Incredibly interesting book

I really didn't know what to expect when I purchased this book, and was influenced to buy it based on the other high reviews here at amazon.com. This book was fascinating. I love animals and ride horses, and this book helps you to understand many different types of animals, as well as learn about autistic people, problems with inbreeding of pedigree dogs, ect. If you are interested in animals and/or psychology, you will probably like this book.

An awesome, unique book

Much food for thought for anyone who cares about or has anything to do with animals, and especially for breeders. Temple is one of America's leading animal behavior researchers and her autism gives her a stunningly unique perspective on a whole range of issues, particularly how animals see the world and what is ethical use/treatment of animals.

She doesn't mince words, and I'm sure some of the generalizations she makes will get people's hackles up. At the same time, most of what she says is spot on. She has a great deal to say about the disastrous accidents that can occur in selective breeding, and how to avoid them. Some of the stories from her personal experience made my blood run cold.

Most astounding of all, she explains it all in language anyone could understand. Truly, it's an amazing book and I can't recommend it highly enough.

Cognition 101

First, I love this book. Second, the title is somewhat misleading and many readers should be warned. If you are looking for an improvement on 'The Horse Whisperer', this isn't your book. There isn't anything on talking to your pet or animals at the zoo. The author points this out on the first or second page, which leaves me wondering if the title was attached after the fact by a marketing guru. A more literal title would be something like "Using neuroscience and slaughter house malfunctions to understand mammal behavior" would be more accurate. There is a great deal of violence described in this book, and almost zero sentimentality. It will horrify many.

Apparently, tales of the slaughter house don't turn my stomach. I loved it.

Grandin launches into a bold description of animal/human psychology based on emotion rather than logic. Since Descartes published "I think, therefore I am (and animals don't, so they are not)," Western Philosophy has been trying to remove emotion from our understanding of 'being human'. Emotion has become an evolutionary hang-over which the enlightened learn to defeat. Grandin puts emotion back into the logic of living, and does a great job of demonstrating her thesis with neuroscience and evolutionary theory.

The narrative and outlook resonates with me. She isn't dividing the world into 'human' and 'animal' domains. When she is talking about translating animals, she is talking about translating the human animal, too.

Grandin's basic insight comes from her efforts to relate to 'normal' humans. She writes, "The difference between a normal person's mental clutter and the intense, detailed absorption of an autistic person's visual concentration closely resembles the difference between humans and animals." How does she know that animal thought parallel's her manner of 'thinking in pictures'? Initially, she simply assumed as much. It was only natural to assume other beings see the world as you do. In her case, it was a lucky guess, producing effective results and a successful career. Now that she can reflect on her success, she concludes it came from thinking in pictures, as non-humans do, but being enough of a 'language' thinker to communicate this insight to the rest of us. Normal people, Grandin writes, don't experience their perceptions directly. Instead, they experience a neocortex filtered summary which is assumed to be reality. For example, she tells of an experiment where subjects were told to watch a basketball video and count the number of passes. While they intently counted, a gorilla walks out onto the center court and jumps up and down. Over 50% of the subject failed to notice the gorilla. It wasn't 'expected', so they didn't see it.

Grandin is agitating for a revolution in how cognition is understood. She is over turning the enthroned theories that animals only respond to 'operant conditioning' (rewards for desired behavior). In its place she proposes 'social learning', an ability to learn from the example of peers. She argues that operant conditioning fails as an evolutionary process. If an antelope calf only learned to fear mountain lions after the experiencing a face-to-face encounter, there wouldn't be any antelopes to evolve. Instead, calves learn by watching the reaction of peers and accepting that emotional response as reality. Social learning theory has recently gained momentum with the discovery of 'mirror neurons' that provide mammals with exactly this ability.

The details are sometimes hard to grasp, but well worth the effort.