Temple grandin quotes

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

If you see a child with autistic-like behaviors at age two and three, the worst thing you can do is just let them sit and watch TV all day. That's just the worst thing you can do. You need to have a teacher working with that child, working on teaching language, working on social interaction, working on getting them interested in different things, and keeping their brain connected to the world.

I'm seeing too many kids where they get fixated on their own autism. I'd rather have them get fixated that they like programming computers or they like art or they want to sing in the church choir or they want to train dogs, you know, something that they can turn into a career.

If you have a 2 or 3 year old who is not talking, you must start an early intervention program. The worst thing you can do with an autistic 3 year old is to do nothing.

In special education, there's too much emphasis placed on the deficit and not enough on the strength.

I'm seeing too many kind of socially awkward kids that get through schools and then they can't hold a job because they haven't learned the discipline of get up in the morning.

What I've tried to do is combine both my personal experiences with scientific research. I like to cross the divide between the personal world and the scientific world.

Steve Jobs was probably mildly on the autistic spectrum. Basically, you've probably known people who were geeky and socially awkward but very smart. When does geeks and nerds become autism? That's a gray area. Half the people in Silicon Valley probably have autism.

An animal’s memory is not in words, they’ve got to be in pictures – it’s very detailed so let’s say the animal gets afraid of something. Like, for example you beat the dog up and they're looking at you and your Nike shoes or any sneaker or anything like a Nike, he's likely to be afraid of that - so anything without that Nike wingtip, he's likely to be fine. If you think about it, that's a different picture, than a Nike type shoe. Its specific because its sensory based.

One of my sensory problems was hearing sensitivity, where certain loud noises, such as a school bell, hurt my ears. It sounded like a dentist drill going through my ears.

I think it's a real shame so many schools have taken out the hands-on classes. Art, music, auto mechanics, cooking, sewing, these are all things that can turn into jobs. You know, wood shop, steel shop, welding. These are all things that can turn into great careers, get kids interested. Things they can do with other students. Other things for our word thinkers: journalism clubs, drama clubs.

One of the things I want to do is be a decent role model. I've got a lot of emails and stuff from children. They look up to me. Kids get different labels and things like that and I want those kids to succeed.

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.

You have to use food motivation whereas a dog will do things for you just for social motivation, praise and petting. Also with any animal you want to stroke it. Don't pat it, stroke it. Most don't like patting.

When I was younger I was looking for this magic meaning of life. It's very simple now. Making the lives of others better, doing something of lasting value. That's the meaning of life, it's that simple.

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.

A treatment method or an educational method that will work for one child may not work for another child. The one common denominator for all of the young children is that early intervention does work, and it seems to improve the prognosis.

I feel very strongly, we've got to give animals a good life. I've worked really hard improving slaughter plants and animal handling and transport. And people have said to me, why don't you work on improving conditions on pig farms? And basically, to be effective on making real change out there on the ground, you can only work on so many things. You know, you get too distributed, you're not effective.

Some children may need a behavioral approach, whereas other children may need a sensory approach.

If you start using a medication in a person with autism, you should see an obvious improvement in behavior in a short period of time. If you do not see an obvious improvement, they probably should not be taking the stuff. It is that simple.

I can explain how a person with autism thinks. I am very, very interested in how people think. It's been a gradual process of learning more and more about how my thinking process is different. You know it's bottom up - you take specific examples to make concepts and then I put them in categories.

One of the big areas I'd like to see a lot more research done on is the sensory problems, and it's real variable. One kid's got sound sensitivity; another one can't tolerate fluorescent lights. I can't stand scratchy clothes.

Social thinking skills must be directly taught to children and adults with ASD. Doing so opens doors of social understandings in all areas of life.

Dogs serve people, but people serve cats.

I feel very strongly that we need to give beef cattle a really good life. When they go to slaughter, it needs to be painless.

You have got to keep autistic children engaged with the world. You cannot let them tune out.

Autism is a neurological disorder. It's not caused by bad parenting. It's caused by, you know, abnormal development in the brain. The emotional circuits in the brain are abnormal. And there also are differences in the white matter, which is the brain's computer cables that hook up the different brain departments.

I strongly recommend that students with autism get involved in special interest clubs in some of the areas they naturally excel at. Being with people who share your interests makes socializing easier.

