12-21-2004, 09:08 PM
http://www.dodgeglobe.com/stories/122004...4009.shtml
Defying autism
Despite disorder, Grandin finds success as designer of livestock-handling equipment
Ask Temple Grandin to describe how she thinks, and she tells you to name something that isn't familiar to her and isn't in the same room. If you say "a pyramid," she immediately visualizes the pyramid on a dollar bill, followed by a photo of a pyramid on the cover of a recent National Geographic magazine.
Then her mind conjures up images of the sphinx, followed by the stone lions in front of a New York City library.
"My mind - these things come up like slides," she said in an interview Sunday. "It's exactly like searching Google for images."
Grandin's ability to see images in her mind, then translate them into workable designs, is one of the keys to her success as a designer of livestock-handling equipment. She has created a center track restrainer system to handle cattle at beef-packing plants, which is used for nearly half the cattle in North America, as well as other devices for handling livestock more humanely and effectively.
Among other accomplishments, she developed an objective scoring system to gauge how meat plants handle their livestock in 1997, and McDonald's Corp. implemented her system two years later.
But Grandin's remarkable visual ability, and her passion for designing better ways to handle livestock, are tied to her disability: autism.
A life with autism
Autism is a neurological disorder that inhibits the brain's development of social interaction and communication skills, according to the Autism Society of America. Autistic children and adults typically have difficulty with verbal and non-verbal communication, social interaction and leisure or playtime activities.
People who suffer from autism can display its symptoms in a variety of combinations, from mild to severe. Some autistic people are highly visual thinkers, like Grandin, but others are not.
The causes of autism are still a puzzle, although experts now know that it stems from abnormalities in the brain's structure or function - not bad parenting.
Grandin, who is 57, was diagnosed with autism when she was 2 1/2 years old, at a time when experts thought the only possible method of treating the disorder was putting the child in an institution. Until then, she did not speak, did not make eye contact with other people and spent her time sitting and rocking.
She remembered that she when she was about 3 years old, she was constantly upset because she could not communicate with other people.
"I can remember the frustration of not knowing how to talk," she said. "That was just tremendously frustrating. A lot of tantrums were just caused by the fact that I had no way of expressing my wants to anybody."
But with the help of a good intervention program, speech therapy, a nanny who worked with her at least 20 hours a week and two influential mentors - her aunt Ann Brecheen and her high school science teacher, Bill Carlock - Grandin eventually learned to control the disorder instead of letting it control her.
Today, Grandin is an accomplished autistic adult and a well-known expert on the disorder and methods of treating it. She was the keynote speaker at Saturday's Infant Mental Health and Autism Conference at Comanche Intermediate Center.
Autistic children benefit when their condition is diagnosed early and they receive immediate treatment - including plenty of one-on-one time between the child and an adult - Grandin said Sunday. She said parents of an autistic child must take care to avoid letting their son or daughter retreat into isolation from the world.
"The worst thing you can do with these kids is let them sit in a corner and just do their little autistic things," she said. "It's absolutely the worst. Watch TV, play video games - the worst thing.
"They need to get lots and lots of hours in with an adult, working on teaching language, teaching them how to talk."
But she said people working closely with an autistic child must also be careful to avoid overstimulation, since autistic children frequently suffer from sensory problems.
Grandin speaks bluntly and rapidly, using a combination of choppy gestures and sweeping hand movements to emphasize what she's saying.
At one point during the interview, she grabbed a piece of paper and traces with her fingers a "continuum of autism," showing that some people with autism show only mild signs of the disorder, while others have more severe symptoms.
She believes the key to helping autistic junior and senior high school students is tapping into their talents, then helping them find a useful career that would put those talents to good use.
"I think it's so important to develop skills that people want," she said. "Now my thing that I do - I design cattle-handling facilities."
She said mentors can help autistic students identify their useful skills and work on developing those skills.
She also said high schools should keep all kinds of trade magazines on hand - everything from auto mechanic magazines to livestock magazines - to educate autistic students about possible careers.
Making a career
Grandin first discovered the world of livestock handling when she was 16, on a visit to her aunt's ranch in Arizona. Then after she grew up in the early 1970s, she traveled to 25 different feed yards around Arizona, helping the employees work with cattle.
Grandin studied the cattle and the facilities carefully, figuring out what made a facility successful or unsuccessful. She even climbed down into the chutes with the cattle so she could see the feed yard through their eyes.
"When I first started doing this 30 years ago, people thought that was just kind of crazy, to be getting down in the chutes to see what cattle were seeing," she said.
But that experience taught her a valuable lesson: Cattle are controlled by the things they see, so they notice details that escape people's eyes.
Grandin discovered that cattle are scared by high contrasts of light and darkness, and by people and objects that move suddenly. That means a docile steer entering a chute might suddenly balk if it moves from sunlight into deep shadow or if something catches their eye.
"Until I made this observation, nobody in the feedlot industry had been able to explain why one veterinary facility worked better than the other," Grandin said in the first chapter of her 1995 book, "Thinking in Pictures." "It was a matter of observing the small details that made a big difference."
Early in Grandin's career, she knelt down near a cattle chute and took black and white photos as the animals walked through the chute. That helped her determine what things - such as shadows and sudden spots of bright sunlight - scared the cattle.
Now Grandin uses that knowledge, coupled with her extreme sensitivity to sensory information, to design more humane, more efficient methods of handling livestock.
"I feel very strongly that we owe cattle a decent life, and when they go over to the plants, they just walk up there and it's all over with before they know what happened," she said.
