It’s amazing how human brains work differently from one another and reacts to certain things differently, “While I was trapped between the windows, it was almost impossible to communicate through the glass. Being autistic is like being trapped like this” ( 36). The author wants to draw a picture in our mind how it feels like when someone is autistic, the feeling of capturing someone in the box and they are limited to their surroundings because they think different and talk different. We all have our own way of learning new material, which is absolutely fine and I think no one should judge us; similarly the author had her own way of learning through visual, “using the photos, I was able to figure out which things scared the cattle” (20). The experience and the prior knowledge that she had, she uses it on the animals because that’s how things work for her through pictures. It was very hard to take every step forward towards her career because most autistic people do not like changes. It also goes to normal people also because when we are comfortable at some place we don’t want to leave that place because we know the people and familiar with the surrounding. Our brains are trained the way we teach to a brain to act the way we want it. Sometimes misunderstanding others creates problems because we can’t think that people learn and think everything in the same way. “Now I realize it was not stupidity but a lack of visualization skills” (26). It does not mean, if I see something the other person will see and feel same about the certain object. No, it is different and everyone is intelligent in their own way of thinking. “However, not all people with autism are highly visual thinkers, nor do they all process information this way” (28). I do agree somewhat with her, but I think she is being biased and not thinking out of the box. There might be a few people who are better at other things who are autistic.
This life is full of challenges we all should have the courage to face it and have faith in ourselves. Things might not look great in the beginning, but once we reach our goal we will feel great.
It’s pretty fascinating that Grandin moves between describing her mental experiences “like” photos or video to describing them simply as photos or videos. I found myself imagining how she would have described her thoughts if she’d lived in an era before photography or video.
As I was reading this essay, I found myself questioning Grandin’s tone again and again. She does seem to have a somewhat superior tone, and places her thinking process on a pedestal because she continuously calls non-visual thinkers out for lacking her specific skill. You state that she fails to “think outside the box,” and I would tend to agree. However, because of the previous essays we read that discuss the difference in voice between NT and ND writers I tried to not get offended. Grandin does say that she came to the realization that her peers were not stupid or slow but simply did not have the capacity to think like her. I think it was more that she writes with a different voice and tone than what we are accustomed to than that she was not thinking outside the box or being condescending.
Jasbir makes a good point: Grandin emphasizes visual thinking so much that she seems to imply that all autistic people think the way she does, even though she does acknowledge that this is not the case a couple of times. Still, her emphasis on her own phenomenology is much stronger than these acknowledgments.
I think it might help to think of her a slightly unreliable narrator–like all narrators. You might even argue that she represents her own former haughtiness and impatience with people who don’t think with so much visual acuity as a strategy to show herself as both fallible and capable of reflecting on and revising her assumptions.
I like that you brought up how people think and learn differently. I was interested in Grandin’s thoughts on educating those with autism: “Teachers who work with autistic children need to understand associative thought patterns” (32). I’m not sure if Grandin makes note of it—as she seems keen to point out how she thinks differently from most of her peers—but I do think that, to some degree, most people (at least, I’m guessing/generalizing) acquire some knowledge of things through association. A general example of this might be seen in a person associating certain a scent with a certain memory, with subsequent reception of that particular scent triggering something that has been memorized/learned. (Perhaps I’m abstracting/tangenting a bit from Grandin’s statement, but I still think that “learning through association” is something that people tacitly do, and that it’s good that Grandin is putting that idea to words).
I liked all her metaphors, it helped put the situation into perspective. Specifically like you had pointed out “While I was trapped between the windows, it was almost impossible to communicate through the glass. Being autistic is like being trapped like this” ( 36) It’s a powerful metaphor she uses here, it allows the reader to associate past experiences to picture the scenario expressed. It is honestly scary to imagine feeling that way, the sad part is there are people in the world that actually go through this day in and day out and her metaphors really allow us to understand it from their perspective. I also had a similar thought as Prof. Tougaw, what if she had lived in an era before photography or video? How would she have interpreted her thoughts then? Would it be like photographic memory or would it be a different associative thought process?