In their book Inattentional Blindness, Arien Mack at the New School for Social Research in New York City and Irvin Rock, who was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, until he died in 1995, explain that people don’t consciously see any object unless they are paying direct, focused attention to that object.5 This means that a human being walking through an alley won’t see, much less be bothered by, sparkling puddles or shiny spots on metal or jiggling chains. None of that stuff is there for them unless they’re looking for it. Normal human beings are blind to anything they’re not paying attention to.
My experience with animals, and with my own perceptions, is that animals and autistic people are different from normal people. Animals and autistic people don’t have to be paying attention to something in order to see it. Things like jiggly chains pop out at us; they grab our attention whether we want them to or not.
For a normal human being, almost nothing in the environment pops. That means it’s practically impossible for a human being to actually see something brand-new in the first place. People probably don’t like novelty any more than animals do, but people don’t get exposed to much novelty, because they don’t notice it when it’s there. Humans are built to see what they’re expecting to see, and it’s hard to expect to see something you’ve never seen. New things just don’t register.
The research on inattentional blindness was shocking, because psychologists had always thought there were all kinds of things in the visual world that automatically grabbed people’s attention—like an airplane blocking a runway. But it turns out that’s not true. There are a few things that seem to grab people’s attention, like the sight or sound of your own name, or large-sized objects, or—this one took me by surprise—cartoon happy faces. Not cartoon sad faces; a cartoon sad face is just as invisible as everything else for people who aren’t actively paying attention. But a cartoon happy face will snatch people out of their inattention.
I wish they’d done some comparative research with animals and autistic people, because my guess is that animals and autistic people either don’t have inattentional blindness at all, or don’t have nearly as much of it as normal people do. Animals definitely act like they see everything, because you can’t get anything past a cow. That’s one of the reasons why a ranch owner has to correct every wrong detail, because a cow will see every wrong detail.
Autistic people are the same way. I know a teenage autistic boy who’s a lot like those cattle trying to walk through a jiggly, sparkly chute. This boy is sixteen years old, and a couple of years ago he suddenly got focused on all the screws in the hallways at his school. He had to stop and touch each and every single one every time he went from one classroom to another. He’s not scared like my cattle, but he definitely balks, and it takes forever to get him from one place to another. It’s a good thing his aide has a sense of humor. The way he sees it, the boy is checking all the screws to make sure they’re screwed in all the way—“He’s making sure this place isn’t going to fall down on top of us.” He might be right about that.
I always thought the reason autistic people are so much more aware of details was that we’re visual instead of verbal. I thought it was a right brain/left brain difference. For most people the left brain is verbal, the right brain is visual.
But research has found that both sides of the brain have problems in autism.6 Based on my own experience and on my work with animals, I’m working from the hypothesis that you can understand a lot about animals and autistic people by focusing on another basic brain difference: the difference between higher parts of the brain and lower parts. The reason normal people have such a hard time seeing (and probably hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling) details is that their frontal lobes, which are at the top of the brain, get in the way. Animals and autistic people see detail either because their frontal lobes are smaller and less developed (in the case of animals), or because they’re not working as well as they could be (in the case of autistic people).
I’ll get to that next.
LIZARD BRAINS, DOG BRAINS, AND PEOPLE BRAINS
When you compare human and animal brains, the only difference that’s obvious to the naked eye is the increased size of the neocortex in people. (Usually the words “neocortex” and “cerebral cortex” mean the same thing, but some researchers use “neocortex” to mean the newer, six-layered part of the cerebral cortex. I’m using “neocortex” and “cerebral cortex” interchangeably.) The neocortex is the top layer of the brain, and includes the frontal lobes as well as all of the other structures where higher cognitive functions are located.
The neocortex is wrapped around all the subcortical or lower brain structures, which are the seat of emotions and life support functions in people and animals. In humans the neocortex is so thick compared to the lower brain structures that it’s the size of a peach compared to a peach pit. In animals the cortex is much smaller. It’s so small that in some animals the “peach” is the same size as the “pit” the neocortex is the same size as all the lower brain structures.
As a general rule, the more intelligent the animal species, the bigger the neocortex. If you remove the neocortex, you can’t tell an animal brain apart from a human brain, just to look at them. I had a hands-on lesson in this in grad school when I dissected a human brain and a pig brain in a class I took at the University of Illinois. The pig brain was a big shock for me, because when I compared the lower-level structures like the amygdala to the same structures in the human brain I couldn’t see any difference at all. The pig brain and the human brain looked exactly alike. But when I looked at the neocortex the difference was huge. The human neocortex is visibly bigger and more folded-up than the animal’s, and anyone can see it. You don’t need a microscope.
Comparing animal brains to human brains tells us two things.
Number one: animals and people have different brains, so they experience the world in different ways—
and
Number two: animals and people have an awful lot in common.
