LUMPERS AND SPLITTERS: WHAT MAKES ANIMALS AND AUTISTIC PEOPLE DIFFERENT
Charles Darwin first used the terms lumpers and splitters to describe the two different kinds of taxonomists. Lumper taxonomists grouped lots of animals or plants into big, broad categories based on major characteristics; splitters divided them up into lots of smaller categories based on minor variations. Lumpers generalize; splitters “particularize.”
This is a core difference between animals and autistic people on the one hand, and normal people on the other. Animals and autistic people are splitters. They see the differences between things more than the similarities. In practice this means animals don’t generalize very well. (Normal people often over-generalize, of course.) That’s why you have to be so careful when you’re socializing an animal to socialize him to many different animals and people.
You have to do the same thing with training. Service dogs who are being trained to lead a blind person across the street don’t generalize from one intersection to another, so you can’t just train them on a couple of intersections and expect them to apply what they’ve learned to a brand-new intersection. You have to train them on dozens of different kinds of intersections: corners where there’s a light hanging in the middle of the intersection and crosswalk lines painted on the pavement, corners where there’s a light hanging in the middle of the intersection and no crosswalk lines, corners where the traffic lights are on poles, and so on.
This is why dog trainers always make people train their own dogs. You can’t send a puppy away to obedience school, because he’ll only learn to obey the trainer, not you. Dogs also need some training from every member of the household, because if only one person trains the dog, that’s the only person the dog is going to obey.
And you have to be careful not to fall into pattern training. Pattern training happens when you always train the dog in the same place at the same time using the same commands in the same order. If you pattern-train a dog, he’ll learn the commands beautifully, but he won’t be able to perform them anyplace other than the spot you trained him in, or in any sequence other than the one you used during training. He’s learned the pattern, and he can’t generalize the individual commands to other times, settings, or people.
People who teach autistic children deal with exactly the same challenge. A behaviorist told me a story about an autistic boy he’d been teaching how to butter toast. The behaviorist and the parents had been working really hard with the boy, and finally he got it. He could butter toast. Everyone was thrilled, but the joy didn’t last too long, because when somebody gave the boy some peanut butter to spread on his toast, he didn’t have a clue! His brand-new bread-buttering skill was specific to butter, and it didn’t generalize to peanut butter. They had to start all over again and teach him how to spread peanut butter on toast. This happens all the time with autistic people, and with animals, too.
It happens so much, and it’s so extreme, that it’s not right just to call animals splitters; animals are super-splitters. That’s what being hyper-specific is all about.
It’s not that animals and autistic people don’t generalize at all. Obviously they do. The black hat horse generalized his original traumatic experience to other people wearing other black hats, and the little boy who could butter toast had generalized that skill to other sticks of butter and other pieces of bread. With training, a service dog learns to generalize what he knows about other intersections to new intersections he’s never seen before.
What’s different is that the generalizations animals and autistic people make are almost always narrower and more specific than the generalizations nonautistic people make. Human with black hat or spread butter on bread: those are pretty narrow categories.
THE HIDDEN FIGURES TALENT
To any normal person, being hyper-specific sounds like a serious mental handicap, and in a lot of ways it is. Hyper-specificity is probably the main reason animals seem less smart than people. How intelligent could a horse be if he thinks the really scary thing in life isn’t a nasty handler but the nasty handler’s hat?
Probably not too intelligent when it comes to school smarts. But being smart in school isn’t everything, and high general intelligence comes at the price of high hyper-specific intelligence. You can’t have both.5
That means normal human beings can’t have extreme perception the way normal animals can, because hyper-specificity and extreme perception go together. I don’t know whether one causes the other, or whether hyper-specificity and extreme perception are just different aspects of the same difference in the brain. What I do know is that Clever Hans couldn’t do what people do, and people can’t do what Hans did. Hans had a special talent humans don’t have.
Until we know more about it, I’m calling this ability the hidden figure talent, based on some research findings in autism. In 1983 Amitta Shah and her colleague Uta Frith tested twenty autistic children, twenty normal children, and twenty children with learning disabilities—all of them the same mental age—on the Embedded Figure Task. In the test, first you show the child a shape, like a triangle, and then you ask him to find the same shape inside a picture of an object like a baby carriage.
The autistic children did much better at finding the hidden figure than any of the other children. They almost always saw the figure instantly, and they scored 21 out of 25 correct answers on average, compared to an average of only 15 correct answers for both the learning disabled and the normal kids. That’s a huge difference. It’s so huge you could probably say normal people are disabled compared to autistic people when it comes to finding hidden figures. The autistic children were so good they almost outscored the experimenters! These were developmentally disabled kids scoring the same as normal adults.6
I believe it, because a few years back I happened to come across a hidden figure test in Wired Magazine, and the hidden figures jumped out at me. For me, they weren’t really hidden.
