On the senses...
This is a long and somewhat philosophical piece
precipitated by an author reading I attended last Thursday. That reading
combined with several readings I attended in the days preceding have caused me
to think about a lot of things in a somewhat more cohesive manner than is usual
for me. That's not to say that what I've written is cohesive, simply that my
thoughts on certain matters are jelling. Herewith a somewhat rambling account
of my evening with Dr. Temple Grandin, an autistic individual who is at the top
rank of individuals concerning themselves with understanding animals and
providing for animal welfare, and someone who reminded me that we have five
senses and we need to use all of them - all the time. A sixth sense is the
intuitive summation of the other five and, yes, we all have that
too.
Thursday evening I headed out for Pioneer Square
to sit in on yet another Elliott Bay Book Company author reading. This time it
was for Dr. Temple Grandin, a Colorado State University assistant professor of
animal science and an individual who was born with autism. The reading was
coincident with a new book of hers which talks about how autism has given her
insight into and a means of understanding how animals communicate. The title of
her book is "Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode
Animal Behavior," and follows up on a previous 1995 book of hers called
"Thinking in Pictures: and Other Reports from My Life with Autism." She is
world-renowned for having done a great deal to clean up the manner by which
animals are treated and slaughtered on the way to becoming meat for the rest of
us.
I was a bit peeved by the time I got to Elliott Bay Books because I had a feeling that this author would bring out a crowd, and sure enough, the reading room was packed, with lots of people standing. There were at least 120 folks crowded into the reading room. I stood around the edge a few minutes before she was scheduled to begin her talk, looking around to see which corner I wanted to stand in when one of the Elliott Bay Book handlers motioned to me that there was a single seat in the back, directly in front of the podium and somewhat hidden because of all the coats on the back of the seats. Perfect, I made my way to the seat similar to the way one would disrupt everyone in a movie aisle to sit in the only remaining seat in the middle of a row. I Put my coat on the back of the seat and sort of fell into a conversation which was already going on between the nearby seat occupants. When the Elliott Bay guy indicated that Dr. Grandin would be out in a few minutes, I asked those around me to "guard" my seat and went and got a coffee and returned.
The reason I had been peeved was because I had left the house to catch a bus which would have put me downtown a full 45 minutes before the reading and given me plenty of time to get coffee and a good seat. This was on Inaugural Day and, Seattle being apparently the number two protest city in the country - after Washington, DC, downtown had been jammed with protesters all day and the bus schedules as well as the commute home for a lot of folks had been completely disrupted. I'd been standing on 35th Avenue SW, in the cold rain, for nearly an hour - during which time two buses should have been by. None appeared which were taking passengers. Instead there were four buses with their destination signs reading "Central Base," which is one of three bus garages downtown. When one of the "CB" buses did stop, offering me a lift to a bus stop where there were more bus lines converging, I accepted and was told by the driver that the entire Metro bus schedule was jimmied because of the protests downtown. I got off at Avalon Way and 35th Avenue where I had at least three times the chance of catching a bus downtown, and did within minutes. Lucky for me it was a #54 (which turns into a #5) and takes the Viaduct, cutting about 15 minutes off the trip time downtown. This put me back somewhat on schedule but I knew when I saw the crowd in the reading room that my original plan of arriving 45 minutes early would have worked - except for the protests. But, fate has a way of even-ing up things, so I had a seat, a coffee, a good view straight forwards to the podium and was set.
Dr. Grandin is about my same age. She was born in Boston in 1947 and by the time she was three was showing signs of classic autism. Instead of being placed in an institution specifically for the autistic, her parents placed here in a private school where her abilities could be enhanced. In interviews with several publications, Dr. Grandin says that of the roughly 25 percent of autistic kids who have some verbal and conceptualization skills, that these kids should be further encouraged in education and allowed to progress, under a tutor, until they have skills which can allow them to live independently. Grandin says a good mentor is essential. Autism, at least from what I could read on the web and from Dr. Grandin's remarks, seems to be an underdevelopment of the cerebellum and limbic systems of the brain. Grandin said her own brain was about 20 percent shy of a normal mass for the cerebellum and limbic areas. Grandin also has commented in publications about the range of abilities which autistic people have which range from being completely non-verbal with an inability to generalize and conceptualize to being able to conceptualize if mentored and shown numerous examples of the "general" concept using specific examples. Autistic individuals also have other characteristics, some physical, some nervous, which manifest themselves through the whole person - such as Dr. Grandin's perpetual and constant pulling of her hair while she talks, her continuous movements about the stage and her - according to her own words - constant checking to see if she's in any risk. In some ways the autistic individual seems to mimic the behavior patterns of individuals with severe Attention Deficit Disorder - very nervous and animated and able to focus on a single topic only with constant reminders. Dr. Grandin was constantly reiterating the topic she was addressing, as if to remind herself of what she was talking about.
Because of her parents and tutors, including one high school teacher who mentored her through high school as well as her undergraduate years at college, she has achieved a stunning level of accomplishment - even by non-autistic standards. She has a BA in psychology and a Masters from Arizona State University in Animal Science and a Doctorate in same from the University of Illinois. More importantly, perhaps, is the work she has done with animal handling and animal slaughter. Through her efforts and insights, animal handling and slaugterhouse structures and methods have undergone a dramatic change in the last decade-and-a-half. She is largely responsible for the nearly-universally accepted methods used in pig and cow handling in the yards and, in particular, the manner and methods which are used to herd these animals through the slaughterhouse up to and including the killing methods. She has created a widely-adopted checklist which is used to rate animal handling facilities and slaughterhouses. Her work in understanding and publishing the results of that understanding concerning animal behavior, especially animal fears and how to handle high-spirited animals, has had a profound change in how livestock is handled and processed. She is now applying her skills to the remaining areas of animal handling which need to be improved - chicken ranches, particularly egg-laying chickens.
