WhatFinger


Savant syndrome

Do Animals Think Like Autistic Savants?



It is an interesting question that was most popularly raised in Temple Grandin’s book, Animals in Translation. Suffering from autism herself, Grandin believed that animals exhibited a similar approach to life as she did. "If you want to understand animals, you have to get away from language," she says.

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Autism is a brain development disorder that impairs social interaction and communication, and causes restricted and repetitive behavior, all starting before a child is three years old. Savant syndrome describes a person having a severe developmental or mental handicap with extraordinary mental abilities not found in most people. When these two things are coupled, they create an autistic savant. Grandin’s theory went further than just suggesting that animals exhibited amazing feats. One must only look at the Clark’s nutcracker, which is able to remember thousands of locations where they have stored nuts. Or the Australian Magpie which is able to imitate the entire bird song of another bird having only heard it once. However Giorgio Vallortigara, of the University of Trento, Italy, and colleagues believe that these feats are simply the result of evolutionary adaptation, not savant-like behavior. "Autism is a pathological condition," he says. "The extraordinary feats of remembering thousands of caches or sounds shown by some animal species are exhibited by healthy animals." Grandin’s theory does have the luck of being provable, which Vallortigara and colleagues set out to prove or disprove. Autism is often linked to the malfunction of the brain’s left hemisphere, which leads someone to put too much emphasis on the details. For example, an autistic child who learned what a giraffe was by its spots, could mistake a leopard with a giraffe. Vallortigara and Lesley Rogers, a colleague at the University of New England, Armidale, Australia, have carried out independent research in to this sort of behavior in animals. Using domestic chicks they covered up the left or right eye of the chick, provided them with both familiar and unfamiliar stimuli, and were allowed to choose. When the left eye was covered, the chick was forced in to using only the left hemisphere of its brain, in which case it could only deal with the detail of the stimuli provided. When the patch was swapped to the right eye, the bird’s right hemisphere was all that was open to it, and thus it could only process large and categorical differences. "These specializations of the hemispheres are the same as in humans," Rogers says. The experiments thus showed that only when forced to use a specific half of its brain did an animal exhibit autistic-like behavior. This indicates that animal brains are more likely to tend towards the neurotypical rather than autistic. However according to Howard Eichenbaum, of the Centre for Memory and Brain at Boston University, Massachusetts, "both Grandin and Vallortigara compound speculation on top of speculation," he says. According to Eichenbaum, because there is no consensus on the distinction between the left and right hemisphere in an animal’s brain, there can be no proof either way. Joshua Hill, a Geek’s-Geek from Melbourne, Australia, Josh is an aspiring author with dreams of publishing his epic fantasy, currently in the works, sometime in the next 5 years. A techie, nerd, sci-fi nut and bookworm.


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Guest Column Joshua Hill -- Bio and Archives

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