Visual Thinking

I had only vaguely been aware of Temple Grandin before. When I found out about this book, as you can see below, I was immediately intrigued. Having ‘aphantasia’, I do not mentally visualize at all; and yet, here was a book examining the advantages and prowess of being able to do so. It’s inevitable that I would want to check it out. Granted, Grandin is a prodigy when it comes to visual thinking—she doesn’t deny the ‘benefit’ of greater visual thinking abilities due to her autism (compared to the neurotypical population). Even so, she highlights various elements and stories that champion the power of visual thinking and argue for a renewed interest in and incorporation of visual thinking, particularly in schools and in the workplace.

The structure of the book is laid out clearly, and the writing is straightforward and easily digestible. Grandin begins by discussing the idea of visual thinking itself—including a fun survey to test where you lie on the continuum of ‘visual—verbal’ thinking. She also critically examines the current state of modern education, which she argues prioritizes skills that shortchange visual thinkers. On this point, I am not sure I fully agree—lacking this ability, I experienced difficulty in quite a lot of subjects and teaching methods in school that rely on visual thinking, even when it pertained to not obviously ‘visual’ subjects. Even so, I was able to excel in my niche as a verbal thinker (thank goodness for the reading/writing-heavy humanities). Nowadays, the focus on STEM, and in particular computer science, seems to emphasize parts of the brain that visual thinkers excel at.

Other parts of the book also discuss, in addition to areas where visual thinkers excel, the ways in which different types of visual thinkers can collaborate and work well together. Grandin identifies that visual thinking itself is a plurality; some-people are better at visual-spatial skills, which lean into object visualization and tangible reality. Others are more attuned to visual-spatial skills, which can include a proclivity for abstract patterns—these are the mathematicians and engineers.

One point of contention I had with Grandin is that she admits a continuum between verbal and visual thinkers, and then further identifies subtypes among visual thinkers. However, she seems steadfast in her view that visual and verbal thinkers are mutually exclusive, or even that the subtypes are mutually exclusive. This book led to me to a lot of great discussions about ways of thinking with friends. I noticed, especially among my more math and STEM-aligned friends, that they often fall into a mixed bag of traits from both subtypes. Grandin doesn’t delve into this ‘combined’ nature as much, and also doesn’t seem to grant that some people can excel both verbally and visually (those lucky ducks).

Some of the book is also devoted to discussing the ‘genius’ type and the effect that neurodiversity can have on different ways of thinking, with a focus on visual thinkers, of course. This was an interesting section to read; although I already read a few things on a similar subject, Grandin has a way of describing things in simple, concise language that is very engaging. The discussion is somewhat surface-level, good for beginners, but not really going as in-depth as I would have appreciated. More research could have supplemented this section, though the anecdotes were nice to read.

I want to give a final mention to the last, but not least, chapter of the book, which delves into animal consciousness and ways of thinking. Here, Grandin posits that animal thinking has more in relation with human visual thinkers than verbal thinkers; I can understand this argument, since language itself is a contentious thing that some argue characterizes human beings, while others begrudgingly admit some animals to have forms of communication. But, even in those cases, it seems to align with Grandin’s view—for example, the noted ‘hive dance’ of bees to communicate locations of nectar has its roots in some kind of spatial understanding.

All in all, this was an eye-opening reading and an enjoyable one at that; Temple Grandin’s research and background as a visual thinker and an advocate for autism (especially for the notion of ‘not preemptively limiting kids because of their diagnosis’) lends credence to her arguments here about visual thinking and educational and workplace reforms. Certainly, I agree that more energy could be invested in collaborating with and elevating visual thinkers, rather than forcing these children into the traditional careers-focused rat race. Grandin would not have found her life’s work without chance encounters on her relatives’ farm, working with cows and other farm animals. I definitely benefited from the modern structure of schooling, with its emphasis on written work, but I can also see that this is far from a ‘one size fits all’ solution for every child.

The human mind, in all of its variance, is incredible. Definitely recommend giving this one a read if you are at all interested in the subject.

