Expanded knowledge about the workings of the autistic brain has opened up new ways of helping autistic people. Finding ways to reach the as-yet-undiagnosed could bring huge benefits to them and to society as a whole. 

Excerpt from Temple Grandin, June 4, 2013.

TEMPLE GRANDIN, Professor of Animal Science, Colorado State University; Co-author, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

When I was a little kid, I had all the full-blown autistic symptoms; no speech until age four. I was really lucky to get very good early educational intervention. I cannot emphasize enough, if you have a three-year-old that’s not talking, you have got to do many hours of one-to-one teaching.

One of the things I really want to talk about is: When does normal variation become an abnormality? You see, when you look at a diagnostic category like autism, there’s no black and white dividing line between socially awkward – somebody who works at Silicon Valley, heads of major tech companies here – and mild autism or Aspergers. 

I find that the people who think in language have a hard time getting their heads around that. It is a true continuous trait. It’s not like having tuberculosis, where you either have it or you don’t. You see, a little bit of some of these traits can give an advantage. When a person is bipolar, you have more siblings in creative careers. In autism, there’s more people in tech careers.

Now the thing I want to ask here is what would happen to little Steve Jobs and what would happen to little Einstein Jr. today? What would happen to poor little Albert? No speech until age three. Now, I wonder how many medications they’d have him loaded up on. There are way too many medications given out to little kids. There is a place for careful, conservative use of medication. I take anti-depressant medication. It controls my panic attacks. I’ve been on it for years and years and years. I wouldn’t be here without it. What would happen to poor little Steve Jobs? A weird loner who brought snakes to his elementary school? Who got bullied and teased and who had to switch high schools? What saved him was the neighborhood computer club.

You take these kids who are kind of different. You have got to get them involved with shared-interest things. This is what worries me. Right now there is a shortage of software engineers in the tech industry. I can tell you where a lot of potential software engineers are: They’re playing video games in the basement, because nobody worked on developing their skills in programming. We need to be introducing interesting things like this to kids really young.

The thing is, autism is a very big spectrum. At one end of the spectrum, you’ve got some really brilliant people that are really socially awkward. Then at the other end of the spectrum you’ve got non-verbal, may have epilepsy, may have all kinds of medical problems, and it’s all labeled autism. Teachers have a hard time shifting gears, dealing with the severe kids to the more mild kids. It is a behavioral profile. It is not a precise diagnosis.

Now, I want to go through the history of the diagnosis. In 1943 Leo Kanner published his famous paper, “Disturbances of Affective Contact.” Back then they thought it was all caused by psychological reasons. In 1950 to 1970 you had the psychoanalytic approach, where they blamed mothers. That was a horrible, horrible era. In 1952, back when the first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual was produced by the American Psychiatric Association, autism was listed along with schizophrenia; they thought they were the same thing. They used to call it childhood schizophrenia. Then when the [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] DSM II came out in 1968 it was just mentioned along with schizophrenia. Then in 1980 they come out with another version, and to be autistic you had to have speech delay with an onset under 30 months of age. In 1987 they kind of broadened the profile a little bit more and they added PDDNOS; Pervasive Development Disorder Not Otherwise Specified. I don’t know what that means.

You see, the problem you’ve got with the DSM – it’s half science, it’s half doctors fighting around a conference room table in a hotel somewhere in the U.S., and it’s insurance codes. Today you have to get these labels to get services. In 1994 the DMS IV added Aspergers Syndrome. Now you could have autism without speech delay. That broadened a lot of the people who went into autism. I get asked all the time, “Has autism increased?” I can think of the quirky, nerdy kind of kids that I went to school with that would definitely be labeled Aspergers today. Then in 2013 they’ve taken out the Aspergers; they’re going to replace it with social communication disorder. It’s the same thing. Now some of this has to do with trying to cut back on all the services stuff.

The one good thing that they’ve put in is mentioning sensory process problems. In autism, you’ve got a lot of problems with sound sensitivity, visual sensitivity problems; some people can’t stand florescent lights. These sensory problems are extremely variable.

The genetics of autism

It is a complicated quagmire. You’ve all seen a little double helix with all the little nucleotide pairs. They call those snips, and you have little tiny code changes all over the genome.

