Temple Grandin Quotes

I am different, not less.

Nature is cruel, but we don't have to be.

What would happen if the autism gene was eliminated from the gene pool? You would have a bunch of people standing around in a cave, chatting and socializing and not getting anything done.

Nature is cruel but we don't have to be

I think using animals for food is an ethical thing to do, but we've got to do it right. We've got to give those animals a decent life and we've got to give them a painless death. We owe the animal respect.

You simply cannot tell other people they are stupid, even if they really are stupid.

If I could snap my fingers and be nonautistic, I would not. Autism is part of what I am.

I don’t want my thoughts to die with me, I want to have done something. I’m not interested in power, or piles of money. I want to leave something behind. I want to make a positive contribution - know that my life has meaning.

I believe there is a reason such as autism, severe manic-depression, and schizophrenia remain in our gene pool even though there is much suffering as a result.

But my favorite of Einstein's words on religion is "Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind." I like this because both science and religion are needed to answer life's great questions.

The worst thing you can do is nothing. (re: teaching children with autism)

[T]he only place on earth where immortality is provided is in libraries. This is the collective memory of humanity.

Animals make us Human.

In an ideal world the scientist should find a method to prevent the most severe forms of autism but allow the milder forms to survive. After all, the really social people did not invent the first stone spear. It was probably invented by an Aspie who chipped away at rocks while the other people socialized around the campfire. Without autism traits we might still be living in caves.

Unfortunately, most people never observe the natural cycle of birth and death. They do not realize that for one living thing to survive, another living thing must die.

There’s a saying in engineering: You can build things cheap, fast, or right, but not all three.

The world needs all types of minds.

The big companies are like steel and activists are like heat. Activists soften the steel, and then I can bend it into pretty grillwork and make reforms.

My mind can always separate the two. Even when I am very upset, I keep reviewing the facts over and over until I can come to a logical conclusion.

Animals like novelty if they can choose to investigate it; they fear novelty if you shove it in their faces.

We raise them for us; that means we owe them some respect. nature is creul but we dont have to be. I wouldnt want to have my guts ripped out by a lion. I'd much rather die in a slaughter house if it were done right.

DIFFERENT NOT LESS

In a noisy place I can’t understand speech, because I cannot screen out the background noise.

I believe that the best way to create good living conditions for any animal, whether it's a captive animal living in a zoo, a farm animal or a pet, is to base animal welfare programs on the core emotion systems in the brain. My theory is that the environment animals live in should activate their positive emotions as much as possible, and not activate their negative emotions any more than necessary. If we get the animal's emotions rights, we will have fewer problem behaviors... All animals and people have the same core emotion systems in the brain.

Sometimes you have to go outside your field of study to find the right people.

If language naturally evolves to serve the needs of tiny rodents with tiny rodent brains, then what's unique about language isn't the brilliant humans who invented it to communicate high-level abstract thoughts. What's unique about language is that the creatures who develop it are highly vulnerable to being eaten.

Children who are visual thinkers will often be good at drawing, other arts, and building things with building toys such as Legos.

Neither living nor learning was good without order.

I believe that the place where an animal dies is a sacred one. There is a need to bring ritual into the conventional slaughter plants and use as a means to shape people's behavior. It would help prevent people from becoming numbed, callous, or cruel. The ritual could be something very simple, such as a moment of silence. In addition to developing better designs and making equipment to insure the humane treatments of all animals, that would be my contribution.

In dealing with autism, I'm certainly not saying we should lose sight of the need to work on deficits, But the focus on deficits is so intense and so automatic that people lose sight of the strengths.

It's OK to be an eccentric; it's not OK to be a rude and dirty eccentric.

The Internet may be the best thing yet for improving an autistic person’s social life.

There's a point where anecdotal evidence becomes truth

Bad things always happen when an animal is overselected for any single trait. Nature will give you a nasty surprise.

I replaced emotional complexity with visual and intellectual complexity. I questioned everything and looked to logic, science, and intellect for answers.