Everything I think is in pictures.

I feel very strongly that if you got rid of all of the autistic genetics you're not going to have any scientists. There'd be no computer people. You'd lose a lot of artists and musicians. There'd be a horrible price to pay.

I think that autistic brains tend to be specialized brains. Autistic people tend to be less social. It takes a ton of processor space in the brain to have all the social circuits.

If by some magic, autism had been eradicated from the face of the Earth, then men would still be socializing in front of a wood fire at the entrance to a cave.

I obtain great satisfaction out of using my intellect.

I'd rather have a kid come up to me and tell me that he loves dinosaurs or he loves airplanes or he likes training dogs or I like Shakespeare. I mean, just something.

What parents and teachers and caregivers did with me that actually worked and a lot of that was the old fashion 50s upbringing. They just gave the instruction when I did something wrong - life was more structured. So basically it's [my work] based on experiences with me that worked and it was teachers and parents that made me have those experiences.

I think a brain can be made "more thinking" or made "more emotional." At what point does this become abnormal? Autism in its milder variants, I think, is part of normal human variation.

People with autism aren't interested in social chit-chat.

Giving those animals [in shelter] quality time - now, I have been in some of the shelters where the cats have been in group housing. Well if you have a cat that never gets out of sternal recumbency, now what that means is that [inaudible] - that's a stressed cat. If they lay on their side, then they are not stressed out.

Autism is part of who I am.

There needs to be a lot more emphasis on what a child CAN do, instead of what he cannot do.

I get satisfaction out of seeing stuff that makes real change in the real world. We need a lot more of that and a lot less abstract stuff.

Animals do have emotion. But fear tends to be one of the most primal emotions.

As you may know, some of the stereotyped behaviors exhibited by autistic children are also found in zoo animals who are raised in a barren environment.

You got to get away from words if you want to understand any animal. It thinks in pictures, it thinks in smells, it thinks in touch sensations - little sound bites like, it's a very detailed memory.

If I did not have my work, I would not have any life.

I am also a believer in an integrated treatment approach to autism.

If you have autism in the family history, you still vaccinate. Delay it a bit, space them out.

By looking at autistic kids, you can't tell when you're working with them who you're going to pull out, who is going to become verbal and who's not. And there seem to be certain kids who, as they learn more and more, they get less autistic acting, and they learn social skills enough so that they can turn out socially normal.

I'm a visual thinker, not a language-based thinker. My brain is like Google Images.

I use my mind to solve problems and invent things.

Normal people have an incredible lack of empathy. They have good emotional empathy, but they don't have much empathy for the autistic kid who is screaming at the baseball game because he can't stand the sensory overload. Or the autistic kid having a meltdown in the school cafeteria because there's too much stimulation.

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.

Autism's an important part of who I am, but I'm a college professor and an animal scientist first. And I wouldn't want to change 'cause I like the logical way I think.

Mild autism can give you a genius like Einstein. If you have severe autism, you could remain nonverbal. You don't want people to be on the severe end of the spectrum. But if you got rid of all the autism genetics, you wouldn't have science or art. All you would have is a bunch of social 'yak yaks.'

Well the dog that is the most is the a Labrador retrievers because they tolerate kids tugging on them and things better than other dogs. They are a real good natured. They’re also real calm and sometimes when working with autistic children that’s probably more popular dog breed - now there are different ways to use service animals.

There is a small segment of people with autism that have savant skills, where they can memorize entire maps of whole entire city. They can do calendar calculations. And this is similar to some of the skills that animals have.

People are always looking for the single magic bullet that will totally change everything. There is no single magic bullet.

Sometimes cats just avoid using a litter box but that [cat going poop outside the litter box but pees inside the litter box] is kind of strange. Most time people ask me why they go outside the litter box period.

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

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.

One area of study that still needs to be done is the kind of autism where kids have speech and they lose it. Some parents say it's happened right after vaccines. That group needs to be studied separately from others.

You have to get autistic kids out and expose them to things, but do this without any surprises, so they know what to expect. You have to find skilled mentors to teach them things. For me, it was an aunt, and it was my science teacher. You need to find the things they're interested in and good at and expand on this.