Let’s talk about some genetics things. Did you know that only 2 percent of the DNA actually codes for a protein? What does the rest of the DNA do? Back in the 1980s they used to call it junk DNA. They don’t call it that anymore. Now they talk about coding DNA. When they originally sequenced the genome years ago, that was only the coding DNA. In 2012 with the ENCODE Project, they have now sequenced the non-coding DNA. What does it do? It’s the operating system. It is what tells the coding DNA what to do. If you didn’t have an operating system, you would just grow blobs of cancer and things like that.

If you take a double-helix and stretch it out, you kind of know what that looks like, but you’d never fit that inside the sperm. They’ve got to take the DNA and they’ve got to wind it all up in a big, squishy ball. When you wind it up in a big, squishy ball, now coding DNA goes against non-coding DNA probably in some kind of a mathematical pattern.

Let’s visualize personality traits like a music mixing board. You’ve all seen a music mixing board, where you slide the little sliders along the slots, like to adjust volume and whatnot. Imagine each one of those slots is a different personality trait – the tendency to be anxious, the tendency to want to explore;,the tendency to be fearful – and you can adjust these things. Now, if you take these sliders and shove them to one end of the board all the way, maybe that’s abnormality. It’s a continuous trait. I think a music mixing board is one of the best ways to visualize these kinds of traits.

I design livestock-handling facilities. When I design things, being a visual thinker is a great asset, because I can test-run equipment in my mind. I thought everybody could test-run equipment in their minds. I didn’t know that it was a special ability. It’s been an interesting journey for me to start learning how other minds think.

I used to joke around that I had a huge Internet line deep in my visual cortex. I’ve had various brain scans taken in different labs along the way, and I look at some brain scans and I found they had a very, very large visual circuit. If you want to see the really cool brainscan you can type Temple Grandin USA Today into Google and you can see my gigantic visual association search engine. You see, normally the language circuit for “speak what you see” goes from the visual cortex up to [a certain level] and then stops. Mine goes all over everywhere. I kind of work like a search engine; put in keywords, and it’s like Google for pictures.

Being a visual thinker is an asset as a designer. I always liked to show off my drawings. When you’re a weird geek, the way you sell yourself is showing off your work. You have to sell your work and not yourself. 

Now, another brain scan was done that showed basically the left parietal area is full of water. I kind of trashed out the math department. Kids who get a label – and I don’t care if it’s an autism label, a social communication label, a dyslexic label, an ADHD label – they tend to have uneven skills; good at one thing, bad at something else. We have got to build up on the area of strength.

We have also got to get a lot more thinking about what kinds of jobs these guys can do when they grow up; teaching them job skills. One of the good things right here in the heart of Silicon Valley is, I can’t start 10-year-olds working on oil rigs – that’s the thing we got in Colorado – or cattle feed yards. But with computers you can introduce that really young. At eight years old, a lot of kids start to learn programming. You got a kid that’s got a mathematics ability; let’s start having them do coding.

I’d rather have them addicted to coding than to video games. I’m seeing too many young boys that ought to be working here. As I travel around the country, I’m seeing moms come up to me and say, “I have a son. He’s 15 years old and he’s a video game recluse.” “I got a son who is 22 years old and I can’t get him out of the house.”

When I was in high school, one of the places where a line was drawn in the sand [was that] I was not allowed to become a recluse in my bedroom, sitting in there all day reading. They didn’t have video games then, otherwise I would have been totally into that. Instead I was out working in the horse barn, and when I was 13 my mother got me a sewing job. I didn’t do much studying when I first went to high school, but boy I sure learned a lot of work skills. That’s really an important thing.

Malcolm Gladwell says if you have enough practice and enough access to resources, anybody can get really good at something. I agree with Malcolm Gladwell about the practice. I didn’t learn my drawing stuff overnight. I had to work on that. I spent three years working on that and having access to the resources. In 1968 both Bill Gates and I had access to the IBM Teletype computer; free, state-of-the-art, no punch-cards here. It actually was a terminal, and you could talk to the computer. I tried to take a computer course to learn programming. It was hopeless. Absolutely hopeless. Bill Gates? He did really well at that. You see, when you get into the extreme thing, this is where innate abilities do matter.

My left parietal area is full of water, but I’m really good at the visualization stuff. I can do the industrial design side of things. You need two kinds of minds; the visual thinker like me and the more mathematical thinker. Let’s take a product like the iPad and the iPhone, for example. Well, Steve Jobs is an artist. He designed the user interface; he wasn’t an engineer. Then the engineers have to make the insides work, and when the original Apple computer was developed, he worked with Steve Wozniak. That was the engineering side of it. The two worked together.

