From Temple Grandin, Colorado State University
When I wrote that animals’ great feats of memory make them resemble autistic savants (23 February, p 8) I was not implying that they were abnormal. My hypothesis is that the Clark’s nutcracker and an autistic savant may use similar neurological mechanisms for storing and retrieving pictures of things they have seen in the past.
What amazed me was that the nutcracker’s task of remembering where hundreds of nut caches are hidden is so similar to an autistic savant remembering every street in a large city.
In my own mind all my thoughts are like photographs, and I access information in my memory like Google for images. If I think about a teapot, I see pictures of specific teapots. There is no generalised image.
Fort Collins, Colorado, US
