Thinking in pictures

At an autism conference I attended eight years ago, I met Einstein's second cousin. We had lunch in the hotel restaurant, and I can remember the great difficulty she had in finding something on the menu that she would not be allergic to. She then proceeded to tell me that she had one musically talented autistic child and an intellectually gifted child. As we continued to talk, she revealed that her family history contained many individuals with depression, food allergies, and dyslexia. Since then I have talked with many families and discovered that the parents and relatives of autistic children are often intellectually gifted.

In the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, Sukhdev Narayan and his colleagues wrote that the intelligence and educational achievements of the parents of an autistic child with good language skills are often greater than those of similar parents without any autistic children. I was not surprised when I learned that two Nobel prizewinners have autistic children. Even in families with low-functioning autistic children I have found a high incidence of intellectually gifted parents and relatives. Research studies have not yet shown a definitive relationship between low-functioning autism and increased intellectual ability in family histories. But this may be due to a number of factors, including the high incidence of low-functioning autism caused by factors such as a high fever at age two, premature birth, Fragile X syndrome, or some other readily diagnosable neurological problem. Numerous discussions with such families more often than not do reveal that intellectual ability is present, however.

Looking at my own family history reveals at least one pattern that has now been well documented. Three different studies reported in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders and one in the American Journal of Medical Genetics indicate that there is a relationship between autism and depression, or affective disorder, in families. My grandfather on my mother's side was a brilliant, shy engineer who invented the automatic pilot for airplanes. For over forty years his invention kept every airplane on course. He worked toward developing this compass in a loft over a streetcar maintenance building, patiently pursuing his theories even though the scientists at all the big aviation companies thought he was wrong.

My grandmother on my mother's side and my mother both have good visualization skills and are intellectually talented. Granny was always bothered by loud noise. She told me that when she was a little girl, the sound of coal sliding down the chute was torture. Throughout her life she had bouts of depression, which were effectively treated in her later years with the drug Tofranil.

On my father's side of the family, there was the infamous Grandin temper. Dad would blow up in restaurants if the food took too long to arrive. He also had a tendency to fixate on a single subject. One time he got obsessed with shutting down the riding stable next door to his house. He spent days and days writing letters to the city officials and measuring the amount of manure that was thrown in the dumpster. My father had a lonely boyhood, and it is very likely that he had a mild form of autism.

Fortunately, none of my siblings are autistic. I have two sisters and a brother. One of my sisters is a visual thinker who is very artistic and extremely good at redecorating old houses. She can look at a dumpy old house and see in her mind the cute place she can turn it into. She had learning problems in school, possibly owing to mild auditory processing problems that made it difficult for her to understand speech in a noisy classroom. Mathematics was difficult for her. My other two siblings are both normal, although my youngest sister has a slight tendency to suffer from sensory overload when too many different noisy activities occur at once. Her eight-year-old son has no signs of autism, but he has had difficulty learning to read and problems understanding some speech sounds. My other nieces and nephews are normal.

Mild autistic traits often show up in the parents and relatives of children with autism. Another study published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, by G. R. Delong and J. T. Dwyer, indicated that over two thirds of families with a high-functioning autistic child had a first- or second-degree relative who had Asperger's syndrome, the mild form of autism. Based on hundreds of discussions with families I've met at conferences, it is clear that many parents of autistic children are visual thinkers with talents in computers, art, and music. Other common traits in the family histories of autistics are anxiety disorder, depression, and panic attacks. Narayan found that the parents of autistic children, especially the fathers, had a tendency to pursue a special interest singlemindedly, and they were likely to have poor social skills. Parents who were not autistic themselves had some of the traits of their autistic children. In a study conducted by Rebecca Landa and other researchers at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where parents were asked to make up a story, 34 percent made up a rambling, plotless story without a clear beginning, middle, and end. That is the nature of associational visual thinking. It is like putting a jigsaw puzzle together. It is not done in any particular order.

There is good evidence that autism has a strong genetic basis. Folstein and Rutter reported that in identical twins, when one twin was autistic, the other twin was autistic 36 percent of the time. Nonautistic twins had a higher percentage of learning problems than normal twin pairs had. Identical twins have the same genetic makeup, whereas fraternal twins have completely different genes. When one fraternal twin was autistic, the other was almost never autistic. But the inheritance of autism is complex. There is no single autism gene. Robin Clark speculates in the journal Personal Individual Differences that the disorder may occur if a person receives too big a dose of genetic traits which are only beneficial in smaller amounts. For example, a slight tendency to fixate on a single subject can enable a person to focus and accomplish a great deal, whereas a stronger tendency to fixate prevents normal social interaction.

