Temple Grandin quotes:

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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.

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.

When you take a drug to treat high blood pressure or diabetes, you have an objective test to measure blood pressure and the amount of sugar in the blood. It is straight-forward. With autism, you are looking for changes in behavior.

Some teachers just have a knack for working with autistic children. Other teachers do not have it.

Let's get into talking about how autism is similar animal behavior. The thing is I don't think in a language, and animals don't think in a language. It's sensory based thinking, thinking in pictures, thinking in smells, thinking in touches. It's putting these sensory based memories into categories.

From a scientific standpoint, Aspergers and autism are one syndrome. Aspergers is part of the autism spectrum, not a separate disorder.

I cannot emphasize enough the importance of a good teacher.

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.

Computerized medical records will enable statistical analysis to be used to determine which treatments are most effective.

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.

Some autistic children cannot stand the sound of certain voices. I have come across cases where teachers tell me that certain children have problems with their voice or another person's voice. This problem tends to be related to high-pitched ladies' voices.

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.

Costs for liability insurance are higher than costs for many procedures. There is a need to reform liability laws to stop out-of-control health care costs.

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.

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.

Children between the ages of five to ten years are even more variable. They are going to vary from very high functioning, capable of doing normal school work, to nonverbal who have all kinds of neurological problems.

I was so afraid to go out west to my aunt's ranch. But the only choice my mother gave me was to go for two weeks or all summer. I wound up staying all summer. And that's where I learned about cattle. I could relate to their behavior, their fears.

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.

When I was in high school and college, I thought everybody could think in pictures. And my first inkling to my thinking was even different was when I was in college and I read an article about, you know, some scientist said that the caveman could not have designed tools until they had language.

My problems are sort of more on a nuisance level. I can't stand scratchy clothes, I've got to have soft kinds of cotton against my skin, and I don't know why some 100% cotton t-shirts itch and others don't; it has something to do with the weave.

I am a big believer in early intervention.

Research is starting to show that a child should be engaged at least 20 hours a week. I do not think it matters which program you choose as long as it keeps the child actively engaged with the therapist, teacher, or parent for at least 20 hours a week.

I had problems getting my words out. If people spoke directly to me, I understood what they said. But when the grownups got to yakking really fast by themselves, it just sounded like 'oi oi.' I thought grownups had a separate language. I've now figured out I was not hearing the hard consonant sounds.

My grandfather was an engineer who invented the automatic pilot for airplanes.

I like to cross the divide between the personal world and the scientific world.

I've worked with tons of people that I know who are on the spectrum - but now I think severe autism has really increased.

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.

I've always thought of myself as a cattle-handling specialist, a college professor first; autism is secondary.

I like to figure things out and solve problems.

I think the core criterion is the social awkwardness, but the sensory issues are a serious problem in many, many cases of autism, and they make it impossible to operate in the environment where you're supposed to be social.

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

The squeeze machine is not going to cure anybody, but it may help them relax; and a relaxed person will usually have better behavior.

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.

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.

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

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.

I am different, not less

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.

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

Autism is an extremely variable disorder.

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

I know a number of autistic adults that are doing extremely well on Prozac.

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.

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.

I am much less autistic now, compared to when I was young. I remember some behaviors like picking carpet fuzz and watching spinning plates for hours. I didn't want to be touched. I couldn't shut out background noise. I didn't talk until I was about 4 years old. I screamed. I hummed. But as I grew up, I improved.

Pressure is calming to the nervous system.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

The world needs different kinds of minds to work together.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Some people with autism who don't talk, all they hear are vowel sounds. Like if I said 'cup,' they might just hear 'uh.'

It is human nature to strive.

My mind sort of works like a search engine. You ask me something, and I start seeing pictures.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 was fascinated with optical illusions.

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.

Autistic children are very difficult to take care of, especially severely autistic ones. When I was 4, I had almost no language; when I was 3, I had none at all.

It's much more work for the mother of an autistic child to have a job, because working with an autistic child is such a hassle until they go to school.

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

One big question that's come up is: Has autism increased on the mild side of things? I don't think so - they've always been here. Some of this is increased detection.

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.

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

We have got to work on keeping these children engaged with the world.

I would not be here now if I did not have anti-depressants.

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.

A cat you train with clicker training and what you've got to do is pair the click with a food reward. And he's doing the stuff because you get a food reward.

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."

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

And while we are on the subject of medication you always need to look at risk versus benefit.

Animals are like autistic savants. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that animals might actually be autistic savants. Animals have special talents normal people don't, the same way autistic people have special talents normal people don't; and at least some animals have special forms of genius normal people don't, the same way some autistic savants have special forms of genius. I think most of the time animal genius probably happens for the same reason autistic genius does: a difference in the brain autistic people share with animals.

Animals make us Human.

Autism is a big continuum, going from someone who remains nonverbal, all the way up to geniuses on Silicon Valley. And some kids are visual thinkers like me. Other kids are pattern thinkers - your mathematicians, your programmers. And there are others, they are word thinkers. Uneven skills. You need to take the thing that they're good at and you need to work on developing it.

Autism is part of who I am.

Autism's a very big spectrum. At one end of the spectrum, Einstein would probably be labeled autistic, Steve Jobs, half of Silicon Valley, you know, Van Gogh. And at the other end of the spectrum, you got much more severe handicaps where they never learn to speak.

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.

Basically when it comes to autistic kids and animals there's kind of three ways that they work, some of them are instant best buddies, they understand a cat, they understand a dog - they're best studies with it, they just know how to communicate with it. Then there's other kids that begin with a little bit of fear of the cat or the dog, but then they begin to like it and then there are other kids where you have a sensory problem - the cat meows and it hurts their ears, so they want to stay away from the cat because you never know when he might meow.

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.

Cats are great with clicker training. There's a great video you can get called "Clicker Magic". There's a scene in that video where a cat is trained to go through a mini dog agility course - it's all done with food motivation and clicker training. You can train them to do all sorts of thing.

Curiosity is the other side of caution.

Different cats don't like certain litter. They also don't like an unstable floor, no animal like's unstable floor. So if you put a thin piece of plastic down under a litter box and the cat walks on it and starts to slip, they don't like that. Any animal doesn't like an unstable floor.

Dogs serve people, but people serve cats.

Engineering is easy - it's the people problems that are hard.

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.

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.

Half of Silicon Valley's got a little bit of autism.

here's certain things that are similar to cats and dogs. Dogs are just hyper social and they have a want to please you way more than a cat does.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 get asked a lot why cats mess outside the litter box. The simplest thing is if you have more than one cat and you have two litter boxes, don't put them right next to each other.

I know a lot of animal communicators and I think a lot of them are just good behaviorists because they pick up on a lot little posture things like how the eyes look, the posture of the cat ears, is it tense? They're picking up just a lot of their body cues from the dog, the cat or the horse.

I mean, you can tame feral cats now, but you are never gonna get them like a cat that's been socialized at a very young age

I obtain great satisfaction out of using my intellect.

I studied a lot of animal behavior and one of the things I find really interesting is the whole idea that animals are sensory based thinkers and I wrote about this in my book, Animals in Translation. That 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 - they'll get afraid of something that they're looking at or hearing, the moment the bad thing happens.

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.

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.

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.

I think that the definition of autism is too broad. You got to remember, autism definition is a behavioral profiling.

I think there's some kids that need to go from being a child to being a grown-up. You get out in the tech communities, the parents just apprentice their kid into the industry and they just skip being a teenager.