The word “autism” still conveys a fixed and dreadful meaning to most people—they visualize a child mute, rocking, screaming, inaccessible, cut off from human contact. And we almost always speak of autistic children, never of autistic adults, as if such children never grew up, or were somehow mysteriously spirited off the planet, out of society.

My thinking pattern always starts with specifics and works toward generalization in an associational and nonsequential way.

I get great satisfaction out of doing clever things with my mind, but I don’t know what it is like to feel rapturous joy.

Label-locked thinking can affect treatment. For instance, I heard a doctor say about a kid with gastrointestinal issues, “Oh, he has autism. That’s the problem”—and then he didn’t treat the GI problem.

Teachers who work with autistic children need to understand associative thought patterns.

Neuroanatomy isn't destiny. Neither is genetics. They don't define who you will be. But they do define who you might be. They define who you can be.

Neurotypical people seem to think and feel that it's okay to be rigid as long as their ideas are shared by enough people.

It is human nature to strive.

To destroy other people's culture is to rob them of immortality.

Many autistic children like to smell things, and smell may provide more reliable information about their surroundings than either vision or hearing.

Complicating matters even further, on a day-to-day basis, in the same individual, the sensory sensitivities can change, especially when the person is tired or stressed. These

People who are attached to each other develop a social dependence on each other that's based in a physical dependence on brain opiates.

When something is "all in your mind," people tend to think that it's willful, that it's something you could control if only you tried harder or if you had been trained differently. I'm hoping that the newfound certainty that autism is in your brain and in your genes will affect public attitudes.

Temple Grandin has argued that ordinary people can become sadistic from the dehumanizing work of constant slaughter.

[Temple Grandin] told him that the one thing she wanted more than anything else in life was for someone to hug her - but the moment that anyone did, she couldn't bear it.

The world needs different kinds of minds to work together.” ― Temple Grandin ―

For example, the main reason zebras never got domesticated is that they’re ultra-high-fear. Zebras may bite people and not let go. They injure more people in zoos than the tigers do.15

What a horse does under compulsion he does blindly, and his performance is no more beautiful than would be that of a ballet-dancer taught by whip and goad. The performances of horse or man so treated would seem to be displays of clumsy gestures rather than of grace and beauty. What we need is that the horse should of his own accord exhibit his finest airs and paces at set signals.

Boys who cry can work for Google. Boys who trash computers cannot. I once was at a science conference, and I saw a NASA scientist who had just found out that his project was canceled—a project he’d worked on for years. He was maybe sixty-five years old, and you know what? He was crying. And I thought, Good for him. That’s why he was able to reach retirement age working in a job he loved.

One of the problems in understanding sensory issues is that sensory sensitivities are very variable, among individuals and within the same individual. A person can be hyper-sensitive in one area (like hearing) and hypo-sensitive in another (like touch). One

The diagnosis of autism can sometimes help you better predict a child’s behaviors, but it tells you nothing about their specific way of thinking, their idiosyncrasies, their strengths, or their individual personality.

The easiest words for an autistic child to learn are nouns, because they directly relate to pictures. Highly verbal autistic children like I was can sometimes learn how to read with phonics. Written words were too abstract for me to remember, but I could laboriously remember the approximately fifty phonetic sounds and a few rules.

Campbell’s Law, which says that any metric used to determine social decision-making will become corrupted by people who want to affect those decisions.

Fieldwork is probably always more likely to be holistic than lab work or mathematical modeling because in the field you can’t get away from the whole when a research project starts.

I was also struck, when we walked together, by her seeming inability to feel some of the simplest emotions. “The mountains are pretty,” she said, “but they don’t give me a special feeling, the feeling you seem to enjoy … You look at the brook, the flowers, I see what great pleasure you get out of it. I’m denied that.

Our whole image of wolf packs and alphas is completely wrong. Instead, wolves live the way people do:7 in families made up of a mom, a dad, and their children. Sometimes an unrelated wolf can be adopted into a pack, or one of the mom’s or dad’s relatives is part of the pack (the “maiden aunt”), or a mom or dad who has died could be replaced by a new wolf. But mostly wolf packs are just a mom, a dad, and their pups.