People with autism run a greater risk than others of having a child with autism, learning difficulties, or developmental problems. However, family history studies by Edward Ritvoe and his colleagues at UCLA have shown that the siblings of an autistic have almost no increased risk of having an autistic child, although they do run an increased risk of having children with learning disabilities or mild autistic traits.

Many researchers speculate that a cluster of interacting genes may cause a variety of disorders such as depression, dyslexia, schizophrenia, manic-depression, and learning disabilities. Dr. Robert Plomin and his colleagues at Pennsylvania State University state that autism is one of the most inheritable psychiatric diagnoses. They also maintain that many disorders such as depression represent extremes of a continuum of behavior from normal to abnormal. The same genes are responsible for both normal variations and the abnormal extremes. It is likely that this same principle applies to autism. People labeled autistic have an extreme form of traits found in normal people. Leo Kanner found that in four out of nine cases, depression or anxiety occurred in the parents of autistic children. Recent studies by Robert Delong, at Duke University in North Carolina, found there is often a history of manic-depression in the families of children with autism.

Genius Is an Abnormality

It is likely that genius is an abnormality. If the genes that cause autism and other disorders such as manic-depression were eliminated, the world might be left to boring conformists with few creative ideas. The interacting cluster of genes that cause autism, manic-depression, and schizophrenia probably has a beneficial effect in small doses. In her book Touched with Fire, Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison reviewed studies that showed a link between manic-depression and creativity. Manic-depressives experience a continuum of emotions, from moody to full-blown mania and deep, dark depression. When writers experience a mild form of the condition, they often produce some of their best work. When the disorder becomes full-blown, they are no longer able to function. There is a tendency for the mood swings to worsen with age, and this may explain why famous writers such as Ernest Hemingway committed suicide relatively late in life. Studies have shown that artists, poets, and creative writers have higher rates of manic-depression or depressive disorder than the general population.

A study done at the University of Iowa by N. C. Andreason showed that 80 percent of creative writers have had mood disorders at some time during their life. A high percentage of artists, poets, and writers have to be medicated to control their condition. Thirty-eight percent of writers and artists have had to take medication, and 50 percent of poets have had to receive treatment. The University of Iowa study also showed that parents and siblings of writers have a high rate of mood disorders.

Dean Simonton, at the University of California at Davis, has studied the factors that make a person a great politician, such as leadership, charisma, and boundless energy or drive. People with these qualities often have had problems with depression and alcohol abuse. Simonton concludes that «in order to be creative, it seems you have to be slightly crazy.»

A study of mathematical giftedness further reinforces the idea of abnormality and genius. A paper by Camilla Persson Benbour, at Iowa State University, provides strong evidence that mathematical genius and giftedness are highly correlated with physical abnormalities. Three things that occur more frequently in people with high mathematical ability than in the population at large are lefthandedness, allergies, and nearsightedness. Both learning disability in mathematics and math talent are associated with lefthandedness. Young children who show very high ability in verbal reasoning and mathematics are twice as likely to have allergies as the rest of the population. Students with extremely high ability are also more likely to be nearsighted. The old stereotype of a little genius with thick glasses may be true.

Obviously, not all geniuses are abnormal, but the genes that produce normal people with certain talents are likely to be the same genes that produce the abnormalities found at the extreme end of the same continuum. Back in the 1940s researchers recognized that elimination of the genes that cause manic-depression would have a terrible cost. Researchers at McLean Hospital near Boston concluded,

Twenty years earlier, John W Robertson wrote in his book Edgar A. Poe, A Psychopathic Study,

As I have said, it has only been recently that I realized the magnitude of the difference between me and most other people. During the past three years I have become fully aware that my visualization skills exceed those of most other people. I would never want to become so normal that I would lose these skills. Similarly, being childlike may have helped me to be creative. In his book Creating Minds, Howard Gardner outlined the creative lives of seven great twentieth-century thinkers, including Einstein, Picasso, and T. S. Eliot. One common denominator was a childlike quality. Gardner describes Einstein as returning to the conceptual world of a child, and says that he was not hampered by the conventional paradigms of physics. It is interesting that autism is caused by brain immaturity. In many ways I have remained a child. Even today I do not feel like a grownup in the realm of interpersonal relationships.