To understand why animals seem so different from normal human beings, yet so familiar at the same time, you need to know that the human brain is really three different brains, each one built on top of the previous at three different times in evolutionary history. And here’s the really interesting part: each one of those brains has its own kind of intelligence, its own sense of time and space, its own memory, and its own subjectivity. It’s almost as if we have three different identities inside our heads, not just one.
The first and oldest brain, which is physically the lowest down inside the skull, is the reptilian brain.
The next brain, in the middle, is the paleomammalian brain.
The third and newest brain, highest up inside your head, is the neomammalian brain.
Roughly speaking, the reptilian brain corresponds to that in lizards and performs basic life support functions like breathing; the paleomammalian brain corresponds to that in mammals and handles emotion; and the neomammalian brain corresponds to that in primates—especially people—and handles reason and language. All animals have some neomammalian brain, but it’s much larger and more important in primates and in people.
The three brains are connected by nerves, but each one has its own personality and its own control system: the “top” doesn’t control the “bottom.” Researchers used to think that the highest part of the brain was in charge, but they no longer believe this. That means we humans probably really do have an animal nature that’s separate and distinct from our human nature. We have a separate animal nature because we have a separate animal brain inside our heads.
The reason we have three separate brains instead of just one is that evolution doesn’t throw away things that work. When a structure or a protein or a gene or anything else works well, nature uses it again and again in newly evolved plants and animals. The word for this is conservation. Biologists say that evolution conserves structures that work.
Paul MacLean, the originator of the three
-brain theory, believes that evolution simply added each newly evolved brain on top of the one that came before, without changing the older brain. He calls this the triune brain theory.7
In other words, if you’re Mother Nature, and you’ve got a lot of lizards running around the world breathing, eating, sleeping, and waking up just fine, you don’t create a whole brand-new dog breathing system when it comes time to evolve a dog. Instead, you add the new dog brain on top of the old lizard brain. The lizard brain breathes, eats, and sleeps; the dog brain forms dominance hierarchies and rears its young.
The same thing happens all over again when nature evolves a human. The human brain gets added on top of the dog brain. So you have your lizard brain to breathe and sleep, your dog brain to form wolf packs, and your human brain to write books about it. In a lot of ways evolution is like building an addition onto your house instead of tearing down the old one and building a new one from the ground up.
TRAPPED INSIDE THE BIG PICTURE
What the neocortex does better than the dog brain or the lizard brain is tie everything together. The whole neocortex is one big association cortex, making connections between all kinds of things that stay more separate for animals. For instance, take the fact that humans have mixed emotions. A human can love and hate the same person. Animals don’t do that. Their emotions are simpler and cleaner, because categories like love and hate stay separate in their brains.
Another example: humans make rapid generalizations from one situation to another; animals don’t. A generalization depends on making an association between one situation or object and another, similar situation or object. Compared to humans, animals generalize so little that one of the most important aspects of any animal training program is getting the animal to make a generalization from the training situation to the rest of his life. A dog can learn to perform tasks at a training school and not know how to perform them at home, because school and home are separate categories. His brain doesn’t automatically associate the two. I’ll talk about this more in other chapters.
Inside the neocortex, the frontal lobes, which sit behind your forehead, are the final destination for all the information that’s floating around your brain. They pull everything together.
Although growing a big neocortex gave us our “book smarts,” we paid a price. For one thing, bigger frontal lobes probably made humans a lot more vulnerable to brain damage and dysfunction of just about any kind. I wonder whether this explains why you don’t often see animals with developmental disabilities. Estimates of the incidence of mental retardation range from 1 percent of the U.S. population up to as high as 3 percent, and it doesn’t seem like there’s anywhere near that level in animals. It’s possible we humans don’t know what a developmental disability in an animal looks like, but I also question whether animals might be less vulnerable to developmental disabilities in the first place because their frontal lobes are less developed.
Frontal lobe functions are the first to go, whether the problem is a traumatic head injury, a developmental disability, old age, or just plain lack of sleep. Worse yet, if you damage any part of your brain in an accident or a stroke you wind up with frontal lobe problems even when your frontal lobes weren’t touched.
People always thought this was because the last structure to evolve is the most delicate, while the older structures have been around so long they’ve become incredibly robust. But a neuropsychologist named Elkhonon Goldberg at New York University School of Medicine, who wrote a fantastic book about frontal lobe functions called The Executive Brain, has a different theory. He thinks that while the frontal lobes may be more fragile, there is another factor involved, which is that every other part of the brain is connected to them. When you damage any part of the brain, you change input to the frontal lobes, and when you change input, you change output. If the frontal lobes aren’t getting the right input, they don’t produce the right output even though structurally they’re fine. So all brain damage ends up looking like frontal lobe damage, whether the frontal lobes were injured or not.8
I think he’s right about this, because frontal lobe problems are a big part of autism, and our frontal lobes are structurally pretty good. A major autism researcher told a journalist friend of mine that if you compared the brain scan of an autistic child to the scan of a sixty-year-old CEO, the autistic child’s brain would look better. In other words, the normal brain shrinkage people experience with age makes your brain look more “abnormal” than autism does. There are some structural differences between autistic brains and normal brains, but they’re so small you can’t see them on a regular MRI, and probably every person has structural brain differences to that degree.