Autistic thinking is always detailed and specific. Teachers and parents need to help both children and adults with autism take all the little details they have in their head and put them into categories to form concepts and promote generalization.

One of the most profound mysteries of autism has been the remarkable ability of most autistic people to excel at visual spatial skills while performing so poorly at verbal skills.

Every person with autism is unique, with a different profile of strengths and challenges.

different way of thinking and learning. People with autism are people first.

To summarize this chapter, parents and teachers need to “stretch” individuals on the autism spectrum. They need to be stretched just outside their comfort zone for them to develop.

intense stereotypies—stereotypies an animal spends hours a day doing—almost never occur in the wild,

Impaired social interactions and withdrawal may not be the result of a lack of compassion, incapability to put oneself into someone else’s position or lack of emotionality

The younger the subject, the earlier the possibility of intervention. The earlier the intervention, the greater the potential effect on the trajectory of an autistic person’s life.

More knowledge makes me act more normal

We do know, however that almost no animal routinely kills prey animal on an indiscriminate basis. The only wild animal I’ve seen who will sometimes violate this rule is the coyote. Most of the time a coyote eats the animals he kills, but occasionally coyotes will go on a lamb-killing spree, killing twenty and eating only one. I believe it’s possible coyotes have lost some of their economy of behavior by living in close proximity to humans and overabundant food supplies. A coyote that kills twenty lambs and eats only one isn’t going to have to trek a hundred miles to find more lambs next week. Any sheep rancher will have several hundred other lambs that will be just as easy to catch later on, and the coyote knows it. Wild coyotes have probably lost the knowledge that you shouldn't waste food or energy.

Kanner had cause and effect backward. The child wasn’t behaving in a psychically isolated or physically destructive manner because the parents were emotionally distant. Instead, the

but quite to the contrary a result of an intensely if not painfully aversively perceived environment.” Behavior that looks antisocial to an outsider might actually be an expression of fear.

The best thing a parent of a newly diagnosed child can do is to watch their child without preconceived notions and judgements and learn how the child functions, acts, and reacts to his or her world.

The “Intense World” paper proposed that if the amygdala, which is associated with emotional responses, including fear, is affected by sensory overload, then certain responses that look antisocial actually aren’t.

The body and the brain aren’t two different things, controlled by two completely different sets of genes. Many of the same chemicals that work in your heart and organs also work in your brain, and many genes do one thing

Eye contact is still difficult for me in noisy rooms because it interferes with hearing. It’s like my brain’s wiring lets only one sense function or the other, but sometimes not both at the same time. In noisy rooms, I have to concentrate on hearing. Some

There are no files in my memory that are repressed,' she asserted. 'You have files that are blocked. I have none so painful that they’re blocked. There are no secrets, no locked doors—nothing is hidden. I can infer that there are hidden areas in other people, so that they can’t bear to talk of certain things. The amygdala locks the files of the hippocampus. In me, the amygdala doesn’t generate enough emotion to lock the files of the hippocampus.

At the age of three, Tito Mukhopadhyay was diagnosed with severe autism, but his mother, Soma, refused to accept the conventional wisdom of the time that her son would be unable to interact with the outside world. She read to him, taught him to write in English, and challenged him to write his own stories.

we generally focus more on what they can’t do, and tend to overlook the positive traits many of these individuals possess.

Geeks, nerds, and eccentrics have always been in the world; what has changed is the world itself and our expectations of others within it.

All people want to feel their efforts matter, and individuals with ASD are no different.

There is often too much emphasis in the world of autism on the deficits of these children and not enough emphasis on developing the special talents that many of them possess.

Being negative is natural and being 100 percent positive takes work.

You know how when you’re cleaning out a closet, the mess reaches a point where it’s even greater than when you started? We’re at that point in the history of autism now.

The Mind of a Mnemonist

Many of these individuals agree that sensory issues are the primary challenge of autism in their daily lives. There

A much more meaningful perspective is to teach this population the academic and interpersonal skills they need to be functional in the world and use their talents to the best of their ability.

Parents and teachers should look at the child, not the child’s label, and remember that the same genes that produce his Asperger’s may have given the child the capacity to become one of the truly great minds of his generation.

