Quotes from Temple Grandin

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

We'd discuss one unwritten rule and a hundred exceptions would instantaneously appear.

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.

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.

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

During meals, I was taught table manners, and I was not allowed to twirl my fork around over my head. The only time I could revert back to autism was for one hour after lunch. The rest of the day, I had to live in a nonrocking, nontwirling world.

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.

Do not allow a child or an adult to become defined by a DSM label.

Instead of making the children do good behaviors by threatening to punish them if they don't, the teachers watch the children until they spontaneously do a good thing and give them rewards to reinforce the behavior and make them more likely to do that behavior again in the future.

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.

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

The educator's job is to ask...well, what IS she like?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The Mind of a Mnemonist

Tal vez los monjes que se concentran en sus cantos y meditaciones son un pouco autistas. He observado que hay una gran similitud entre ciertos rituales de oraciones y cantos y el balanceo de un niño autista. Creo que tiene que haber algo más en eso que simplemente colocarse con endorfinas.

Baron-Cohen. In 2001, he and his colleagues at the Autism Research Centre in Cambridge, England, introduced the autism-spectrum quotient questionnaire

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.

Attention-shifting slowness. Once a sound has my attention, I have trouble letting go and moving on to the next sound. If a mobile phone rings during one of my talks, it totally disrupts my train of thought; it grabs my attention, and my ability to shift back is slower than most people's.

And just to complicate matters, autistic people seem to get visual cues mixed up with aural cues. Normally when a person is listening, the visual cortex gets turned down. But a 2012 fMRI study found that when autistics were listening to sound cues, their visual cortices remained more active than neurotypicals'. If that's the case, then even while they're straining to process aural cues, they're being distracted and confused by visual cues.

Research has also shown that when performing language tasks, the autistic subject relies on the visual and spatial areas of the brain more heavily than the neurotypical subject does, perhaps to compensate for a lack of the kind of semantic knowledge that comes with social interaction