Debunking Animal Autism (Scientific American)

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Debunking Animal Autism

Animal behaviorist Temple Grandin believes extraordinary animals think much like autistic geniuses. Now, some neuroscientists say it simply isn't true. *This week's podcast guest hosted by Christopher Intagliata, an intern for Scientific American Mind. www.sciammind.com

Imagine you’re at the beach. The right side of your brain registers brown grains of sand, gray ones, white ones, tan ones, black ones… “Hellooo!” the left side says. “It’s a beach!”

But what if the left side didn’t tell you it was a beach? That’s sort of how animal behaviorist and autistic celebrity Temple Grandin describes being autistic. Lots of Polaroid snapshots scattered about. Fewer brain “managers” sweeping them into perfect little piles.

Grandin says that animals also think like autistic savants, a theory she popularized in her book Animals in Translation.

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Great info, thanks for sharing it. I agree with them that Aspergers is not in the brain, i think it's in the cerebellum.

While I believe that Temple Grandin's theory is probably and oversimplification, I think there is something in this. Here is my social story on the issue.

I have always been the slowest one in class. I was slow to find words in the dictionary. I was very slow at mental math. But then I was also the slowest one in quantum mechanics and the slowest one in probability theory. My subjective experience is that it is relatively easy to collect details but that it takes me a while to put it all together somehow. That is true even for something as simple as seeing similarity in structure. However, as evidenced by my being able to move on through advanced degrees, I will eventually get the (pause as I cringe at the phrase used) BIG PICTURE. In fact, I may indeed get that picture more completely than many of my NT colleagues.

The point, I think, is that the relatively slow association and climb to the abstract concept does indeed seem like it could be similar to what our smaller brained siblings on the planet do to get along. The similarity would seem to stem mostly from the slow motion issue rather than there being a true difference in structure.

That difference in structure may apply, however, to the savant qualities that some of us share. I don't get the feeling that animals do this. If an animal is really good at something, it is because of the gradual changes and selection in its line of decent, not because of some individual knack like that seen in autism.

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I would comment about the cerebellum vs brain issue. The cerebellum is intricately intertwined with the rest of the brain functionally. If Asperger's is in the cerebellum, I think it is in the brain also.

Flying off the animal planet topic

Animals may have similar information processing capabilities to people living on the Autism Spectrum but to conclude they are Autistic is to anthropomorphize, to project our thinking and emotional abilities onto the non human creatures of this planet. Animals may share some of our traits, genes, etc., but to call them Autistic would be as inaccurate as calling them NT (as in dogs, who seem to have a theory of mind [they are reading cues about our behaviour and eye contact and this is how they 'understand' us]).

Grandin's theory is interesting but I think it just might be one of those human generalizations.

Uh, the brain is part of the cerebellum. I'd also recommend reading up on literature and looking at brain scans in regards to autistic neurology.

The other way around. The cerebellum is part of the brain.

If humans can easily sense something 'off' about us, and animals are supposed to be better at that sort of stuff, then any autistic animals would be abandoned or eaten by their mothers.

we use animals with autistic phenotypes in autism research.

one thing to consider is that animals have different learning styles and social structures (interact differently than we do)..... so it's not like you're gonna see an autistic mouse that behaves exactly like an autistic person... though there are similar functional deficits; they're just integrated and expressed (exhibited) really differently.

I've always considered Grandin's hypothesis to be flawed to some degree. IMO nobody thinks totally in terms of images because self-talk (either out-loud or done mentally) is a necessary part of conscious self-awareness; language is the source of the mental narrative that ties our thoughts together into a coherent self.

My theory on autism goes like this;
Humans are incredibly social animals. We can prove this by saying that we're the only animals with eye whites. Why? So we can read each other better.
I think that when apes evolved to humans and tried to adapt to places with a high degree of civilization and large populations in small areas, our brains didn't quite catch up with the new social instincts like the rest of humans did and we didn't get these new social instincts. So yes, our manner of thinking is similar to other animals more than a normal human's.

And really, if you've read the latest National Geographic, there's too many misconceptions on how animals behave.

we're not the only animals with eye whites........ i dont get it

I have seen a suggestion that humans evolved a white sclera to give better signals for gaze direction. The argument is weakened by the fact that lots of species have a high contrast between pupil and iris or sclera, even if they are not social. Here are examples of some animal eyes:

I can't be sure of identification from just looking at the eye. I think the picture in the second column, third row from the top shows a frog's eye, the one in the fourth column, bottom row looks like an octopus to me. Not social.

Of course, two counterexamples aren't enough. Your argument would still stand up if high contrast is correlated with living in a social group. I have no idea whether that correlation exists.


I think you have to change the detail of the argument, because the timing doesn't work out. High population densities and anything resembling civilization have been around only since the invention of agriculture, about 5000 - 10000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent and china and about 2000 years ago in America. Modern humans with their big brains have been around for a lot longer than that, I think it's about 200000 years. But you are right that modern humans, even in hunter gatherer societies, do have larger groups sizes then chimps and bonobos (150 - 250 instead of about 30 - 50). The suggestion that the demands of social life are responsible for humans' big brains is the social or Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis.

I'll have to listen to the podcast before I can make any more comments.