The problem with normal people is they’re too cerebral. I call it being abstractified.
I have to fight against abstractification constantly when I’m working with the government and the meatpacking industry. A big part of my job now is trying to make sure all food animals are given a humane slaughter, but even though there’s a lot of support for animal welfare it’s getting harder to make good reforms instead of easier. It’s harder because today government regulatory agencies are all run by people who’ve been to college, but who in some cases have never even been inside a meatpacking plant, let alone worked in one. It’s terrible. I keep telling them, “You have got to go out there and visit a plant.”
Things were different in the 1960s when I was visiting my aunt’s ranch in Arizona. That was my first experience with the United States Department of Agriculture. At that time livestock were being attacked by screwworms all over the West, Southwest, and Mexico. Screwworms are the larvae of a fly that lays its eggs in open wounds. The wounds can be from anything—a cut, a tick bite, or even a newborn’s navel. (Screwworms can attack humans, too, and like to lay their eggs inside the nostril.) When the eggs hatch the maggots come out and eat the animal alive. Other maggots eat dead flesh, but screwworm maggots eat live flesh and they are deadly.
Up until the USDA got involved, my aunt had been digging the maggots out of wounds on her horses by hand. She would pick each maggot out with a tweezers, drop it on the ground, and squash and stomp it. Then she’d blob screwworm paste all over the wound to fill it up so no flies could get back in and lay more eggs. The paste looked like black roofing cement. If you didn’t do this, the horse would die. A screwworm infestation was a hideous, horrible thing.
The USDA fieldworkers figured out how to get rid of the screwworms by taking advantage of a quirk in their reproductive system. The screwworm’s developmental sequence goes from egg to maggot to pupa to fly, and the USDA bred a bunch of screwworms and irradiated the males when they reached the pupa stage, making them sterile. Then they put the pupae in little paper boxes, like a Chinese takeout box, and dropped the boxes out of airplanes. The flies would come out of the boxes and mate with lots of females, and the females they’d mated laid eggs that didn’t hatch.
The program was a huge success. It started in 1959, the United States working with Mexico, and the last case of screwworm infestation was recorded in Texas in 1982. Today there are no screwworms anywhere in the United States or Mexico. I remember those years well. You’d find the little boxes all over the ranch, seven or eight of them each summer. The box would say “USDA” and there would be a little story printed on the side explaining what it was and that it wasn’t going to hurt you.
This was the original biotechnology and it worked. The government saved thousands and thousands of animals, maybe millions. They just did it; they didn’t get everyone’s permission.
Today the government could never get a program like that off the ground. Some environmental activist would say, “We have to protect these flies,” and you’d have people who’d never seen a screwworm in their lives advocating to save them from extinction. The whole thing would be about ideology, not reality. The USDA would be required to file environmental impact statements and the environmental impact statements would be challenged in court, and it would never get done.
Even worse, the government might not even get to the point of having advocates block their efforts. To put this type of project together you need a really good field staff that is in charge of things. But today the abstract thinkers are in charge, and abstract thinkers get locked into abstract debates and arguments that aren’t based in reality. I think this is one of the reasons there is so much partisan fighting inside government. In my experience, people become more radical when they’re thinking abstractly. They bog down in permanent bickering where they’ve lost touch with what’s actually happening in the real world. The only way anything can get done is when there’s an emergency. Then all of a sudden everyone has to move.
So the 1960s and the 1970s were the golden age; that was a time when people who were in charge of regulation, or who were running the plants, had actually done things with their hands.
One thing I’ve noticed about animal welfare regulators who have never worked in the industry is that they always go for some kind of zero-tolerance approach. If the plant violates one or two agency rules, it has to be shut down.
If you don’t know anything about the meatpacking business, that sounds like a good idea. Make sure no animal ever gets hurt, under any circumstances.
But in real life that’s never the way it works out. In real life what happens is that a plant makes one or two mistakes, so the agency shuts it down. Well, shutting down a plant creates a huge uproar, because you’ve closed a whole big huge company that employs a lot of people. Management immediately protests the decision, and lots of pressure gets put on the inspector who reported the violations to clean up his report so the plant can go back to work.
And that’s what happens. The plant goes back to work and doesn’t get inspected so closely anymore. The violations keep on piling up.
It doesn’t have to be that way. I constantly argue that what we really need to do to protect animals is set high standards. People can live up to high standards, but they can’t live up to perfection. When you give a plant a good standard—like 95 percent of all cattle have to be stunned (killed) correctly on the first shot every single day—they always do better than they do under zero-tolerance regulation. A lot of times they beat the standard, too.
But regulators today are too abstract in their thinking to see that. They’re focused on their thoughts about the animals, not on the real animals in the real plants, so more animals end up suffering. It’s not right.
HOW PEOPLE SEE THE WORLD
Unfortunately, when it comes to dealing with animals, all normal human beings are too abstractified, even the people who are hands-on. That’s because people aren’t just abstract in their thinking, they’re abstract in their seeing and hearing. Normal human beings are abstractified in their sensory perceptions as well as their thoughts.
That’s why the workers at the facility where the cattle wouldn’t go inside a dark building couldn’t figure out what the problem was. They weren’t seeing the setup as it actually existed; they were seeing the abstract, generalized concept of the setup they had inside their heads. In their minds their facility was identical to every other facility in the industry, and on paper it was identical. But in real life it was different, and they couldn’t see it. I’m not just talking about management. The guys in the yard, who were there working with the animals, trying to get them to walk inside the building, couldn’t see it, either.
That’s the big difference between animals and people, and also between autistic people and nonautistic people. Animals and autistic people don’t see their ideas of things; they see the actual things themselves. We see the details that make up the world, while normal people blur all those details together into their general concept of the world.
A huge amount of my consulting business is getting paid to see all the stuff normal people can’t see. I do this constantly. Not too long ago I got a call to go out to a meatpacking plant where the animals were getting big fat bruises on their loins. The loin is the area in between a cow’s rib cage and its rear leg. It’s the most expensive part of the animal, because that’s where the steak is located. So nobody wants their cattle getting bruised loins. A bruise means bleeding inside the muscle, and the bloody area has to be cut out in the butchering process, which means less meat to sell. Delaying slaughter until the bruise clears up doesn’t help, either, because a healed bruise leaves behind tough meat and gristle. Gristle is scar tissue. Just about any injury, no matter how tiny, can produce gristle, including the needle used in a cow’s vaccinations. (To prevent scarring from vaccination, you have to give the shot just under the skin. The beef industry is working hard trying to get feedlot employees and ranchers to give shots correctly.)
So here was this plant with all its beautiful, well-tended cattle walking around with big bruises on their sides, and nobody could figure out how they were getting them. One minute a cow would be fine; the next minute the same cow would have a great big shiner on her side.
They brought me out, and I walked into the chute to take a look around. That’s the first thing I always do, because you can’t solve an animal mystery unless you put yourself in their place—literally in their place. You have to go where the animal goes, and do what the animal does.
The chute turned out to be the problem. There was a sharp three-inch piece of metal sticking out from the side, and the cattle were hitting it. That little shard of metal was obvious to me, but not one person at the plant had spotted it—and all of them were looking. I think they probably would have seen it pretty quickly if any of the cattle had bellowed when they hit it, but the cattle didn’t yelp. The animals were hitting hard enough to bruise themselves, but not hard enough for it to really hurt.
WHAT DO ANIMALS SEE?
When an animal or an autistic person is seeing the real world instead of his idea of the world that means he’s seeing detail. This is the single most important thing to know about the way animals perceive the world: animals see details people don’t see. They are totally detail-oriented. That’s the key.
It took me almost thirty years to figure this out. During all that time I kept a growing list of small details that could spook an animal without realizing that “seeing in details” was a core difference between animals and people. The first small detail I saw spook a cow was shadows on the ground. Cattle will balk at the sight of a shadow. Then the workers get out the electric prods, because they have no idea what’s scaring the cattle, so they can’t fix it. I first saw cattle get spooked by a shadow thirty years ago, and I’ve been seeing it ever since.
The next detail I noticed was that cattle were afraid to enter dark places. That got me on the track of thinking that differences in contrast were important for animal behavior, which is true, but it didn’t tell me that detail per se was the issue.
I finally realized that animals perceive way more details than people do when McDonald’s hired me in 1999 to help them implement the animal welfare audit I’d originally created three years earlier for the USDA. They had a list of fifty meatpacking plants they purchased beef from, and they had announced that all fifty plants had to pass my audit or get thrown off the list.