Some scientists are strictly analytical thinkers. The physicist Richard Feynman denied the validity of poetry and art. In his biography of Feynman, Genius, James Gleick wrote, «He would not concede that poetry or painting or religion could reach a different kind of truth.» Of course, many scientists do value poetry and share traits from both the creative and scientific end of the continuum, just as some scientists, artists, and highly analytical philosophers have some autistic traits. Albert Einstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Vincent van Gogh all exhibited developmental abnormalities during early childhood. By definition, autism is an early-onset disorder, and problems such as delayed speech and odd behavior must show up at an early age for a person to be labeled as having autistic traits.

As a child, Einstein had many of these traits. He did not learn to speak until he was three. In a letter to a mother of an autistic child, he admitted to not being able to learn to speak until late and that his parents had been worried about it. Bernard Patten reports in the Journal of Learning Disabilities that Einstein silently repeated words to himself until age seven and did not freely associate with his peers. Whereas some prodigies develop at an early age, Einstein did not exhibit any great genius as a young child. Some people thought he was a dullard. He was a bad speller and did poorly in foreign languages. Like many autistic-type children, he was very good at jigsaw puzzles and spent hours building houses from playing cards. He had a singlemindedness of purpose and a poor memory for things that did not interest him, especially things of a personal nature. In Einstein: The Life and Times, the biographer Ronald W. Clark wrote that Einstein's backwardness may have helped guide him in his field. Einstein himself said, «I sometimes ask myself, how did it come that I was the one to develop the theory of relativity? The reason, I think, is that a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time.» He had tremendous ability to concentrate and could work for hours or days on the same problem.

In Einstein Lived Here, Abraham Pais wrote, «To be creative in establishing lasting deep human relations demands efforts that Einstein was simply never willing to make.» Like me, he was more attached to ideas and work. I don't know what a deep relationship is. His deep passion was for science. Science was his life. One of his graduate students said, «I have never known anybody who enjoyed science so sensuously as Einstein.» According to Howard Gardner, Einstein was interested in the relationships between objects far more than in relationships between people.

In their book, The Stigma of Genius, the biographers Joe L. Kincheloe, Shirley R. Steinberg, and Deborah J. Tippins puzzled over the dichotomy between Einstein's public charm and charisma and his private life as a loner. He was an aloof observer of people and a solitary child. In The Private Lives of Albert Einstein, Roger Highfield and Paul Garter wrote, «Einstein described his dedication to science as an attempt to escape the merely personal by fixing his gaze on the objective universe. The desire to locate a reality free of human uncertainties was fundamental to his most important work» (referring to the theory of relativity). I can relate to this. On weekends I write and draw by myself, and during the week I give talks and act very social. Yet there is something missing in my social life. I can act social, but it is like being in a play. Several parents have told me that their autistic child has done a great job in the school play, acting like somebody else. As soon as the play is over, he or she reverts to being solitary.

Like Einstein, I am motivated by the search for intellectual truth. For me, searching for the meaning of life has always been an intellectual activity driven by anxiety and fear. Deep emotional relationships are secondary. I am happiest when I see tangible results, such as giving a mother information on the latest educational programs that will enable her autistic child to achieve in school. I value positive, measurable results more than emotion. My concept of what constitutes a good person is based on what I do rather than what I feel.

Einstein had many traits of an adult with mild autism, or Asperger's syndrome. Kincheloe and his colleagues reported that Einstein's lectures were scattered and sometimes incomprehensible. Students would often be confused because they could not see associations between some of the specific examples he gave and general principles. The association was obvious to Einstein's visual mind but not to his verbal-thinking students. Students reported that Einstein would lose his train of thought while writing a theorem on the blackboard. A few minutes later he would emerge from a trance and write a new hypothesis. The tendency for scattered thought is due to associative thinking.

Einstein also did poorly in school until he was sent to one that allowed him to use his visualization skills. He told his psychologist friend Max Wertheimer, «Thoughts did not come in any verbal formulation. I rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I try to express it in words afterwards.» When he developed the theory of relativity, he imagined himself on a beam of light. His visual images were vaguer than mine, and he could decode them into mathematical formulas. My visual images are extremely vivid, but I am unable to make the connection with mathematical symbols. Einstein's calculation abilities were not phenomenal. He often made mistakes and was slow, but his genius lay in being able to connect visual and mathematical thinking.

