THINKING IN PICTURES: Autism and Visual Thought. Chapter 1: Autism and Visual Thought. Dr. Temple Grandin. I THINK IN PICTURES. Words are like a second language to me. I translate both spoken and written words into full- color movies, complete with sound, which run like a VCR tape in my head. When somebody speaks to me, his words are instantly translated into pictures.
Language- based thinkers often find this phenomenon difficult to understand, but in my job as an equipment designer for the livestock industry, visual thinking is a tremendous advantage. During my career I have designed all kinds of equipment, ranging from corrals for handling cattle on ranches to systems for handling cattle and hogs during veterinary procedures and slaughter. I have worked for many major livestock companies. In fact, one third of the cattle and hogs in the United States are handled in equipment I have designed.
THANK YOU Thank you for downloading the VisuAL PM. We hope that this small sample of our products will demonstrate the value and benefit that they will provide to you. Make your agile meetings as productive as possible. Expert Doug Rose explains how to set up and run common agile activities. Integrating Leader Standard Work with Visual Management Tools with Joe Murli Management Tools. Custom visual analysis makes the data more manageable. See your product range as you want, by slicing and dicing your product range to spot gaps instantly.
Visual Meetings How Graphics Pdf Free
Information Builders WebFOCUS business intelligence suite allows you to save reports in html, PDF, Excel, PowerPoint, plain text and XML, among other formats. The Visual Computer is dedicated to reporting on the latest research in the field of graphics, visualization, imaging, and virtual reality. It features practical results, applications, and contributions that describe advances. HP EliteBook 8470p Notebook PC Corporate Elite. This premier notebook offers a 14-inch diagonal display and amazing battery life. The business rugged design, graphics choices,5 powerful processing and smooth audio quality are. Students new to Canada or anyone interested in meeting people from around the world are invited to join the Newcomer Club. Meetings are usually held during lunches and offer the opportunity to meet new people, engage in fun.
Some of the people I've worked for don't even know that their systems were designed by someone with autism. I value my ability to think visually, and I would never want to lose it. When I was a child and a teenager, I thought everybody thought in pictures.
I had no idea that my thought processes were different. In fact, I did not realize the full extent of the differences until very recently.
Visual Meetings How Graphics Pdf Reader
At meetings and at work I started asking other people detailed questions about how they accessed information from their memories. From their answers I learned that my visualization skills far exceeded those of most other people. Early in my career I used a camera to help give me the animals' perspective as they walked through a chute for their veterinary treatment. I would kneel down and take pictures through the chute from the cow's eye level. Using the photos, I was able to figure out which things scared the cattle, such as shadows and bright spots of sunlight. Back then I used black- and- white film, because twenty years ago scientists believed that cattle lacked color vision.
Today, research has shown that cattle can see colors, but the photos provided the unique advantage of seeing the world through a cow's viewpoint. They helped me figure out why the animals refused to go in one chute but willingly walked through another. I started designing things as a child, when I was always experimenting with new kinds of kites and model airplanes.
In elementary school I made a helicopter out of a broken balsa- wood airplane. When I wound up the propeller, the helicopter flew straight up about a hundred feet. I also made bird- shaped paper kites, which I flew behind my bike.
The kites were cut out from a single sheet of heavy drawing paper and flown with thread. I experimented with different ways of bending the wings to increase flying performance. Bending the tips of the wings up made the kite fly higher. Thirty years later, this same design started appearing on commercial aircraft. I visualize my designs being used in every possible situation, with different sizes and breeds of cattle and in different weather conditions. Doing this enables me to correct mistakes prior to construction.
Today, everyone is excited about the new virtual reality computer systems in which the user wears special goggles and is fully immersed in video game action. To me, these systems are like crude cartoons. My imagination works like the computer graphics programs that created the lifelike dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.
When I do an equipment simulation in my imagination or work on an engineering problem, it is like seeing it on a videotape in my mind. I can view it from any angle, placing myself above or below the equipment and rotating it at the same time. I don't need a fancy graphics program that can produce three- dimensional design simulations. I can do it better and faster in my head. I have video memories of every item I've ever worked with - - steel gates, fences, latches, concrete walls, and so forth.
To create new designs, I retrieve bits and pieces from my memory and combine them into a new whole. My design ability keeps improving as I add more visual images to my library. I add video- like images from either actual experiences or translations of written information into pictures.
