Imagine you’re at the beach. The right side of your brain
registers brown grains of sand, gray ones, white ones, tan ones, black
ones… “Hellooo!” the left side says. “It’s a beach!”
But what if the left side didn’t tell you it was a beach? That’s sort
of how animal behaviorist and autistic celebrity Temple Grandin
describes being autistic. Lots of Polaroid snapshots scattered about.
Fewer brain “managers” sweeping them into perfect little piles.
Grandin says that animals also think like autistic savants, a theory she popularized in her book Animals in Translation.
But this week in the journal PLoS Biology neuroscientists argue that
animals have brains similar to those of non-autistic humans—they take
in lots of juicy stimuli, sift through, and draw a cohesive picture.
They say this selective filtering process is as essential to animals as
it is to us.
The authors agree that some animals have extraordinary, savant-like
cognitive powers—Clark’s woodpecker can locate over 1000 pine nut
stashes, for example—but they say these brilliant birds are simply well
adapted, and don’t suffer other cognitive impairments typical in human
autistic savants.
This week‘s podcast guest hosted by Christopher Intagliata, an intern for Scientific American Mind.