McDonald’s was already auditing their suppliers for food safety, so they asked me to train their auditors to monitor animal welfare, too. It was easy to train the auditors, but it wasn’t easy for all the plants to get in compliance, even though they wanted to. Good intentions weren’t enough. We had to help plants figure out what they were doing wrong.
One of the criteria the plants had to meet to pass my audit was that employees couldn’t use the electric prod on more than 25 percent of the animals. Any plant that couldn’t get its prod usage down to 25 percent had to analyze what the problem was and correct it. But sometimes no one at the plant could see why their animals were balking.
Always, when I would go out to the plant to analyze the situation, I would find two things.
First, the problem was always a small detail, usually a detail the humans hadn’t even noticed. The entrance to the chute might be too dark, or there might be a bright reflection on a metal bar that was causing the animals to balk.
Second, to get their prod scores down a plant had to correct all the details that were scaring the cattle. They couldn’t just correct some of the details or most of the details. They had to correct all of the details.
There was this one hog plant on the list that had four things they had to fix. Three involved lighting and the fourth was that they needed to put up some metal sheeting to prevent the pigs from seeing people moving around up ahead. This is something most people don’t realize: cattle and hogs raised for food are domestic animals, but they aren’t naturally tame unless they’ve been socialized to humans as babies. So they get jittery when they’re walking through a chute or alley and see people moving up ahead of them. All domestic animals, including cats and dogs, have to be socialized to people. The plant had to make all four corrections to get their prod scores down. They couldn’t just fix three and let it go at that.
That turned out to be true at all the plants. No plant had zillions of bad details; about the most any plant had was six. But if they had four bad details they had to correct all four. For the animals every detail was equally bad and equally important. That’s what made me realize that details are the key, and that’s when I started preaching the importance of detail in all my talks and all my articles and books.
Only highly visual people react to details the way animals do. I knew one interior designer who was supervising a renovation of her own bathroom and the contractor cracked one of the marble tiles. She couldn’t stand it. Every time she went in the bathroom she saw that crack. It jumped out at her and she’d get upset all over again. She knew she was different, but that’s what made her good at her job. She saw the visual details most people didn’t.
Nancy Minshew, a research neurologist at the University of Pittsburgh who specializes in autism, was coming out with her new work on autistic people’s cognitive processing around the same time, and she confirmed my new insight into animals and detail. Her brain scans showed that autistic people are much more focused on details than on whole objects. Since I’d noticed so many similarities between animals and autistic people in my career, the fact that Nancy Minshew was finding a connection between autism and an orientation to detail gave me another reason to think I was right about animals.1
TINY DETAILS THAT SCARE FARM ANIMALS
Here’s the checklist I give plant owners when their cattle or hogs are refusing to walk through an alley or a chute:
1. SPARKLING REFLECTIONS ON PUDDLES
I figured this out at a plant where the pigs were constantly backing up in the alley, so the employees were using electric prods to keep them moving forward. The plant was failing its animal welfare audit, because workers were supposed to be using the prods on no more than 25 percent of the pigs, and they were using them on every single animal. Normally a pig has no problem walking through a chute, but in this plant every single pig was stopping and backing up.
I got down on my hands and knees and went through the chute the same way the pigs did. The managers probably thought I looked crazy, but that’s the only way you can do it. You have to get to the same level as the animals, and look at things from the same angle of vision.
Sure enough, as soon as I got down on all fours I could see that there were lots of tiny, bright reflections glancing off the wet floor. Plant floors are always wet, because they’re always being hosed down to keep them clean. Nobody could have seen those reflections even if they did know what to look for, because the humans’ eyes weren’t on the same level as the pigs’.
Once we knew what the problem was I got back down on my hands and knees again, and while I was pretending I was a pig the employees moved the big hanging lights overhead with a stick until each little reflection was gone. And that was that. Once the reflections were gone the pigs walked right up the chute, and the plant passed its audit.
2. REFLECTIONS ON SMOOTH METAL
I first saw this with cattle walking up a single-file chute that was made of shiny stainless steel. Every time the sides jiggled the shiny reflections from the lights would vibrate and oscillate, and the cattle would stop. In that plant all we had to do was move the lights, but in another plant with the same problem, we had to bolt the sides down so they couldn’t move at all.
A still reflection is always less of a problem for an animal than a moving one, although any bright reflecting surface can scare an animal. A lot of times we have to move the lights and bolt down the metal sides. A number of things can cause reflections to move: machine vibrations, or cattle banging up against the metal, or water running off a ramp into the water that’s already on the floor, making the reflections on the surface jump and move like a sparkling brook.
3. CHAINS THAT JIGGLE
I learned about jiggling chains in a big beef plant in Colorado that had a chain hanging down at the entrance of the chute. The chain was part of a gate latch, and it wasn’t very long; maybe only one foot, and swinging back and forth three inches each way. But that was enough. The cattle would come around a curve, take one look at that chain, then stop and stare at it with their heads swinging back and forth in rhythm with the chain. You’d think that would be obvious to the employees, but it wasn’t. The humans just didn’t see it, even though the cows’ heads were going back and forth in rhythm to the swinging of the chain. I’m not sure the employees even noticed that the cows’ heads were moving; forget the chain. The employees were just using more force, zapping them with cattle prods, screaming and yelling and so on, to try to get the cattle moving.
4. METAL CLANGING OR BANGING
This one’s universal. You see it everywhere in feed yards and plants—metal gates, sliding doors, squeeze chutes—everywhere. People in the industry call it clatter, and clatter is something you always have with metal equipment. I recommend plastic tracks for sliding doors, so you don’t have metal sliding against metal, and now a company named Silencer makes an extra-quiet squeeze chute that’s good, too.
5. HIGH-PITCHED NOISE
Examples: backup alarms on trucks and high-pitched motor whining.
I remember my first experience with this at a big beef plant in Nebraska where they’d just put in one of my cattle-handling systems. They used a hydraulic system that gave off a high-pitched whining noise, and the noise would get the cattle all agitated so my system didn’t work. We changed the plumbing to eliminate the noise and the cattle became a lot calmer.
6. AIR HISSING
Another one you see everywhere. The problem with high-pitched sounds like hissing air and hydraulic squeals is that they’re too close to distress calls, which are almost always high-pitched. High-pitched sounds are one of the few things humans will usually notice, especially if they’re intermittent, because we inherited a built-in alarm system from our animal ancestors that’s still working. That’s why humans choose high-pitched intermittent sounds when they want to make sure they get people’s attention. Police cars, ambulances, garbage truck backup beeps—it’s almost always a high-pitched intermittent sound. The people who design these systems instinctively go for the kind of sound animals use to signal danger.
7. AIR DRAFTS BLOWING ON APPROACHING ANIMALS
I don’t know why cattle don’t like this; I just know they don’t. Whenever cattle are out in a big storm, they’ll turn their bottoms to the wind. I also hear stories about dogs hating to have air blown into their faces or their ears. This seems to be something kids like to do to dogs, so I’ve heard quite a few of these stories.
8. CLOTHING HUNG ON FENCE
I say “clothing” because the problem almost always is clothing, but anything hanging on a fence can scare animals. Usually what happens is that people get hot, take off their jackets and shirts, and hang them on the fence. Sometimes people will drape towels or rags on the fence, which is just as bad. Once I went to a ranch that had a wiggling plastic jug wired to the fence and that was causing problems.
The worst is when you have yellow clothing hanging on fences. I first saw this happen at a plant in Colorado. It’s the same problem as the bright yellow ladder against the gray wall I mentioned a while back. No cow will walk toward a sudden patch of bright yellow color.
9. PIECE OF PLASTIC THAT IS MOVING
Anything moving is a problem for animals, but usually I find the problem will be a piece of plastic. That’s because people in the industry put plastic all over everything. They’ll tape it over a window to keep the cold air out, or wrap it around a pipe because the pipe is dripping, and it always vibrates and jiggles. Plastic just has a way of getting stuck all over the place, especially now, with the new food safety rules. Employees pull plastic off big rolls and make raincoats out of it, or aprons and leg guards; the plants let the employees make anything they want out of the stuff. Then it ends up getting caught on something where it jiggles and scares the animals. Paper towels will also scare pigs and cattle if the wind is blowing it. I had a paper towel problem at five or six different places.
10. SLOW FAN BLADE MOVEMENT
I’ve seen this in several different places. Animals don’t have a problem with an electric fan that’s turned on the way autistic children do. A lot of autistic children are riveted by the motion of the blades, or by just about anything that’s spinning fast. I don’t know why this happens, but I think they may be seeing the flicker of the fan blades even at very high speeds. I’ve met a number of dyslexic people who can see the flicker, so I assume many autistic people see it, too. Dyslexics who can see the blade flicker say it’s horribly distracting and fatiguing.