Let’s develop the talents in a person’s specialist brain. I am a photo-realistic visual thinker. Another name for this is object visualizer; can’t do algebra. These kids who can’t do algebra, let’s jump them to geometry. Some of them can do programming just fine. The other kind of visual-spatial thinker is the pattern thinker or spatial visualizer. This is the music and math mind. They think in patterns. Some of these kids have trouble with reading. A third type is the verbal facts mind. This is the kid that knows all the facts about his favorite subject; it could be baseball; it could be movie stars; it could be a lot of different things. Often not that good at drawing.

Another kind of person is a pure auditory thinker. They learn through their ears. Some of these people would be really great in sales. I actually didn’t do too bad in sales one time. I’m really pleased that Costco has featured me in their magazine. I did book signing at a Costco, and I just walked up to people and I found I was a really good Costco sales associate. You’ve got to learn how to approach the customers. I’d walk up to them and I’d say, “My name is Temple Grandin. I’m a professor of animal science. I’ve got a book about animal behavior. Do you have pets?” If they didn’t want to talk I’d just back off. You can’t be stalking customers. That’s a social interaction that’s quite easily taught. I was very proud of myself. I sold 60 books and the rest of the book table sold five, so I think I was doing pretty good. 

For the verbal thinker on the spectrum, you know what’s a great field for them to work in? Specialty retail sales. It could be jewelry, it could be men’s shoes, it could be sporting goods. I can tell you if I ever have to do retail sales, I’d probably go work at Home Depot in the hardware store. That would be the kind of thing that would interest me.

Making talent show

I always like to show off my drawings because that’s how I sell myself. I have to sell my skill. A lot of people have trouble getting through a job interview. You know what? You better have your iPad there with your portfolio on it. The way I sold things is I showed pictures of my jobs. I showed my drawings. I can remember when I was at the Ag-Engineering meeting, this was back in 1974, nobody wanted to talk to me until I whipped out my drawings. They go, “Oh, you did that? Maybe you are worth talking to.”

People respect ability. There is [an] artist named Grant Manier, the eco-artist. He’s a man with a little bit more severe autism. I’m just so happy; I was talking to his mom and I convinced him to enter his art in a professional art show, because this work is professional grade.

Sometimes the most obvious is the least obvious. I have a picture of the remains of the Fukushima nuclear power plant. This is an example of why we need to have all kinds of minds. I always like to figure out, “Why did this happen? How could they let a mess like this happen?” I read all these newspapers. After reading a week’s worth of papers, maybe two weeks worth of papers, picking up all these little details, I finally figured out what they did wrong. I’m going, “How could you do that? How could you not see it?”

It’s not too good of an idea when you live by the sea to put that super important generator and all that emergency cooling equipment that you need in a non-waterproof basement. What do you think happened? The water came crashing in there, drowned the generators, drowned all the electrical wiring. When I was young I used to think this was due to stupidity. It’s not due to stupidity. The mathematics mind doesn’t see it. This is why you need the different kinds of minds. I can visualize the waves smashing out the louvers of the generator building – they’re going to be baby blue louvers, that’s the color of this plant – and a wall of water coming in there. Then the generators are underwater and now there is a Japanese guy on a baby blue catwalk and he’s looking down and, I don’t know what the swear words are in Japanese, but he’s saying them right now, because he knows we’re in so much trouble right now it’s not funny.

I can’t design a nuclear power plant, but I can visualize ways that it could be broken and then visualize ways to prevent that, especially with anything that’s mechanical. I’m getting concerned about some of the things in automation, hackers getting into the power grid and things like that. We’ve got to have mechanical systems where, if a piece of equipment gets too hot, [has] too much pressure or spins too fast, it shuts down, and it’s some non-electronic thing that’s hacker proof because there are no electronics involved in it. It will just turn the equipment off before it’s busted, because you break a generating plant and they’re not going to fix that very quickly, that’s for sure.

In the very first work I did with cattle I got down in the chutes to see what the cattle were seeing. Other people didn’t think to notice that. I’m finding when I work with the veterinary students, I’ve got to teach them how to be observant of visual detail that most people don’t see. If you’ve got a flag waving next to the chute, maybe that’s what is scaring the cattle; so you get rid of the flag. Or you got an animal walking out of the chute and there is a sunbeam on the floor and the animal is looking right at that sunbeam and most people don’t notice it. Or there is a chain hanging down in the chute and that’s scaring the cattle and they don’t notice it.

