Thinking in pictures

To have feelings of gentleness, one must experience gentle bodily comfort. As my nervous system learned to tolerate the soothing pressure from my squeeze machine, I discovered that the comforting feeling made me a kinder and gentler person. It was difficult for me to understand the idea of kindness until I had been soothed myself. It wasn't until after I had used the modified squeeze machine that I learned how to pet our cat gently. He used to run away from me because I held him too tightly. Many autistic children hold pets too tightly, and they have a disproportionate sense of how to approach other people or be approached. After I experienced the soothing feeling of being held, I was able to transfer that good feeling to the cat. As I became gentler, the cat began to stay with me, and this helped me understand the ideas of reciprocity and gentleness.

From the time I started using my squeeze machine, I understood that the feeling it gave me was one that I needed to cultivate toward other people. It was clear that the pleasurable feelings were those associated with love for other people. I built a machine that would apply the soothing, comforting contact that I craved as well as the physical affection I couldn't tolerate when I was young. I would have been as hard and as unfeeling as a rock if I had not built my squeeze machine and followed through with its use. The relaxing feeling of being held washes negative thoughts away. I believe that the brain needs to receive comforting sensory input. Gentle touching teaches kindness.

I always thought about cattle intellectually until I started touching them. I was able to remain the neutral scientist until I placed my hands on them at the Swift plant and feedlots in 1974. When I pressed my hand against the side of a steer, I could feel whether he was nervous, angry, or relaxed. The cattle flinched unless I firmly put my hand on them, but then touching had a calming effect. Sometimes touching the cattle relaxed them, but it always brought me closer to the reality of their being.

People have a need to touch animals in order to connect with them. I still vividly remember an experience I had while handling cattle at the Arlington feedlot in Arizona. We were working them through a squeeze chute to give them vaccinations. I was operating the chute and giving the animals their vaccinations. When I gave an injection, I always placed my hand on the animal 't back, which had a calming effect on me. This calmness seemed to be reciprocal, because when I was calm, the cattle remained calm. I think they sensed this, and each animal walked quietly into the chute. I mentally asked him to relax so he would not get hit by the head restraint. Everything remained calm until the side of the squeeze chute broke and knocked over a bucket. This got me and all the cattle completely rattled for the rest of the afternoon. The spell had been broken.

The application of physical pressure has similar effects on people and animals. Pressure reduces touch sensitivity. For instance, gentle pressure on the sides of a piglet will cause it to fall asleep, and trainers have found that massaging horses relaxes them. The reactions of an autistic child and a scared, flighty horse are similar. Both will lash out and kick anything that touches them. Wild horses can be desensitized and relaxed by pressure. Recently I watched a demonstration of a pressure device for breaking them. The horse used in the demonstration had been sold by a rancher because he was unrideable, and he kicked and reared when people approached. The effect of the pressure device on his nervous system was similar to that of my squeeze machine. Pressure helped this frightened horse to overcome his intense fear of being touched.

The machine was built by Robert Richardson of Prescott, Arizona, and it used sand to immobilize the horse gently as it applied pressure. The wild horse was placed in a narrow stall similar to a horse trailer, with two gentle horses in adjacent stalls to keep it company because wild horses will panic when they are alone. The horse head protruded through a padded opening in the front of the stall, and a rear pusher gate prevented him from backing up and pulling his head inside. Sand from an overhead hopper flowed down the stall walls and slowly filled up the stall so that the horse hardly felt it until he was buried up to his back. Slow application of pressure is the most calming. It wasn't until the sand came up to his belly that he jerked slightly, but then he appeared to relax. He seldom put his ears back, which is a sign of fear or aggression, and he never tried to bite anybody. He was alert and curious about his surroundings, and he acted like a normal horse in a stall, even though his body was now completely buried. He was free to move his head, and eventually he allowed people to touch his face and rub his ears and mouth. Touching that had been intolerable was now being tolerated.

After fifteen minutes, the sand was removed from the stall by draining through a grating in the floor. The horse now tolerated being touched on the rest of his body. The effect of the pressure lasted for thirty minutes to one hour. During that time the horse learned to trust people a little more and to experience touch as a positive sensation.

