By favouring verbal thinkers, says the author and animal scientist, essential skills are being lost. Her new book aims to demonstrate the power of processing information in different ways
Temple Grandin is perhaps the world’s most famous scholar living with autism. In more than 50 years working in animal agriculture – specialising in designing more humane livestock handling facilities – she has improved cattle treatment internationally. She is also a prominent activist, author and speaker on autism. Her insights shared about her personal experiences – she struggled to talk as a child – have done much to increase our understanding of the condition. Her new book, Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns and Abstractions, argues that, in a world dominated by verbal thinkers, those with visual brains are being overlooked and underestimated – to the detriment of all of us. Grandin, 75, is a professor of animal science at Colorado State University.
What are the different ways of thinking, as you conceive them?
I’ve come to gradually see, and it has been confirmed in the scientific literature, there are two kinds of visual thinkers: “object visualisers”, like me, who think in pictures (concrete, detailed images), and a second group who, different from me, are “spatial visualisers”. More mathematically inclined, they think in patterns and abstractions. They are distinct from verbal thinkers who perceive and process information primarily through language. Both types of visual thinkers tend to be more bottom up, details first. Verbal thinkers tend to be more top down, linear and sequential. Most people are mixtures of different kinds of thinking. What tends to happen in fully verbal autistic people is that you get the extremes of one type or another. That I am an extreme object visualiser is probably because I am autistic.
Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns and Abstractions is published by Rider & Co (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
