Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gift of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns and Abstractions

A great gift

For a book that's written on visual thinking, there’s an extraordinary lack of pictures. I found the text informative but heavy going, and it was a difficult read. The text is small, which also makes it difficult to read.

This excellent book explains what it means to be a visual thinker, how our culture and schools are biased against visual thinkers, the detrimental effect of that bias on individuals, why our society needs visual thinkers, the benefits of visual and verbal thinkers working together, and the relevance of visual thinking to the issue of animal consciousness. As such, this is a very important book that deserves to be widely read.I would have given this book 4.8 stars, had the rating system allowed it. My rating of 4 stars does not take away from how interesting and important this book is.Comments that might lead to improvements:1. The quality of the writing might have improved had the book been written as a full collaboration with a verbal thinker. Although the book is broadly well organized into 7 sections, readers who think sequentially will sometimes find the organization less than ideal. As an example, the author says that an animal recognizing itself in a mirror is viewed by many scientists as“…the gold standard for the highest level of animal consciousness: self-awareness. If you have a dog, you’ve probably noticed that upon seeing its reflection, it will either bark or not react at all, and never get past this stage” (p.258).Now, an experience in my own life contradicts this conclusion about consciousness. On one ordinary day, our dog Meg was chasing a rabbit up our long driveway. The rabbit circled back clockwise and ran right in front of Meg. But Meg was hot on the rabbit’s scent trail. Instead of following the rabbit, she took the same clockwise loop in her pursuit. (She did not catch the rabbit.)Because of this observation, I don’t take the mirror test as saying much about dog consciousness. It is not until page 266 that the author writes“The reason dogs do not engage with their image in the mirror is likely because their primary senses for socializing are smell and hearing, with vision a distant third.”Placing all these sentences in one paragraph (on p.258, with the reference to scientists’ “gold standard”), along with other evidence of dog consciousness, would improve the reader’s experience.2. Throughout the book, Dr. Grandin often repeats the same concepts and stories, such as the observations she made when visiting cattle chutes.3. Each chapter opens with drawings of cattle handling facilities, presumably drawn by the author. As you may know, she has worked extensively for slaughter houses, and, if you love animals, you would want to know at the very beginning of the book how she reconciles this life choice while claiming to be an animal lover herself. She provides a reasonable, intelligent answer, but you won’t find it until page 272.4. Temple Grandin is both a visual thinker and autistic. As a child and young adult, she was treated unkindly, unfairly, and sometimes abusively because of the ways she processed information. I am therefore somewhat sympathetic when I read what I see as incomplete, biased, or inaccurate descriptions of some of the individuals she uses as examples. For example, she referred to Thomas Edison as the inventor of over one thousand devices. Biographies and the description in Wikipedia say that“Edison was legally credited with most of the inventions produced there [Menlo Park], though many employees carried out research and development under his direction. His staff was generally told to carry out his directions in conducting research, and he drove them hard to produce results.”Dr. Grandin seems enamored of Elon Musk. She omits the fact that Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning actually founded Tesla, Incorporated. Musk is a successful businessman and showman, but he is not an inventor.5. The book focuses primarily on two kinds of visual thinking and contrasts it to verbal thinking. However, a more complete description of other modes of thinking would have enriched the book and better engaged readers. For example, my step-mother had an extraordinary auditory memory. This ability enabled her to vividly and precisely recall the words she heard spoken. She said it was almost like a recording, along with a memory of where and when she heard those words. The same thing applied to song melodies and lyrics.6. Another example that Grandin omits is people who “think” kinesthetically. Those are the people who become dancers, Olympic wrestlers, and gymnasts.7. I have no doubt that computer programming is an area where Temple Grandin’s Spatial Visual thinkers excel (p.178). What she does not reveal is that even for relatively simple programming tasks, the algorithms that each computer programmer creates is usually a unique solution. Analysis of each algorithm is needed in order to discover precisely how each programmer’s mind is unique.It’s likely that individuals think and experience the world in many ways, each of which is on a continuum. Many of these differences remain hidden. Dividing people simply into the book’s categories of verbal, object visual, and spatial visual, is overly simplistic. However, Temple Grandin’s Visual Thinking calls attention to some of the ways different people think. Hopefully, by doing so, more people will value these differences.

As a longtime fan of Dr. Grandin, I bought her latest book in preparation for attending a fascinating lecture she gave earlier this year. She has written other books on this topic for the general public, but this one is more up-to-date and reflects her latest knowledge and views. Every educator, especially teachers in early grades who are often the first to recognize a student's learning strengths and weaknesses, should become familiar with her insights as a woman on the Autism spectrum who overcame childhood hardship and ignorance about Autism in the days before it was recognized as a condition to obtain a Ph.D. and become a renowned expert on animal husbandry, feedlot design, and the challenges and special abilities of visual learners. I don't know if all education experts agree with her theories and conclusions, but her insights will shed light on the education of all learners, young and old, visual or verbal/mathematical. Although I can't imagine her ever slowing down, she is now in her mid-70s so grab any chance you have to hear and see her lecture at a university or other venue. She is very inspiring!

An intriguing discussion by Temple Grandin, an autistic person who "thinks in pictures" rather than in "words". She insightfully deals with the fact that not all people conceptualize or understand in the same fashion and that our formal educational system does little favor to those who are not literal linear verbal thinkers. Quite thought provoking. Very much worth the read.