McDonalds shows up again
She says she was able to be so successful in the livestock area largely because of a lawsuit which involved the burger giant McDonalds. Because McDonalds doesn't purchase particular cuts or whole sides of beef, but rather takes the leftover pieces for grinding into hamburger, McDonalds is a major client at over 90 percent of the roughly 120 beef slaughterhouses operated in the U.S. Because McDonalds, and Wendy's and other large consumers of ground beef, were clients of hers they were able to implement her methods and use her checklist when they rated the beef supply houses they use. Because a loss of McDonalds, or the others, as a client of a beef house would have been a serious economic impact to financial health of the individual meet handling facility, they nearly universally agreed to subscribe to the methods Dr. Grandin has come up with. She told several stories about taking the general counsel and other high-ranking officials from these fast-food companies to different slaughterhouses and walking them through the plant. After educating them into some of the ways which can spook or otherwise harm pigs and cows, she told of several of these officials being shocked when they saw things which previously they wouldn't have blinked over. All to the good and she will continue this work with chickens.
I shouldn't have been surprised given the overall topic and Dr. Grandin's reputation that about half the audience at Elliott Bay Books were animal rights activists. A large proportion of the remainder were pet owners or were involved in the pet industry. While Dr. Grandin was giving her talk about the animal handling changes she's helped to implement, she was asked by an audience member if she ate meat or supported eating meat. Much to my delight and to the apparent chagrin of about half the audience, she responded "Absolutely. I love meat. I am a meat eater and will always be a meat eater. I am concerned about the welfare of these animals which we have raised for this purpose. We need to treat these animals with respect and we need to be aware of ways which will make their passage through the livestock area and the slaughterhouse easier and less frightening. But, realize that these animals would not even be here were it not for our market for meat. We're talking about creatures we breed and raise to kill for food."
That set off another related tangent by Dr. Grandin. She began to describe how our breeding programs for cows and pigs has negatively affected these animals in ways we did not or could not realize. As an example she talked about the leaner breeds of pigs which have been bred and how that has caused a problem with their legs such that a sow can no longer actually stand to allow suckling pigs access to her teats. The same is true of certain breeds of cattle which have also been bred for leanness. She says she is beginning to look into this aspect and will probably have some guidelines for breeders when she's done with examining the entirety of the situation. That's one area where Dr. Grandin said functioning autistics can provide a tremendous value-added in intellectual areas over non-autistic individuals. The autistic individual will spend a lot of time examining specific examples and understand that example. After examining dozens or hundreds of specific examples, the autistic individual can make great leaps from the specific to the general which a non-autistic individual might not be able to do for several reasons. The non-autistic individual would not have the same depth of focus with respect to each specific example, the autistic compulsive behavior pattern is advantageous in this respect because after spending considerable time on each specific example, the autistic individual knows inside-and-out what is going on with that specific example. By studying the dozen or hundred specific examples presented, the autistic individual can find the related links between the specific cases very readily. Almost as if it were a leap of faith or an intuitive insight.
Autistic Mind Readers?
She was actually asked by an audience member about the supposed mind-reading abilities of some autistic individuals and responded saying that the autistic individual is not reading someone's mind. They are incredible students of the minute detail of their lives. If all the minute details of something add up to a general condition, the autistic individual will come out and say something is going to happen. Not because they can tell the future or read someone's mind but because the pattern of behavior we all have is composed of these minute details and with enough of them another individual can tell what is going to happen or what someone is up to. "Clues," she said. "We all leave clues around everywhere about what it is we're doing or what it is we are getting ready to do. The autistic individual is simply reading these clues. Most non-autistic individuals ignore these clues because they are at the detail level of our existence." Which caused me to think back on the many times I've been able to read forward from what a group was saying or doing to get an idea of where they were heading or what they were about to do.
I think one of the aspects of Dr. Grandin's talk which may have gotten overlooked or even ignored by some in the audience is her description of how the autistic mind works, how it uses a collection of specific images applied to specific examples and how that collection of "specifics" then leads to a generalization which is invariably true. Reminds me of some of the things I learned in philosophy - be attentive to the details of something and you will have the foundation of an understanding of how it works. This is especially true with animals, as Dr. Grandin would soon explain.
Since her talk was really about her new book and how autism has allowed her a more intimate look into and understanding of how animals communicate, she finished with the background discussion of where she's been and what she's done with respect to animal welfare and animal handling and began to dive right into the ways by which animals communicate. I should say again that during the entire time Dr. Grandin was talking, she was pacing back and forth on the stage. She had uncoiled the microphone from its stand and said early on that she liked to be very free and not tied to having to stand in a particular place. She also would, about every second or third sentence, reach up to her hair with her free hand, the one not holding the microphone, which she kept moving from hand to hand, and stroke one or the other side of her somewhat disheveled hair. Not an affectation but a very physical demonstration of the nervousness and compulsive behavior which is characteristic of those who are autistic. And, she talked faster than anyone I've ever heard - maybe two-and-a-half times as fast as I've ever talked, which can be quite fast. She was absolutely lucid and distinct with her speech and never stumbled on a word, phrase or sentence. Just a fast and dense transfer of information verbally. When she was responding to someone's question or comment, about half the time she would lean-forward with the respondent and finish the question or comment. About half the time she would repeat the comment or question because the audience person talking was using such a low voice. From this I gathered that she can be pointedly direct in her listening abilities as well.
How Do Animals Think?
How do animals think and how do they communicate? "Well, they don't have words and they don't converse with each other in the usual sense that we do," she said. As an autistic individual who had a very hard time conceptualizing the world, she said she thought in pictures, in images, in sounds, in colors and shapes, in smells and touches. Her world has evolved from one which didn't include abstract words and phrases to one where she is quite comfortable, if compulsive, in the use of these abstract concepts. But, she still sees the world in images, when she's thinking about something she doesn't think in words, she thinks in images and pictures. That's how animals think and how they communicate she said. Animals don't have a vocabulary of abstract concepts. They have a world comprised of images, smells, touches, of fears and wants and pleasing things.
Dr. Grandin gave numerous examples of how animals not only see in images but stash their fears in images. She also runs an animal clinic out of her Colorado location and talked a lot about some of the pet owners who came to see her. One case involved a rescued dog who was pretty sweet in every way except when the new owner made herself a cup of chocolate. Then the dog would howl and get very nervous and run and hide. The owner went to Dr. Grandin, who, because of her interest in understanding these animals, went to the owner's house and sat and watched while the dog and dog's owner went about their daily routine. When the owner went to make a cup of chocolate everything was fine until she poured the mixture into a handled mug and at that point the dog started up again in an agitated state. Dr. Grandin tried a number of things including working with the dog to see if it was the smell of chocolate, it wasn't, was it the location in the kitchen, it wasn't, finally Dr. Grandin tried something different and poured the chocolate into a mug which had no handle. With that, the dog was fine. The owner could drink the chocolate out of the handle-less mug and she and the dog were doing okay in every respect. Dr. Grandin hypothesized that when the dog was a puppy someone had used a mug holding it by the handle to perhaps beat the dog or hit it or abuse it in some way. The dog remembered the image of the mug with the handle and when approached by a person holding a mug by the handle went into this routine which it had learned earlier.
