Tag: autobiography

Apr 07 2026

Book review: Thinking in Pictures by Temple Grandin

My next review is of Thinking in Pictures and Other Reports from My Life with Autism by Temple Grandin. For me it follows on from Pete Wharmby’s autobiographical book on autism, Untypical, and Steve Silberman’s history of autism, Neurotribes.

Thinking in Pictures is comprised of 11 thematic chapters which typically contain a mixture of reflections on the author’s personal experiences with autism, animal handling technology and research into autism and how it is treated. Grandin is very well known in the field of animal handling, one third of the animals slaughtered in the US are processed using machinery she has designed.

The core of Grandin’s experience of autism is visual thinking. She describes having a library of video clips in her mind which she combines in order to think new thoughts – verbal thinking is a second language to her. This makes some tasks easy, like designing animal processing equipment, and other tasks difficult – verbal tasks require her to find the right piece of video to capture the words, and abstract ideas are a real challenge. Similarly arithmetic is challenging for her.

Grandin was diagnosed as autistic relatively young, she learnt to speak quite late, was prone to tantrums and did not like being touched. She was born in 1947, 4 years after Leo Kanner’s landmark paper defining autism. This was at a time when autism was not widely known, and the diagnostic criteria were very strict. Her diagnosis was triggered by her mother who was very committed to getting the best for her daughter – she has written her own autobiography (A Thorn In My Pocket: Temple Grandin’s Mother Tells the Family Story by Eustacia Cutler).

In common with Wharmby, Grandin sees autism as very much a sensory issue. Sights, sounds and touch are often not processed in the same way by autistic people and it is from this their symptoms arise – sensory over-sensitivity overwhelms their brain’s ability to carry other tasks. Sounds may be garbled: their ability to hear frequencies is unimpaired but distinguishing words or separating different voices is challenging. Similar issues can apply with vision.

Grandin talks here about her “Squeeze Machine” a device she invented based on a cattle crush which allowed her to apply soothing pressure to herself – a device later marketed more widely – and to which she attributes the ability for her to empathise with others. She found touch from people stressful, and the feel of clothes very difficult to cope with.

In her early years Grandin was given very intensive teaching based on the Lovaas method which involves a lot of repetition and positive reinforcement. It was sufficient to get her into mainstream school but she was thrown out for misbehaviour and went to a small boarding school specialising in bright children with emotional problems. Here she seems to have clicked with one science teacher in particular who supported her in her interests and odd ways. Interestingly she later ponders the value of online school for some “high functioning” autistic people – as she points out learning to build social relationships with teenagers is not an important life skill outside of school!

Grandin entered the world of work in a crabwise fashion, writing to an agricultural journal to publish an article she had written on animal handling which led on to a regular column in the journal. This was to become a full-time job in designing animal handling equipment. She preferred to work as a consultant since this allowed her to get work without interviews and removed a lot of the social difficulties of a fixed workplace. Grandin felt she needed to learn social niceties explicitly rather than dropping into them naturally. She used her visual thinking both in terms of understanding machinery but also the behaviour/thoughts of cattle moving through machinery. She believes that animals must think visually, as she does. Her record is a testament to how good she is at her job.

Grandin talks in some detail about her use of antidepressants to address her autism related anxiety, this is part of quite a lengthy chapter discussing a wide range of drugs and how they have worked for different individuals.

Grandin says she would not want to give up her autism and lose the skills she has, this leads into a wider discussion of other potentially autistic people (Einstein, Wittgenstein, Van Gogh) and how their genius lay in part in their autism. I think it is common to see these retrospective diagnoses as problematic these days, it is something that Silberman touches on in his book. She also talks a bit about the parents of autistic children and their higher prevalence of autism, anxiety, depression or panic attacks. It seems that autism is very substantially genetic. There is also a chapter on “savant” skills, and how in some senses these might be considered “unthinking”.

The books finishes with a chapter on religion, Grandin believes in a personal God for logical reasons but points out that other autistic people have no personal God or are entirely fanatical about religion. Interestingly she sees the books she writes as her version of an afterlife and finds the destruction of culture very upsetting because it is taking away an afterlife. Thinking in Pictures ends rather abruptly on this point – there is no “conclusions” chapter.

I found Grandin’s descriptions of how she thought and animal handling technology the most interesting, the autism research feels a little dated to me (this revised edition of the book was published over 20 years ago) and have the air of notes transcribed with little synthesis.

