thinkers. And to this day, Google products favor engineering over art.

What all these examples tell me is that in society, the three kinds of minds naturally complement one another. Society puts them together without anybody thinking about it. But what if we did think about it? What if we recognized these categories consciously and tried to make the various pairings work to our advantage? What if each of us was able to say,
Oh, here’s my strength, and here’s my weakness—what can I do for you, and what can you do for me?

When Richard and I started collaborating on this book, we both recognized that we worked well together. But as we developed the idea of brains being wired for different ways of thinking, we realized
why
we worked well together. Richard’s a pattern and word thinker, and I’m a picture thinker. And because we realized how we complement each other’s strengths, we have been able to exploit them to a greater extent than would have otherwise been possible.

I’m always saying to Richard, “You’re the structure guy”—meaning that his strength in organizing the concepts in the book compensates for my weakness in that area. When I look back at papers I wrote in the 1990s, I’m embarrassed at how randomly organized they were. Concepts didn’t follow concepts in logical formation. They just sort of clumped here and there—pretty much wherever they occurred to me in the process of writing the paper. I’ve gotten better at structure over the years, but I know I’ll never be like Richard. When he tells me that a particular concept we’ve been chewing over belongs in chapter 6, I say, “Okay.”

Fine. Good for us. Even if I weren’t autistic, we’d be a good team, because our kinds of minds complement each other. But the fact is, I am autistic, and the strengths I bring to the collaboration are strengths that belong to my kind of autistic brain—the quick associations, the long-term memory, the focus on details.

Let’s apply this same principle to the marketplace. If people can consciously recognize the strengths and weaknesses in their ways of thinking, they can then seek out the right kinds of minds for the right reasons. And if they do that, then they’re going to recognize that sometimes the right mind can belong only to an autistic brain.

We’ve discussed how autistic brains seem to be better at picking out details than normal brains. If we see that kind of trait not as a byproduct of bad wiring but simply as the product of wiring—the kind of argument that Michelle Dawson made in chapter 6—then we can begin to see it as offering a possible advantage in some circumstances. And if we see that being able to see the trees before the forest might make someone better at seeing certain kinds of patterns, then we can ask where that skill might be useful. And if we realize that security screeners at the airport need to pick out details quickly, then there we go: a job.

By cultivating the autistic mind on a brain-by-brain, strength-by-strength basis, we can reconceive autistic teens and adults in jobs and internships not as charity cases but as valuable, even essential, contributors to society.

Some entrepreneurs have already made that leap. Aspiritech,
in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, and Specialisterne, in Copenhagen, both employ primarily high-functioning autistics and individuals with Asperger’s to test software. Their brains—wired to endure repetition, to focus closely, to remember details—are just what the job requires. The son of Aspiritech’s founder was diagnosed with Asperger’s at the age of fourteen, and as an adult he was fired from his job as a grocery bagger. But when it comes to testing software, he’s the go-to guy.

In 2007
Walgreens opened a distribution center in Anderson, South Carolina, that hired a work force that was 40 percent persons with disabilities, including those on the autism spectrum. The idea was the brainchild of Randy Lewis, a vice president at the retailer who was the father of an autistic son. Thanks to touchscreens and flexible workstations, the employees with disabilities work side by side with their “normal” peers. When Walgreens saw that the center was 20 percent more efficient than the company’s other centers, it expanded the philosophy to another distribution center, in Windsor, Connecticut, in 2009.

But you don’t need to wait for a big corporation with an enlightened hiring policy to build a branch near you. Parents can take their autistic kid to a neighborhood shop or restaurant, talk to the owner or manager, and see if there might be a job available that would be suitable for the child’s skill level. And if one door closes, and another, and even another, “keep on knockin’.”

That advice
is courtesy of Savino Nuccio D’Argento—Nuccio to everyone. He (along with a business partner) owns Vince’s Italian Restaurant in the Chicago suburb of Harwood Heights. Nuccio has an autistic son, Enzo, and through his contacts with the autism branch of Chicago Easter Seals, Nuccio regularly hires adult persons with autism. He also opens his doors to training programs for school-age kids; they learn to vacuum, set tables, make sure the salt and pepper shakers are filled—the kinds of tasks that will help prepare some of them for entry into the adult world.

“For other people, it would be like, ‘Oh, I hate this job,’” Nuccio says. Not so for people with autism. “They love it, because every day it’s the same thing.”

The problems he’s encountered, in fact, haven’t come from the autistic employees and trainees. Instead, he says, they’ve come from the “normal” employees who resist the change in their work environment.

“It still takes time for other people to accept it,” he says. “There are still people out there who look at it as, ‘Oh, heck, I’ve got to deal with this.’ It’s sad. It saddened me at first because I didn’t think I had employees who thought that way. But you’ve just got to get them to cross that hurdle and let them know it’ll be okay.” Maybe the first couple of weeks are rough on the other employees, he says, and he understands why. “They’ve got to deal with this person asking them the same question over and over and over again.” In the end, though, the employees adjust—especially, he says, once they have an epiphany: “We’re helping these people, sure, but they’re going to end up helping us, because they’re going to do their job really well.”

If necessary, Easter Seals will try to place the trainees in paying positions elsewhere. One trainee went on to answer phones for Easter Seals. Another works forty-hour weeks at a produce store. Nuccio hope his own son, now fourteen, will one day reach the same happy outcome—happy for both of them. As Randy Lewis, the Walgreens executive, told NBC News, the inspiration for his hiring innovation was the age-old question that haunts so many parents of children with disabilities:
What will happen to my child when I’m gone?
To which the mother of an adult with Asperger’s who worked at the distribution center in Anderson answered: “I don’t have that worry anymore.”

And what about the employees themselves—the people with autism who are fortunate enough to knock on the right door? Here’s an inspirational case that recently came to my attention.

In the fall of 2009, John Fienberg, a high-functioning autistic, got a temp job at a New York City ad agency as a digital librarian—a great gig for a word thinker like John. It was supposed to last only a week, but John’s skills—accuracy, speed, and a willingness to perform repetitive tasks that vexed normal brains—made him a valuable asset to the agency. He continued temping there for six months, until the company found money in the budget to hire him full-time. Today he catalogues, files, and otherwise manages the product photography, advertising masters, and stock imagery in the ad firm’s digital library.

“I am naturally very detail-oriented in a way that makes cataloguing very easy for me,” he wrote in an e-mail. The fact that he was communicating via e-mail was a reflection of his social skills. When we contacted him by e-mail (Richard heard about him through a friend), he said that he would be willing to be interviewed, but that he strongly preferred not to talk over the phone. He also said that meeting in person could be a problem; he knows he exhausts people with his over-talking.

“My boss is aware of my disabilities and does his best to work with me,” John continued, “and I try to repay him by producing results that make it worth putting up with me when I don’t quite understand something the way he wishes I would. The rest of my coworkers do not interact with me except for the phone and through e-mails.” Still, he said, “to the best of my knowledge they all really like me and appreciate my contributions. I even got a commendation from one of them last month that was shared at the staff meeting.”