Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism (22 page)

Social interaction is further complicated by the physiological problems of attention shifting. Since people with autism require much more time than others to shift their attention between auditory and visual stimuli, they find it more difficult to follow rapidly changing, complex social interaction. These problems may be a part of the reason that Jack, a man with autism, said, “If I relate to people too much, I become nervous and uncomfortable.” Learning social skills can be greatly helped with videotapes. I gradually learned to improve my public speaking by watching tapes and by becoming aware of easily quantifiable cues, such as rustling papers that indicate boredom. It is a slow process of continuous improvement. There are no sudden breakthroughs.

Figuring out how to interact socially was much more difficult than solving an engineering problem. I found it relatively easy to program my visual memory with the knowledge of cattle dipping vats or corral designs. Recently I attended a lecture where a social scientist said that humans do not think like computers. That night at a dinner party I told this scientist and her friends that my thought patterns resemble computing and that I am able to explain my thought processes step by step. I was kind of shocked when she told me that she is unable to describe how her thoughts and emotions are joined. She said that when she thinks about something, the factual information and the emotions are combined into a seamless whole. I finally understood why so many people allow emotions to distort the facts. My mind can always separate the two. Even when I am very upset, I keep reviewing the facts over and over until I can come to a logical conclusion.

Over the years, I have learned to be more tactful and diplomatic. I have learned never to go over the head of the person who hired me unless I have his or her permission. From past experiences I have learned to avoid situations in which I could be exploited and to stroke egos that may feel threatened. To master diplomacy, I read about business dealings and international negotiations in the
Wall Street Journal
and other publications. I then used them as models.

I know that things are missing in my life, but I have an exciting career that occupies my every waking hour. Keeping myself busy keeps my mind off what I may be missing. Sometimes parents and professionals worry too much about the social life of an adult with autism. I make social contacts via my work. If a person develops her talents, she will have contacts with people who share her interests.

During the past twenty years, for example, I've worked with Jim Uhl. He has constructed more than twenty of my projects, and he is one of my closest friends. Construction is his life. His business started in a tiny toolshed at the back of his home and has grown into a major company that does big jobs for the Arizona Department of Transportation and the mines. We just love to talk about contracting. Some of the best times of my life have been working on construction projects. I can relate to people who produce tangible results. Seeing my drawings turn into steel and concrete turns me on. Construction workers love to complain about stupid people in the front office, and I fit right in when they bitch about the “suits and ties” from the office who don't understand equipment or construction. Over the years I have worked with many crews and many different contractors. They all like to complain and tell construction war stories. I have no trouble being with them, and I become one of the guys. Another reason I fit in with construction workers and technical people is that we are mostly visual thinkers.

I am told by my nonautistic friends that relationships with other people are what most people live for, whereas I get very attached to my projects and to certain places. Last year Jim and I drove out to Scottsdale Feedyard, which is now closed and partially torn down. All that was left were a few posts, some tanks at the feed mill, and a deserted, wrecked office. The pens had been sold for scrap steel. It upset me very much and I didn't know if we should have come. The windows in the manager's office were broken, and the rain had warped the wood paneling. One of the few posts still standing was from the door in the fence where twenty years ago I had been blocked by the cowboy foreman.

Watching the Swift plant slowly self-destruct and knowing it was going to close was very upsetting for me. I guess my relationships with Tom Rohrer and Norb Goscowitz and the other people there were the closest I've had. The Swift plant was the place where I had had some of my deepest thoughts about the meaning of life. Memories of its closing are much more devastating than any other memory. I still can't write about it without crying.

My sense of identity was tied up with that plant, just as the things I had in my high school room were my identity. Then, when I went away for the summer, I did not want to pack any of my wall decorations away because I felt I would somehow lose myself. I had a special attic room in the dormitory where I went to think and meditate. Going to the special room, known as the Crow's Nest, was essential to my sense of well-being. When the construction of the dorm was finished, I no longer had free access to it; a locked door prohibited me from entering. I was so upset that the headmaster gave me a key.

I also remember becoming upset when my Aunt Breechan died, but I was even more distraught when I found out that her ranch was for sale. The idea of the loss of the place made me grief-stricken. Hans Asperger also observed a strong attachment to places in autistics, noting that autistic children take longer to get over homesickness than normal children. There is an emotional bonding to the routines and objects at home. Maybe this is because of the lack of strong emotional attachments to people. I think Mr. Spock would understand.