The motion is part of the attraction, too. I don’t get hooked on fans myself, but I do get stuck on those geometric screen savers a lot of computers have. I can’t stop looking at them, literally, so if I’m in an office where there’s a geometric screen saver either I have to sit with my back to the screen, or ask the owner to turn it off.
With fans, what drives an animal crazy is when the fan is turned off, but the blades are rotating slowly in the breeze. You have to put up big pieces of plywood or metal so the animals can’t see the fan. Otherwise, forget it. They’re going to balk. I went to one ranch where they had a windmill that was messing up the animals. On windy days the animals wouldn’t move.
11. SEEING PEOPLE MOVING UP AHEAD
Another case for plywood. I mentioned this one earlier. Cattle are eighteen months old when they’re slaughtered, and pigs are only five months old, so it doesn’t pay to train them to lead. They’re not like horses who’ve been trained to accept a halter and a lead rope and walk calmly alongside a human being.
12. SMALL OBJECT ON THE FLOOR
Example: a white Styrofoam coffee cup on a muddy brown floor.
I had a bad experience with this one time when I was up on a catwalk above a cattle chute. An employee at the plant had been storing his white plastic water bottle on the catwalk, and I accidentally kicked it off. The minute it hit the ground, I said a bad word. It landed right at the entrance to the chute, where I knew it was going to cause a problem, and it did. That little plastic water bottle lying harmlessly on the ground was as big a barrier for those 1,200-pound cows as if I’d dropped a big pile of boulders there.
We had to shut the whole line down, because no animal would walk over it, and it was too dangerous for anyone to go in there and try to pick it up. A crowd pen is a small space, and there were fifteen big animals in it, none of them trained to lead; a human going inside the pen could have been crushed. So the employees had to stand outside and run at the cattle and chase them until finally one of the cows stepped on the bottle and crushed it into the manure so that it turned brown, not white. Then the cattle were fine. They all stepped over it and went on into the alley. That part of the line was shut down for fifteen minutes, and the plant as a whole lost five minutes. At $200 a minute that was a $1,000 delay.
13. CHANGES IN FLOORING AND TEXTURE
Example: cattle or pigs moving from a metal floor to a concrete floor or vice versa.
The problem is contrast.
14. DRAIN GRATE ON THE FLOOR
Same problem again: contrast. The drain grate looks too different from the floor.
15. SUDDEN CHANGES IN THE COLOR OF EQUIPMENT
High-contrast color changes are the worst. You can’t have the gates painted one color and the pens painted another. I’ve also seen problems with gray-painted alleys leading up to shiny metal equipment.
16. CHUTE ENTRANCE TOO DARK
Another contrast issue—going from light to dark.
17. BRIGHT LIGHT SUCH AS BLINDING SUN
If you have the sun coming up over the top of a building just as the cattle are approaching there is nothing you can do. It is a hell of a problem and there isn’t any way to fix it except maybe extend the roof out over the yards. Otherwise you just have to suffer through it.
18. ONE-WAY OR ANTI-BACKUP GATES
These are two different terms for the same thing. Anti-backup gates don’t look like the normal gates the cattle are used to seeing on a ranch. Anti-backup gates hang down from overhead instead of being attached on one side, and basically look like a cow- or pig-sized dog door in a house. Plants install one-way gates in single-file alleys to keep the cattle from backing up into the long line of animals behind them. The pig or cow pushes through the gate—the same way a dog pushes through a dog door—and the gate falls down behind each pig or cow after it walks through. It’s not flexible like a dog door, so you can’t push it backward, only forward.
The animals hate having to push through the gate. That’s the problem, the going-through. The anti-backup gates bother the animals so much I don’t like to use them. I work with the cattle gently enough that they’re all happy to keep walking forward, and I can just tie the doors up out of the way, where the cattle don’t see them and don’t have to deal with them.
You could make up the same kind of list for any animal, although it would be different for each one. Bats have sonar and dogs don’t, so the list of common distractions for bats is going to have some sonar distracters on it, while the dog’s distracter list won’t. But any list of common distractions for an animal would be highly, highly detailed, exactly like this one.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ANIMAL VISION AND HUMAN VISION
Although I created this list for cattle and hogs, you can use this list to predict trouble spots for any other animal if you think about what these eighteen distracters have in common.
First of all, fourteen out of the eighteen distracters are visual, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find a ratio like that for most animals. But to predict what kind of visual object will distract or frighten an animal, you have to know more about what animal vision is like.
It’s pretty different from ours. For instance, you always hear that dogs “don’t see well,” which is true as far as it goes. Dogs don’t have very good visual acuity, which is the ability to see the tiny details of what you’re looking at clearly and crisply. People with 20/20 vision have excellent visual acuity, and a lot of animals don’t. That means that most animals aren’t going to be frightened by tiny objects, simply because they can’t see them well.
A typical dog has a visual acuity of 20/75, which means that a dog has to stand twenty feet away to clearly see an object a person with normal vision sees well standing seventy-five feet away. The dog has to get much closer to the object than we do. This isn’t due to nearsightedness but to the fact that dogs have fewer cones in their retinas than people do. Everyone probably remembers from biology class that cones handle color and daytime vision, and rods handle nighttime vision. Basically dogs have traded good visual acuity for good nighttime vision. A dog doesn’t see any objects as sharply as a person does, including an object that’s right under his nose. That’s why it’s so hard for dogs to see a piece of kibble you’ve dropped on the floor for them to eat. If they didn’t watch it fall, most dogs can’t see it lying on a mottle-colored tile floor (though some can).
There’s also a lot of variation in visual acuity among the different breeds of dogs, as well as among individuals of a breed. One study found that 53 percent of German shepherds and 64 percent of Rottweilers were nearsighted. You might wonder whether being nearsighted matters to a dog since everything it sees is fuzzy to start out with, but tests show that it does. A nearsighted dog has much worse visual acuity than a normal-sighted dog. Interestingly, although German shepherds tend to be nearsighted, only 15 percent of the Shepherds in a demanding program for guide dogs were myopic.2 Probably the nearsighted dogs were flunking out of the program without the trainers’ knowing why.
Another huge difference between animals and people is that most animals have panoramic vision. The eyes of prey animals like horses, sheep, and cows are set so far apart that they can literally see behind their heads. That’s why some hansom cab horses wear blinkers; they can see everything going on behind them, and they get distracted. Most racehorses don’t wear blinkers for the same reason: their trainers want them to know exactly where the horses behind them are, and how fast they’re moving.
Prey animals don’t have perfect 360-degree vision, although they come close. There’s one small blind spot directly behind a cow or horse that you have to be careful not to sneak up to. The animal can’t tell what you are, and he might get scared and lash out and kick you. Prey animals also have a small blind spot directly in front of their heads because their eyes are set so far to the sides.
Even though their eyes are so far apart, prey animals do have depth perception, though it seems to be different from ours. We use binocular vision, which means each eye is seeing the same thing from a slightly different angle. When our brains combine the angles, we get our sense of depth.
Prey animals’ eyes are so far apart that a lot of researchers have assumed their left eye was seeing something completely different from the right eye, so they couldn’t have binocular vision. But they’ve tested this in sheep, and sheep do have at least some binocular vision. We know this because sheep can see the cliff in visual cliff experiments. In the original visual cliff studies the experimenters put a baby on top of a table covered in a sheet of glass thick enough to crawl on. Directly underneath the glass there was a checkered surface that, midway across the table, suddenly dropped off way below the glass surface. It was a visual cliff, not a real one, so the baby couldn’t actually fall over the edge if he crawled out over the drop-off. Very young babies will refuse to crawl over the cliff even if their mothers stand on the opposite side of the table and call them. They can see the cliff, and they instinctively know it’s dangerous. It turns out that sheep won’t walk over the cliff, either, which means they have to be seeing the difference in depth. (On the other hand, sheep don’t appear to have depth perception while they’re moving, only when they stand still.)
You’ve probably seen bulls in bullfights lower their heads before they charge the matador. Border collies do the exact same thing when they’re herding sheep. They lower their heads below their shoulders and stare at the sheep. They do this because their retinas are different from ours. The human retina has a fovea, which is a round spot in the back of the eye where you get your best vision. Domestic animals and fast animals who live on the open plains like antelopes and gazelles have a visual streak instead of a fovea. The visual streak is a straight line across the back of the retina. When you see an animal lower its head to look at something, it’s probably getting the image lined up on its visual streak. Most experts think the streak helps animals scan the horizon.