Einstein's dress and hair were typical of an adult with autistic tendencies, most of whom have little regard for social niceties and rank. When he worked at the Swiss patent office, he sometimes wore green slippers with flowers on them. He refused to wear suits and ties in the days when professors dressed for teaching. I wouldn't be surprised if his dislike for dress clothes was sensory. The clothes he preferred were all soft, comfortable clothes such as sweatshirts and leather jackets. Nor did Einstein's hair meet the norm for men's hair fashions. Long, wild hair that was not cut was definitely not the style. He just did not care.

It has been suggested by Oliver Sacks that the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was probably a high-functioning person with autism. He did not talk until he was four years old, and he was considered a dullard with no talent. It is likely that his family history included depression, because both of his brothers committed suicide. He had great mechanical ability, and at age ten he constructed a sewing machine. Young Wittgenstein was a poor student, and he never wore a tie or hat. He used formal, pedantic language and used the polite form of «sie» in German to address his fellow students, which alienated them and caused them to tease him. Overly formal speech is common in high-functioning autistics.

Vincent van Gogh's artwork reveals great emotion and brilliance, but as a child and a young man he had some autistic traits. Like Einstein and Wittgenstein, van Gogh showed no outstanding abilities. Biographers describe him as an aloof, odd child. He threw many tantrums and liked to go in the fields alone. He did not discover his artistic talents until he was twenty-seven years old. Prior to establishing a career in art, he had many of the characteristics of an adult with Asperger's syndrome. He was ill groomed and blunt. In his book Great Abnormals, Vernon W. Grant describes his voice and mannerisms, which also resemble those of an adult with autistic tendencies: «He talked with tension and a nervous rasp in his voice. He talked with complete self-absorption and little thought for the comfort or interest in his listeners.» Van Gogh wanted to have a meaningful existence, and this was one of his motivations for studying art. His early paintings were of working people, to whom he related. According to Grant, van Gogh was forever a child and had a very limited ability to respond to the needs and feelings of others. He could love mankind in the abstract, but when forced to deal with a real person, he was «too self-enclosed to be tolerant.»

Van Gogh's art became bright and brilliant after he was admitted to an asylum. The onset of epilepsy may explain his switch from dull to extremely bright colors. Seizures changed his perception. The swirls in the sky in his painting Starry Night are similar to the sensory distortions that some people with autism have. Autistics with severe sensory processing problems see the edges of objects vibrate and get jumbled sensory input. These are not hallucinations but perceptual distortions.

Bill Gates, the head of Microsoft and the inventor of Windows, is another person who has some autistic traits. Time magazine was the first to make the connection, comparing Oliver Sacks's New Yorker article about me with John Seabrook's article on Gates in the same magazine. Some of the traits that were similar were repetitive rocking and poor social skills. Gates rocks during business meetings and on airplanes; autistic children and adults rock when they are nervous. Other autistic traits he exhibits are lack of eye contact and poor social skills. Seabrook wrote, «Social niceties are not what Bill Gates is about. Good spelling is not what Bill Gates is about.» As a child, Gates had remarkable savant skills. He could recite long passages from the Bible without making a single mistake. His voice lacks tone, and he looks young and boyish for his age. Clothes and hygiene are low on his list of important things.

Mild autistic traits can provide the singlemindedness that gets things done. Hans Asperger stresses the value of people with Asperger's syndrome, recognizing that they often achieve success in highly specialized academic professions. Individuals with Asperger's syndrome who are not retarded or afflicted with extreme rigidity of thinking can excel. Asperger concludes that narrowmindedness can be very valuable and can lead to outstanding achievement.

There are few Einsteins today. Maybe they all flunk the Graduate Record Exam or get poor grades. I had to get through school by going through the back door, because I failed the math part of the Graduate Record Exam. My grades in high school were poor until I became motivated in my senior year. In college I did well in biology and psychology but had great difficulty with French and math. Most of the great geniuses have had very uneven skills. They are usually terrible in one subject and brilliant in their special area. Richard Feynman had very low scores on the Graduate Record Exam in English and history. His physics score was perfect, but his art score was in the seventh percentile.

