Animals in Translation

"This book is unusual for lots of reasons. I found it really gripping. For me, as a scientist who has been looking at autism from the outside, I felt there is so much we can learn from her because she is autistic herself, and is able to tell us what the world looks like from her point of view. She is a professor in the US who received her diagnosis of autism in childhood. Her previous book mphasised the visual aspect of her experience. She called it ‘thinking in pictures.’ The idea is that whereas most of us think in words, many autistic people think in images – as if they have a series of photographs in their minds. In the book that I have picked, Animals in Translation , she has also highlighted the way that autistic people are hypersensitive to the sensory world. They may notice things that other people miss and they may react to sensory stimuli in much more extreme ways. It could be sounds, it could be visual. Certain kinds of touch are really difficult for autistic people, such as human touch, perhaps because it is unpredictable, and autistic people prefer predictability. But Temple Grandin designed a machine that she calls the squeeze machine, which you can climb into and it presses you, and you can adjust how much pressure you have from it, which she finds very soothing. When the touch and pressure is under the autistic person’s control, she reports that for her it is as nice as a hug. Yes, and the other dimension to this book is that as an autistic person she is a very acute observer. She uses that skill to observe other animals and draws the comparison between how autistic people react to different sensations and how animals do as well. She has used that very productively in her own career. She designs equipment for the agriculture industry, for example. In this sense, she has ‘systemized’ animal behaviour, being able to predict what will cause them anxiety and what will calm them, and perhaps she has excelled in this because non-human animal behaviour is a bit simpler than human interaction, particularly verbal communication, which cannot easily be systemized."