Researchers have also found that of the meat-eating animals that have been tested so far, the two fastest animals—the cheetah and the greyhound—also have the most highly developed visual streaks. Their visual streaks are dense with photoreceptors, giving them extra-acute vision. To test visual acuity you can use a bar code design. The more acute your vision, the tinier a bar code you can look at, from a greater distance, and still see the stripes as separate rather than as a gray square. Animals with super-acute vision can also see separate grains of sand on the beach.
SEEING COLOR AND CONTRAST
A third area where animals and people diverge is in the ability to see color and contrast. At least ten of the eighteen distracters are high-contrast images, like a shiny reflection on metal, or a sparkling reflection in a puddle. Several of the other visual distracters, such as a white Styrofoam or plastic coffee cup on the floor or a piece of clothing hanging over a fence, involve contrast, too. I have some photographs of high-contrast distracters on my Web site. One is a picture of a white coffee cup on a brown floor; another is a pair of bright yellow boots against a gray floor and railing.
Sharp contrasts are also a problem when you’re trying to move an animal toward an area that’s either too dark or too light. We already talked about the cattle that wouldn’t go into the squeeze chute building because it was too dark, but cattle will also refuse to walk directly into an area that is too bright. Strong changes in light are so distracting to cattle that you can’t have direct sources of lighting, like an unshaded lantern or lightbulb, at the mouth of an alley. They won’t walk toward it. You want overhead lighting with no shadows, like the light outdoors on a bright but cloudy day. Sometimes you can get that effect with skylights made out of white translucent plastic.
Slowly rotating fan blades are also a high-contrast stimulus, because animals see contrast differently from the way we do. If the fan is turned on and is rotating so fast you can’t see the blades, there’s no problem. But when a fan blade is turning slowly it creates a flicker, and that flicker is a much higher contrast image for an animal than it is for us.
Animals see more intense contrasts of light and dark because their night vision is so much better than ours. Good night vision involves excellent vision for contrasts and relatively poor color vision. I first learned about animals’ incredible contrast vision back when I was taking black-and-white pictures of the cattle chutes. There’d be a shadow on the ground that even I wouldn’t see until I got the pictures developed. The reason I could see it only in my photographs is that contrast is much sharper when you take away color. Shadows are so much clearer in black and white that during World War II the Allies recruited people who were completely color-blind—not just red-green color-blind, but people who didn’t see any color at all—to interpret reconnaissance and spy photos. They could spot things like netting draped over a tank to camouflage it that were invisible to people whose color vision was normal.
Animals seem to see sharp contrast on the floor as a false visual cliff; they act as if they think the dark spots are deeper than the lighter spots. That’s why cattle guards work on roads. A cattle guard is a pit dug across a road, covered with metal bars. A car can drive over it and a cow could walk over it if it tried, but it won’t because it sees the two-foot drop-off between the bars.
To a cow the contrast is so sharp the drop-off probably looks like a bottomless pit. In An Anthropologist on Mars Oliver Sacks has an essay about an artist who lost his color vision in a car crash. After that it was hard for him to drive, because tree shadows on the road looked like pits his car could fall into. Without color vision, he saw contrasts between light and dark as contrasts in depth.3 Since cows have much poorer color vision than normal people do and mainly see colors in the yellow-green range, they may see light-dark contrasts as contrasts in depth in an analogous fashion to Dr. Sacks’s color-blind artist.
Whatever the reason, cows act like Dr. Sacks’s color-blind artist. Cattle guards are expensive to build, so a lot of times the Department of Transportation just uses a standard line-painting machine (that’s the machine they use to paint the center line on highways) to paint batches of bright white lines across the highway going in the same direction as a crosswalk. It’s a poor man’s cattle guard.
When the cattle aren’t highly motivated to cross the road, a grouping of twenty white lines painted six inches apart will make them stay put, because the contrast scares them. If the cattle are highly motivated, it’s a different story. If you’ve got mama on one side and baby on the other, painted lines won’t work. Or if cattle are starving, they’ll cross the lines to get to better grazing on the other side of the road. But under normal circumstances, painted lines work just fine.
You need to know something about animals’ color vision to predict what visual stimuli they’ll experience as high-contrast. The breakdown is pretty simple: birds can see four different basic colors (ultraviolet, blue, green, and red), people and some primates see three (blue, green, and red), and most of the rest of the mammals see just two (blue and green). With dichromatic, or two-color, vision the colors animals see best are a yellowish green (the color of a safety vest) and bluish purple (which is close to the purple of a purple iris). That means that yellow is the high-contrast color for almost all animals. Anything yellow will really pop out at them, so you have to be careful about yellow raincoats, boots, and machinery.4
THE REAL PROBLEM IS NOVELTY
Any sharp contrast between light and dark will draw the attention of a dichromatic animal, either distracting or scaring him. If he’s a big animal who you’re trying to move from Point A to Point B, a sharp contrast in light and dark will stop him in his tracks.
However, not all high contrast will scare an animal, only high-contrast visual stimuli that are novel and unexpected. If dairy cattle are used to seeing bright yellow raincoats slung over gates every day when they enter the milking parlor there’d be no problem. It’s the animal who’s seeing a bright yellow raincoat slung over a gate for the first time at a slaughter plant or feedlot who’s going to balk. Novelty is the key.
The anti-backup gates used in many cattle alleys have the same problem: the cattle have never seen them before, so they don’t want to go through them. Novelty is a huge problem for all animals, all autistic people, all children—and just about all normal grown-ups, too, though normal adults can handle novelty better than animals, autistic people, or kids. Fear of the unknown is universal. If you’ve never seen something before, you can’t make a judgment about it; you don’t know if it’s good or bad, dangerous or safe. And your brain always wants to make that judgment; that’s how the brain works. Researchers have found that even nonsense syllables spark positive and negative emotions; to your brain, there’s no such thing as neutral. So if you can’t tell what something is, you get anxious trying to decide whether it’s good or bad.
Any novel object or image in a cow’s visual field will get her worried, and if you happen to be trying to move her in the direction of the novel object or image, forget it.
It’s different when you don’t try to force things. On its own, an animal will always investigate a novel stimulus, even though new things are scary. I learned that back when I was writing stories and taking photographs for Arizona Farmer Ranchman Magazine. I noticed that if you just left a pile of camera equipment alone in the middle of the field, all the cows would come up to it and investigate. But if you walked toward them carrying the same equipment, they’d take off. Motion was a problem, so if I just stood there holding the equipment, the cows would come to me.
I also noticed that if I got down low to the ground I was a lot less scary to them. At first I was just trying to get the cow’s head framed against the sky, without any grass showing in the frame, so I’d crouch down to get the shot I wanted. But then I noticed that when I crouched down, I could get close-ups of the cattle because they wouldn’t run away. Those photos were beautiful—big Black Angus heads silhouetted against the blue sky.
Finally one day I decided to just lie down flat on my back and see what happened. They all came up to me and sniffed and licked and sniffed and licked. These were feedlot cattle who weren’t tame.
When a cow comes up to explore you, it’s always the same. They’ll stretch out their heads toward you and sniff you; that’s always first. Then the tongue will reach out and just barely touch you, and as they get less afraid they’ll start licking you. They’ll lick your hair and chew on it, and they like to lick and chew your boots, too. I usually don’t let them lick me on my face because cattle have extremely rough tongues and I could get a scratched cornea, although I sometimes just close my eyes and let them go ahead. I don’t mind if the tongue goes down my neck. That’s okay. And I let them lick my hands. I think they probably like the taste of the salt on your skin.
Sometimes I’ll kiss them on the nose.
I wasn’t the only person to figure out that it’s perfectly safe to lie down in the middle of a bunch of thousand-pound untamed animals. In the 1970s there were a lot of Mexicans coming over the border to work in the feedlots, and when the Border Patrol came around the Mexicans would hide inside the corrals, with the cattle. Five guys would lie down on the ground with a hundred head of Brahman steers surrounding them. Brahmans are the big huge cattle with the hump on their back. They’re nice animals, as long as you treat them well, but they’re scary-looking to anybody who doesn’t know cattle, so the Border Patrol guys wouldn’t dare go in those pens.