I can visualize the operation of such things as squeeze chutes, truck loading ramps, and all different types of livestock equipment. The more I actually work with cattle and operate equipment, the stronger my visual memories become.
A dip vat is a long, narrow, seven- foot- deep swimming pool through which cattle move in single file. It is filled with pesticide to rid the animals of ticks, lice, and other external parasites. In 1. 97. 8, existing dip vat designs were very poor. The animals often. They would refuse to jump into the vat, and sometimes they would flip over backward and drown. The engineers who designed the slide never thought about why the cattle became so frightened.
Because their eyes are on the sides of their heads, cattle have wide- angle vision, so it was like walking through the facility with a wide- angle video camera. I had spent the past six years studying how cattle see their world and watching thousands move through different facilities all over Arizona, and it was immediately obvious to me why they were scared. Those cattle must have felt as if they were being forced to jump down an airplane escape slide into the ocean. I've seen cattle that were handled in two identical facilities easily walk through one and balk in the other. The only difference between the two facilities was their orientation to the sun.
The cattle refused to move through the chute where the sun cast harsh shadows across it. Until I made this observation, nobody in the feedlot industry had been able to explain why one veterinary facility worked better than the other. It was a matter of observing the small details that made a big difference. To me, the dip vat problem was even more obvious. Before doing anything else, I always check out what is considered state- of- the- art so I don't waste time reinventing the wheel. Then I turned to livestock publications, which usually have very limited information, and my library of video memories, all of which contained bad designs.
From experience with other types of equipment, such as unloading ramps for trucks, I had learned that cattle willingly walk down a ramp that has cleats to provide secure, non slip footing. Sliding causes them to panic and back up. The challenge was to design an entrance that would encourage the cattle to walk in voluntarily and plunge into the water, which was deep enough to submerge them completely, so that all the bugs, including those that collect in their ears, would be eliminated. I experimented with different entrance designs and made the cattle walk through them in my imagination. Three images merged to form the final design: a memory of a dip vat in Yuma, Arizona, a portable vat I had seen in a magazine, and an entrance ramp I had seen on a restraint device at the Swift meat- packing plant in Tolleson, Arizona.
The new dip vat entrance ramp was a modified version of the ramp I had seen there. My design contained three features that had never been used before: an entrance that would not scare the animals, an improved chemical filtration system, and the use of animal behavior principles to prevent the cattle from becoming overexcited when they left the vat. The final design had a concrete ramp on a twenty five- degree downward angle. Deep grooves in the concrete provided secure footing. The ramp appeared to enter the water gradually, but in reality it abruptly dropped away below the water's surface. The animals could not see the drop- off because the dip chemicals colored the water. When they stepped out over the water, they quietly fell in, because their center of gravity had passed the point of no return.
Many of the cowboys at the feedlot were skeptical and did not believe my design would work. After it was constructed, they modified it behind my back, because they were sure it was wrong. A metal sheet was installed over the non slip ramp, converting it back to an old- fashioned slide entrance. The first day they used it, two cattle drowned because they panicked and flipped over backward. They were flabbergasted when they saw that the ramp now worked perfectly. Each calf stepped out over the steep drop- off and quietly plopped into the water. I fondly refer to this design as .
The owners and managers of feedlots sometimes have a hard time comprehending that if devices such as dip vats and restraint chutes are properly designed, cattle will voluntarily enter them. I can imagine the sensations the animals would feel.
If I had a calf's body and hooves, I would be very scared to step on a slippery metal ramp. The platform where they exit is usually divided into two pens so that cattle can dry on one side while the other side is being filled. No one understood why the animals coming out of the dip vat would sometimes become excited, but I figured it was because they wanted to follow their drier buddies, not unlike children divided from their classmates on a playground.
I installed a solid fence between the two pens to prevent the animals on one side from seeing the animals on the other side. It was a very simple solution, and it amazed me that nobody had ever thought of it before. My imagination scanned two specific swimming pool filters that I had operated, one on my Aunt Brecheen's ranch in Arizona and one at our home. To prevent water from splashing out of the dip vat, I copied the concrete coping overhang used on swimming pools.
That idea, like many of my best designs, came to me very clearly just before I drifted off to sleep at night. Instead, I store information in my head as if it were on a CD- ROM disc. When I recall something I have learned, I replay the video in my imagination. The videos in my memory are always specific; for example, I remember handling cattle at the veterinary chute at Producer's Feedlot or Mc. Elhaney Cattle Company.