Another example was a gentleman who visited Dr. Grandin with his large shepherd and described a situation where the dog had been hit in the street by a car but had been taken to an animal hospital and had recovered pretty much completely. The dog's owner said the animal was fine and was pretty much his old self with respect to play, eating, getting in the car and going places and all the other things he did with the dog. Except, every time he was out walking the dog and crossed a street, about midway across the street the animal would cower and refuse to go any further. This was perplexing to the owner and he thought Dr. Grandin could help figure out what was going on. She and the dog and owner went around the neighborhood where this guy lives and she watched as he played, walked, and engaged in conversation with some of his neighbors. When he crossed the street with his dog, Dr. Grandin asked him to cross out of the intersection area and away from the crosswalk markings. When the owner did that, the dog crossed the street with no problem. She then asked him to cross in the crosswalk area and the dog went into his cowering mode and refused to cross more than half-way. Dr. Grandin was able to deduce that when the dog had been hit, he was in the crosswalk area and while he was laying there in pain what he was looking at were the white crosswalk markings and had come to associate the markings with great pain.
Dr. Grandin said that in most of these instances it's a visual memory which triggers an aversion or some form of non-typical behavior based on the animal's past and what was in their visual field of view at the previous time. She also said that even though the visual was a powerful memory element for dogs (as well as for the autistic) that it could be equally the case where a smell or sound or feel of something would trigger a memory in an animal.
As an example of the different ways animals record information, she recalled several tales of animals which had been fond of a neighborhood and had been removed from that area because the owner moved. Cats, in particular, Dr. Grandin said are "place" animals and if they've got a favorite spot in a yard, theirs or a neighbor's, they may try and return to that place. An audience member brought up a tale of such a cat who had moved with its owner some five miles away and within a few days had returned to the home of the questioner, who happened to be the neighbor of the person who moved and whose yard was the frequent hiding place for the owner's cat. How is this possible since the animal clearly couldn't have tracked his way back using visual cues because when the owner moved the cat was in a cat carrier inside a U-Haul van? Dr. Grandin said that dogs and cats have particularly powerful senses of smell and the cat was easily able to follow smells it picked up inside the van while being moved. She mentioned several other cases of animals who were able to use their sense of smell to backtrack to a favorite place - in some cases the distances were in excess of hundreds of miles.
Squirrel Snapshots
Dr. Grandin also shared some recent observations of other animals to give the audience more a sense of the capabilities and use of sensory input which a wide range of animals possess. She said that recent studies have shown that squirrels, who often hide nuts and other food in upwards of a hundred locations within their territory, will, after digging the hole and burying the food item, jump up and look around and then move along. Dr. Grandin then gave an example of how she finds her car in the parking lot of some of the slaughterhouses she visits. These are large lots with hundreds of cars arranged in the usual parking lot style but without the alphabetic or color-coded signs which shopping centers use to help people find their cars. How does the good doctor find her car? She told us that she stands by her car and looks at the buildings in the distance and then moves a few feet in one direction and then the other to see which sides of which buildings she can see from her car and which sides are obscured except when she moves one way or the other. She's visually triangulating her present position by taking a plus visual and a minus visual snapshot. That's what she says the squirrels do, they snapshot the location of their surroundings from the location of the buried cache and that visual memory can later be used when they uncover and use the food cache.
She also told us that carrier pigeons use sight first and smell second in their homing. Blindfolded carrier pigeons can still find their way back home but if they're blindfolded and their olfactory sense is deadened - they have to breathe so they use temporary chemical deadeners in these tests - the pigeon becomes lost because the visual and olfactory senses are missing and the pigeon has nothing to match against its memory.
Another person in the audience asked how we could further the cause of inter-species communication and she answered "with music, with song." As an example of why this would be fruitful research she disclosed recent discoveries made studying prairie dog colonies. The prairie dog is a supremely social creature and in any given colony there are several individual members who take turns serving as lookouts from their various colony entrances. The studies involved recording the various calls the prairie dogs make and studying the resultant behavior associated with the different calls. These animals make a chirping sound which varies in pitch and intensity. To humans it sounds a lot like birds chirping or singing. What she said the studies revealed was that the prairie dog has developed a language using these chirps - a language which has verbs and nouns. One set of chirps is the verb component and the second set of chirps is the noun component. In this way prairie dogs are able to provide true verbal intelligent communication among themselves. Whales entertain themselves and each other with elaborate, hours-long, compositions using a variety of waveforms and we haven't begun to delve into the meaning of these songs except to note that many of them are haunting and beautiful.
Dr. Grandin is a fervent believer in evolution and made the comment that throughout human history there have been instances, recorded and annotated, of the many uses of song and music in the human realm. Her thoughts suggests that music and song would not be as powerful an element of the human experience if these special uses of sound didn't have a larger meaning - a meaning perhaps we've evolved away from with our use of abstract symbolic language and writing. Certainly the tone and content of cat meows and dog barks contain meaning even if we're not privy to that meaning, she said. The same is true of a lot of animals. We underestimate the cognitive abilities of our animal friends all the time. She recounted another experiment which involved a crow. In this experiment a crow was placed in a fairly commodious cage with a bent paperclip which could be inserted in an opening which would provide the crow with food. The crow was not shown how to use the paperclip, nor that using it would provide food. Several days later the crow was proficient at the use of the paperclip food dispenser mechanism. The experimenters then removed the bent paperclip and replaced it with a paperclip which looked like an ordinary paperclip. It took the crow only a few hours to figure how to bend the paperclip so it would work again in the food dispenser slot. That, Dr. Grandin said, is pretty powerful proof of the problem-solving cognitive capabilities of a crow.
