Temple Grandin on Her Search Engine

I just loved flying things when I was child. I loved model airplanes that flew. I loved kites. If it flew, I liked it. And then when I got into high school, it was horses. Horses, horses, and more horses.

I was diagnosed with autism as a young child. I had all of the full-blown autism symptoms, no speech, screaming, just everything. I was definitely fully autistic. Now, my brain is visually indexed. I’m basically Totally visual. I mean, everything in my mind works like a search engine set for the image function. And you type in the keyword and I get pictures, and it comes up in an associational sort of way. I want you to give me some key words  and don’t give me something common like house or car, because everybody can visualize that.

Alfalfa.

Well, I saw a field of hay. Now, I’m seeing bales of hay over where  Mark’s horses are. And I go, oh that’s grass hay, that’s not alfalfa. And now I’m down at the zoo, and they used to feed alfalfa hay to the antelopes, and Nancy used to complain it was way too rich. OK, you’re wondering how did I get from alfalfa to the Phoenix Zoo. OK, you can see how it’s associational. There is a logical progression there.

I’ve designed handling facilities for all the major meat companies. Half of the cattle in this country, when they go to a meat plant, they’re handled in a center track restrainer system that I designed. My first big breakthrough was when I designed dip vat systems and they worked really, really well. Beef Magazine and all the cattle magazines were there, and one of them called it a work of art and I was just so happy. People you know, being autistic, they thought I was really  weird, but my stuff worked.

I started doing my livestock handling class. I also guest lecture on humane slaughter methods, cattle handling, meat quality things, livestock behavior for the veterinary college. My students in my class actually have to draw drawings. One of the interesting things I’ve found is that there are some students that absolutely can’t draw, that have learning problems. I can tell by looking at their drawings, because instead of just drawing nice half-circles, they’ve got it all over the place.

I just had a student this year in my class that her drawings were really horrible. I’m asking the student, so what are you seeing? She said, well, I see just waves, and I asked her if she hated driving at night, haven fluorescent lights. Yes. Does print jiggle on the page? Yes. I suggested she go out and try on some different colored sunglasses and she went out and got some little pink sunglasses and her economics grade went from a B to an A, because now she could see the charts. Cheap sunglasses, simple intervention. Nobody knows why they work. But they do and there’s kids flunking out of school that don’t need to. That’s the thing that’s so disgusting and the only reason I know about this is because of the autism community.

One of the big concerns I have right now is getting people on the spectrum into good careers. Into the things like computer science and stuff like that.  As an autistic person, I am what I do more than what I feel. I get a lot of satisfaction in life, you know, I can design something and it works, or I have a student say, you know, your course was really helpful for me. Or somebody likes one of my books, they say, well, it helped them with their autistic child, or it helped them to understand their dog. That makes me really happy that I’m doing something that does something constructive on the ground.

Asperger’s has always been here. And it has another name, geek and nerd. And when you get into the really smart kids, I get worried about them getting held back by that label. Because I know odd maintenance guys that are just brilliant in appliance. Engineers– in fact, there’s 2 and 1/2 as many engineers with a family history of people with Asperger’s. It’s always been here. What I’ve noticed out in Silicon Valley, there’s a lot of kids out there that are Asperger’s. They’re geeks, they’re nerds. And their parents apprentice them into the computer industry. When the kid is maybe 11 years old, he’s taught programming. By the time the kid’s in high school, he’s doing Mom and Dad’s work on the computer. And they’re just apprenticed in. Those are the lucky ones. And they’re all over the tech industry. And then I go out somewhere away from Silicon Valley, and see a guy come up to the book table. He’s got a big ponytail, and ought to be going to computer school, and they want to put him on welfare. I say, no, he needs to be going to computer school.