The effects of gentle touching work at a basic biological level. Barry Keverne and his colleague at the University of Cambridge in England found that grooming in monkeys stimulated increased levels of endorphins, which are the brain's own opiates. Japanese researchers have found that pressure on the skin produces a relaxed muscle tone and makes animals drowsy. Pigs will roll over and solicit scratching on their bellies when rubbed. The drive for contact comfort is great. Harry Harlow's famous monkey experiments showed that baby monkeys that had been separated from their mother needed a soft surface to cling to. If a baby monkey was deprived of contact with either a real mother or a mother substitute such as the soft fluffy paint roller Harlow gave them, then its capacity for future affection was weakened. Baby animals need to feel contact and comfort and to have normal sensory experiences to develop normally. Harlow also found that gentle rocking helped prevent abnormal, autistic-like behavior in baby monkeys who were separated from their mothers. Every parent knows that rocking calms a cranky baby, and both children and adults enjoy rocking. That's why rocking horses and rocking chairs continue to sell well.

The old theory of autism, popular until the 1970s, placed blame on the «refrigerator mother», whose supposed rejection of the child caused the autism. The psychologist Bruno Bettelheim's theories, popularized in his book The Empty Fortress, held that psychological difficulties caused autism. We now know that autism is caused by neurological abnormalities that shut the child off from normal touching and hugging. It is the baby's abnormal nervous system that rejects the mother and causes it to pull away when touched. There is the further possibility that secondary damage to the brain, caused by a defective nervous system, adds to the child's further retreat from normal comforting touch.

Studies of the brain show that sensory problems have a neurological basis. Abnormalities of the cerebellum and the limbic system may cause sensory problems and abnormal emotional responses. Margaret Bauman and her colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital autopsied the brains of people with autism and found that both the cerebellum and the limbic system had immature neuron development. Eric Courchesne also found abnormalities in the cerebellum on MRI brain scans. Research on rats and cats has shown that the center part of the cerebellum, the vermis, acts as a volume control for the senses. As early as 1947, Dr. William Chambers wrote an article in the American Journal of Anatomy reporting that stimulating a cat's vermis with an electrode caused the cat to become supersensitive to sound and touch. A series of abnormalities in lower brain centers probably causes sensory oversensitivity, jumbling, and mixing.

Tests done in many different laboratories around the world clearly indicate that people with autism have abnormal results on brain stem function tests, and that nonverbal people with severe impairments have the most abnormal results. Neurological problems occur during fetal development and are not caused by psychological factors. However, it's possible that if a baby does not receive comforting touch, the feeling and kindness circuits in the brain shrivel up.

Autism and Animal Behavior

Zoo animals kept in barren concrete cages become bored and often develop abnormal behavior such as rocking, pacing, and weaving. Young animals placed alone in such environments become permanently damaged and exhibit strange, autistic-like behavior, becoming overly excitable and engaging in stereotypical behaviors such as self-mutilation, hyperactivity, and disturbed social relations. The effects of sensory deprivation are very bad for their nervous systems. Total rehabilitation of these animals is extremely difficult.

Animal and human studies show that restriction of sensory experiences causes the central nervous system to become hypersensitive to sound and touch. The effects of early sensory restriction are often long-lasting. Puppies reared in empty concrete kennels become very excited when they hear a noise. Their brain waves still show signs of excessive excitability six months after they are removed from the kennel and housed on a farm. The brain waves of autistic children show similar signs of excessive arousal. Further experiments with rats have illustrated the damaging effects of restricting normal sensory experiences. Trimming the whiskers on baby rats causes the parts of the brain that receive sensations from the whiskers to become oversensitive, because there are no incoming touch sensations. This abnormality is relatively permanent; the brain areas are still abnormal after the whiskers grow back. It may be that the autistic child's abnormal sensory functioning causes his or her brain to develop secondary abnormalities because of distorted sensory input or a lack of such input. And these distortions may affect what are considered normal emotions.

The environment a young animal is raised in will affect the structural development of its brain. Research by Bill Greenough, at the University of Illinois, indicated that rearing rats in cages with toys and ladders to play with increased the number of dendrites, or nerve endings, in the visual and auditory parts of their brains. I conducted research as part of my Ph.D. dissertation that indicated that pigs engaging in abnormal rooting, owing to being raised in a barren plastic pen, grew extra dendrites in the part of the brain that received sensations from the snout. Construction of this abnormal «dendrite highway» may explain why it is so difficult to rehabilitate zoo animals that have engaged in years of stereotypical pacing. This is why it is so important to start therapy and education when an autistic child is young, so that developing nerve endings can connect in the right places.