Nevermore
I have my own story about the cognitive capabilities of crows. A year before we left Washington, the DC area had one of the most snowful winters in the two decades I'd lived there. Wisconsin Avenue was closed from Georgetown all the way past Bethesda for most of the first day after nearly three feet fell. I was out in front of our house, getting exercise by shoveling snow from around the Volvo and generally enjoying the white and the hundreds of kids and adults who were sliding down the hill across from our front porch. We lived across from the largest and most fun of all the hills in the city to go sledding down. After a while my eye caught sight of a crow which had perched himself at the top of our steep but completely snow-covered roof. Fascinated by crows, I stopped shoveling and watched this crow as he slid down the eighteen feet or so of 45-degree pitched snow-covered roof, reached the gutter, fluffed the snow off his feathers, flew to the top of the roof and slid down again. He did this for longer than I had patience to watch but I was struck by how profoundly intelligent that crow was. In the wild, crows live for seven to eight years. In captivity they can and have lived upwards of twenty-five years. This was a crow in the wild. The previous winter and the one before that were not such that our roof would have been as covered with snow as it was this particular winter so it's unlikely that the crow I was watching had some experience with roofs covered with snow. It just decided, probably after slipping on the snow, that sliding down the roof would be fun. Humor, play, enjoying oneself, or playing strictly for one's own delight are generally among the accepted examples of proof of intelligent, self-aware behavior. I'd been a fan of crows, ravens and the like for decades, but that winter cinched it for me - these birds are a damned lot smarter than even Edgar Allen Poe allowed. Dr. Grandin was providing further proof.
In order to better understand animals and to better communicate with them, Dr. Grandin said we need to use our senses and not our abstract words and phrases. Animals don't think in abstract words or use a constructed grammar to think. They use the images, the smells, the sounds, the touches of their environment. Another question from the audience asked if it was true that animals have a sense of impending catastrophe. Dr. Grandin answered that many creatures, mammal. reptile, and avian, have greater senses of hearing or seeing or of smell than do humans. Many animals can hear the low-frequency sounds of tornadoes or tsunamis or even the beginning movement of the plates in earthquakes. These animals are relying on their senses to live in their world. Humans seem to have many of the same capabilities but thousands of years of language and grammar have caused us to think in abstract terms rather than in the concrete terms of our senses.
Dr. Temple Grandin is a powerful person whose presence is obvious. Her insight into both human and animal communications was extraordinary as is the sum of her life so far. I'm sure she's not nearly finished with animal care or in helping bridge the distance between animal and human understanding and communication. Her comments about how we think and how we sometimes (or all the time) ignore the signals our senses are providing was illuminating. I'm a very observant individual and am constantly using as many senses as I have to decipher my environment or the human situations I'm in. I'm pulling data from my ears, from my eyes, from my nose and mouth if there's something to taste. I use my hands and feet and feel things. When Dr. Grandin was discussing how we so often ignore the signals from our senses I was reminded of Craig Childs' comments about how he explored the Southwest desert area using a combination of his eyes, ears, nose and hands and feet. Childs is a desert ecologist and desert hiker and for him, to understand the desert ecology, one had to "feel" that ecology. These were rocks and boulders and ledges which were not always what they seemed to be. Something which looked solid and sturdy might be compressed dust from eons ago which would break in one's hands. To explore the desert is to use all the senses. Dr. Grandin was saying that to understand their world animals use the senses they have because that's all they have. Their world of memories is a world of images, smells, sounds, tastes and feels. Our world includes so much else that the images, smells, sounds, tastes and feels sometimes get pushed out of our mind as we shape our thoughts in words and phrases and sentences - spoken, overheard, read somewhere or planned to say in the future.
Underlying Philosophical Points
Realize that I choose the authors I hear based on my own interests and the personal philosophy I have and use in my life. That's a precursor caution which I feel compelled to say because it's no accident that many of the authors I've heard say things which are a cumulative summation of some simple truth. I'm listening to authors who are recounting how they see their world, why that world is the way it is, and what they plan to do with that world. Even when I'm listening to fiction authors such as Ursula Le Guin, I'm listening to individuals who are creating worlds within and who are experimenting with new sociologies but who are still telling me how they see their world and how they navigate through it. It's a quest and it's a journey along a path which evolution is defining. I'm part of evolution but am also who I am because of evolution. I learn. I teach. I listen. I talk.
Sometimes when I leave Elliott Bay Books after one of these authors' presentations I'm stuck inside my head for hours going over what they said and how it either reaffirms something I'd discovered or known or how it illuminates an area where I've had an inquisitive impulse or how it gives me an entirely new realm to explore.
I've had a few friends in my life who've been born with or have had accidents which left them with one or more senses disabled - not useful to them anymore or ever. I've always been struck by how these friends have made so much more use of their remaining senses than I have with that same sense. These friends have taught me new and different ways to use my senses, so that even though I have all my senses, I now know how to use them in a richer manner. I have a friend who can't see who has taught me ways to listen which have improved my aural discriminatory capabilities beyond what I thought was possible. I have another friend who lost the sight in one eye as a teenager who taught me how to use focus rather than stereo-optical triangulation to guage the distance of an object. I've had friends who lost the use of a limb who have emboldened me to try using my feet for grasping tasks and to use my left hand for things I might otherwise use my right hand for. I'm a richer person with more sensory capabilities and a more dextrous individual because of these teachers - my friends. I've tried to use friends who didn't know something to help teach me how to think in ways I might not have thought of because I did know something.
I guess the essence of this is that we're all much more capable at many more things than we realize and we all need to explore our own senses and expand the ways in which we use our bodies. We've been given an incredible gift - this human body - and most of us barely make minimal use of the skills, talents and learnings we have. I'm extremely grateful to Dr. Grandin for touring with her new book. I'm grateful to her for giving the rest of us a view into the mind of an autistic individual and also providing us with a new means of thinking. I'm certainly grateful to Elliott Bay Books and others, too, such as University Books, which provide these opportunities for the rest of us. More than that, though, I'm amazed and awestruck at the power of life on this planet. Humans and our fellow other creatures - we all have a fantastic story to tell, and to hear that story all we need do is pay attention to our senses and open our minds.