I’m always getting asked about slaughter plants. Do they know they’re going to get slaughtered? I’ve found they behave exactly the same at a slaughter plant as they do in a veterinary chute. If there’s a chain hanging down or they see people walking by or it’s too dark, the cattle won’t go in. I’m trying to train students to see this visual detail. I have a lab and I have a chain hanging down in the cattle handling facility waving back and forth, and only 2 students out of 12 see it. An animal’s world is sensory-based, not word-based. You want to understand animals, you’ve got to get away from words.

It’s okay to be weird

Let’s get back to some of the diagnosis stuff. People get locked into these labels. I don’t see the labels, because I’m not language based. I see the kid. They bring the kid into the meeting and I’m going, “Yeah, I saw the senior version of him when I visited a Silicon Valley company.”

The normal mind overgeneralizes and will ask questions like, “What’s the most important thing to do for autism?” If they’re three and they’re not talking, I can give you a universal answer: early intervention. Once you get past age three, I’ve got to have a lot more information. What is his problem? I can’t answer that in a real general way.

There is evidence that language covers up visual thinking, because there is a type of Alzheimer’s disease that as the language part of the brain is wrecked, arts ability will start to come out. When Van Gogh was painting Starry Night, I don’t think he realized he was painting mathematical models of turbulence in the skies of Starry Night.

A really important principle for anybody who is working with kids in autism is [that] it’s bottom-up thinking, not top-down. All concepts consist of specific examples placed in categories. Everything is learned by specific examples. So, you want to teach the kid the word “down”? You’ve got to use many different examples; I sat down in the chair; I put the remote down on the table; the airplane goes down and lands; I jumped in the pool and went down in the water.

The other thing is, my thinking is associative and not linear. I’ve got a picture here of the United Airlines terminal in Chicago. There are two ways my mind could go. I could start bringing up pictures of airports, or I could start bringing up pictures of glass structures. There are no generalized pictures. I go through pictures of the biosphere in Arizona. How about the old crystal palace at the World’s Fair? How about the greenhouse at Colorado State University? That’s the glass structure category. There’s pictures of plants inside the greenhouse. Now I’m thinking about this orchid that I’ve got on my kitchen windowsill. Or I could look at airport category: Denver Airport, Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, Minneapolis Airport.

Cattle are very specific in their thinking. They’ll view a man on a horse as something totally different than a man on the ground. So if cattle are trained to be tamed with a man on a horse and they see their first man on the ground in the slaughter plant, they will freak out, not because they’re at the slaughter plant but because they’re seeing a scary new thing: a man on the ground.

The other thing I find a lot of people have problems with is, “How do I categorize a problem? Do I have a training issue with a piece of equipment? Or is it something wrong with the design?” Let’s say we have an autistic kid with problems. Do we have a behavior problem? Or do we have a biological problem? The biological problem, if he’s non-verbal, could be a hidden, painful medical problem. I don’t multitask well; I can’t remember long strings of information, I have to write it down. That’s a biological problem.

[Look at] a cool picture of the launch team for the Mars Rover. You’ve got the mohawk guy, the Elvis guy, you’ve got an ancient, old hippie there – and those are the happy people on the spectrum. They went to Asperger heaven. [Laughter.] It’s okay to be weird, it’s okay to wear a mohawk on national television; it’s perfectly okay. You know what? You can’t be a rude, filthy, dirty nerd. There’s a scene in the movie [2010’s Temple Grandin] where my boss slams down the deodorant and says, “You stink, use it.” That actually happened. How did the guys in the jet propulsion center get there? Because when they were young they probably had a few social skills just bashed into them.

One advantage to growing up in the 1950s and ’60s is that social skills were taught in a much more systematic manner. I’m seeing too many kids today who don’t know how to shake hands.

Let me give you some tips on how to help the kids who are different to really succeed. There’s a tendency to coddle these kids. You can’t just throw them into surprises. That causes panic. When I was 15, I was afraid to go to my aunt’s ranch. They gave me a choice; one week or all summer. Not going was not an option. You’ve got to stretch them. I’m seeing a 19-year-old honors student who has never grocery shopped by herself; that’s ridiculous. I’m seeing kids who haven’t learned enough work skills. I had a great science teacher. You have to show kids interesting things.

They have got to learn work skills. Here in computer land, you can start that around age eight. When I go out into other parts of the country, at 12 or 13 they can be walking dogs for the neighbor or they can be working at the farmer’s market, they can be maintaining a neighborhood website. These are the kinds of things they could be doing. They need the discipline of a job.