But it never came to that, because the Border Patrol people never saw any of the illegal workers lying underneath all those cattle. The Mexicans had to lie perfectly still, because if they moved the cattle would run and give them away. And, of course, that would have been really dangerous for the five guys lying on the ground. You don’t want a thousand-pound Brahman steer and his ninety-nine friends stepping on you by accident when they’re trying to get away. It sounds dangerous, but I don’t remember a single person ever getting hurt.
The reason cattle will approach something novel under their own steam is that they’re curious. All animals are curious; it’s built into their wiring. They have to be, because if they weren’t they’d have a lot harder time finding what they need and avoiding what they don’t need. Curiosity is the other side of caution. An animal has to have some drive to explore his environment in order to find food, water, mates, and shelter. People say curiosity killed the cat, and that’s probably true; curiosity can get an animal into a lot of trouble. But an animal or a person can be too cautious, too. If you’re too cautious to explore things, you miss out on things you need.
Being too cautious might make you miss signs of danger, too. Animals and people need to avoid trouble before it happens, and one way to do that is to pick up on signs of danger and act on them now, instead of waiting until you’re face-to-face with a hungry wolf and then trying to get away. Curiosity drives an animal to explore its environment for signs of danger.
So it makes sense that a cow would voluntarily explore a yellow raincoat hanging on a fence but dig in his heels if you try to force him to walk past one. Since anything new could be dangerous, an animal wants a clear escape route before he’s going to poke his nose into something he’s never seen before. When he’s being forced through a one-way alley, there’s no escape. So he refuses to move.
You can use the exact same checklist with horses, too, partly because they’re prey animals like cattle and partly because their lives and environments are pretty similar. Since I spend most of my time with cattle I don’t have a good checklist of details that scare dogs or cats, but I can tell you that the same principle applies even though they’re predators and don’t have as many natural enemies to worry about. All animals, predator or prey, have a built-in sense of caution that is triggered by new things.
With dogs, it’s a little hard to predict which new things might scare them, since dogs live with people and get exposed to so many new things all the time. A dog who’s not naturally timid can seem like he doesn’t mind high-contrast novel stimuli the way a cow does.
But I don’t think that’s true. One of the good times to see the effects of novel visual stimuli on a dog is Halloween. My experience is that dogs do not like Halloween costumes! A friend of mine was sitting in her upstairs office one day, getting some work done, with the family Lab lying next to her, when her son walked up the stairs wearing his Scream costume. You probably know the one I mean: the costume is dark black, and the mask is bright white with a big red tongue hanging out of its mouth. You can’t get much higher contrast than that, unless you made the tongue yellow. The Lab jumped to her feet and started barking her head off.
My friend was totally surprised, because she had recognized her son from his footsteps, which sounded the same way they always did. He wasn’t wearing a costume on his feet. But the minute the dog saw the mask she went nuts.
This is another example of the cardinal rule of my checklist: just one of these distracters, out of eighteen, will throw an animal off. To the Lab, it didn’t matter that my friend’s son still sounded and smelled the same. He didn’t look the same, so he wasn’t the same, and that was that. Apparently animals use an additive system rather than an averaging system when they’re figuring out what something is and whether they should be afraid of it.
That same Lab also went crazy when the neighbors put a Halloween scarecrow up in the front yard. My friend was taking her dog for a walk when they spotted the scarecrow, and the Lab started barking ferociously at the thing. Her hackles were up, too. That same house managed to throw my friend’s other dog into a panic with a piece of lawn sculpture they put in the backyard. The sculpture was a foot-high all-black iron frog, and when the other dog caught sight of it he had the same reaction his pack mate did to the scarecrow. He went nuts. Frantic barking, hackles up, straining at the leash.
Dog and cat owners won’t have any problem recognizing the next category of common distracters: things that are moving. For any animal you can name, sudden movement is riveting, especially sudden rapid movement. Rapid movement stimulates the nervous system. It makes prey animals run away, and it makes predator animals give chase. It always grabs your attention. That’s why used car lots put flags or twirly plastic thingies up all around their lots. You can’t not look at a bunch of brightly colored, rapidly moving objects. Jiggling parts on feedlot equipment trigger a cow’s inborn impulse to flee, and all of a sudden you’ve got a whole herd of cows turning into the feedlot version of a forty-car pileup. It’s a disaster.
SOUND
Last but not least, you have your sound distracters. Any novel, high-pitched sounds will cause cattle to balk, because they activate the part of an animal’s brain that responds to distress calls. An intermittent high-pitched sound is that much worse. Intermittent sounds will drive anyone crazy; they’re much more upsetting than a constant, loud din, whether it’s high-pitched or not. You can’t relax, because you’re waiting for the next sound. And you can’t turn this response off, either, because intermittent sounds activate your orienting response. People aren’t so aware of this response in themselves, but if you live around animals you know it well. Anytime an animal of any species hears a sudden sound, something they weren’t expecting, they stop what they’re doing and orient to the source of the sound.
When I worked with pigs at the University of Illinois I saw the orienting response every time a small plane would fly over the farm. The pigs couldn’t see the plane from inside the barn, but the minute that plane could be heard approaching the farm all activity in the barn would stop dead, and every animal stood perfectly still. After about two seconds of focused listening the pigs went back to their normal hubbub of activity. You can see the same thing at a horse stable when a garbage truck backs up to the dumpster. As soon as the backup warning starts beeping every horse will stick its head out of the stall at the exact same moment and stand at the alert. They look like they’re saluting the truck.
I think the orienting response is the beginning of consciousness, because the animal has to make a conscious decision about what to do about that sound. If he’s a prey animal, should he run? If he’s a predator, does he need to chase something? A predator might need to flee, too, of course, so a predator actually has two decisions to make.
Intermittent sounds keep hitting that orienting response. That’s why it’s impossible to get to sleep when you’re hearing an intermittent sound like a beeping elevator in a hotel or an intermittently beeping clothes dryer. A friend of mine with a nine-year-old autistic boy told me a story about her son, who had gotten into opening and closing doors repetitively. She was exhausted one day, mostly because her son didn’t sleep well at night, and she needed to take a nap, but when she lay down her son started opening and closing the sliding pocket door to the laundry room next to her bedroom. He would wait a few seconds in between each new door closing, just long enough for her to start to drift off to sleep again, and then suddenly she’d hear a rumble-rumble-thump and the door would hit the doorjamb again. Even though the sound was muffled, she said she was frantic after about ten minutes of this. It’s the Chinese water torture principle. If you had water pouring on your head continuously you wouldn’t like it, but you could learn to ignore it. Having drops of water dripping on your head intermittently is literally torture.
BEING OBLIVIOUS
The funny thing about the checklist is that probably the only thing on it that would bother a herd of humans you were trying to move through a feed yard chute is the intermittent sounds. Humans wouldn’t bat an eye at anything else on the checklist—jiggling chains, sparkling puddles, shiny spots on metal, little pieces of moving plastic, slowly rotating fan blades, even a continuous high-pitched sound—nothing on this checklist would be any problem for human beings at all.
They wouldn’t be a problem for humans, because humans wouldn’t take them in.
I’ve mentioned the Gorillas in Our Midst video, in which a lady dressed in a gorilla suit walks onscreen during a basketball game pounding her chest and 50 percent of all viewers don’t see her. If 50 percent of normal human beings can’t see a lady dressed up like a gorilla, it’s small wonder employees in meatpacking plants don’t notice jiggly chains.
In their book Inattentional Blindness, Arien Mack at the New School for Social Research in New York City and Irvin Rock, who was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, until he died in 1995, explain that people don’t consciously see any object unless they are paying direct, focused attention to that object.5 This means that a human being walking through an alley won’t see, much less be bothered by, sparkling puddles or shiny spots on metal or jiggling chains. None of that stuff is there for them unless they’re looking for it. Normal 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 he suddenly 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.
LIZARD BRAINS, DOG BRAINS, AND PEOPLE BRAINS
When you compare human and animal brains, the only difference that’s obvious to the naked eye is the increased size of the neocortex in people. (Usually the words “neocortex” and “cerebral cortex” mean the same thing, but some researchers use “neocortex” to mean the newer, six-layered part of the cerebral cortex. I’m using “neocortex” and “cerebral cortex” interchangeably.) The neocortex is the top layer of the brain, and includes the frontal lobes as well as all of the other structures where higher cognitive functions are located.
The neocortex is wrapped around all the subcortical or lower brain structures, which are the seat of emotions and life support functions in people and animals. In humans the neocortex is so thick compared to the lower brain structures that it’s the size of a peach compared to a peach pit. In animals the cortex is much smaller. It’s so small that in some animals the “peach” is the same size as the “pit” the neocortex is the same size as all the lower brain structures.