Seeking is a combination of emotions people usually think of as being different: wanting something really good, looking forward to getting something really good and curiosity. Seeking gives you the energy to go after your goals.

One thing I'd like to just keep on doing is I want to educate people about animal behavior and about autism. I've been doing autism talks for the last 20 years and there still are people out there that do not want to, they can't recognize that these sensory problems are real. That, for some of these kids when that fire alarm goes off, that really hurts the ears, it's a really real thing.

It is never too late to expand the mind of a person on the autism spectrum.

When you're a weird geek, the way to sell yourself is to show your skills.

I'm seeing too many smart kind of socially awkward kids, a lot milder than I was, not getting employment because they're not learning job skills.

Curiosity is the other side of caution.

When kids are really little, they all look the same. No speech, no social relatedness, cannot emphasize enough the importance of early educational intervention.

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

I'm a child of the 50s. I was expected to have table manners. There needs to be some expectations for behavior. I'm seeing some children today, they don't push them enough.

Language for me narrates the pictures in my mind. When I work on designing livestock equipment I can test run that equipment in my head like 3-D virtual reality. In fact, when I was in college I used to think that everybody was able to do that.

The thing about being autistic is that you gradually get less and less autistic, because you keep learning, you keep learning how to behave. It's like being in a play; I'm always in a play.

In the 50s and 60s, kids were taught how to shake hands. They were taught how to have manners. There needs to be a lot more of that kind of stuff because the autistic mind doesn't pick up social things and subtle cues.

People can live up to high standards, but they can't live up to perfection.

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.

All animals and people have the same core emotion systems in the brain.

Medication should never be considered the only tool for helping a person.

People wouldn’t have become who we are today if we hadn’t coevolved with dogs.

Research has shown that a barren environment is much more damaging to baby animals than it is to adult animals. It does not hurt the adult animals the same way it damages babies.

You can be honest without sharing your opinions on everything.

I had people in my life who didn't give up on me: my mother, my aunt, my science teacher. I had one-on-one speech therapy. I had a nanny who spent all day playing turn-taking games with me.

People on the autism spectrum don't think the same way you do. In my life, people who made a difference were those who didn't see labels, who believed in building on what was there. These were people who didn't try to drag me into their world, but came into mine instead.

My mind works like Google for images. You put in a key word; it brings up pictures.

The world needs different kinds of minds to work together.

I am different, not less

Pressure is calming to the nervous system.

I have been on the same dose of anti-depressants for 15 years, and my nerves still go up and down in cycles; but my nerves are cycling at a lower level than they were before.

A real common problem with a lot of animals is that guys are bad, hate to say it, but they will tune into some big feature like the glasses, maybe the beard, baseball hats, you know some unique feature like that. And they'll generalize like, "Okay! All people with baseball hats or black rimmed glasses are bad."

We owe them [animals] a decent life and a decent death, and their lives should be as low-stress as possible. That's my job. I wish animals could have more than just a low-stress life and a quick, painless death. I wish animals could have a good life, too, with something useful to do. People were animals, too, once, and when we turned into human beings we gave something up. Being close to animals brings some of it back.

I'd rather see a kid get fixated on something they can turn into a career.

I think sometimes parents and teachers fail to stretch kids. My mother had a very good sense of how to stretch me just slightly outside my comfort zone.

I can remember the frustration of not being able to talk. I knew what I wanted to say, but I could not get the words out, so I would just scream.

It's very important for the parents of young autistic children to encourage them to talk, or for those that don't talk, to give them a way of communicating, like a picture board, where they can point to a glass of milk, or a jacket if they're cold, or the bathroom. If they want something, then they need to learn to request that thing.

A cat can be social, but a dog, we've bred this hyper social animal that's really truly different and will do stuff for us just to please us with praise and stroking.

For example, if ears are back on a horse, it's obviously not very happy. And the eyes show that it's not happy. Now, if the eyes are nice and soft and brown, then it's calm. You can see these things in horses and cattle, and I think that some of these people are just really good at picking up these signals, but they don't realize it.

All children in the '50s were taught manners, they were taught to say please and thank you, they were taught not to be rude. And I'm seeing some problems today where somebody's losing a job because they made fun of a fat lady that couldn't fit in the elevator. I mean that was the sort of thing that, when I was eight years old, my mother made it very clear to me that that was not okay to say that kind of stuff.

