It’s In the Details

Are animals autistic savants? ask researchers Giorgio Vallortigara et al. in the February 19th PLoS Biology. Yes, indeed says Temple Grandin in her 2005 book, Animals in Translation: Animals and autistic savants—who have extraordinary skills in certain areas, and especially in mathematics, music and drawing—both have “extreme cognitive skills” and also “think in detail” based on their processing of sensory-based data. Vallortigara et al consider these claims from the perspective of specialists in animal cognition and critique what Grandin says:

We argue that animals, like nonautistic humans, process sensory information according to rules, and that this manner of processing is a specialised feature of the left hemisphere of the brain in both humans and nonhuman animals. Hence, we disagree with the claim that animals are similar to autistic savants. However, we discuss the possibility that manipulations that suppress activity of the left hemisphere and enhance control by the right hemisphere shift attention to the details of individual stimuli, as opposed to categories and higher-level concepts, and can thereby make performance more savant-like in both humans and animals.

One key difference between autistic savants and animals according to Vallortigara et al is that the heightened abilities of savants in some areas (being able to recite long streams of prime numbers, having a photographic memory) are accompanied with severe impairments in areas such as social functioning and language use. Animals, though, display extraordinary abilities specific to their species, and are not impaired in other areas. Liza Gross summarizes the article on a PLoS blog.

The extraordinary skills shown by savants are accompanied by deficits in other cognitive domains, which the authors argue is not the case for the remarkable species-specific adaptations seen in some taxa. For example, the Clark’s nutcracker can stash whitebark pine seeds in thousands of different sites and recover them up to eight months later. Yet the bird exhibits no cognitive deficits in other areas.

Accompanying the PLoS Biology essay (which is available in full online) is a response by Temple Grandin herself.

I think the basic disagreement between the authors and me arises from the concept of details—specifically how details are perceived by humans, who think in language, compared with animals, who think in sensory-based data. Since animals do not have verbal language, they have to store memories as pictures, sounds, or other sensory impressions. Sensory-based information by its very nature is more detailed than word-based memories. As a person with autism, all my thoughts are in photo-realistic pictures. I can search my own brain, like using Google, for images. As I read about the cognition experiments, I saw the birds performing in my imagination like a virtual reality computer system. The main similarity between animal thought and my thought is the lack of verbal language.

The exchange between the animal cognition researchers and Grandin herself is itself intriguing. The researchers consider animal behavior in the natural environment; Grandin writes about domestic and farm animals that she has studied, and infuses these observations with how her own thinking works, via images and sensory stimuli. Grandin especially emphasizes the amount of detail that can be contained in one piece of sensory-based data, in one image that, like the oft-quoted saying, “contains a thousand words.”

Jim and I tend to think that Charlie, like Grandin, thinks most of all using something other than words (as Jim and I both do). Charlie often has some very specific images of how things should be in his mind (and attempts to recreate these down to the last details, by insisting that we wear certain-colored shirts or lie on the couch a certain way). He has a strong memory for music and spontaneously sing-hums the melody of various songs, in phrases far longer than the short verbal sentences he produces on his own.

Charlie’s no savant in any area, but rather has some very focused abilities in a few areas. Besides music and swimming in the ocean—-Charlie always knows when another wave is about to rise and crash even when he has back turned to it—-he has a strong memory for how to get to familiar places, or places that he wants to get to (the Whole Foods a couple of towns over that is the only store that sells a certain kind of “bread berries”—raisin bread). Lately Charlie has been calling out “this way, this way!” from the back seat and pointing and there have been a few times when he has led my parents around New York City to get to the Toys ‘R’ Us in Times Square, which has an indoor ferris wheel. I am inclined to wonder if this directional ability is somewhat genetic as Jim has an innate and easy sense of how to get from here to there (and he was once a New York City taxi driver; the PLoS Biology essay notes that, for London taxi drivers, “domain-specific cognitive specialisations” resulting from their “extraordinary ability to navigate using landmarks” come at a price—in their brains, there is an “increase in the volume of the posterior hippocampus” and “a relative decrease in the anterior portion of the same structure”).

Reflecting on Grandin’s statements about the greater associative power of images for her, I have to say that, when I think of a single word, a potentially infinite string of associations follows. Take “chair”: How to say the word in a few other languages comes to mind; and then images of many, many chairs I have seen (a lot of them); the chair I am sitting on right now; words that kind of sound like “chair” (clear; the French chair, “flesh”; Cheer as in the detergent); Plato’s chair in the tenth book of the Republic and then on I go to thinking about the Greek word for “chair,” kline and reclining, clinics, clinical, Freud……

Yes, it’s easy to get stuck in details in our day to day life with Charlie: Always have to keep the big picture in mind.