As a general rule, the more intelligent the animal species, the bigger the neocortex. If you remove the neocortex, you can’t tell an animal brain apart from a human brain, just to look at them. I had a hands-on lesson in this in grad school when I dissected a human brain and a pig brain in a class I took at the University of Illinois. The pig brain was a big shock for me, because when I compared the lower-level structures like the amygdala to the same structures in the human brain I couldn’t see any difference at all. The pig brain and the human brain looked exactly alike. But when I looked at the neocortex the difference was huge. The human neocortex is visibly bigger and more folded-up than the animal’s, and anyone can see it. You don’t need a microscope.
Comparing animal brains to human brains tells us two things.
Number one: animals and people have different brains, so they experience the world in different ways—
and
Number two: animals and people have an awful lot in common.
To understand why animals seem so different from normal human beings, yet so familiar at the same time, you need to know that the human brain is really three different brains, each one built on top of the previous at three different times in evolutionary history. And here’s the really interesting part: each one of those brains has its own kind of intelligence, its own sense of time and space, its own memory, and its own subjectivity. It’s almost as if we have three different identities inside our heads, not just one.
The first and oldest brain, which is physically the lowest down inside the skull, is the reptilian brain.
The next brain, in the middle, is the paleomammalian brain.
The third and newest brain, highest up inside your head, is the neomammalian brain.
Roughly speaking, the reptilian brain corresponds to that in lizards and performs basic life support functions like breathing; the paleomammalian brain corresponds to that in mammals and handles emotion; and the neomammalian brain corresponds to that in primates—especially people—and handles reason and language. All animals have some neomammalian brain, but it’s much larger and more important in primates and in people.
The three brains are connected by nerves, but each one has its own personality and its own control system: the “top” doesn’t control the “bottom.” Researchers used to think that the highest part of the brain was in charge, but they no longer believe this. That means we humans probably really do have an animal nature that’s separate and distinct from our human nature. We have a separate animal nature because we have a separate animal brain inside our heads.
The reason we have three separate brains instead of just one is that evolution doesn’t throw away things that work. When a structure or a protein or a gene or anything else works well, nature uses it again and again in newly evolved plants and animals. The word for this is conservation. Biologists say that evolution conserves structures that work.
Paul MacLean, the originator of the three-brain theory, believes that evolution simply added each newly evolved brain on top of the one that came before, without changing the older brain. He calls this the triune brain theory.7
In other words, if you’re Mother Nature, and you’ve got a lot of lizards running around the world breathing, eating, sleeping, and waking up just fine, you don’t create a whole brand-new dog breathing system when it comes time to evolve a dog. Instead, you add the new dog brain on top of the old lizard brain. The lizard brain breathes, eats, and sleeps; the dog brain forms dominance hierarchies and rears its young.
The same thing happens all over again when nature evolves a human. The human brain gets added on top of the dog brain. So you have your lizard brain to breathe and sleep, your dog brain to form wolf packs, and your human brain to write books about it. In a lot of ways evolution is like building an addition onto your house instead of tearing down the old one and building a new one from the ground up.
TRAPPED INSIDE THE BIG PICTURE
What the neocortex does better than the dog brain or the lizard brain is tie everything together. The whole neocortex is one big association cortex, making connections between all kinds of things that stay more separate for animals. For instance, take the fact that humans have mixed emotions. A human can love and hate the same person. Animals don’t do that. Their emotions are simpler and cleaner, because categories like love and hate stay separate in their brains.
Another example: humans make rapid generalizations from one situation to another; animals don’t. A generalization depends on making an association between one situation or object and another, similar situation or object. Compared to humans, animals generalize so little that one of the most important aspects of any animal training program is getting the animal to make a generalization from the training situation to the rest of his life. A dog can learn to perform tasks at a training school and not know how to perform them at home, because school and home are separate categories. His brain doesn’t automatically associate the two. I’ll talk about this more in other chapters.
Inside the neocortex, the frontal lobes, which sit behind your forehead, are the final destination for all the information that’s floating around your brain. They pull everything together.
Although growing a big neocortex gave us our “book smarts,” we paid a price. For one thing, bigger frontal lobes probably made humans a lot more vulnerable to brain damage and dysfunction of just about any kind. I wonder whether this explains why you don’t often see animals with developmental disabilities. Estimates of the incidence of mental retardation range from 1 percent of the U.S. population up to as high as 3 percent, and it doesn’t seem like there’s anywhere near that level in animals. It’s possible we humans don’t know what a developmental disability in an animal looks like, but I also question whether animals might be less vulnerable to developmental disabilities in the first place because their frontal lobes are less developed.
Frontal lobe functions are the first to go, whether the problem is a traumatic head injury, a developmental disability, old age, or just plain lack of sleep. Worse yet, if you damage any part of your brain in an accident or a stroke you wind up with frontal lobe problems even when your frontal lobes weren’t touched.
People always thought this was because the last structure to evolve is the most delicate, while the older structures have been around so long they’ve become incredibly robust. But a neuropsychologist named Elkhonon Goldberg at New York University School of Medicine, who wrote a fantastic book about frontal lobe functions called The Executive Brain, has a different theory. He thinks that while the frontal lobes may be more fragile, there is another factor involved, which is that every other part of the brain is connected to them. When you damage any part of the brain, you change input to the frontal lobes, and when you change input, you change output. If the frontal lobes aren’t getting the right input, they don’t produce the right output even though structurally they’re fine. So all brain damage ends up looking like frontal lobe damage, whether the frontal lobes were injured or not.8
I think he’s right about this, because frontal lobe problems are a big part of autism, and our frontal lobes are structurally pretty good. A major autism researcher told a journalist friend of mine that if you compared the brain scan of an autistic child to the scan of a sixty-year-old CEO, the autistic child’s brain would look better. In other words, the normal brain shrinkage people experience with age makes your brain look more “abnormal” than autism does. There are some structural differences between autistic brains and normal brains, but they’re so small you can’t see them on a regular MRI, and probably every person has structural brain differences to that degree.
Of course, the fact that a brain difference is tiny doesn’t mean its effect is tiny. The researcher also said that a brain difference could be subtle but significant. But he added that there’s nothing about the anatomy of the autistic brain that told him autism can’t eventually be treated by medication the same way psychiatric disorders can be treated.
Until we learn more, I am assuming that one of the problems in autism isn’t bad frontal lobes; it’s bad input into the frontal lobes.
Bad input can happen to normal people, too. Just being incredibly tired and sleep-deprived will lower your frontal lobe function, and the aging process hurts the frontal lobes much more than any other part of the brain.
That brings me back to animals. The good news is: when your frontal lobes are down, you have your animal brain to fall back on. That’s exactly what happens, too. The animal brain is the default position for people. That’s why animals seem so much like people in so many ways: they are like people. And people are like animals, especially when their frontal lobes aren’t working up to par.
I think that’s also the reason for the special connection autistic people like me have to animals. Autistic people’s frontal lobes almost never work as well as normal people’s do, so our brain function ends up being somewhere in between human and animal. We use our animal brains more than normal people do, because we have to. We don’t have any choice. Autistic people are closer to animals than normal people are.
The price human beings pay for having such big, fat frontal lobes is that normal people become oblivious in a way animals and autistic people aren’t. Normal people stop seeing the details that make up the big picture and see only the big picture instead. That’s what your frontal lobes do for you: they give you the big picture. Animals see all the tiny little details that go into the picture.
EXTREME PERCEPTION: THE MYSTERY OF JANE’S CAT
Compared to humans, animals have astonishing abilities to perceive things in the world. They have extreme perception. Their sensory worlds are so much richer than ours it’s almost as if we’re deaf and blind.
That’s probably why a lot of people think animals have ESP. Animals have such incredible abilities to perceive things we can’t that the only explanation we can come up with is extrasensory perception. There’s even a scientist in England who’s written books about animals having ESP. But they don’t have ESP, they just have a super-sensitive sensory apparatus.
Take the cat who knows when its owner is coming home.9 My friend Jane, who lives in a city apartment, has a cat who always knows when she’s on her way home. Jane’s husband works at home, and five minutes before Jane comes home he’ll see the cat go to the door, sit down, and wait. Since Jane doesn’t come home at the same time every day, the cat isn’t going by its sense of time, although animals also have an incredible sense of time. Sigmund Freud used to have his dog with him every time he saw a patient, and he never had to look at his watch to tell when the session was over. The dog always let him know. Parents tell me autistic kids do the same thing. The only explanation Jane and her husband could come up with was ESP. The cat must have been picking up Jane’s I’m-coming-home-now thoughts.