Nov 03 2011

Going Home

For the half-term holiday, The Inelegant Gardener and I went on a road-trip to visit my parents in the deep south… of England via Malvern where The Inelegant Gardener’s father lives.

The first stop on the tour is Wool, where I grew up. It’s the furthest I’ve ever lived from a motorway: about an hour and a half from the M5 in Somerset. On the way we pass the outskirts of Dorchester where Prince Charles’ model village, Poundbury, is plonked down incongruously on top of hill, it’s pretty pricey. I experience a navigation fail since the bypass is largely new since I left 20 or so years ago and my mental map is slow to update.

Signposts near Wool are decorated with a graphic of a tank (for The Tank Museum) and a monkey (for Monkey World).

The Inelegant Gardener is always amused by the signpost at the edge of the village for “New Buildings”, it’s been there since I was a child. Funnily enough there are new buildings close to the sign in the form of Purbeck Gates, a new development of 160 houses just approaching completion.

Even for a middle-aged atheist like me, it seems the church is the best image of the village, this is the Anglican church where Father Smedley dropped me on my back whilst demonstrating the christening ceremony to the religious education class.

Church of England, Wool

Whilst staying in Wool we went off for a morning in Weymouth, there’s much road building going on since Weymouth will host part of the 2012 Olympics: the sailing part. There is also controversy since upgrading the roads approaching Weymouth will simply dump traffic faster into a small town that can’t handle it, furthermore the council appears to be thinking about charging people to access public land to view the sporting events.

Weymouth Bay

Weymouth has some rather fine Georgian and Regency Buildings.

Fine Georgian buildings on the Esplande, WeymouthIt was an early seaside resort, visited by George III. This is commemorated by a chalk horse on the road out of the town. There is also a statue celebrating his 50th year on the throne.

Statue of George III, 50th anniversary 1809/10

This is the house where my maternal grandmother started her working life in service at the age of 16, in around 1935:

109, The Statue House, Weymouth where Granny Hart started in service 1935

I’ve always rather liked Weymouth but we rarely visited when I was a child, it turns out this is because my mum went to school in Weymouth and this has put her off the town ever since!

We saw a lot of beach huts on our trip, these are some rather smart examples from Weymouth.

Beach huts on Weymouth Bay

We also visited Lulworth Cove, familiar to many as a geology field trip destination. This is Stair Hole:

Stair Hole (1/3)

I tend to take my home coast for granted, it is now branded “The Jurassic Coast”, and it’s spectacular!

Next stop Southbourne where my dad now lives with my stepmother, this is outside my home territory but not that far away.

Here you can see the lie of the land, with Hengistbury Head directly ahead and the Isle of Wight featuring the “Polar Bear” in the distance to the right.

Isle of Wight from Southbourne Beach

We went off to Mudeford, where Highcliffe Castle sits on the top of the cliff as you can see – glorious blue skies.

Highcliffe Castle

And to finish the trip we went up to the New Forest, Britain’s most recently created National Park. This is a woodland glade close to where dad wants his ashes scattering:

Woodland Glade

And here’s a mushroom…

Fungus

There was quite a lot of rainfall during the week!

Oct 06 2011

Ada Lovelace Day

The 7th October is Ada Lovelace Day, Finding Ada has encouraged me to write a timely post about women in science, technology engineering or mathematics (STEM), specifically it says:

Create content about a woman in STEM that you admire

Ada Lovelace lived 1815-1852, and is sometimes credited as the world’s first programmer for the notes she wrote on Charles Babbages’ analytical engine – a mechanical computing device which was never constructed. She is commemorated in the Ada programming language, developed for the US Department of Defence with reliability in mind.

To be honest I’ve never found scientific inspiration in long dead “heroic” individual scientists. Lately I’ve been reading rather more of the history of science; institutionally the position of women in science until at least the middle of the 20th century was pretty dire: the Royal Society, proud of its internationalism, religious and political intolerance did not admit its first female members until 1945. The first women were admitted to study at Oxford and Cambridge universities in the later half of the 19th century and they did not gain equal formal status with men until the middle of the 20th century. It’s always somewhat bemusing to hear criticisms of other country’s poor record on female education when we weren’t doing so well within living memory.

