Translation↑

When playing peek-a-boo, a baby momentarily experiences the “real” absence of their parent. It might resemble the anxiety a child feels when separated from their parent in a large facility, such as a department store, and fears, “What if I never see them again?” Over time, however, through repeated experiences, the baby learns that even if the parent’s face is temporarily hidden behind their hands, it remains there and will reappear. Similarly, a child learns that if their parent is somewhere within the same facility, they will eventually reunite. Even if the parent goes abroad, as long as they share the location of their home, the child believes, “They’ll come back.”

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In Animals in Translation, Temple Grandin & Johnson, Catherine writes, “Ordinary adults handle novelty better than animals, autistic people, and children.” This is attributed to adults’ ability to employ cognitive processes like categorization, abstraction, and inference, which allow them to organize and integrate information. These processes help adults quickly assess whether what’s in front of them is manageable or not.
In contrast, animals, autistic individuals, and young children tend to rely less on generalization or abstraction. As a result, each event feels isolated and lacks the reassurance of broader patterns, leading to heightened anxiety. Interestingly, Grandin also offers a counterpoint: while animals perceive the richness of raw, individual details, humans—equipped with large frontal lobes that excel at information reduction—pay a price for this skill: they become “desensitized.” She even likens it to having impaired vision or hearing.

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In daily life, we are supported by a vast amount of information. Laws, names (language), and customs—these are just a few examples of the structures that maintain our mental peace. For instance, names like “farm” or “hospital” immediately convey the purpose of these places, even if we’ve never been to them. At the very least, we can infer they aren’t “human processing facilities,” which provides some reassurance. For animals, however, such linguistic cues don’t exist. To them, a slaughterhouse and a hospital might be indistinguishable—both equally terrifying.

We live in environments—buildings, towns, and societies—constructed and governed by humans. These are systems we trust to function according to comprehensible rules. In normal life, we assume we understand what these structures are, how they work, and what purposes they serve. It is only during emergencies, like natural disasters, that we are reminded of the uncontrollable nature of reality.

Yet in our day-to-day existence, we rarely feel the existential fear of the unknown that animals likely experience regularly. We have built systems that shield us from such fears.

The same applies to unfamiliar food. Imagine being served a sandwich containing chocolate, pork, cheese, and mayonnaise. Even if you’ve never eaten it before, you can draw on past experiences to imagine how it might taste. In Japan, where food safety standards are trusted, the idea that it might contain something life-threatening wouldn’t even cross your mind.

In her book, Grandin recounts a story about an autistic boy who couldn’t resist touching every screw in a school building. A caregiver humorously remarked that the boy was “making sure the building wouldn’t collapse on his head.”

This reminded me of a story by the artist Koki Tanaka, who described seeing a man on a foreign train. The man tested every hand strap by hanging his weight on it before finally sitting down. Interestingly, he didn’t inspect the seat itself. Tanaka reflected, “No one ever checks, so we can’t really be sure if those straps are actually strong enough to hold our weight.” He described the man as someone who “exposes the uncertainty of the world.”

Through generalization, abstraction, and reliance on language, we stop truly seeing the world and become increasingly desensitized. We lose the habit of observing carefully, exercising caution, and verifying things for ourselves. Ultimately, we forget that the world is inherently uncertain.

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Grandin, Temple, & Johnson, Catherine. Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior. Translated by Naoko Shinogi, NHK Publishing, 2006.

Tanaka, Koki. It’s Inevitably Fragmented. Akaaka Art Publishing, 2013.

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