To my knowledge no one’s ever tested animals on hidden figure tests, but I bet they’d do well. Probably the easiest way to do a hidden figure test with an animal would be to run a simple recognition task. Teach the animal to touch or peck a certain shape, then show him a picture with the shape embedded inside and see whether the animal can still find it.
Most people don’t realize how valuable the hidden figure talent is in the right situation. In Maryland there’s an employment agency for autistic adults that places its clients in jobs like quality assurance. They have one group of autistic men working in a factory inspecting logo T-shirts coming off the line for flaws in the silk-screening. Nonautistic people have a hard time seeing tiny differences between one silk-screened logo and another, but those autistic employees can pick up practically microscopic flaws in a glance. It’s the hidden figure test all over again. To them the flaws in the silk-screening aren’t hidden.
The agency’s clients also outperform normal people in bindery work. When you’re assembling corporate reports you have to be able to tell the front cover from the back cover quickly and accurately. To regular people the fronts and backs look alike, but autistic employees can always tell the front from the back, and they do it in a flash. Extreme perception lets them see all the tiny differences normal people can’t see. The agency even has one autistic woman working quality assurance on submarine parts.
I thought about those employees not too long after 9/11 when news reports started coming out about how hard it is for people who work as luggage inspectors to spot weapons on their video screens due to clutter. If you’re a normal human being and your job is to sit in one place all day long staring at a video screen, pretty soon you’ll have trouble separating out the form of a weapon from all the other junk that’s packed in people’s bags. The screen is too cluttered, and everything blurs together. But that might not be a problem for autistic people, and I think airports ought to try out some autistic people in that job.
I think we’re letting a huge amount of talent go to waste, both in people who aren�
��t “normal” and in animals who are. That’s probably because we don’t really understand what animals could do if we gave them a chance. We’re just leaving it up to animals like the seizure alert dogs to invent their own jobs.
AUTISTIC SAVANTS
I mentioned at the beginning of this book that I think animal genius is probably the same thing as autistic savantry. I’ve felt this way for years, just from being around animals and observing them, and I mentioned it in Thinking in Pictures. But I didn’t know why autistic genius and animal genius looked so similar to me, or whether autistic genius and animal genius might come from the same difference in the brain.
It’s not that autistic savants and animal savants do the same things. Animal savants show brilliance when they learn complicated migratory routes after just one flight or discover how to perceive seizures before they happen. Autistic savants do lightning-fast calendar or prime number calculations inside their heads, or become artistic savants who can make almost perfect line drawings of buildings and landscapes from memory, often starting from a very young age—and using perfect perspective. That’s especially amazing, because even great artists have to be taught how to draw using perspective. A four-year-old autistic savant just naturally knows how to do it.
Even though autistic savantry and animal savantry seem so different on the surface, the one thing that did jump out was that a lot of these talents involve amazing feats of rote memory. Autistic people are known for their ability to memorize whole train schedules, the capitals of every country in the world, and so on. Autistic savants are the only people who seem like they could give a Clark’s nutcracker a run for its money when it comes to remembering where they hid thirty thousand pine seeds. But beyond that, I didn’t know why animal genius felt so familiar to me.
Then in 1999 Dr. Allan Snyder, a psychologist at the Centre for the Mind at Australian National University, published a paper that laid out a unified theory of all the different savant talents. If his theory is right, it probably explains animal genius, too.7 Dr. Snyder and his co-author, Dr. D. John Mitchell, say that all the different autistic savant abilities come from the fact that autistic people don’t process what they see and hear into unified wholes, or concepts, rapidly the way normal people do.
A normal person looks at a building and his brain turns all the hundreds and thousands of building pieces coming in through his sensory channels into one unified thing, a building. The brain does this automatically; a normal person can’t not do it. That’s why a common drawing lesson art teachers use is to have art students turn a picture upside down and copy it that way, or else draw the negative space surrounding an object instead of the object itself. Turning the object upside down or drawing the negative space tricks your brain into letting the image stay in separate pieces more easily,8 so you can draw the object instead of your unified concept of the object. People are always amazed at how good their upside-down drawings are.
Autistic people are stuck in the pieces stage of perception to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the person. Donna Williams, the autistic woman who wrote the book Nobody Nowhere, says she can’t really see a whole object all at once. She sees a kind of slide show of the object. If she’s looking at a tree, first she might see a branch on that tree, then the screen changes and she sees a bird sitting on the branch, then the screen changes again and she sees some leaves, and so on. Some autistic people have this problem a lot worse than others, and I think it’s possible some autistic people have such fragmented sensory systems that they may be almost blind or deaf. I wonder whether some autistic people are so deprived of coherent sensory input that they are like autistic Helen Kellers.