Merian-Maria-Sibylla-Tolhoren-Sun

Shell illustrations by Merian Maria Sibylla

This is not to say there are no women in the history of science, just that they fitted into the social accepted roles of their times. For example, Marie-Anne Pierette Paulze, the wife of Antoine Lavoisier was clearly heavily and expertly involved in the conduct of his scientific experiments in the late 18th century. William’s sister, Caroline Herschel spent many evenings observing the heavens with him (and by herself), discovering several comets and being formally recognised for her work in her later years with medals from the Royal Astronomical Society (1828) and the king of Prussia (1846). In the late 17th century naturalist and artist Maria Sybilla Merian published several books based around her observations, particularly on the metamorphosis of butterflies, and drawings of flowers and insects both in Europe. Later in her life she spent two years in Surinam where she made a study of South American flora and fauna. I’m rather impressed with Merian, travelling and living in South America in the 17th century was pretty challenging stuff regardless of gender.

Sadly I had not got into the habit of posting on my book reading when I read a biography of Marie Curie: with Nobel Prizes in both physics and chemistry, she is outstanding even ignoring the challenges of doing science as a woman at the beginning of the 20th century.

Practically speaking I have been taught science along with many other subjects by women; Ms Pitman who taught me physics (and was sarcastic about the PE teachers), and Mrs Haas who taught me biology. This is not to ignore those whose names I can’t recall, my recall of anything dating back 25 years or so is vague these days! Looking back it seems women made their first impact in science in communication and teaching, see for example Mary Somerville and Émilie du Châtelet.

For me my education, my wonder, was as much to do with my family as my teachers.

Ultimately the woman in STEM who has most influenced me is my mum. She learnt to program on an Elliot 503 in the early sixties: 400 square feet of computer with substantially less processor power than the most lowly of today’s devices. She was later to work for the UK Atomic Energy Authority where she worked on PACE analogue computers, and mechanical calculators. All this is somewhat vague on my part because it is only now I have started to pay an interest in the day to day work she did before I was born.

Forty-one years ago my mum gave up her career when she became pregnant with me and even a few years later, when my brother and I had both started at school, a local employer refused to give her a job application form on the grounds that she was a mother.

As The Inelegant Gardener and I await our first child things are very different.

Sep 14 2011

Get Organised!

This is a post about how I record my research, I write it in the hope that others will reveal some of themselves and perhaps gain something from the writing. I write it because how exactly people work is something of a mystery.

This seems like something I’ve picked up slowly over many years rather than being taught it all in one big bang as an undergraduate. I suspect there may have been attempts to teach me this, but sometimes it takes getting it horribly wrong for you to learn stuff, like the importance of backing up your files.

Clearly scientific literature (including company internal reports) has always been important to my work. I wrote a little bit about scientific publication a while back (here). Generation 1 of my filing system was Windows 3.1’s Cardfile program which I used at the start of my PhD, for each paper I photocopied I typed the details onto an index card. I wrote a sequence number on the corner of each printed paper along with a couple of keywords which I also enter into whatever indexing system I’m using and filed it away in a filing cabinet, ordered by the sequence number. These days most papers are available as PDF and I file this in a directory with the sequence as the first part of the filename.

After Cardfile I moved on to Endnote, and currently I use Reference Manager which are more specialist pieces of software specifically designed for storing the details of publications and also formatting bibliographies in popular wordprocessing packages. Notes on the contents of a paper still get scribbled onto the paper copy in red ink…

These days Zotero and Mendeley both look like good free options for reference management. I haven’t switched to Zotero because it’s currently tied to the Firefox browser and I haven’t switched to Mendeley because I’m not absolutely certain what it is syncing to the Cloud and what other people can see of it there, exposing even the titles of internal company reports to outsiders is a Very Bad Thing. I also had some minor problems importing my legacy collection into Mendeley. Unlike previous iterations of such software Zotero and Mendeley both make reasonable attempts at extracting paper details from PDF files or webpages.

Stray bits of paper scribbled on at meetings I still haven’t really cracked, I try to write the date and a sequence number on any bit of paper I use, and some link to the project it relates too but this is unsatisfying. For many years I’ve considered scanning in bits of paper; our company photocopiers will e-mail scans of paper to you in PDF format and with harddisk space being so cheap now* it seems odd not to do this. All this means I still have a folder per project where bits of paper end up. And, truth be told, I still find it easier to comment on a bit of work by scribbling on a bit of paper.

I’ve started using OneNote a bit for odd note collecting, the OneNote metaphor is of a collection of notebooks, each notebook is divided into sections by tabs along the top of the page and each section is divided further into pages using tabs down the righthand side of the page. My main problem with OneNote is that it’s not possible to display your notes in date order, I seem to use it mainly for a jumping off point to other things.