Winter is a time of introspection for most places except perhaps the tropics. Bears hibernate. Humans seem to delve deeper into themselves, either by reading or writing or conversing. It's good that we do this. Summer is a time for exploration and playful activities. I've often wondered if the life cycle here on Earth would be as interesting if our axis weren't tilted 23.5 degrees to one side, or if there were no Moon to create the tides, or if the axial spin were such that we had only one wind like Venus. When we go looking for other planets to live on, let's look for those with tilt and spin and tides. Would our plant life be as rich and sustaining if it didn't go dormant for a third of its life cycle?
I was a bit peeved by the time I got to Elliott Bay Books because I had a feeling that this author would bring out a crowd, and sure enough, the reading room was packed, with lots of people standing. There were at least 120 folks crowded into the reading room. I stood around the edge a few minutes before she was scheduled to begin her talk, looking around to see which corner I wanted to stand in when one of the Elliott Bay Book handlers motioned to me that there was a single seat in the back, directly in front of the podium and somewhat hidden because of all the coats on the back of the seats. Perfect, I made my way to the seat similar to the way one would disrupt everyone in a movie aisle to sit in the only remaining seat in the middle of a row. I Put my coat on the back of the seat and sort of fell into a conversation which was already going on between the nearby seat occupants. When the Elliott Bay guy indicated that Dr. Grandin would be out in a few minutes, I asked those around me to "guard" my seat and went and got a coffee and returned.
The reason I had been peeved was because I had left the house to catch a bus which would have put me downtown a full 45 minutes before the reading and given me plenty of time to get coffee and a good seat. This was on Inaugural Day and, Seattle being apparently the number two protest city in the country - after Washington, DC, downtown had been jammed with protesters all day and the bus schedules as well as the commute home for a lot of folks had been completely disrupted. I'd been standing on 35th Avenue SW, in the cold rain, for nearly an hour - during which time two buses should have been by. None appeared which were taking passengers. Instead there were four buses with their destination signs reading "Central Base," which is one of three bus garages downtown. When one of the "CB" buses did stop, offering me a lift to a bus stop where there were more bus lines converging, I accepted and was told by the driver that the entire Metro bus schedule was jimmied because of the protests downtown. I got off at Avalon Way and 35th Avenue where I had at least three times the chance of catching a bus downtown, and did within minutes. Lucky for me it was a #54 (which turns into a #5) and takes the Viaduct, cutting about 15 minutes off the trip time downtown. This put me back somewhat on schedule but I knew when I saw the crowd in the reading room that my original plan of arriving 45 minutes early would have worked - except for the protests. But, fate has a way of even-ing up things, so I had a seat, a coffee, a good view straight forwards to the podium and was set.
Dr. Grandin is about my same age. She was born in Boston in 1947 and by the time she was three was showing signs of classic autism. Instead of being placed in an institution specifically for the autistic, her parents placed here in a private school where her abilities could be enhanced. In interviews with several publications, Dr. Grandin says that of the roughly 25 percent of autistic kids who have some verbal and conceptualization skills, that these kids should be further encouraged in education and allowed to progress, under a tutor, until they have skills which can allow them to live independently. Grandin says a good mentor is essential. Autism, at least from what I could read on the web and from Dr. Grandin's remarks, seems to be an underdevelopment of the cerebellum and limbic systems of the brain. Grandin said her own brain was about 20 percent shy of a normal mass for the cerebellum and limbic areas. Grandin also has commented in publications about the range of abilities which autistic people have which range from being completely non-verbal with an inability to generalize and conceptualize to being able to conceptualize if mentored and shown numerous examples of the "general" concept using specific examples. Autistic individuals also have other characteristics, some physical, some nervous, which manifest themselves through the whole person - such as Dr. Grandin's perpetual and constant pulling of her hair while she talks, her continuous movements about the stage and her - according to her own words - constant checking to see if she's in any risk. In some ways the autistic individual seems to mimic the behavior patterns of individuals with severe Attention Deficit Disorder - very nervous and animated and able to focus on a single topic only with constant reminders. Dr. Grandin was constantly reiterating the topic she was addressing, as if to remind herself of what she was talking about.
Because of her parents and tutors, including one high school teacher who mentored her through high school as well as her undergraduate years at college, she has achieved a stunning level of accomplishment - even by non-autistic standards. She has a BA in psychology and a Masters from Arizona State University in Animal Science and a Doctorate in same from the University of Illinois. More importantly, perhaps, is the work she has done with animal handling and animal slaughter. Through her efforts and insights, animal handling and slaugterhouse structures and methods have undergone a dramatic change in the last decade-and-a-half. She is largely responsible for the nearly-universally accepted methods used in pig and cow handling in the yards and, in particular, the manner and methods which are used to herd these animals through the slaughterhouse up to and including the killing methods. She has created a widely-adopted checklist which is used to rate animal handling facilities and slaughterhouses. Her work in understanding and publishing the results of that understanding concerning animal behavior, especially animal fears and how to handle high-spirited animals, has had a profound change in how livestock is handled and processed. She is now applying her skills to the remaining areas of animal handling which need to be improved - chicken ranches, particularly egg-laying chickens.
McDonalds shows up again
She says she was able to be so successful in the livestock area largely because of a lawsuit which involved the burger giant McDonalds. Because McDonalds doesn't purchase particular cuts or whole sides of beef, but rather takes the leftover pieces for grinding into hamburger, McDonalds is a major client at over 90 percent of the roughly 120 beef slaughterhouses operated in the U.S. Because McDonalds, and Wendy's and other large consumers of ground beef, were clients of hers they were able to implement her methods and use her checklist when they rated the beef supply houses they use. Because a loss of McDonalds, or the others, as a client of a beef house would have been a serious economic impact to financial health of the individual meet handling facility, they nearly universally agreed to subscribe to the methods Dr. Grandin has come up with. She told several stories about taking the general counsel and other high-ranking officials from these fast-food companies to different slaughterhouses and walking them through the plant. After educating them into some of the ways which can spook or otherwise harm pigs and cows, she told of several of these officials being shocked when they saw things which previously they wouldn't have blinked over. All to the good and she will continue this work with chickens.
