Thinking in pictures

I have no picture, I have no thought.

Tutoring me in algebra was useless because there was nothing for me to visualize.

The autistic brain was most active in the part of the brain that processes the individual words while the normal brain was most active in the part that analyzes the whole sentence. The Asperger brain was active in both areas.

normal brains tend to ignore the details while people on the autism spectrum tend to focus on the details instead of larger concepts

they cannot handle any deviation from their routine. F

visual image or word becomes associated with an experience.

When I was in high school, I received a brochure from a cattle chute company that said, “thoughts with no price tags.” “Men will wrangle for religion, write for it, fight for it, die for it, anything but live for it.” I never forgot that quote.

The sins of the system are specific to each specific society. A sin of the system in the United States would be of no consequence in Holland. A good example would be drug offenses. In the United States the penalty for a drug offense may be worse than the penalty for murder. This makes no logical sense.

People feed, shelter, and breed cattle and hogs, and in return the animals provide food and clothing. We must never abuse them, because that would break the ancient contract. We owe it to the animals to give them decent living conditions and a painless death. People are often confused by the paradox of my work, but to my practical, scientific mind it makes sense to provide a painless death for the cattle I love.

However, there is one thing that completely separates people from animals. It is not language or war or toolmaking; it is long-term altruism. During a famine in Russia, for example, scientists guarded the seed bank of plant genetics so that future generations would have the benefits of genetic diversity in food crops. For the benefit of others, they allowed themselves to starve to death in a lab filled with grain. No animal would do this. Altruism exists in animals, but not to this degree. Every time I park my car near the National USDA Seed Storage Lab at Colorado State University, I think that protecting the contents of this building is what separates us from animals.