Of course, the fact that a brain difference is tiny doesn’t mean its effect is tiny. The researcher also said that a brain difference could be subtle but significant. But he added that there’s nothing about the anatomy of the autistic brain that told him autism can’t eventually be treated by medication the same way psychiatric disorders can be treated.
Until we learn more, I am assuming that one of the problems in autism isn’t bad frontal lobes; it’s bad input into the frontal lobes.
Bad input can happen to normal people, too. Just being incredibly tired and sleep-deprived will lower your frontal lobe function, and the aging process hurts the frontal lobes much more than any other part of the brain.
That brings me back to animals. The good news is: when your frontal lobes are down, you have your animal brain to fall back on. That’s exactly what happens, too. The animal brain is the default position for people. That’s why animals seem so much like people in so many ways: they are like people. And people are like animals, especially when their frontal lobes aren’t working up to par.
I think that’s also the reason for the special connection autistic people like me have to animals. Autistic people’s frontal lobes almost never work as well as normal people’s do, so our brain function ends up being somewhere in between human and animal. We use our animal brains more than normal people do, because we have to. We don’t have any choice. Autistic people are closer to animals than normal people are.
The price human beings pay for having such big, fat frontal lobes is that normal people become oblivious in a way animals and autistic people aren’t. Normal people stop seeing the details that make up the big picture and see only the big picture instead. That’s what your frontal lobes do for you: they give you the big picture. Animals see all the tiny little details that go into the picture.
EXTREME PERCEPTION: THE MYSTERY OF JANE’S CAT
Compared to humans, animals have astonishing abilities to perceive things in the world. They have extreme perception. Their sensory worlds are so much richer than ours it’s almost as if we’re deaf and blind.
That’s probably why a lot of people think animals have ESP. Animals have such incredible abilities to perceive things we can’t that the only explanation we can come up with is extrasensory perception. There’s even a scientist in England who’s written books about animals having ESP. But they don’t have ESP, they just have a super-sensitive sensory apparatus.
Take the cat who knows when its owner is coming home.9 My friend Jane, who lives in a city apartment, has a cat who always knows when she’s on her way home. Jane’s husband works at home, and five minutes before Jane comes home he’ll see the cat go to the door, sit down, and wait. Since Jane doesn’t come home at the same time every day, the cat isn’t going by its sense of time, although animals also have an incredible sense of time. Sigmund Freud used to have his dog with him every time he saw a patient, and he never had to look at his watch to tell when the session was over. The dog always let him know. Parents tell me autistic kids do the same thing. The only explanation Jane and her husband could come up with was ESP. The cat must have been picking up Jane’s I’m-coming-home-now thoughts.
Jane asked me to figure out how her cat could predict her arrival. Since I’ve never seen Jane’s apartment I used my mother’s New York City a
partment as a model for solving the mystery. In my imagination I watched my mother’s gray Persian cat walk around the apartment and look out the window. Possibly the cat could see Jane walking down the street. Even though he would not be able to see Jane’s face from the twelfth floor he would probably be able to recognize her body language. Animals are very sensitive to body language. The cat would probably be able to recognize Jane’s walk.
Next I thought about sound cues. Since I am a visual thinker I used “videos” in my imagination to move the cat around in the apartment to determine how it could be getting sound cues that Jane would be arriving a few minutes later. In my mind’s eye I positioned the cat with its ear next to the crack between the door and the door frame. I thought maybe he could hear Jane’s voice on the elevator. But as I played a tape of my mother getting onto the elevator in the lobby, I realized that there would be many days when Mother would ride the elevator alone and silent. She would speak on the elevator for only some of the trips—when there were other people in the elevator car with her—but not all of them.
So I asked Jane, “Is the cat always at the door, or is he at the door only sometimes?”
She said the cat is always at the door.
That meant the cat had to be hearing Jane’s voice on the elevator every day. After I questioned her some more, Jane finally gave me the crucial piece of information that solved the cat mystery: her building does not have a push-button elevator. The elevator is operated by a person. So when Jane got on the elevator she probably said “Hi” to the operator.
A new image flashed into my head. I created an elevator with an operator for my mother’s building. To make the image I used the same method people use in computer graphics. I pulled an image of my mother’s elevator out of memory and combined it with an image of the elevator operator I saw one time at the Ritz in Boston. He had white gloves and a black tuxedo. I lifted the brass elevator control panel and its tuxedoed operator from my Ritz memory file and placed them inside my mother’s elevator.
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