I shouldn't have been surprised given the overall topic and Dr. Grandin's reputation that about half the audience at Elliott Bay Books were animal rights activists. A large proportion of the remainder were pet owners or were involved in the pet industry. While Dr. Grandin was giving her talk about the animal handling changes she's helped to implement, she was asked by an audience member if she ate meat or supported eating meat. Much to my delight and to the apparent chagrin of about half the audience, she responded "Absolutely. I love meat. I am a meat eater and will always be a meat eater. I am concerned about the welfare of these animals which we have raised for this purpose. We need to treat these animals with respect and we need to be aware of ways which will make their passage through the livestock area and the slaughterhouse easier and less frightening. But, realize that these animals would not even be here were it not for our market for meat. We're talking about creatures we breed and raise to kill for food."
That set off another related tangent by Dr. Grandin. She began to describe how our breeding programs for cows and pigs has negatively affected these animals in ways we did not or could not realize. As an example she talked about the leaner breeds of pigs which have been bred and how that has caused a problem with their legs such that a sow can no longer actually stand to allow suckling pigs access to her teats. The same is true of certain breeds of cattle which have also been bred for leanness. She says she is beginning to look into this aspect and will probably have some guidelines for breeders when she's done with examining the entirety of the situation. That's one area where Dr. Grandin said functioning autistics can provide a tremendous value-added in intellectual areas over non-autistic individuals. The autistic individual will spend a lot of time examining specific examples and understand that example. After examining dozens or hundreds of specific examples, the autistic individual can make great leaps from the specific to the general which a non-autistic individual might not be able to do for several reasons. The non-autistic individual would not have the same depth of focus with respect to each specific example, the autistic compulsive behavior pattern is advantageous in this respect because after spending considerable time on each specific example, the autistic individual knows inside-and-out what is going on with that specific example. By studying the dozen or hundred specific examples presented, the autistic individual can find the related links between the specific cases very readily. Almost as if it were a leap of faith or an intuitive insight.
Autistic Mind Readers?
She was actually asked by an audience member about the supposed mind-reading abilities of some autistic individuals and responded saying that the autistic individual is not reading someone's mind. They are incredible students of the minute detail of their lives. If all the minute details of something add up to a general condition, the autistic individual will come out and say something is going to happen. Not because they can tell the future or read someone's mind but because the pattern of behavior we all have is composed of these minute details and with enough of them another individual can tell what is going to happen or what someone is up to. "Clues," she said. "We all leave clues around everywhere about what it is we're doing or what it is we are getting ready to do. The autistic individual is simply reading these clues. Most non-autistic individuals ignore these clues because they are at the detail level of our existence." Which caused me to think back on the many times I've been able to read forward from what a group was saying or doing to get an idea of where they were heading or what they were about to do.
I think one of the aspects of Dr. Grandin's talk which may have gotten overlooked or even ignored by some in the audience is her description of how the autistic mind works, how it uses a collection of specific images applied to specific examples and how that collection of "specifics" then leads to a generalization which is invariably true. Reminds me of some of the things I learned in philosophy - be attentive to the details of something and you will have the foundation of an understanding of how it works. This is especially true with animals, as Dr. Grandin would soon explain.
Since her talk was really about her new book and how autism has allowed her a more intimate look into and understanding of how animals communicate, she finished with the background discussion of where she's been and what she's done with respect to animal welfare and animal handling and began to dive right into the ways by which animals communicate. I should say again that during the entire time Dr. Grandin was talking, she was pacing back and forth on the stage. She had uncoiled the microphone from its stand and said early on that she liked to be very free and not tied to having to stand in a particular place. She also would, about every second or third sentence, reach up to her hair with her free hand, the one not holding the microphone, which she kept moving from hand to hand, and stroke one or the other side of her somewhat disheveled hair. Not an affectation but a very physical demonstration of the nervousness and compulsive behavior which is characteristic of those who are autistic. And, she talked faster than anyone I've ever heard - maybe two-and-a-half times as fast as I've ever talked, which can be quite fast. She was absolutely lucid and distinct with her speech and never stumbled on a word, phrase or sentence. Just a fast and dense transfer of information verbally. When she was responding to someone's question or comment, about half the time she would lean-forward with the respondent and finish the question or comment. About half the time she would repeat the comment or question because the audience person talking was using such a low voice. From this I gathered that she can be pointedly direct in her listening abilities as well.
How Do Animals Think?
How do animals think and how do they communicate? "Well, they don't have words and they don't converse with each other in the usual sense that we do," she said. As an autistic individual who had a very hard time conceptualizing the world, she said she thought in pictures, in images, in sounds, in colors and shapes, in smells and touches. Her world has evolved from one which didn't include abstract words and phrases to one where she is quite comfortable, if compulsive, in the use of these abstract concepts. But, she still sees the world in images, when she's thinking about something she doesn't think in words, she thinks in images and pictures. That's how animals think and how they communicate she said. Animals don't have a vocabulary of abstract concepts. They have a world comprised of images, smells, touches, of fears and wants and pleasing things.
Dr. Grandin gave numerous examples of how animals not only see in images but stash their fears in images. She also runs an animal clinic out of her Colorado location and talked a lot about some of the pet owners who came to see her. One case involved a rescued dog who was pretty sweet in every way except when the new owner made herself a cup of chocolate. Then the dog would howl and get very nervous and run and hide. The owner went to Dr. Grandin, who, because of her interest in understanding these animals, went to the owner's house and sat and watched while the dog and dog's owner went about their daily routine. When the owner went to make a cup of chocolate everything was fine until she poured the mixture into a handled mug and at that point the dog started up again in an agitated state. Dr. Grandin tried a number of things including working with the dog to see if it was the smell of chocolate, it wasn't, was it the location in the kitchen, it wasn't, finally Dr. Grandin tried something different and poured the chocolate into a mug which had no handle. With that, the dog was fine. The owner could drink the chocolate out of the handle-less mug and she and the dog were doing okay in every respect. Dr. Grandin hypothesized that when the dog was a puppy someone had used a mug holding it by the handle to perhaps beat the dog or hit it or abuse it in some way. The dog remembered the image of the mug with the handle and when approached by a person holding a mug by the handle went into this routine which it had learned earlier.