Even Einstein, after graduating from the Zurich Federal Institute of Technology, was not able to obtain an academic appointment. He annoyed big important professors when he told them that their theories were wrong. He had to take a job at the Swiss patent office. While he was a patent clerk, he wrote his famous theory of relativity and got it published in a physics journal. Today it would be extremely difficult for a patent clerk to get a paper published in a physics journal. If Einstein had lived today, his paper probably would have been rejected and he would have stayed in the patent office.

There are many examples of great scientists, artists, and writers who were poor students. Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary theory, was not able to master a foreign language. When he left school, he was considered only an ordinary student. Darwin wrote in his autobiography, Life and Letters, which was edited by his son Francis, «I was considered by all my masters and by my father as a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard of intellect.» He found life at Cambridge University dull and did poorly in mathematics. Darwin's saving grace was his passion for collecting. This provided the motivation to go on his famous voyage on the Beagle, where he first formulated the theory of evolution.

Gregor Mendel, the father of modern genetics, was unable to pass the exam to get a high school teaching license, according to Guinagh Kevin in his book Inspired Amateurs. Mendel failed the exam several times. He conducted his classic experiments in the corner of a monastery garden with pea plants. When he presented the results at his university thesis defense, he failed to get his degree. Nobody paid any attention to his wild theories, but fortunately 120 copies of his paper survived and were recognized as the works of genius that they are after his death. Today his principles are taught in every high school science class.

During my career, I have met many brilliant visual thinkers working in the maintenance departments of meat plants. Some of these people are great designers and invent all kinds of innovative equipment, but they were disillusioned and frustrated at school. Our educational system weeds these people out of the system instead of turning them into world-class scientists.

Autistic savants who can accomplish amazing feats of memory, drawing, calculation, or reproduction of musical compositions usually have almost no social skills. Until recently, many professionals assumed that savants could not be creative. They thought that their brains acted as tape recorders or photocopiers. But close examination of savant drawings and music shows that there can be true creativity, and these skills can be developed. In Extraordinary People, Darold A. Treffert cites two cases in which savants' social skills and musical and artistic talents have both improved. These abilities will grow if the person is encouraged and supported in this work by a good teacher. Stephen Wiltshire, the famous autistic savant from England, draws fabulously detailed pictures of buildings and also has great musical ability In his book An Anthropologist on Mars, Oliver Sacks describes how Wiltshire's ability to improvise musically has steadily improved and how when he sings all signs of autism disappear, only to reappear when the music stops. Music transforms him and may temporarily open the door to emotion. When he does his detailed beautiful drawings of buildings he acts autistic. Contrary to popular belief, savants do not always have an absolute photographic memory. When Dr. Sacks asked him to make several drawings of his house there were mistakes such as an added chimney or a window in the wrong place. This was partly due to not having enough time to fully study the house. When Stephen makes drawings of imaginary cities he takes bits and pieces of building from his memory and puts them together in new ways. This is the same way I do design work.

It's clear that the genetic traits that can cause severe disabilities can also provide the giftedness and genius that has produced some of the world's greatest art and scientific discoveries. There is no black-and-white dividing line between normal and abnormal. I believe there is a reason that disabilities such as autism, severe manic-depression, and schizophrenia remain in our gene pool even though there is much suffering as a result. Researchers speculate that schizophrenia may be the evolutionary price that has to be paid for abilities in language and social interactions. Tim Crow, of the Clinical Research Centre in London, points out that the incidence of schizophrenia is the same in most societies and that it is not decreasing, even though schizophrenics are less likely than others to have children.

The genes that cause schizophrenia may confer advantages in a milder form. This may also be true for manic-depression and autism. In my own case, I believe my contributions to humane slaughtering of cattle and improved treatment of animals have been facilitated by my abnormality. But none of my work would have been possible had I not developed a correlative system of belief.

Update: Thinking with the Subconscious Mind

The Asperger's Syndrome diagnosis was not used much in the United States when Thinking in Pictures was written. One of my biggest concerns today with the Asperger's diagnosis is that students who should be in gifted and talented programs get shunted off into the special education track where they do not belong. I have seen students with IQs of 150 where nothing was being done to develop their intellects and prepare them for careers. Dr. Simon Baron-Cohen at the University of Cambridge in England conducted a study that showed that there were more engineers in the family histories of people with autism. Another study showed that scientists and accountants were overrepresented in autistic family histories. Many famous scientists and musicians such as Carl Sagan and Mozart were probably Asperger's. Famous people on the autism/Asperger spectrum are profiled in books and on Web sites.