Autistic Emotions

Some people believe that people with autism do not have emotions. I definitely do have them, but they are more like the emotions of a child than of an adult. My childhood temper tantrums were not really expressions of emotion so much as circuit overloads. When I calmed down, the emotion was all over. When I get angry, it is like an afternoon thunderstorm; the anger is intense, but once I get over it, the emotion quickly dissipates. I become very angry when I see people abusing cattle, but if they change their behavior and stop abusing the animals, the emotion quickly passes.

Both as a child and as an adult, I have felt a happy glee. The happiness I feel when a client likes one of my projects is the same kind of glee I felt as a child when I jumped off the diving board. When one of my scientific papers is accepted for publication, I feel the same happiness I experienced one summer when I ran home to show my mother the message I had found in a wine bottle on the beach. I feel a deep satisfaction when I make use of my intellect to design a challenging project. It is the kind of satisfied feeling one gets after finishing a difficult crossword puzzle or playing a challenging game of chess or bridge; it's not an emotional experience so much as an intellectual satisfaction.

At puberty, fear became my main emotion. When the hormones hit, my life revolved around trying to avoid a fear-inducing panic attack. Teasing from other kids was very painful, and I responded with anger. I eventually learned to control my temper, but the teasing persisted, and I would sometimes cry. Just the threat of teasing made me fearful; I was afraid to walk across the parking lot because I was afraid somebody would call me a name. Any change in my school schedule caused intense anxiety and fear of a panic attack. I worked overtime on my door symbols because I believed that I could make the fear go away if I could figure out the secrets of my psyche.

The writings of Tom McKean and Therese Joliffe indicate that fear is also a dominant emotion in their autism. Therese stated that trying to keep everything the same helped her avoid some of the terrible fear. Tony W, another man with autism, wrote in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders that he lived in a world of daydreaming and fear and that he was afraid of everything. In my case the terrible fear did not begin until puberty, but for some autistic people it starts in early childhood. Sean Barron reported that he felt pure terror during the first five or six years of his life. The highly structured environment of the classroom reduced some of his fear, but he was often afraid and anxious in the hallways.

The intense fear and anxiety I used to experience has been almost eliminated by the antidepressant medication I've been on for the last thirteen years. The elimination of most of my fears and panic attacks has also attenuated many of my emotions. The strongest feeling I have today is one of intense calm and serenity as I handle cattle and feel them relax under my care. The feeling of peacefulness and bliss does not dissipate quickly like my other emotions. It is like floating on clouds. I get a similar but milder feeling from the squeeze machine. I get great satisfaction out of doing clever things with my mind, but I don't know what it is like to feel rapturous joy. I know I am missing something when other people swoon over a beautiful sunset. Intellectually I know it is beautiful, but I don't feel it. The closest thing I have to joy is the excited pleasure I feel when I have solved a design problem. When I get this feeling, I just want to kick up my heels. I'm like a calf gamboling about on a spring day.

My emotions are simpler than those of most people. I don't know what complex emotion in a human relationship is. I only understand simple emotions, such as fear, anger, happiness, and sadness. I cry during sad movies, and sometimes I cry when I see something that really moves me. But complex emotional relationships are beyond my comprehension. I don't understand how a person can love someone one minute and then want to kill him in a jealous rage the next. I don't understand being happy and sad at the same time. Donna Williams succinctly summarizes autistic emotions in Nobody Nowhere: «I believe that autism results when some sort of mechanism that controls emotions does not function properly, leaving an otherwise relatively normal body and mind unable to express themselves with the depth that they would otherwise be capable of.» As far as I can figure out, complex emotion occurs when a person feels two opposite emotions at once. Samuel Clemens, the author of Tom Sawyer, wrote that «the secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow,» and Virginia Woolf wrote, «The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.» I can understand these ideas, but I don't experience emotion this way

I am like the lady referred to as S. M. in a recent paper by Antonio Damasio in Nature. She has a damaged amygdala. This part of the brain is immature in autism. S. M. has difficulty judging the intentions of others, and she makes poor social judgments. She is unable to recognize subtle changes in facial expression, which is common in people with autism. In developing many varied, complex ways to operate the squeeze machine on myself, I keep discovering that slight changes in the way I manipulate the control lever affect how it feels. When I slowly increase the pressure, I make very small variations in the rate and timing of the increase. It is like a language of pressure, and I keep finding new variations with slightly different sensations. For me, this is the tactile equivalent of a complex emotion and this has helped me to understand complexity of feelings.