Another example was a gentleman who visited Dr. Grandin with his large shepherd and described a situation where the dog had been hit in the street by a car but had been taken to an animal hospital and had recovered pretty much completely. The dog's owner said the animal was fine and was pretty much his old self with respect to play, eating, getting in the car and going places and all the other things he did with the dog. Except, every time he was out walking the dog and crossed a street, about midway across the street the animal would cower and refuse to go any further. This was perplexing to the owner and he thought Dr. Grandin could help figure out what was going on. She and the dog and owner went around the neighborhood where this guy lives and she watched as he played, walked, and engaged in conversation with some of his neighbors. When he crossed the street with his dog, Dr. Grandin asked him to cross out of the intersection area and away from the crosswalk markings. When the owner did that, the dog crossed the street with no problem. She then asked him to cross in the crosswalk area and the dog went into his cowering mode and refused to cross more than half-way. Dr. Grandin was able to deduce that when the dog had been hit, he was in the crosswalk area and while he was laying there in pain what he was looking at were the white crosswalk markings and had come to associate the markings with great pain.
Dr. Grandin said that in most of these instances it's a visual memory which triggers an aversion or some form of non-typical behavior based on the animal's past and what was in their visual field of view at the previous time. She also said that even though the visual was a powerful memory element for dogs (as well as for the autistic) that it could be equally the case where a smell or sound or feel of something would trigger a memory in an animal.
As an example of the different ways animals record information, she recalled several tales of animals which had been fond of a neighborhood and had been removed from that area because the owner moved. Cats, in particular, Dr. Grandin said are "place" animals and if they've got a favorite spot in a yard, theirs or a neighbor's, they may try and return to that place. An audience member brought up a tale of such a cat who had moved with its owner some five miles away and within a few days had returned to the home of the questioner, who happened to be the neighbor of the person who moved and whose yard was the frequent hiding place for the owner's cat. How is this possible since the animal clearly couldn't have tracked his way back using visual cues because when the owner moved the cat was in a cat carrier inside a U-Haul van? Dr. Grandin said that dogs and cats have particularly powerful senses of smell and the cat was easily able to follow smells it picked up inside the van while being moved. She mentioned several other cases of animals who were able to use their sense of smell to backtrack to a favorite place - in some cases the distances were in excess of hundreds of miles.
Squirrel Snapshots
Dr. Grandin also shared some recent observations of other animals to give the audience more a sense of the capabilities and use of sensory input which a wide range of animals possess. She said that recent studies have shown that squirrels, who often hide nuts and other food in upwards of a hundred locations within their territory, will, after digging the hole and burying the food item, jump up and look around and then move along. Dr. Grandin then gave an example of how she finds her car in the parking lot of some of the slaughterhouses she visits. These are large lots with hundreds of cars arranged in the usual parking lot style but without the alphabetic or color-coded signs which shopping centers use to help people find their cars. How does the good doctor find her car? She told us that she stands by her car and looks at the buildings in the distance and then moves a few feet in one direction and then the other to see which sides of which buildings she can see from her car and which sides are obscured except when she moves one way or the other. She's visually triangulating her present position by taking a plus visual and a minus visual snapshot. That's what she says the squirrels do, they snapshot the location of their surroundings from the location of the buried cache and that visual memory can later be used when they uncover and use the food cache.
She also told us that carrier pigeons use sight first and smell second in their homing. Blindfolded carrier pigeons can still find their way back home but if they're blindfolded and their olfactory sense is deadened - they have to breathe so they use temporary chemical deadeners in these tests - the pigeon becomes lost because the visual and olfactory senses are missing and the pigeon has nothing to match against its memory.
Another person in the audience asked how we could further the cause of inter-species communication and she answered "with music, with song." As an example of why this would be fruitful research she disclosed recent discoveries made studying prairie dog colonies. The prairie dog is a supremely social creature and in any given colony there are several individual members who take turns serving as lookouts from their various colony entrances. The studies involved recording the various calls the prairie dogs make and studying the resultant behavior associated with the different calls. These animals make a chirping sound which varies in pitch and intensity. To humans it sounds a lot like birds chirping or singing. What she said the studies revealed was that the prairie dog has developed a language using these chirps - a language which has verbs and nouns. One set of chirps is the verb component and the second set of chirps is the noun component. In this way prairie dogs are able to provide true verbal intelligent communication among themselves. Whales entertain themselves and each other with elaborate, hours-long, compositions using a variety of waveforms and we haven't begun to delve into the meaning of these songs except to note that many of them are haunting and beautiful.
Dr. Grandin is a fervent believer in evolution and made the comment that throughout human history there have been instances, recorded and annotated, of the many uses of song and music in the human realm. Her thoughts suggests that music and song would not be as powerful an element of the human experience if these special uses of sound didn't have a larger meaning - a meaning perhaps we've evolved away from with our use of abstract symbolic language and writing. Certainly the tone and content of cat meows and dog barks contain meaning even if we're not privy to that meaning, she said. The same is true of a lot of animals. We underestimate the cognitive abilities of our animal friends all the time. She recounted another experiment which involved a crow. In this experiment a crow was placed in a fairly commodious cage with a bent paperclip which could be inserted in an opening which would provide the crow with food. The crow was not shown how to use the paperclip, nor that using it would provide food. Several days later the crow was proficient at the use of the paperclip food dispenser mechanism. The experimenters then removed the bent paperclip and replaced it with a paperclip which looked like an ordinary paperclip. It took the crow only a few hours to figure how to bend the paperclip so it would work again in the food dispenser slot. That, Dr. Grandin said, is pretty powerful proof of the problem-solving cognitive capabilities of a crow.
Nevermore
I have my own story about the cognitive capabilities of crows. A year before we left Washington, the DC area had one of the most snowful winters in the two decades I'd lived there. Wisconsin Avenue was closed from Georgetown all the way past Bethesda for most of the first day after nearly three feet fell. I was out in front of our house, getting exercise by shoveling snow from around the Volvo and generally enjoying the white and the hundreds of kids and adults who were sliding down the hill across from our front porch. We lived across from the largest and most fun of all the hills in the city to go sledding down. After a while my eye caught sight of a crow which had perched himself at the top of our steep but completely snow-covered roof. Fascinated by crows, I stopped shoveling and watched this crow as he slid down the eighteen feet or so of 45-degree pitched snow-covered roof, reached the gutter, fluffed the snow off his feathers, flew to the top of the roof and slid down again. He did this for longer than I had patience to watch but I was struck by how profoundly intelligent that crow was. In the wild, crows live for seven to eight years. In captivity they can and have lived upwards of twenty-five years. This was a crow in the wild. The previous winter and the one before that were not such that our roof would have been as covered with snow as it was this particular winter so it's unlikely that the crow I was watching had some experience with roofs covered with snow. It just decided, probably after slipping on the snow, that sliding down the roof would be fun. Humor, play, enjoying oneself, or playing strictly for one's own delight are generally among the accepted examples of proof of intelligent, self-aware behavior. I'd been a fan of crows, ravens and the like for decades, but that winter cinched it for me - these birds are a damned lot smarter than even Edgar Allen Poe allowed. Dr. Grandin was providing further proof.