Update: Learning Social Skills

Over the last ten years I have gained additional insights into how people relate to each other. I learned that I am
what I do
instead of
what I feel
. In my life I have replaced emotional complexity with intellectual complexity. People on the spectrum who are happy have friends with their same interests. Computer programmers are happy when they are with other programmers and they can talk about programming. I talked to one lady on the spectrum who met her husband at a science fiction book club. She writes technical manuals and he works in the computer industry. They love fine food and their idea of a wonderful romantic evening is to go to a really nice restaurant and spend time talking about computer data storage systems. Normal people have a hard time understanding why this special interest is so absorbing.

Develop Shared Interests

Social interaction revolves around shared interests. When I was in high school being teased by the other kids, I was miserable. The only place I was not teased was during horseback riding and model rocket club. The students who were interested in these special interests were not the kids who did the teasing. These activities were a shared interest for us.

I strongly recommend hobbies and careers where common interests can be shared. Mentors who can nurture talent can help students become successful. Students on the spectrum should be encouraged to participate in activities such as robotics club, choir, poetry group, scouting, or chess club. My '50s upbringing helped me because turn taking and sharing was drilled into me. Today some Asperger's students have difficulty working as a team to build a robot. Working with another person should be part of the activity. Little kids need to be taught turn taking because this will make it easier to work with another person when they get older. Too many activities today are solitary. Special interest groups such as
Star Trek
conventions or historical societies are great places to network and find other people with similar interests. The people on the spectrum who are depressed and unhappy often have no interests they can share with another person.

There are some really smart Asperger's and high-functioning students who need to be removed from the social pressure cooker of high school. After all, socializing with teenagers is not an important life skill. I am a strong believer in mainstreaming elementary school students so they can socialize with normal children. Lower-functioning students often do fine in high school because it is obvious to the other students that they are handicapped and should not be teased. But for some high-functioning high school students, it might make sense for them to take classes online or at a community college.

Learning Manners and Social Survival

I think some of the high-functioning Asperger's people are having serious employment problems because today's society fails to teach social skills. A brilliant man with Asperger's was fired from a library job for making comments to fat patrons. Mother taught me that these kinds of comments are rude. Even though honesty is the best policy, my opinion about other people's appearance was usually not welcome. Through many specific examples, I developed a category of “rude honesty” when I needed to keep my mouth shut. All social skills were learned by being given many specific examples that I could put into categories such as “rude honesty,” “introduction routines with a new client,” “how to deal with coworker jealousy,” etc. As I gained more and more experience I placed each new social experience in the appropriate social file. Coworker jealousy was difficult to deal with. At one plant, a jealous engineer damaged some of my equipment. Today I have learned how to bring him into the project to make him feel a part of it. This will reduce jealousy. I have also learned to compliment the jealous person when they do good work. Today I just accept the fact that jealousy is a lousy human trait. To get a project done it has to be defused.

Social Skills Versus Social Relatedness

Learning social skills is like learning how to act in a play. Social skills can be taught but social emotional relatedness cannot be taught. Social skills and emotional relatedness are two different things. Often parents ask me, “Will my child have a true emotional relationship with me?” It is sometimes difficult for parents to accept that the brain of their child is wired differently. A social emotional relationship that is purely emotional may be of little interest to the child. Autism varies widely, and some individuals will be more emotionally related than others.

Modulating emotions is difficult for me. One time on a plane I laughed so hard at a movie that many people started staring at me. When I cry at a sad movie, I cry more than most people. My emotion is either turned on or all turned off. I have the four simple emotions of happy, sad, fearful, or angry. I never have mixtures of these emotions, but I can rapidly switch emotions.

After I was kicked out of a large girls' school for throwing a book at a girl who teased me, I learned to change anger to crying. I was unable to change the intensity of the emotion but I could switch to a different emotion. At my boarding school, horseback riding was taken away after I got into several fist fights due to teasing. Since I wanted to ride the horses, I immediately switched to crying. Switching to crying enabled me to not lose a job due to either hitting or throwing things. At the Swift Plant, I often retreated to the cattle yards to cry. Today any kind of violent behavior would not be tolerated in the workplace.

