On Saturday night at 8pm, HBO is putting on a biopic with Claire Danes playing
Temple Grandin, the high-functioning autistic animal sciences professor who is so interesting from a sort of sci-fi point of view, like
HAL 9000 come to life. Her view, however, is that autistic people tend to have brains that function not like computers but like animals — they can't see the forest for the trees. Animals are constantly spooked by small visual details that don't bother non-autistic humans because we barely notice much of what goes on around us that isn't relevant to our main trains of thought.
Here's a very positive review of the Temple Grandin film by Dorothy Rabinowitz in the WSJ.