Great book!

I am currently reading Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin. She is an animal scientist with autism, and uses her unique perspective to explain how animals and autistics think. I am finding this book fascinating, and it makes me think about so many other things I have learnt. I am only about a 1/4 through, but thought I would write about some of the ideas so far. One of the biggest differences she sees with animals and normal people, is that animals see details more than the big picture. They will notice unexpected little things in their environment that relate to sensory data like noise or visuals. People tend to only see what they expect to see and focus instead on the big picture. This got me thinking about Jungs Sensory vs Intuitive. Temple herself sees in detail, as she says do Autistics and animals. Her theory about this difference is that the animal mostly relies on the paleomammalian brain, the animal brain that looks after the senses and survival stuff, humans have a more developed neomammalian brain that allows us to make associations between all the information coming into the other brain and discern what's relevant to focus on. Autistic people have a functioning neomammalian brain but have defects in the pathways that connect them to the paleomammalian brain, so they rely more heavily on the animal instinct than the frontal lobe. When you use more frontal lobe you forfeit some of your animal instincts and when you use more animal instincts you forfeit some of the frontal lobe. Does this explain the Jungian theory of being capable of both but being dominant in another. Autistic children sense a lot of things that we ignore and they can suffer because of it. D is a sensory person and relates better to animals. In the book on creative therapy I was reading they described 4 temperaments similar to personality profiles. They also put described how ADD Autism and Aspergers were more prominent in different sectors of the four temperments. So depending on which connections were formed in childhood, a person would rely more heavily on different parts of the brain, using these different parts would result in different behaviours, motivation and anxiety.
Another area she talked about was the selectivity of the frontal lobe. Our senses are overloaded with data all day everyday. Our frontal lobe scans the information and selects relevant information for us to be aware of and the rest stays in our subconcious. We ignore and tune out, a lot of data, so that we can focus on what is important to us. Jung relates this to our judging function. The Myers-Briggs addition was to decide if our dominant inclination is to filter the information or to collect it. Perceiving or Judging. People on the spectrum have an impaired ability to filter out the huge amounts of information that assails them. They are super sensitive. Does this mean that they would profile as Perceivers? Some Autistic peoples brains have switched off the sound despite having a fully functioning hearing capability. Maybe this is a coping mechanism.
She describes the super hearing of a dyslexic student of hers who can hear a transmission from a radio that has been switched off, if it is still plugged in. I can imagine that some people declared mentally unstable are predisposed to this extreme sensitivity, and hear electricity hum and radios crackling that the rest of us can't hear, and would be driven mad by it. She suggests all human brains are capable of this but unless forced to by an accident or drugs we don't know how to use this capability.
She then goes on to describe how selective breeding of physical traits almost always has a neurological effect. Too much inbreeding results in emotional neuroses, sometimes aggression. Certain physical traits often partner with certain behaviours, like animals with albino skin and blue eyes having problems. I read that there are a large number of diagnoses in silicon valley where many science and computer people live. Some of these people are possibly undiagnosed high functioning Autistic, and are selectively breeding these children with more of these traits unknowingly. Evolution at work. Maybe this is the future generation of children who can multitask, and live in a computerised world and we just haven't caught up yet.
As I said I find so much of this book fascinating and it triggers off so many little tangents in my mind so I am off to get back to reading.