January 20, 2006
Animal scientist Temple Grandin says autism helps her see things as animals do. Grandin talks about her work designing humane slaughter systems for animals, and her unique way of looking at the world.
January 20, 2006
Animal scientist Temple Grandin says autism helps her see things as animals do. Grandin talks about her work designing humane slaughter systems for animals, and her unique way of looking at the world.
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FLATOW: I'm Ira Flatow this is TALK OF THE NATION SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR News.
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FLATOW: You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. For the rest of the hour, a look inside the often mysterious world of autism through the eyes of someone who has made a career out of overcoming the roadblocks the illness put in her way.
Temple Grandin doesn't see the world like most of us do. She does, she would say, see the world more like most animals: a place of fear without emotion where your thoughts come to you in pictures rather than in words.
Temple Grandin is autistic. Her writings about her struggles with autism, her fear, her anxiety, the overwhelming sensation of smell and sound, provide an intriguing glimpse into the world of autistic people.
Because of her autism Dr. Grandin says she can understand how animals see the world in a way that most humans cannot. She has written about her experiences with autism and her observations of animals in many books.
You may remember her Thinking in Pictures. Well, her latest book is Animals In Translation. She now joins us.
Let me formally introduce her. Temple Grandin is an Associate Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior is co-authored with Katherine Johnson. She joins us from studies of KPBS in San Diego.
Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY, Dr. Grandin.
Dr. TEMPLE GRANDIN (Colorado State University):
It's good to be here.
FLATOW: How has your book been received?
Dr. GRANDIN: Well, there's been a lot of interest in it. I was really happy to say that we're making some of the bestseller lists.
But 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. That's the basis of how an animal would think. One thing I want to say is, animals do have emotion. But fear tends to be one of the most primal emotions.
FLATOW: So you don't read animals minds, don't want our listeners to confuse that?
Dr. GRANDIN: No. And I always get asked all the time about animal communicators and I really don't want to get into a discussing whether ESP exists or not. Let's just stick with, you know, the other more concrete things.
FLATOW: Mm hmm. Yeah.
Dr. GRANDIN: Because that's how I think.
FLATOW: Yeah.
Dr. GRANDIN: I think in most cases, a lot of these animal communicators are very good animal behavior people. And a lot of them are visual thinkers and their picking up very subtle body cues from the animal.
You know, it's crouching down a little bit, it's moving around little bit differently. They're just very good at reading animal behavior. And I think in most cases that can explain some of their successes.
FLATOW: And why do you think your autism allows you to understand how animals think?
Dr. GRANDIN: Well to understand animal thinking you've got to get away from a language. See my mind works like Google for images. You put in a key word; it brings up pictures. See 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. And language just sort of, you know, gives an opinion. Like, oh, that's a good idea or oh, I just figured out how to design that.
Language is not actually used in the actual designing process that is all done in pictures.
FLATOW: Mm hmm. When did you first discover that you could do this? That you could understand how animals think?