Quotes from Temple Grandin

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Think of it this way: the object thinkers build the trains, and the spatial visualizers make them run.