Jane asked me to figure out how her cat could predict her arrival. Since I’ve never seen Jane’s apartment I used my mother’s New York City apartment as a model for solving the mystery. In my imagination I watched my mother’s gray Persian cat walk around the apartment and look out the window. Possibly the cat could see Jane walking down the street. Even though he would not be able to see Jane’s face from the twelfth floor he would probably be able to recognize her body language. Animals are very sensitive to body language. The cat would probably be able to recognize Jane’s walk.
Next I thought about sound cues. Since I am a visual thinker I used “videos” in my imagination to move the cat around in the apartment to determine how it could be getting sound cues that Jane would be arriving a few minutes later. In my mind’s eye I positioned the cat with its ear next to the crack between the door and the door frame. I thought maybe he could hear Jane’s voice on the elevator. But as I played a tape of my mother getting onto the elevator in the lobby, I realized that there would be many days when Mother would ride the elevator alone and silent. She would speak on the elevator for only some of the trips—when there were other people in the elevator car with her—but not all of them.
So I asked Jane, “Is the cat always at the door, or is he at the door only sometimes?”
She said the cat is always at the door.
That meant the cat had to be hearing Jane’s voice on the elevator every day. After I questioned her some more, Jane finally gave me the crucial piece of information that solved the cat mystery: her building does not have a push-button elevator. The elevator is operated by a person. So when Jane got on the elevator she probably said “Hi” to the operator.
A new image flashed into my head. I created an elevator with an operator for my mother’s building. To make the image I used the same method people use in computer graphics. I pulled an image of my mother’s elevator out of memory and combined it with an image of the elevator operator I saw one time at the Ritz in Boston. He had white gloves and a black tuxedo. I lifted the brass elevator control panel and its tuxedoed operator from my Ritz memory file and placed them inside my mother’s elevator.
That was the answer. The fact that Jane’s building had an elevator operator provided the cat with the sound of Jane’s voice while Jane was still down on the first floor. That’s why the cat went to the door to wait. The cat wasn’t predicting Jane’s arrival; for the cat Jane was already home.
DIFFERENT SENSE ORGANS
Cats have really good hearing, so Jane’s cat was using a sensory capacity we humans don’t have. Animals have all kinds of sensory abilities we don’t have, and vice versa. (Our color vision is a good example of a sensory capacity we have that a lot of animals don’t.) Dogs can hear dog whistles; bats and dolphins can use sonar to “see” a moving object at a distance (a flying bat can actually spot and classify a flying beetle from thirty feet away); dung beetles can perceive the polarization of moonlight. I know dung beetles are insects, not animals, but an insect’s brain is so tiny it makes the things their sensory system can handle even more miraculous.
There are two things going on with extreme perception in animals: one is the different set of sense organs animals have, and the other is a different way of processing sense data in the brain. With Jane’s cat, I’m talking mostly about a different physical capacity to hear sounds humans can’t.
There are hundreds or maybe even thousands of examples of this in the animal world, lots of which we probably still don’t know about. A good example is the silent thunder of elephants. It wasn’t until the 1980s that a researcher named Katy Payne, of Cornell University, figured out that elephants communicate with one another using infrasonic sound waves too low for humans to hear.10 People who studied elephants had always wondered how elephant families managed to coordinate their movements with family members miles away. An elephant family could be split up for weeks, and then meet up at the same place at the same time. They had to be communicating with one another somehow, but they were way out of the range any human could either see or shout across.
Katy Payne made a lucky guess about infrasonic sound when she felt “a throbbing in the air” next to the elephant cages at the Portland Zoo in Oregon. She’d had the same feeling as a child when the organ played in church. She started to think maybe the elephants were communicating with each other in a super-low range humans don’t hear. That would solve the problem of the long-distance communication, because infrasonic sound travels a lot farther than sound waves in the register humans do hear.
She turned out to be right. Elephants “roar” out to each other below our level of hearing. During the daytime an elephant can hear another elephant calling him from at least as far away as two and a half miles. At nighttime, because of temperature inversions, that distance can go up by an order of magnitude to as much as twenty-five miles. It’s a huge distance.
Now it turns out that elephants may be talking to one another through the ground, not just the air. Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell, a biologist at Stanford, is working on this. She believes elephants can probably use seismic communication—making the ground rumble by stomping on it—to communicate with other elephants as far away as twenty miles.
She figured this out by watching the elephants in the Etosha National Park in Namibia. Right before another herd of elephants arrived, the elephants she was watching would start to “pay a lot of attention to the ground with their feet.”11 They’d do things like shift their weight or lean forward, or lift a foot off the ground. They were listening.
Dr. O’Connell-Rodwell thinks the animals are probably using the pads of their feet like the head of a drum. She and her team are also dissecting elephant feet to see whether they have pascinian and meissner corpuscles, which are special sensors elephants have in their trunks to detect vibrations. If they find them in the feet, too, that’s pretty good evidence elephants use seismic waves to communicate. A lot of animals communicate by thumping on the ground, including skunks and rabbits, so it won’t surprise me if we find out elephants are talking to one another that way.
If elephants do have special corpuscles to detect vibrations that would be an example of an animal species having extreme perception because they’re built differently and have different sense organs. Animals have all kinds of sense receptors we don’t. Another example: dolphins have an oil-filled sac in their foreheads, underneath their forehead bumps, that they use for sonar. The dolphin sends a sound through the oil (which “focuses” the sound) and out to objects in the water. The sound bounces back to the dolphin and his brain forms a sound picture of what’s out there. Humans can’t use sonar because humans don’t have any of the necessary sense structures.
Humans also have sensory receptors animals don’t, like the huge number of cones in our retina for seeing color.
I’ve been talking mostly about vision, but all the other senses are different in different animals, too. There’s some fascinating new research about the relationship between vision and smell in New World versus Old World primates. Old World primates are the famous ones everyone knows about: gorillas, chimpanzees, baboons, orangutans, macaques, humans. New World primates are the smaller animals we call monkeys. New World primates usually live in trees in Central and South America; they have long prehensile tails and flat noses. Tamarins, squirrel monkeys, sakis, and marmosets are all New World monkeys.
Old World primates, like baboons, chimpanzees, and macaques, have trichromatic, three-color vision, but most of the New World monkeys (spider monkeys, marmosets, capuchins) only have dichromatic, two-color vision. (Some New World females have trichromatic vision, but not all.)
What’s interesting about this is that Old World primates and humans also have very poor ability to smell pheromones, which are chemical signals animals emit as a form of communication. (Most people think of pheromones as sexual signals, like the pheromones a female in heat emits, but a pheromone is any chemical used for communication. Ants, for instance, leave trails of scents behind them for other ants to follow.) About a year ago researchers found that Old World primates and humans both have so many mutations in a gene called TRP2, which is part of the pheromone signaling pathway, that it’s not working anymore. In the course of evolution, the pheromone system in Old World primates, including humans, broke down.
It turns out that when we gained three-color vision we probably lost pheromone signaling. Jianzhi George Zhang, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Michigan, ran a computer simulation to find out when the TRP2 gene started to deteriorate, and discovered that TRP2 went into decline at the same time Old World primates were developing trichromatic color vision, around 23 million years ago.12
Probably what happened was that once Old World primates could see in three colors they started using their vision to find a mate, instead of their sense of smell. That theory fits with the fact that a lot of Old World primate females have bright red sexual swellings when they’re fertile, while New World monkeys do not. Once monkeys no longer needed a good sense of smell to reproduce successfully, their ability to smell probably went into decline as a direct result.
That would have happened because use it or lose it is a principle in evolution. If monkeys with a poor sense of smell can reproduce just as well as monkeys with an excellent sense of smell, the monkeys with the poor ability pass all of their weak or defective smell genes on to their offspring, and any spontaneous new mutations in the smell genes don’t get winnowed out. It looks like that’s what happened to Old World primates. The normal mutations that happen in the process of reproduction just kept accumulating until no primates had a working copy of TRP2 anymore. Improved vision came at a cost to their sense of smell.
SAME BRAIN CELLS, DIFFERENT PROCESSING
So far I’ve been talking about the sense organ or sense receptor part of animal perception: animals have different sensory organs than we do, organs that let them see, hear, and smell things we can’t. But the other half of the story is where things get interesting, and that is the differences in brain processing.
All sensory data, in any creature, has to be processed by the brain. And when you get down to the level of brain cells, or neurons, humans have the same neurons animals do. We’re using them differently, but the cells are the same.