My lab books have been the core of my research since I started my PhD., in my loft there’s a sequence of about 20 of them. Some of my colleagues have fantastically neat lab books with diagrams and graphs carefully sellotaped in and orderly paragraphs describing the experiments done, I never really got that well organised but I did a fair job of adding to an index at the front of each one.  I still use paper lab books today but at a reduced rate. I’ve switched to a system using Microsoft Word, for each month I have have a document which looks like the one below:

I can type things in, hyperlink to other documents and cut and paste graphs and pictures as well. I use the Document Map view and, by applying appropriate styling, I get quick links to each day with a view of the keywords for the day – in this instance, designing the Death Star in AutoCAD ;-) For each year I get 12 documents which I store in a folder for that year. The thing I haven’t got working in this system is nice keyword searching across multiple years.

I’ve worked on multiple projects throughout my career and I’ve come to the conclusion that trying to separate them for the purposes of lab books and references doesn’t work too well – you end up spending time working out which lab book / file you should be adding stuff to and with decent indexing it just isn’t necessary.

These days you can buy specialised electronic lab book software, it seems it is normally done at a large scale though rather than by individual which I can’t help thinking is not a good thing since we all have individual ways of working which will vary with both the work we do and our own personal ways of doing things.

Looking at my current electronic lab book it strikes me that WordPress could be used for the task. The thing that Word can’t do easily is to give me rapid links by category or date to any part of my labbook but it strikes me that WordPress does this pretty well if you put the appropriate widgets into the sidebar. I suspect any electronic lab book software is essentially a database with a front end, for WordPress the front-end is written in PHP. The benefit of WordPress is that it’s very widely used, with lots of plugins to provide new functionality and extending it is within the reach of most programmers.

Here endeth the world’s dullest blog post, comments on your own “ways of working” are most welcome!

*Except if you’re in a corporate environment, in which case the laws of every decreasing disk space cost seem to work differently.

Jun 14 2011

Choosing to die

Terry Pratchett was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and has made a programme, Choosing to die, about his enquiries into assisted suicide. It’s pretty difficult viewing: Pratchett visits the widow of a Belgian writer who, like him, had Alzheimer’s disease and had chosen to end his life. He visits a former taxidriver in a hospice with motor neuron disease, who had chosen not to die. The bulk of the programme is spent with two men who went to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland, where they were helped to die. Andrew, only a couple of years older than me, with multiple sclerosis and Peter, born in 1939, with motor neuron disease. The death of Peter is shown in full. It’s not this that is my abiding memory though, that will be of the courage and dignity of the wife and mother of these two dying men. Neither woman wants their loved one to go.

The striking thing for me was how both men appeared to be heading off to Switzerland before their time, for fear of not being able to go when they felt they had to. The current legislation seems to be wilfully sadistic, obliging early death for those that chose whilst holding out the threat of prosecution to the family.

The Swiss are allowed to be helped to die at home, whilst foreigners go to die in a small blue apartment in an industrial estate. Incongruously the shallow steps to the front door are protected by black and yellow safety tape: because if you’re going to die you don’t want to fall over and crack your head open. This seems a great pity since in the background you could see the snow clad Swiss Alps, a glorious place to die.

A number of members of my close family have died over the last ten years. I don’t think we’re an unusual family, we’ve discussed assisted dying, often in the aftermath of a death. My paternal grandparents both died in their nineties in retirement homes, very much reduced from their previous vigorous selves, moving gradually to death. My maternal grandparents both died at home, quite suddenly. My stepfather died at home in a hospital bed, cared for by my mum with the support of nurses. He’d known he was going to die since cancer stopped him eating a couple of months earlier. Mum is the bravest person I know.

The consensus in the family appears to be for assisted dying but I think we all know privately that as the law stands now it will not happen. We will be left to face what lingering or sudden deaths nature serves up to us, in the knowledge that modern medicine has got so much better at keeping us alive but not necessarily living.

This is one of the few places where my atheism collides with the established church: any time the right to die is discussed it appears to be a Christian or one of the Lords Spiritual who is called upon to make the case against: often citing the idea that my life is a gift from God, and that I have no right to dispose of it. Clearly for an atheist this is an argument discarded in a moment.

I may die in an accident tomorrow. I may hang on to the absolute end waiting to see what is over the the next ridge. Or maybe, when I am old and have had enough, I’ll want to go at a time and place of my choosing.

How I choose to die is none of your business – I won’t presume to choose for you.