Subtle Emotional Cues

I was in my early '50s when I first learned about small eye signals. I did not understand why eye contact with so important. There was a whole secret world of eye movements that were unknown to me until I read Simon Baron-Cohen's book
Mind Blindness
. Tone of voice was the only subtle signal I picked up. Obviously I recognized strong emotion in other people when they expressed anger by yelling, sadness by crying, or happiness by laughing.

Mother has written about the difficulties with her marriage in her book
A Thorn in My Pocket
. When I was a child, I did not pick up on the emotional turmoil between my mother and father. I failed to recognize the signs of conflict because they were subtle. They seldom yelled at each other and they never hit each other or threw things.

What Does Research Show?

Hundreds of scientific papers have been written on abnormalities in face perception in autism. The bottom line is that in autistic people the amygdala (emotion center) is abnormal and people with autism use different brain circuits when they recognize faces. I still have embarrassing moments when I do not recognize the face of a person I met five minutes ago. I am able to recognize people I have been around for a long time. If a face has a really unique feature like a giant nose, I can remember that. The number of studies on face recognition and eye signals greatly outnumber papers on how people with autism think or perceive sensory input. Normal people are more interested in studying emotions rather than studying sensory problems or how savant skills work. I wish the scientists would spend more time on sensory problems. Severe problems with sensory oversensitivity wrecks the lives of many people on the spectrum. The most miserable individuals are the ones with such severe sensory problems that they cannot tolerate a restaurant or office. Socializing is impossible if your ears hurt from normal noise in movie theaters, sporting events, or busy streets.

8
A C
OW'S
E
YE
V
IEW

Connecting with Animals

ONE THIRD of the cattle and hogs in the United States are handled in facilities I have designed. Throughout my career I have worked on systems to improve the treatment of livestock. The principle behind my designs is to use the animals' natural behavior patterns to encourage them to move willingly through the system. If an animal balks and refuses to walk through an alley, one needs to find out why it is scared and refuses to move. Unfortunately, people often try to correct these problems with force instead of by understanding the animal's behavior. My connection with these animals goes back to the time I first realized that the squeeze machine could help calm my anxiety. I have been seeing the world from their point of view ever since.

People ask me all the time whether the cattle know they are going to be slaughtered. What I have observed over the years and at many meat plants is that the things that frighten cattle usually have nothing to do with death. It is the little things that make them balk and refuse to move, such as seeing a small piece of chain hanging down from an alley fence. For instance, a lead animal will stop to look at a moving chain and move his head back and forth in rhythm with its swing. He isn't concerned about being slaughtered; he's afraid of a small piece of chain that jiggles and looks out of place.

Most people do not observe these simple things because they get the cattle too excited by poking and prodding them when they refuse to move through an alley or out of a pen. When cattle are excited, it is impossible to determine what is bothering them. They go into antipredator mode and push themselves together in a boiling ball of circling, agitated animals, with their heads toward the center of the group. The smallest distraction can stop a group of cattle moving through an alley. I remember one time when a meat plant became totally chaotic because a plastic juice bottle had fallen into the entrance where the cattle lined up to walk into the plant. They absolutely refused to walk over the white plastic bottle. Anything that causes visual contrast will attract the animals' attention. They fear a drain gate across a concrete floor or a sparkling reflection from a puddle. Sometimes moving an overhead lamp to eliminate a reflection on a floor or wall will make it easier to move cattle and hogs. Poor lighting can cause many problems. Cattle and hogs will not walk into a dark place, so installing a lamp to illuminate the entrance to an alley will entice them to enter. Animals, like people, want to see where they are going.

When I put myself in a cow's place, I really have to be that cow and not a person in a cow costume. I use my visual thinking skills to simulate what an animal would see and hear in a given situation. I place myself inside its body and imagine what it experiences. It is the ultimate virtual reality system, but I also draw on the empa-thetic feelings of gentleness and kindness I have developed so that my simulation is more than a robotic computer model. Add to the equation all of my scientific knowledge of cattle behavior patterns and instincts. I have to follow the cattle's rules of behavior. I also have to imagine what experiencing the world through the cow's sensory system is like. Cattle have a very wide, panoramic visual field, because they are a prey species, ever wary and watchful for signs of danger. Similarly, some people with autism are like fearful animals in a world full of dangerous predators. They live in a constant state of fear, worrying about a change in routine or becoming upset if objects in their environment are moved. This fear of change may be an activation of ancient antipredator systems that are blocked or masked in most other people.