In order to better understand animals and to better communicate with them, Dr. Grandin said we need to use our senses and not our abstract words and phrases. Animals don't think in abstract words or use a constructed grammar to think. They use the images, the smells, the sounds, the touches of their environment. Another question from the audience asked if it was true that animals have a sense of impending catastrophe. Dr. Grandin answered that many creatures, mammal. reptile, and avian, have greater senses of hearing or seeing or of smell than do humans. Many animals can hear the low-frequency sounds of tornadoes or tsunamis or even the beginning movement of the plates in earthquakes. These animals are relying on their senses to live in their world. Humans seem to have many of the same capabilities but thousands of years of language and grammar have caused us to think in abstract terms rather than in the concrete terms of our senses.
Dr. Temple Grandin is a powerful person whose presence is obvious. Her insight into both human and animal communications was extraordinary as is the sum of her life so far. I'm sure she's not nearly finished with animal care or in helping bridge the distance between animal and human understanding and communication. Her comments about how we think and how we sometimes (or all the time) ignore the signals our senses are providing was illuminating. I'm a very observant individual and am constantly using as many senses as I have to decipher my environment or the human situations I'm in. I'm pulling data from my ears, from my eyes, from my nose and mouth if there's something to taste. I use my hands and feet and feel things. When Dr. Grandin was discussing how we so often ignore the signals from our senses I was reminded of Craig Childs' comments about how he explored the Southwest desert area using a combination of his eyes, ears, nose and hands and feet. Childs is a desert ecologist and desert hiker and for him, to understand the desert ecology, one had to "feel" that ecology. These were rocks and boulders and ledges which were not always what they seemed to be. Something which looked solid and sturdy might be compressed dust from eons ago which would break in one's hands. To explore the desert is to use all the senses. Dr. Grandin was saying that to understand their world animals use the senses they have because that's all they have. Their world of memories is a world of images, smells, sounds, tastes and feels. Our world includes so much else that the images, smells, sounds, tastes and feels sometimes get pushed out of our mind as we shape our thoughts in words and phrases and sentences - spoken, overheard, read somewhere or planned to say in the future.
Underlying Philosophical Points
Realize that I choose the authors I hear based on my own interests and the personal philosophy I have and use in my life. That's a precursor caution which I feel compelled to say because it's no accident that many of the authors I've heard say things which are a cumulative summation of some simple truth. I'm listening to authors who are recounting how they see their world, why that world is the way it is, and what they plan to do with that world. Even when I'm listening to fiction authors such as Ursula Le Guin, I'm listening to individuals who are creating worlds within and who are experimenting with new sociologies but who are still telling me how they see their world and how they navigate through it. It's a quest and it's a journey along a path which evolution is defining. I'm part of evolution but am also who I am because of evolution. I learn. I teach. I listen. I talk.
Sometimes when I leave Elliott Bay Books after one of these authors' presentations I'm stuck inside my head for hours going over what they said and how it either reaffirms something I'd discovered or known or how it illuminates an area where I've had an inquisitive impulse or how it gives me an entirely new realm to explore.
I've had a few friends in my life who've been born with or have had accidents which left them with one or more senses disabled - not useful to them anymore or ever. I've always been struck by how these friends have made so much more use of their remaining senses than I have with that same sense. These friends have taught me new and different ways to use my senses, so that even though I have all my senses, I now know how to use them in a richer manner. I have a friend who can't see who has taught me ways to listen which have improved my aural discriminatory capabilities beyond what I thought was possible. I have another friend who lost the sight in one eye as a teenager who taught me how to use focus rather than stereo-optical triangulation to guage the distance of an object. I've had friends who lost the use of a limb who have emboldened me to try using my feet for grasping tasks and to use my left hand for things I might otherwise use my right hand for. I'm a richer person with more sensory capabilities and a more dextrous individual because of these teachers - my friends. I've tried to use friends who didn't know something to help teach me how to think in ways I might not have thought of because I did know something.
I guess the essence of this is that we're all much more capable at many more things than we realize and we all need to explore our own senses and expand the ways in which we use our bodies. We've been given an incredible gift - this human body - and most of us barely make minimal use of the skills, talents and learnings we have. I'm extremely grateful to Dr. Grandin for touring with her new book. I'm grateful to her for giving the rest of us a view into the mind of an autistic individual and also providing us with a new means of thinking. I'm certainly grateful to Elliott Bay Books and others, too, such as University Books, which provide these opportunities for the rest of us. More than that, though, I'm amazed and awestruck at the power of life on this planet. Humans and our fellow other creatures - we all have a fantastic story to tell, and to hear that story all we need do is pay attention to our senses and open our minds.
Winter is a time of introspection for most places except perhaps the tropics. Bears hibernate. Humans seem to delve deeper into themselves, either by reading or writing or conversing. It's good that we do this. Summer is a time for exploration and playful activities. I've often wondered if the life cycle here on Earth would be as interesting if our axis weren't tilted 23.5 degrees to one side, or if there were no Moon to create the tides, or if the axial spin were such that we had only one wind like Venus. When we go looking for other planets to live on, let's look for those with tilt and spin and tides. Would our plant life be as rich and sustaining if it didn't go dormant for a third of its life cycle?
Posted: Tue - January 25, 2005 at 12:32 AM
Quick Links
Categories
Calendar
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
Archives
XML/RSS Feed
Statistics
Total entries in this blog:
Total entries in this category:
Published On: Jul 04, 2005 05:41 PM
Total entries in this category:
Published On: Jul 04, 2005 05:41 PM