When I wound up the propeller, the helicopter flew straight up about a hundred feet. In elementary school I made a helicopter out of a broken balsa-wood airplane. I started designing things as a child, when I was always experimenting with new kinds of kites and model airplanes. They helped me figure out why the animals refused to go in one chute but willingly walked through another.Įvery design problem I've ever solved started with my ability to visualize and see the world in pictures. Today, research has shown that cattle can see colors, but the photos provided the unique advantage of seeing the world through a cow's viewpoint. Back then I used black-and-white film, because twenty years ago scientists believed that cattle lacked color vision. Using the photos, I was able to figure out which things scared the cattle, such as shadows and bright spots of sunlight. I would kneel down and take pictures through the chute from the cow's eye level. Early in my career I used a camera to help give me the animals' perspective as they walked through a chute for their veterinary treatment. I credit my visualization abilities with helping me understand the animals I work with. From their answers I learned that my visualization skills far exceeded those of most other people. At meetings and at work I started asking other people detailed questions about how they accessed information from their memories. In fact, I did not realize the full extent of the differences until very recently. I had no idea that my thought processes were different. When I was a child and a teenager, I thought everybody thought in pictures. One of the most profound mysteries of autism has been the remarkable ability of most autistic people to excel at visual spatial skills while performing so poorly at verbal skills. I value my ability to think visually, and I would never want to lose it. Some of the people I've worked for don't even know that their systems were designed by someone with autism. In fact, one third of the cattle and hogs in the United States are handled in equipment I have designed.

I have worked for many major livestock companies. During my career I have designed all kinds of equipment, ranging from corrals for handling cattle on ranches to systems for handling cattle and hogs during veterinary procedures and slaughter. Visual thinking has enabled me to build entire systems in my imagination. Language-based thinkers often find this phenomenon difficult to understand, but in my job as an equipment designer for the livestock industry, visual thinking is a tremendous advantage. When somebody speaks to me, his words are instantly translated into pictures. I translate both spoken and written words into full-color movies, complete with sound, which run like a VCR tape in my head. With 2006 Updates from the Expanded Edition THINKING IN PICTURES: Autism and Visual Thought THINKING IN PICTURES

Grandin thinking in pictures