I have learned how to understand simple emotional relationships that occur with clients. These relationships are usually straightforward; however, emotional nuances are still incomprehensible to me, and I value concrete evidence of accomplishment and appreciation. It pleases me to look at my collection of hats that clients have given me, because they are physical evidence that the clients liked my work. I am motivated by tangible accomplishment, and I want to make a positive contribution to society.

I still have difficulty understanding and having a relationship with people whose primary motivation in life is governed by complex emotions, as my actions are guided by intellect. This has caused friction between me and some family members when I have failed to read subtle emotional cues. For instance, it was difficult for my younger sister to have a weird sister. She felt she always had to tiptoe around me. I had no idea that she felt this way until years later, when she told me about her childhood feelings toward me. Motivated by love, my mother worked with me and kept me out of institutions. Yet sometimes she feels that I don't love her.

She is a person for whom emotional relationships are more important than intellect and logic. It pains her that I kicked like a wild animal when I was a baby and that I had to use the squeeze machine to get the feeling of love and kindness. The irony is that if I had given up the machine, I would have been a cold, hard rock. Without the machine, I would have had no kind feelings toward her. I had to feel physical comfort in order to feel love. Unfortunately, it is difficult for my mother and other highly emotional people to understand that people with autism think differently. For her, it is like dealing with somebody from another planet. I relate better to scientists and engineers, who are less motivated by emotion.

At a conference a man with autism told me that he feels only three emotions, fear, sadness, and anger. He has no joy. He also has problems with the intensity of his emotions, which both fluctuate and get mixed up, similar to sensory jumbling. My emotions don't get mixed up, but they are reduced and simplified in some areas. The emotional jumbling described by this man may be like the sudden emotional changes that normally occur in two-year-old children. They can be laughing one minute and having a tantrum the next. The tendency to shift emotional states rapidly often occurs in autistic children at a later age, whereas older autistic children may have the emotional patterns of a younger child.

During the last couple of years, I have become more aware of a kind of electricity that goes on between people which is much subtler than overt anger, happiness, or fear. I have observed that when several people are together and having a good time, their speech and laughter follow a rhythm. They will all laugh together and then talk quietly until the next laughing cycle. I have always had a hard time fitting in with this rhythm, and I usually interrupt conversations without realizing my mistake. The problem is that I can't follow the rhythm. Twenty years ago, Dr. Condon, a Boston physician, observed that babies with autism and other developmental disorders failed to move in synchrony with adult speech. Normal infants will tune into adult speech and get in synch with it.

The work I do is emotionally difficult for many people, and I am often asked how I can care about animals and be involved in slaughtering them. Perhaps because I am less emotional than other people, it is easier for me to face the idea of death. I live each day as if I will die tomorrow. This motivates me to accomplish many worthwhile things, because I have learned not to fear death and have accepted my own mortality. This has enabled me to look at slaughtering objectively and perceive it the way the cattle do. However, I am not just an objective, unfeeling observer; I have a sensory empathy for the cattle. When they remain calm I feel calm, and when something goes wrong that causes pain, I also feel their pain. I tune in to what the actual sensations are like to the cattle rather than having the idea of death rile up my emotions. My goal is to reduce suffering and improve the way farm animals are treated.

People with autism are capable of forming very strong emotional bonds. Hans Asperger, the German doctor after whom the syndrome is named, states that the commonly held assumption of poverty of emotion in autism is inaccurate. However, my strong emotional bonds are tied up with places more than people. Sometimes I think my emotional life may appear more similar to those of animals than humans, because my feelings are simpler and more overt, and like cattle, I have emotional memories that are place-specific. For instance, I am not aware of a subconscious full of memories that are too painful to think about, and my emotional memory is very weak. It is highly doubtful that cattle become emotionally aroused when they think about a cowboy who whipped them, but they will have a measurable fear response, such as increased heart rate or stress hormone release, when they see that particular cowboy or return to the place where they were whipped. They often associate danger with a specific place. People with autism also have place- or object-specific memories. Going back to the place where something good happened or looking at an object associated with good feelings helps us reexperience the pleasure. Just thinking about it is not enough.