That means that theoretically we could have extreme perceptions the way animals do if we figured out how to use the sensory processing cells in our brains the way animals do. I think this is more than a theory; I think there are people who already do use their sense neurons the way animals do. My student Holly, who is severely dyslexic, has such acute auditory perception that she can actually hear radios that aren’t turned on. All appliances that are plugged in continue to draw power, even when they’re turned off. Holly can hear the tiny little transmissions a turned-off radio is receiving. She’ll say, “NPR is doing a show on lions,” and we’ll turn the radio on and sure enough: NPR is doing a show on lions. Holly can hear it. She can hear the hum of electric wires in the wall. And she’s incredible with animals. She can tell what they’re feeling from the tiniest variations in their breathing; she can hear changes the rest of us can’t.
Autistic people almost always have excruciating sound sensitivities. The only way I can describe how a lot of sounds affect me is to compare it to staring straight into the sun. I get overwhelmed by normal sounds in the environment, and it’s painful. Most autism professionals talk about this as just being super-sensitive, which is true as far as it goes. But I think autistic people are also super-perceptive. They’re hearing things normal people aren’t, like a piece of candy being unwrapped in the next room.
It happens with vision, too; a lot of autistic people have told me they can see the flicker in fluorescent lighting. Holly’s the same way. She can barely function in fluorescent lighting because of it. Our whole environment is built to the specifications and limitations of a normal human perceptual system—and that’s not the same thing as a normal animal perceptual system, or as a normal-abnormal human system like a dyslexic person’s system, or an autistic person’s. There are probably huge numbers of people who don’t fit the normal environment. Even worse, half the time they probably don’t even realize they don’t fit, because this is the only environment they’ve ever been in, so they don’t have a point of comparison.
Some researchers say that people like Holly have developed super-sensitive hearing because their visual processing is so scrambled. Super-sensitive hearing is a compensation, in other words. That’s always the explanation researchers give for the super-hearing of blind people; people who are blind have built up their hearing to compensate for not being able to see.
I’m sure that’s true, but I don’t think it’s the whole story. I think the potential to be able to hear the radio when it’s turned off is already there inside everyone’s brains; we just can’t access it. Somehow a person with sensory problems figures out how to get to it.
I have two reasons for thinking this. First, there are a lot of cases in the literature of people suddenly developing extreme perception after a head injury. In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat Oliver Sacks has a story about a medical student who was taking a lot of recreational drugs (mostly amphetamines). One night he dreamed that he was a dog. When he woke up he found that all of a sudden, literally overnight, he had developed super-heightened perceptions, including a heightened sense of smell. When he went to his clinic, he recognized all twenty of his patients, before he saw them, purely by smell. He said he could smell their emotions, too, which is something people have always suspected dogs can do. He could recognize every single street and shop in New York City by smell, and he felt a strong impulse to sniff and touch things.13
His color perception was much more vivid, too. All of a sudden he could see dozens of shades of colors he’d never seen before—dozens of shades of the color brown, for instance.
This happened overnight. It’s not like he lost some other sense and then built up his sense of smell over time to compensate. He dreamed he was a dog and the next morning woke up able to smell things like a dog. The actor Christopher Reeve had a similar experience right after his accident. All of a sudden he had an incredibly heightened sense of smell.
The other important thing to know about this guy is that he hadn’t had any big brain injury that anyone knew about. Dr. Sacks assumes that the heavy drug usage was probably the cause, but there’s no way of knowing. The student continued to function in medical school just fine, and his vision and sense of smell went back to normal about three weeks later. Of course, some part of his brain could have been temporarily incapacitated, but if it was, there’s no obvious way that being able to smell people the way a dog smells people helped him compensate for whatever might have been wrong. The most likely explanation is that he always had an ability to smell like a dog and see fifty different shades of brown, but he just didn’t know it and couldn’t access it. Somehow his heavy amphetamine usage must have opened up the door to that part of his brain.
My other reason for thinking everyone has the potential for extreme perception is the fact that animals have extreme perception, and people have animal brains. People use their animal brains all day long, but the difference is that people aren’t conscious of what’s in them. We’ll talk about this in the last chapter. A lot of what animals see normal people see, too, but normal people don’t know they’re seeing it. Instead, a normal person’s brain uses the detailed raw data of the world to form a generalized concept or schema, and that’s what reaches consciousness. Fifty shades of brown turn into just one unified color: brown. That’s why normal people see only what they expect to see—because they can’t consciously experience the raw data, only the schema their brains create out of the raw data.
Normal people see and hear schemas, not raw sensory data.
I can’t prove that humans are taking in the same things animals are, but we do have proof that humans are taking in way more sensory data than they realize. That’s one of the major findings of the inattentional blindness research. It’s not that normal people don’t see the lady dressed in a gorilla suit at all; it’s that their brains screen her out before she reaches consciousness.
We know people see things they don’t know they see because of years of research into areas like implicit cognition and subliminal perception. Dr. Mack and Dr. Rock, who wrote Inattentional Blindness, adapted some of these studies for their inattentional blindness research. They’d do things like ask their subjects to tell them which arm of a cross that flashed onto a computer screen for about 200 milliseconds was longer. Then, on some of the trials, there’d be a word like “grace” or “flake” printed on the screen, too. Most people didn’t notice the word. They were paying attention to the cross, so they didn’t see it.14
But Dr. Rock and Dr. Mack showed that many of them had seen the words unconsciously. Later on, when they gave subjects just the first three letters of the word—gra or fla—and asked them to finish them with any word that came to mind, 36 percent answered “grace” or “flake.” Only 4 percent of the control subjects—these were people who hadn’t been subliminally exposed to any words at all—came up with “grace” or “flake.” That’s a huge difference and can only mean that the subjects who were subliminally exposed to “grace” and “flake” really did see “grace” and “flake.” They just didn’t know it.
So we know that people perceive lots more than they realize consciously. Drs. Rock and Mack say that inattentional blindness works at a high level of mental processing, meaning that your brain does a lot of processing before it allows something into consciousness. In a normal human brain sensory data comes in, your brain figures out what it is, and only then does it decide whether to tell you about it, depending on how important it is. A lot of processing has already taken place before a normal human becomes conscious of something in the environment. (Drs. Rock and Mack use the phrase high level to mean advanced processing, not necessarily higher levels of the brain. They don’t discuss neuropsychology, just cognitive psychology.)
There are a few things that always do break through to consciousness. I mentioned that people almost always notice their names in the middle of a page of text no matter how hard they’re concentrating on something else; they will also notice a cartoon smiley face. But if you change the face just a tiny bit—turn the smile upside down so it’s a frown, for instance—people don’t see it. This is more evidence for the fact that your brain thoroughly processes sensory data before allowing it to become conscious. With the smiley face your brain has to have processed it to the level of knowing it’s a face and even that it’s a smiling face before it lets the face into conscious perception. Otherwise you’d see the frowny face as often as you saw the smiley face. It’s the same principle with your name. If your name is “Jack,” the word “Jack” will pop out at you in the middle of a page. But the letters “Jick” won’t. That means your brain processes the word “Jack” all the way up to the level of knowing that it’s your name before your brain admits “Jack” into consciousness.
We don’t know why humans have inattentional blindness. Maybe inattentional blindness is the brain’s way of filtering out distractions. If you’re trying to watch a basketball game and a lady gorilla comes into view, your brain screens her out because she’s not supposed to be there, and she’s not relevant to what you’re trying to do, which is watch a game. Your nonconscious brain takes a look at the lady gorilla and decides she’s a distraction.
Being able to filter out distractions is a good thing; just ask anyone who can’t filter things out, like a person with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. It’s hard for humans to function intellectually when every little sensory detail in their environment keeps hijacking their attention. You go into information overload.
But humans probably paid a price for developing the ability to filter out ladies wearing gorilla suits, which is that normal people can’t not filter out distractions. A normal brain automatically filters out irrelevant details, whether you want it to or not. You can’t just tell your brain: be sure and let me know if anything out of the ordinary pops up. It doesn’t work that way.
Autistic people and animals are different: we can’t filter stuff out. All the zillions and zillions of sensory details in the world come into our conscious awareness, and we get overwhelmed. There’s no way to know exactly how close an autistic person’s sensory perceptions are to an animal’s. There are probably some big differences, if only for the reason that animal perceptions are normal for animals, while autistic people’s perceptions are not normal for people.
But I think many or even most autistic people experience the world a lot the way animals experience the world: as a swirling mass of tiny details. We’re seeing, hearing, and feeling all the things no one else can.