Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin Page A

human beings are blind to anything they’re not paying attention to.
    My experience with animals, and with my own perceptions, is that animals and autistic people are different from normal people. Animals and autistic people don’t have to be paying attention to something in order to see it. Things like jiggly chains pop out at us; they grab our attention whether we want them to or not.
    For a normal human being, almost nothing in the environment pops. That means it’s practically impossible for a human being to actually see something brand-new in the first place. People probably don’t like novelty any more than animals do, but people don’t get exposed to much novelty, because they don’t notice it when it’s there. Humans are built to see what they’re expecting to see, and it’s hard to expect to see something you’ve never seen. New things just don’t register.
    The research on inattentional blindness was shocking, because psychologists had always thought there were all kinds of things in the visual world that automatically grabbed people’s attention—like an airplane blocking a runway. But it turns out that’s not true. There are a few things that seem to grab people’s attention, like the sight or sound of your own name, or large-sized objects, or—this one took me by surprise—cartoon happy faces. Not cartoon sad faces; a cartoon sad face is just as invisible as everything else for people who aren’t actively paying attention. But a cartoon happy face will snatch people out of their inattention.
    I wish they’d done some comparative research with animals and autistic people, because my guess is that animals and autistic people either don’t have inattentional blindness at all, or don’t have nearly as much of it as normal people do. Animals definitely act like they see everything, because you can’t get anything past a cow. That’s one of the reasons why a ranch owner has to correct every wrong detail, because a cow will see every wrong detail.
    Autistic people are the same way. I know a teenage autistic boy who’s a lot like those cattle trying to walk through a jiggly, sparkly chute. This boy is sixteen years old, and a couple of years ago hesuddenly got focused on all the screws in the hallways at his school. He had to stop and touch each and every single one every time he went from one classroom to another. He’s not scared like my cattle, but he definitely balks, and it takes forever to get him from one place to another. It’s a good thing his aide has a sense of humor. The way he sees it, the boy is checking all the screws to make sure they’re screwed in all the way—“He’s making sure this place isn’t going to fall down on top of us.” He might be right about that.
    I always thought the reason autistic people are so much more aware of details was that we’re visual instead of verbal. I thought it was a right brain/left brain difference. For most people the left brain is verbal, the right brain is visual.
    But research has found that both sides of the brain have problems in autism. 6 Based on my own experience and on my work with animals, I’m working from the hypothesis that you can understand a lot about animals and autistic people by focusing on another basic brain difference: the difference between higher parts of the brain and lower parts. The reason normal people have such a hard time seeing (and probably hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling) details is that their frontal lobes, which are at the top of the brain, get in the way. Animals and autistic people see detail either because their frontal lobes are smaller and less developed (in the case of animals), or because they’re not working as well as they could be (in the case of autistic people).
    I’ll get to that next.
    L IZARD B RAINS , D OG B RAINS , AND P EOPLE B RAINS
    When you compare human and animal