I have emotional reactions to places where I've stayed for a number of days or weeks while working on designing a livestock system. One of my clients told me that I fussed over a project for two weeks like a mother with a new baby. Places where I invest a lot of time become emotionally special. When I return to one of these spots, I am often overwhelmed with fear as I approach. I panic, thinking that I will be denied entry to my special place. Even though I know it's irrational, I always survey each place I work in to make sure I can get back in. Large meat-packing plants have security guards, but in almost every plant I have figured out how to evade security, just in case it becomes one of my special places and I need to get back in. Driving by, I will see every hole in the fence and every unlocked gate and imprint them in my memory forever. My fear of blocked passages feels very primal, as though I were an animal that has been trapped.

For me, finding these holes and gaps is similar to the way a wary animal surveys new territory to make sure it has safe escape routes and passages, or crosses an open plain that may be full of predators. Will the people try to stop me? Some of the surveying is automatic and unconscious. I'll find the unlocked gate even when I am not looking for it. I can't help but see it. And when I spot an opening, I get a rush of happy excitement. Finding all the holes in the fence also reduces fear. I know I am emotionally safe if I can get through the fence. My fear of blocked passages is one of the few emotions that is so great that it's not fully suppressed by my antidepressant medication.

I had similar fearful reactions when I approached my symbolic doors. I was partly afraid that the door would be locked, like the blocked burrow of a tunneling animal. It was as if an antipredator system deep in my brain was activated. Basic instincts that we share with animals may be triggered by certain stimuli. This idea has been suggested by respected scientists such as Carl Sagan in his book The Dragons of Eden and Melvin Konner in The Tangled Wing. Judith Rapoport suggests in The Boy Who Couldn't Stop Washing that obsessive-compulsive disorders, where people wash their hands for hours or repeatedly check whether the stove is off, may be the result of an activation of old animal instincts for safety and grooming.

The fear of blocked passages persisted in both my visual symbolic world of doors and in the real world long after I stopped using door symbols. In my early days I would find the doors that opened up to the roofs of the highest buildings on the school campus. From a high vantage point I could survey the danger that lurked in the next stage of my life. Emotionally I was like an animal surveying the plains for lions, but symbolically the high place signified striving to find the meaning of life. My intellect was trying to make sense of the world, but it was being driven by an engine of animal fears.

Nearly thirty years ago, when I was navigating my visual symbolic world of doors, I recognized that fear was my great motivator. At that time I didn't realize that other people experience other major emotions. Since fear was my major emotion, it spilled over into all events that had any emotional significance. The following diary entry shows very clearly how I attempted to deal with fear in my symbolic world.

I opened the little door and went through tonight. To lift up the door and see the wide expanse of the moonlight roof before me. I have put all my fears anxieties about other people on the door. Using the trap door is risky because if it were sealed shut I would have no emotional outlet. Intellectually the door is just a symbol but on the emotional level the physical act of opening the door brings on the fears. The act of going through is my overcoming my fears and anxiety towards other people.

The intellectual side of me always knew that making changes in my life would be a challenge, and I deliberately chose symbolic doors to help me get through after the first door almost magically appeared. Sometimes I had massive activation of my sympathetic nervous system — the system that enables an animal or person to flee from danger — when I went through a door. It was like facing a lion. My heart would race and I would sweat profusely. These reactions are now controlled with antidepressant drugs. In conjunction with vast amounts of stored information in my memory, the drugs have enabled me to leave the visual symbolic world behind and venture out into the so-called real world.

Yet, it has only been during the last two or three years that I have discovered that I do not experience the full range of emotions. My first inkling that my emotions were different came in high school, when my roommate swooned over the science teacher. Whatever it was she was feeling, I knew I didn't feel that way toward anyone. But it was years before I realized that other people are guided by their emotions during most social interactions. For me, the proper behavior during all social interactions had to be learned by intellect. I became more skilled at social interactions as I became more experienced. Throughout my life I have been helped by understanding teachers and mentors. People with autism desperately need guides to instruct and educate them so they will survive in the social jungle.