You could train cats do things, a lot of people don't think cats aren't trainable. Cats can be trusted just a friend.

I'm a visual thinker, really bad at algebra. There's others that are a pattern thinker. These are the music and math minds. They think in patterns instead of pictures. Then there's another type that's not a visual thinker at all, and they're the ones that memorize all of the sports statistics, all of the weather statistics.

In my opinion, one of the greatest animal-welfare problems is the physical abuse of livestock during transportation.... Typical abuses I have witnessed with alarming frequency are; hitting, beating, use of badly maintained trucks, jabbing of short objects into animals, and deliberate cruelty.

My Advice is: You always have to keep persevering.

It is important that our relationship with farm animals is reciprocal. We owe animals a decent life and a painless death. I have observed that the people who are completely out of touch with nature are the most afraid of death.

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.

My mother was always expanding my art skills and getting me to paint different things. You always got to push some. And, I mean, I learned basic things like getting up on time, how to shop - you know, you don't touch things in a store you're not going to buy. These things were taught very young. I don't see today enough of this basic, you know, basic skill teaching.

I don't like the way most people think. It's imprecise. I find that when parents ask me questions, they ask very imprecise questions. They say, "My kid has behavioral problems at school." Well, I have to say, "What kind of problems? Is he hitting? Is he rude? Does he rock in class?" I need to narrow questions to specifics. I am very pragmatic and intellectual, not emotional. I do get great satisfaction when a parent says, "I read your book, and it really helped me."

I tend to be much more in the present and my emotions are simpler. I can be happy, I can be sad, I can be depressed, but there's a complexity that I don't have. I don't brood the same way. Fear is my main emotion.

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.

These diagnostic profiles like depression, ADHD, autism, dyslexia, it's half science and the other half is a committee of doctors bickering over what it should be, and it has changed. It's not precise like a diagnosis of tuberculosis would be very precise.

I cannot emphasize enough the importance of a good teacher.

I want get people to think about sensory based of thinking.

I think one of the worst things schools have done is taken out all of the stuff like art, music, woodworking, sewing, cooking, welding, auto-shop. All these things you can turn into careers. How can you get interested in these careers if you don't try them on a little bit?

I can remember being bullied and teased. It was absolutely horrible. I got kicked out of ninth grade for throwing a book at a girl who teased me. It was absolutely terrible.

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.

Nature is cruel but we don't have to be

You can't punish a child who is acting out because of sensory overload.

People talk about curing autism. But if you got rid of all those traits, who's going to make the next computer?

The most important thing people did for me was to expose me to new things.

How do you have a think in pictures? Well, you have to sort the pictures into categories. You know, for example, a dog knows that, you know, there's good people and there's bad people. And I talked to a lady the other day where her dog was afraid of people with white beards because she had adopted him from an animal shelter and somebody with a white beard had abused him. And this dog was now afraid of everybody that had a white beard. That was the bad category.

I would never talk just to be social. Now, to sit down with a bunch of engineers and talk about the latest concrete forming systems, that's really interesting. Talking with animal behaviorists or with someone who likes to sail, that's interesting. Information is interesting to me. But talking for the sake of talking, I find that quite boring.

Who do you think made the first stone spears? The Asperger guy. If you were to get rid of all the autism genetics, there would be no more Silicon Valley.

The thing is, autism is all different, you know, variables. And you start out with a certain amount of, you know, the point where the differences in the brain are going to just be a personality variant and, like, for very mild Asperger's. But you get into more severe kinds of autism where there's obvious speech delay, obvious abnormal behavior in a two and three-year-old child, you know, the initial neurology is different from case to case. But all children with autism are going to do better if they get really good educational intervention.

Animals make us Human.

Language just gradually came in, one or two stressed words a time. Before then, I would just scream. I couldn't talk. I couldn't get my words out. So the only way I could tell someone what I wanted was to scream. If I didn't want to wear a hat, the only way I knew to communicate was screaming and throwing it on the floor.

There tends to be a lot of autism around the tech centers... when you concentrate the geeks, you're concentrating the autism genetics.

Sometimes we forget about common sense. Autism is used too much as an excuse for bad behavior.