Fear is a universal emotion in the animal kingdom, because it provides an intense motivation to avoid predators. Fear is also a dominant emotion in autism. Therese Joliffe wrote that trying to keep everything the same helped her avoid some of the terrible fear. Tony W. wrote that he lived in a world of daydreaming and fear and was afraid of everything. Before I started taking antidepressants, minor changes in my daily routine caused a fear reaction. There were times that I was dominated by fear of trivial changes, such as switching to daylight savings time. This intense fear is probably due to a neurological defect that sensitizes the nervous system to stimuli that are minor to normal people.

In order to survive, members of a prey species such as cattle or sheep have to be ever vigilant and flee when they spot a predator. Cattle and sheep have supersensitive hearing, an acute sense of smell, and eyes on the sides of their heads so they can scan the landscape while grazing. They are much more sensitive to high-pitched sounds than people and can hear sounds that are outside the range of human hearing.

High-pitched sounds tend to be more disturbing to them than low-pitched sounds. Tom Camp, a USDA researcher in Texas, found that a loud bell on an outdoor telephone caused a calf's heart rate to jump suddenly by fifty to seventy beats per minute. It's unlikely that anyone but me would have noticed that the sounds that upset cattle are the same kinds of sounds that are unbearable to many autistic children with overly sensitive hearing. A sudden hissing similar to that caused by the air brakes on a semi truck will trigger a strong startle reaction in both calves and cattle. When calves hear this sound, they instantly lay their ears against their heads and back up to get away from the source of the noise. Like cattle, a person with autism has hypervigilant senses.

Even today, a person whistling in the middle of the night will cause my heart to race. High-pitched sounds are the worst. High, rapidly repeated sounds are stimulating to the nervous system. P. B. McConnell and his colleague J. R. Baylis, in Germany, found that dog trainers use high-pitched intermittent sounds to stimulate a dog to do something like fetch, while low sounds are used to make it stop, such as saying “Whoa” to a horse. In tame animals the high-pitched sounds have a mild activating effect, but in wild animals and autistic children they set off a massive fear reaction.

Contrary to popular belief, cattle and other livestock can see color, but their visual system is most attuned to detecting novel movement. Cattle vision is like having wide-angle camera lenses mounted on the sides of your head. The animals have 360 degree vision and can see all around themselves, except for a small blind spot behind their rear ends. However, the price they pay for wide-angle vision is a very narrow field where they can perceive depth. To do that, cattle have to stop and put their heads down. Predatory species, such as lions, dogs, cats, and tigers, have their eyes on the front of their heads, which enables them to perceive depth and accurately judge distances when they leap and bring down their prey. Eyes on the front of the head provide superior binocular vision, whereas eyes on the sides of the head provide the ability to scan the environment and be constantly vigilant.

In the old American West, novelty sometimes triggered stampedes during the great cattle drives. A hat blowing in the wind or a horse bucking would set off the instinct to flee. It is possible to desensitize cattle to novelty, however. For example, calves in the Philippines are grazed along the highways from birth. They learn that all the sights and sounds of the highway will not hurt them. These tame, halter-broken animals are not perturbed by anything.

Most cattle on American ranches are exposed to far less novelty. Coats and hats left on fences will often cause them to balk and refuse to walk by. When a steer is calm in its familiar home feedlot pen, the same hat or coat left on a fence may evoke first fear and then curiosity. The steer will turn and look at the coat and then cautiously approach it. If the coat does not move, he will eventually lick it. A coat that is flapping in the wind is more likely to make animals fearful, and they will keep their distance. In the wild, sudden movement is a sign of danger; it may be a lion in a bush or an animal fleeing from a predator.

The reaction of cattle to something that appears out of place may be similar to the reaction of autistic children to small discrepancies in their environment. Autistic children don't like anything that looks out of place—a thread hanging on a piece of furniture, a wrinkled rug, books that are crooked on the bookshelf. Sometimes they will straighten out the books and other times they will be afraid. Their fear reaction may be similar to a cow's reaction to a coffee cup in an alley or a hat on a fence. Autistic children will also notice minor discrepancies that normal people ignore. Could this be an old antipredator instinct that has surfaced? In the wild, a broken branch on a tree or disturbed earth is a possible sign of predator activity in the vicinity. The animal that survives and avoids the lions is the one that has developed the finest abilities in detecting warning signs of changes.