For me and other people on the autism spectrum, sensory experiences that have little or no effect on neurotypical people can be severe life stressors for us. Loud noises hurt my ears like a dentist’s drill hitting a nerve. For

By cultivating the autistic mind on a brain-by-brain, strength-by-strength basis, we can reconceive autistic teens and adults in jobs and internships not as charity cases but as valuable, even essential, contributors to society.

Different types of thinking provide strengths in one area and deficits in another. My thinking is slower but it may be more accurate. Faster thinking would be helpful in social situations, but slower, careful thought would enhance production of art or building mechanical devices. Rapidly delivered verbal information is even more challenging for object-visual thinkers like me. Standup comedians often move too quickly through their routines for me to process. By the time I have visualized the first joke, the comedian has already launched two more. I get lost when verbal information is presented too fast. Imagine how a student who is a visual thinker feels in a classroom where a teacher is talking fast to get through a lesson.

Flexible thinking is a highly important ability that is often—to the detriment of the child—omitted as a teachable skill on a child’s IEP. It impacts a child in all environments, both now and in the future: school, home, relationships, employment, recreation.

The body and the brain aren’t two different things, controlled by two completely different sets of genes. Many of the same chemicals that work in your heart and organs also work in your brain, and many genes do one thing in your body and another thing in your brain.

We do know, however that almost no animal routinely kills prey animal on an indiscriminate basis. The only wild animal I’ve seen who will sometimes violate this rule is the coyote. Most of the time a coyote eats the animals he kills, but occasionally coyotes will go on a lamb-killing spree, killing twenty and eating only one. I believe it’s possible coyotes have lost some of their economy of behavior by living in close proximity to humans and overabundant food supplies. A coyote that kills twenty lambs and eats only one isn’t going to have to trek a hundred miles to find more lambs next week. Any sheep rancher will have several hundred other lambs that will be just as easy to catch later on, and the coyote knows it. Wild coyotes have probably lost the knowledge taht you shouldn't waste food or energy.

The memory feats of food-caching animals that can remember the location of hundreds of food stores are highly similar to the ability of some people with autism to memorize every street in a city. My theory is that savant-type skills occur when memories are sensory-based instead of language-based. Language leads to abstractification and loss of detail. Animals naturally lack language and autistic people have language problems because of a disorder, but in autistic people and animals the cause of sensory-based memory is the same: thinking and remembering in pictures instead of words.

Visual thinkers, on the other hand, see images in their mind’s eye that allow them to make rapid-fire associations. Generally, visual thinkers like maps, art, and mazes, and often don’t need directions at all. Some visual thinkers can easily locate a place they’ve been to only once, their internal GPS having logged the visual landmarks. Visual thinkers tend to be late talkers who struggle with school and traditional teaching methods. Algebra is often their undoing, because the concepts are too abstract, with little or nothing concrete to visualize. Visual thinkers tend to be good at arithmetic that is directly related to practical

Behavioral trainers never talk about vices and depravity. Behaviorists are some of the most "optimistic' teachers and trainers there are, because if a person or an animal isn't learning, a behaviorist is trained to examine what "he" is doing wrong, not what the person or animal is doing wrong. This means that behavioral teachers and trainers don't blame the student.

The Asperger’s child at the gifted meeting is doing well in school, but the Asperger’s child at an autism meeting may be in a poor special ed program, bored, and getting into trouble because adults in his life hold lower expectations of his abilities. Unfortunately, in some cases, people are so hung up on the labels attached to students that they teach to these low expectations and aren’t even curious to learn if the child is actually more capable.

The idea that hyperreactivity and hyporeactivity are two variations on a theme might even have implications for theory of mind. The “Intense World” paper proposed that if the amygdala, which is associated with emotional responses, including fear, is affected by sensory overload, then certain responses that look antisocial actually aren’t. “Impaired social interactions and withdrawal may not be the result of a lack of compassion, incapability to put oneself into someone else’s position or lack of emotionality, but quite to the contrary a result of an intensely if not painfully aversively perceived environment.” Behavior that looks antisocial to an outsider might actually be an expression of fear.