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Curious about this book precisely because I am very much not a visual thinker.

This came across as a little too disorganized and scattershot; a lot of this book reads like just a firehose of anecdotes, and there are a several not-very-well-related substantive topics that Grandin addresses. A bit more focus would make this a better book -- or even, a couple better books.

First, Grandin isn't talking about all visual thinking: she describes the distinction between spatial visualizers and object visualizers. The former is related more to abstract visualization and better-connected to verbal thinking; object visualizers, on the other hand, are, well, much more purely visual: they really, truly do see vivid, realistic images. And yes, Grandin is that latter type -- I mean, she did write a book called "Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism"! This book is focused on those object visualizers and their place in society; Grandin calls these the "clever engineers". I think she has a great point, that these people are dramatically undervalued these days, and that our education system, employment systems, and culture in general simply do not give these hands-on folks their due.

But then this book proceeds onto other topics. There's a section on disasters -- very reminiscent of Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies, and even perhaps The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. And while Grandin has a good argument that visual thinking, and object visualizers in particular, are very helpful in avoiding disasters, accidents, and the general dangers of complex systems, I don't think there's anything so special to this, and that the benefit is not so specific to visual thinking, but rather, as Clearfield says in "Meltdown", the real benefit in avoiding meltdowns of various kinds comes from diversity of perspectives and experiences. This part of Grandin's book is interesting, but not very compelling.

So too is her section on genius and visual thinking. Yes, I'm sure many geniuses over history have been amazing visual thinkers. But I'm equally certain many geniuses have been spatial visualizers, or very verbally-focused. This section, too, feels like something she just tossed into the book.

A latter section on animal thinking is a bit more interesting, since that gets more at the specifics of visual thinking. Take bees, for example. They find food, fly back to the nest, do their dances, and communicate where the food is. This, and many other animal behaviors and cognition, do seem to be strong forms of visual thinking. Grandin, in this part of the book, makes a couple overtures towards an argument that visual thinking can be considered superior to verbal thinking, and I wish she would write that book: one tightly focused on human object visualizing, animal cognition as a form of visual thinking, the spectrum of the two, and why such thinking is unique and valuable.

This last part would mesh especially well with the flurry, in recent years, of work on cephalopod cognition; as well as insect cognition. This theoretical book would address the fact that our culture and society are very, very verbal and language-focused -- here, Grandin could start from The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, and address some of the left-brain, right-brain dichotomies. (A very literal dichtomy -- a division into two -- in the context of people who have their corpus callosum severed!)

This topic might also address AI, which has blown up so quickly here in early 2023: I mean, it's right there on the tin! ChatGPT and its ilk are large language models! One could describe the limitations of verbal thinking by drawing a throughline from ChatGPT back to the original Eliza chatbot. It does seem to be pretty simple to fool humans, using verbal thinking. Consider one of, the oh-so-convincing hallucinations of these large language model chatbots.

I myself am on the autistic spectrum, and share some of Grandin's object visualization tendencies (although I am obviously very much a spatial visualizer). I like Grandin's attitudes towards neurodiversity. But she has a couple great books, or perhaps long-form essays/pamphlets, buried in this book.

An overall really interesting book, I really like Temple Grandin's explanations and writing style. I'm thinking of reading her other books on animal thinking. Her explanations of what went wrong and right with two nuclear disasters and stories about engineering were really interesting to me, and the section on how humans and the rest of the animals are similar brain-wise is interesting too.

I agree with the other review that it does fall into the "billionare guys who are neurodiverse" trope which is annoying for so many different reasons I won't get into...also has Musk even engineered anything he owns? (Feel free to prove me wrong on this) This isn't probably the most sensitive book on neurodiversity and it is heavily American-centric, but her main point is that American education needs to value different types of thinking and hands-on learning more to improve its economy and infrastructure. (also that algebra classes are an unnecessary barrier to graduation) But if you are interested in how ND people and visual thinkers are perceived in other countries, this isn't the best book for that.