Cattle, deer, and antelope will turn and face a source of potential danger that is not immediately threatening. Cows on a pasture will turn and face an approaching person, and antelope on the African plains will turn toward and sometimes follow a lion. After all, the lion they can see is less of a threat than a lion they cannot see. The animals will follow the lion but remain at a safe distance, which enables instant flight. This is known as the animal's flight zone.

People working with cattle reared on the open range can use the principles of the flight zone to move groups of animals efficiently and quickly. The size of the flight zone will vary depending on how tame the cattle are. Tame dairy cattle may have no flight zone, and they will approach people for petting. Beef cattle raised on western ranches are not completely tame, and they will move away if people go too close to them. The flight zone can vary from five feet to over one hundred feet. Excited cattle will have a larger flight distance than calm cattle. H. Hedigar stated in his book
The Psychology and Behavior of Animals in Zoos and Circuses
that taming is the artificial removal of the flight distance between animals and people.

It is fairly easy to move groups of cattle in a quiet and orderly manner if people work on the edge of the herd's collective flight zone. Deep invasion of the flight zone, however, may cause cattle to panic. If they are cornered in a pen, they may attempt to jump a fence to increase the distance between themselves and a threatening person.

Therapists have observed that autistic children often lash out when they stand close to other children while waiting in a line. They become tense when other children invade their personal space. Having another child accidentally brush up against them can cause them to withdraw with fear like a frightened animal. A light unexpected touch triggers flight, and a firm touch, similar to the pressure of a tightly bunched herd of cattle, is calming.

A great deal of my success in working with animals comes from the simple fact that I see all kinds of connections between their behavior and certain autistic behaviors. Another example is the fact that both cattle and people with autism can become very set in their habits. A change in a daily routine can cause an autistic person to have a tantrum. Such changes used to make me very anxious. Ranchers have discovered that cattle placed on a new pasture must be encouraged to graze the entire area when they are first put there. I observed a lazy group of bulls that refused to walk less than a quarter of a mile to a good pasture. Why do cattle do this? It may have something to do with instincts to avoid predators. When cattle learn that a certain area is safe, they become reluctant to move to a new area, which may contain danger.

An experiment that Ken Odde and I conducted at Colorado State University indicated the great strength of a bovine's reluctance to change a previously learned safe route. Cattle were given a choice between an alley that led to a squeeze chute and an alley that they could just walk through. The animals quickly learned to avoid the side where they would be restrained in the squeeze chute. When the alleys were switched, most of the cattle refused to switch sides to avoid restraint. Being held in a squeeze chute is slightly uncomfortable, but not so aversive that the animals were willing to change from the previously learned safe route. When something really painful or disagreeable happens, though, most animals will quickly change to avoid it. Mary Tanner, a student at Colorado State University, found that most cows at a dairy were willing to enter both sides of a milking parlor, but a few were very rigid and always entered on the same side.

Preliminary evidence indicates that the more nervous and excitable cows are the ones that are the most reluctant to change a previously learned safe route. Resistance to change may be partially motivated by attempts to reduce anxiety. In my own experience, minor changes in my high school class schedule or switching from daylight savings time to standard time caused severe anxiety. My nervous system and the nervous systems of some other people with autism are in a state of hyperarousal for no good reason. Before I took antidepressant drugs, my nervous system was constantly ready to flee predators. Insignificant little stresses caused the same reaction as being attacked by a lion. These problems were created by abnormalities in my nervous system. Now that the medication has calmed my nerves, I can take small changes in routine in stride.

One of the most stressful events for semiwild cattle is having people deeply invade their flight zone when they are unable to move away. A person leaning over the top of an alley is very threatening to beef cattle that are not completely tame. Cattle will also balk and refuse to walk through an alley if they can see people up ahead. This is one of the reasons that I designed curved single-file alleys with solid sides. They help keep cattle calmer. The solid sides prevent the animals from being frightened by people and other moving objects outside the alley. A curved alley also works better than a straight one because the cattle are unable to see people up ahead, and each animal thinks he is going back where he came from.