Baron-Cohen asks an important question: is Asperger Syndrome a disability? Where is the dividing line between normal and abnormal? He is referring to mild Asperger's with no speech delays where the student is working at normal or above school grade levels. Brain scan studies have shown all kinds of abnormalities in the amygdale (emotion center), frontal cortex, and many other parts of the brain. At what point do these differences in the sizes of different brain structures become just variations on the more extreme end of the normal range?

In the updates of previous chapters I discussed the research on the lack of connectivity between different parts of the brain. Sections that are far apart are underconnected but local areas in the brain may have overconnectivity Dr. S. F. Witelson in the Department of Psychiatry at McMasters University in Canada studied Einstein's brain. He found that the area responsible for mathematical reasoning was 15 percent larger. The mathematical area also had more extensive connections to the visual parts of the brain. It was like having the «math» and «art» departments fused together. Local overconnectivity may explain Einstein's genius.

I Think with My Subconscious

In most people, language covers up the primary sensory based thinking that people share with animals. Sensory based thinking is subconscious in most people. I think with the primary sensory based subconscious areas of the brain. Reading through the scientific literature on different types of memory, I came to the realization that depending on the type of psychology one was studying, there are different names for conscious and subconscious memory. There are two types of long term memory and they are probably the same thing, regardless of what they are called. Below is a chart showing the different pairs of names that mean the same thing.

Conscious memory

Unconscious memory

Verbal (word memory)

Sensory based memory (visual, motor, auditory, etc.)

Explicit memory

Implicit memory

Declarative memory

Procedural memory

More easily forgotten

Resistant to forgetting

Since I think with the subconscious, repression does not occur and denial is impossible. My «search engine» has access to the entire library of detailed sensory based memories.

My memory is not automatic. I have to push the «save» button to store a memory in my database. Things which are of little interest to me such as hotel room décor are not remembered unless the place was really unique. To push the «save» button requires either conscious effort or a strong emotion. The brain circuits that connect emotions to my «save» button are intact. However, I can search through old memories of really bad events, such as being fired from a job, with no emotion. At the time I was fired I cried for two days. The emotion was experienced in the present but the memory in my database of being fired can be accessed without emotion. It took me a long time to figure out that most normal people cannot open a «bad experience file» in their brain without experiencing emotion along with the memory.

Privileged Access

People with savant skills are often able to perform tasks better than normal people because they have direct access to primary areas of the brain and experience no interference from language. Simon Baron-Cohen's research showed that people on the autism spectrum are superior to normal people on the «hidden figure» test. In this test a person has to locate a figure such as a triangle hidden in another larger figure. When this task is done in a brain scanner, the autistic person's brain is most active in primary visual systems for object features. It is like a direct line to the «picture department.» In the normal person, the frontal cortex and other areas are activated and may interfere with the visual task.

A. W. Snyder at the University of Sydney found that savantlike drawing skills emerged when the frontal cortex of a normal person was impaired with low-frequency magnetic pulses. Turning off the frontal cortex also enabled normal people to be better proofreaders. The frontal cortex is connected to everything in the brain and it interferes with perceiving details.

Work by Dr. Bruce Miller at the University of California provides hard evidence that primary visual thinking and musical parts of the brain are sometimes blocked by the frontal cortex. He studied patients who have a type of Alzheimer's disease called frontal-temporal lobe dementia. As the disease destroys language parts of the brain, art and music skills emerged in people who had no previous interest in art or music. One patient created paintings that won awards in art shows. As language deteriorated, the art became more photo-realistic and the person's behavior resembled autism. One person who lost all language designed a sprinkler head.

Since I think with my subconscious I can see the decisionmaking process that is not perceived by most people. One day I was driving on the freeway when an elk ran across the road. A picture flashed into my mind of a car rear-ending me. That would be the consequence for putting on the brakes. Another picture flashed up of an elk crashing through the windshield, which would be the consequence of swerving. A third picture came up of the elk passing in front of the car. That would happen if I just slowed down. Now three pictures were on the computer screen in my mind. I clicked on the slowing down choice and avoided an accident. I think what I have just described is how animals think.