I have recently started to lose my hearing. Finding a unifying principle in scientific literature

On everything in life, I was overwhelmed with a mass of details and I realized that I had to group them together and try to figure out unifying principles for masses of data.ģ. When I was in college, I called this finding the basic principle. Instead, I look at how all the little pieces fit together to form a bigger picture. When I solve the problem, it is not top-down and theory driven. When you start to put the puzzle together, you will be able to see what the picture is when it is approximately one-third or one-quarter of the way completed.

Imagine if you had a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle in a paper bag and you had no idea what the picture on the box is. I read lots of journal papers and I take little pieces of information and put them together as if completing a jigsaw puzzle. I put lots of little pieces of data together to form a new theory. Most people have to have a theory first, and then they try to make the data conform to it. I find lots of little details and put them together to form concepts and theories.ĭuring the last 5 years, I successfully used this method to fix some of my health problems.

All my thinking is bottom-up instead of top-down. When I design equipment, I take bits and pieces of other equipment I have seen in the past and combine them to create a new system. If the teacher thinks about it visually, a butterfly cut of chicken looks like a butterfly. A teacher working with a child with autism may not understand the connection when the child suddenly switches from talking about butterflies to talking about chicken. The memories that come up first tend to be either early childhood or something that happened within the last week. Then my mind gets off the subject and I see a butterfly cut of chicken that was served at a fancy restaurant approximately 3 days ago. The next image is metal decorative butterflies that people decorate the outside of their houses with and the third image is some butterflies I painted on a piece of plywood when I was in graduate school. If you say the word ‘butterfly’, the first picture I see is butterflies in my childhood backyard. My mind is associative and does not think in a linear manner. I was surprised to discover that the other non-autistic equipment designers could not do full motion test runs of equipment in their minds. I did not know that this was a special skill until I started interviewing other people about how they think. When I design livestock facilities, I can test run the equipment in my imagination similar to a virtual reality computer program. All my thoughts are in photo-realistic pictures, which flash up on the ‘computer monitor’ in my imagination. My mind works similar to an Internet search engine, set to locate photos.

Temple grandin visual thinking