Snyder and Mitchell say that the reason autistic people see the pieces of things is that they have privileged access to lower levels of raw information. A normal person doesn’t become conscious of what he’s looking at until after his brain has composed the sensory bits and pieces into wholes. An autistic savant is conscious of the bits and pieces.
That’s why autistic savants can make perspective drawings without being taught how. They’re drawing what they see, which is all the little changes in size and texture that tell you one object is closer up and another object is farther away. Normal people can’t see all those little changes without a lot of training and effort, because their brains process them unconsciously. So normal people are drawing what they “see,” which is the finished object, after their brains have put it all together. Normal people don’t draw a dog, they draw a concept of a dog. Autistic people draw the dog.
It’s ironic that we always say autistic children are in their own little worlds, because if Dr. Snyder is right it’s normal people who are living inside their heads. Autistic people are experiencing the actual world much more directly and accurately than normal people, with all their inattentional blindness and their change blindness and their every-other-kind-of-blindness. (Dr. Snyder hasn’t talked about inattentional or change blindness that I know of, but the research on those concepts supports his work.)
Math savants use this same brain difference to do calendar calculations and prime number identification. An autistic savant who can tell you on what day you were born is seeing time as a sequence of seven different days repeating over and over again going back to the beginning of time. They quickly scan back over the pattern until they come to your day.
Normal people don’t experience time that way. To a normal person a month or a year or a decade is one unified time span, not a collection of separate and distinct days. It’s a blur. (Dr. Snyder’s theory is a little more complicated than I’ve been making it sound. He thinks the brain has a processor that divides all incoming data—time, space, objects, and so forth—into equal parts. That’s why an autistic savant can tell whether a number is prime or not, because a prime number can’t be divided.)
Calendar calculation is the hidden figure talent all over again. I believe most or even all of the savant talents autistic people have are variations on the hidden figure ability.
I also believe that most or even all of the savant talents animals have are variations on the hidden figure ability, and in just the past couple of years Dr. Snyder and Dr. Bruce Miller, a physician at the University of California at San Francisco, have supplied some hard evidence that I may be right. Dr. Miller works with patients who have a disorder called frontotemporal dementia in which the front part of the brain progressively loses its functions. In frontotemporal dementia the frontal lobes and the temporal lobes, which are at the side of your head, are affected.9 Neither of these areas is working well in autistic people either, and as I’ve been saying throughout this book, the biggest area of difference between the animal brain and the human brain is that an animal’s frontal lobes are smaller and less well developed than a human’s. Serious frontal lobe damage is worse than being autistic. If your frontal lobes are badly damaged you can have symptoms of practically all the psychiatric disorders—autism, ADHD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, severe mood disorders, you name it.
You’re probably going to have at least some autistic symptoms. We know that Dr. Miller’s patients do, because some of them start to develop savant talents. A few of these people have become artists in their fifties and sixties, even winning awards in art shows. Others have developed musical abilities; one patient invented a chemical detector and got a patent for it. When he made his invention he could name only one out of fifteen objects on a standardized word test. A patient who had lost all his language ability designed sprinklers! These patients had sudden-onset talents.
I suspect what’s happening with these people is that all of a sudden they’re able to have the same kind of hyper-specific perception that underlies an autistic savant’s ability to do a calendar calculation or make a perspective drawing without being taught.
Dr. Snyder has now begun to test the proposition that savant talents come from conscious access to the raw data of the brain. When he uses magnetic stimulation to interfere with frontal lobe functioning in hi
s subjects, they start to make much more detailed drawings than they could just moments before.10 They also get better at proofreading. Before he turns on the magnetic stimulation, Dr. Snyder has his subjects read this poem out loud:
A bird in the hand
is worth two in the
the bush
Almost all people look at the poem and say, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”
About five minutes after he turns on the magnetic stimulation some of his subjects suddenly read, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the the bush.” The duplicate “the” pops out at them as their left frontal-temporal lobes go down, and they start turning into hidden figure specialists, perceiving detail they didn’t perceive before. One of them even told Dr. Snyder that he felt more “alert” and “conscious of detail.” He was so intensely aware of the details around him that he said he wished they had asked him to write an essay, something he normally didn’t like to do.
THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS
I don’t know whether extreme talents in animals work the same way Dr. Snyder thinks they work in people with autism, but we have a lot of evidence that animals at least see the world in sharper detail than regular people do. I’ve already talked about how important visual detail is to animals, but we also have some fascinating research on ant navigation that goes along with Dr. Snyder’s experiments.
Animals in Translation Page 35