Update: Empathy and Emotions

There are some situations where «normal» people have a horrific lack of empathy. Some of this lack of empathy is beyond my comprehension. Time after time I read in the paper about a company that is in financial trouble and they need to ask the workers to take a cut in pay. The workers agree to a pay cut, but the chairman of the board gives himself a bonus. This often makes the workers really angry. The workers would be more willing to undergo hardship if their leader had some hardship. This is a situation where ego and emotion blinds empathy. Why does this blindness occur? Power and ego circuits that I do not have cause this blindness. These managers seem to be incapable of learning from this same mistake made by other companies. Possibly these managers do not have empathy because they do not directly see how the workers react. In most cases, he or she does not face them. New research is revealing how empathy works. Brain circuits called mirror areas are activated when a person sees another person hurt. These circuits enable a person to experience the other person's pain. Brain imaging studies by Finnish scientists have shown that the mirror circuits in people with Asperger's syndrome have less activation compared to normal people.

People have empathy when they directly experience suffering. In my work with restaurant companies, I have taken many top executives on their first tours to farms and slaughter plants. Prior to the site visits, animal welfare was just an abstract thing. After they saw suffering firsthand, they made big changes and forced their suppliers to comply with animal welfare guidelines. Executives who had been apathetic jumped into action. One of them was totally disgusted after he saw a half-dead dairy cow going into their product. My job was to implement an auditing system for measuring animal welfare standards in slaughter plants. There was only one executive who reacted differently. On the flight home he clapped on a headset and told silly airline pilot jokes. He wanted to avoid discussing his visit to a slaughter plant because his reaction had conflicted with his beliefs. His company is one of the few companies that has failed to implement strong welfare guidelines.

This brings up another human emotion that I do not understand: denial. Some parents with children who are still not talking until age four cannot admit to themselves that something is wrong. I do not understand this kind of emotional lock on logic. Children with autism have to be taught what it is like to be in another person's shoes in a very concrete way. When I threw dirt on another person, my mother explained that I should not throw dirt because I would not like it if they threw dirt on me.

I think there are different types of empathy For me to have empathy I have to visually put myself in the other person's place. I can really emphasize with a laid-off worker because I can visualize his family sitting at the dining room table trying to figure out how the bills will get paid. If the worker fails to pay the mortgage he will lose his house. I really relate to physical hardship. I have observed that normal people have bad visual empathy. They are often not able to perceive how another person would see something. Many people leave out essential details when they give driving directions because they are not able to imagine what the other driver would be seeing. People have told me that they do not get lost with my directions. Normal people have emotional empathy but some of them lack empathy for sensory over sensitivity in autistic people. Some of the best therapists who work with individuals with sensory problems can empathize with these difficulties because they themselves have struggled with sound, touch, or visual oversensitivity The people who have the best sensory empathy have experienced the pain or total sense of chaos caused by faulty sensory processing.

Sometimes Consequences are Needed

The subject of consequences is controversial. Some people think that nothing aversive should ever be done. I was always testing the limits. I knew that a tantrum in school had a penalty of no TV for one day. Discipline between home and school was consistent. Mother and the teachers were a team. I would have been out of control if there had been no consequences for bad behavior. Even though I was raised in a strict household, my abilities in art were always encouraged and never taken away as a punishment. I want to emphasize that I am totally against the use of aversives such as electric shocks. The repeated use of many aversives is wrong and abusive.

Positive methods should always be used for teaching and educating, but there are some situations where a single aversive event is needed to teach the child how another person feels. Three different teachers have told me that they had students who would constantly spit on them. They had tried all of the nonaversive methods such as ignoring it or explaining why they did not like it. Then one day after the teachers had been spat on one hundred times they got fed up and spat back. The child responded by saying, «Ick, I don't like that.» The teacher said, «Now you know how I feel when you spit on me.» In all three cases, the spitting stopped. Now the child really understood how it felt to the other person when he spat.

Emotional Brain Versus Thinking Brain Type

Simon Baron-Cohen of University of Cambridge in England introduced the idea of people as one of two emotional brain types. He states that people are either empathizers or systematizers. Empathizers are people who relate to other people through their emotions. Systematizers are people who are more interested in things than people. Normal people tend to be empathizers while people on the autism/Asperger's spectrum tend to be systematizers. I scored high on Baron-Cohen's test for being a systematizer. In the update of Chapter 1 I describe the three thinking types: visual, music and math, and verbal logic. Both emotional types of brain may have the different thinking types, but people in the autism/Asperger spectrum may have the most extreme variations of the thinking types. I hypothesize that some emotional circuits may fail to hook up and local networks in the «art» or «math» department may have extra connections. Brains will be highly variable depending on which «computer cables» get connected.