But in order to do her job successfully, Grandin must keep her stock of mental images up to date. That requires paying close attention to the world around her and storing that information in her memory bank.
"It's important to get out there and see things, because I need to keep my visual library up to date," she said. "I'm always adding more information to my library."
Defying autism
Despite disorder, Grandin finds success as designer of livestock-handling equipment
Ask Temple Grandin to describe how she thinks, and she tells you to name something that isn't familiar to her and isn't in the same room. If you say "a pyramid," she immediately visualizes the pyramid on a dollar bill, followed by a photo of a pyramid on the cover of a recent National Geographic magazine.
Then her mind conjures up images of the sphinx, followed by the stone lions in front of a New York City library.
"My mind - these things come up like slides," she said in an interview Sunday. "It's exactly like searching Google for images."
Grandin's ability to see images in her mind, then translate them into workable designs, is one of the keys to her success as a designer of livestock-handling equipment. She has created a center track restrainer system to handle cattle at beef-packing plants, which is used for nearly half the cattle in North America, as well as other devices for handling livestock more humanely and effectively.
Among other accomplishments, she developed an objective scoring system to gauge how meat plants handle their livestock in 1997, and McDonald's Corp. implemented her system two years later.
But Grandin's remarkable visual ability, and her passion for designing better ways to handle livestock, are tied to her disability: autism.
A life with autism
Autism is a neurological disorder that inhibits the brain's development of social interaction and communication skills, according to the Autism Society of America. Autistic children and adults typically have difficulty with verbal and non-verbal communication, social interaction and leisure or playtime activities.
People who suffer from autism can display its symptoms in a variety of combinations, from mild to severe. Some autistic people are highly visual thinkers, like Grandin, but others are not.
The causes of autism are still a puzzle, although experts now know that it stems from abnormalities in the brain's structure or function - not bad parenting.
Grandin, who is 57, was diagnosed with autism when she was 2 1/2 years old, at a time when experts thought the only possible method of treating the disorder was putting the child in an institution. Until then, she did not speak, did not make eye contact with other people and spent her time sitting and rocking.
She remembered that she when she was about 3 years old, she was constantly upset because she could not communicate with other people.
"I can remember the frustration of not knowing how to talk," she said. "That was just tremendously frustrating. A lot of tantrums were just caused by the fact that I had no way of expressing my wants to anybody."
But with the help of a good intervention program, speech therapy, a nanny who worked with her at least 20 hours a week and two influential mentors - her aunt Ann Brecheen and her high school science teacher, Bill Carlock - Grandin eventually learned to control the disorder instead of letting it control her.
Today, Grandin is an accomplished autistic adult and a well-known expert on the disorder and methods of treating it. She was the keynote speaker at Saturday's Infant Mental Health and Autism Conference at Comanche Intermediate Center.
Autistic children benefit when their condition is diagnosed early and they receive immediate treatment - including plenty of one-on-one time between the child and an adult - Grandin said Sunday. She said parents of an autistic child must take care to avoid letting their son or daughter retreat into isolation from the world.
"The worst thing you can do with these kids is let them sit in a corner and just do their little autistic things," she said. "It's absolutely the worst. Watch TV, play video games - the worst thing.
"They need to get lots and lots of hours in with an adult, working on teaching language, teaching them how to talk."
But she said people working closely with an autistic child must also be careful to avoid overstimulation, since autistic children frequently suffer from sensory problems.
Grandin speaks bluntly and rapidly, using a combination of choppy gestures and sweeping hand movements to emphasize what she's saying.
At one point during the interview, she grabbed a piece of paper and traces with her fingers a "continuum of autism," showing that some people with autism show only mild signs of the disorder, while others have more severe symptoms.
She believes the key to helping autistic junior and senior high school students is tapping into their talents, then helping them find a useful career that would put those talents to good use.
"I think it's so important to develop skills that people want," she said. "Now my thing that I do - I design cattle-handling facilities."
She said mentors can help autistic students identify their useful skills and work on developing those skills.
She also said high schools should keep all kinds of trade magazines on hand - everything from auto mechanic magazines to livestock magazines - to educate autistic students about possible careers.
Making a career
Grandin first discovered the world of livestock handling when she was 16, on a visit to her aunt's ranch in Arizona. Then after she grew up in the early 1970s, she traveled to 25 different feed yards around Arizona, helping the employees work with cattle.
Grandin studied the cattle and the facilities carefully, figuring out what made a facility successful or unsuccessful. She even climbed down into the chutes with the cattle so she could see the feed yard through their eyes.
"When I first started doing this 30 years ago, people thought that was just kind of crazy, to be getting down in the chutes to see what cattle were seeing," she said.
But that experience taught her a valuable lesson: Cattle are controlled by the things they see, so they notice details that escape people's eyes.
Grandin discovered that cattle are scared by high contrasts of light and darkness, and by people and objects that move suddenly. That means a docile steer entering a chute might suddenly balk if it moves from sunlight into deep shadow or if something catches their eye.
"Until I made this observation, nobody in the feedlot industry had been able to explain why one veterinary facility worked better than the other," Grandin said in the first chapter of her 1995 book, "Thinking in Pictures." "It was a matter of observing the small details that made a big difference."
Early in Grandin's career, she knelt down near a cattle chute and took black and white photos as the animals walked through the chute. That helped her determine what things - such as shadows and sudden spots of bright sunlight - scared the cattle.
Now Grandin uses that knowledge, coupled with her extreme sensitivity to sensory information, to design more humane, more efficient methods of handling livestock.
"I feel very strongly that we owe cattle a decent life, and when they go over to the plants, they just walk up there and it's all over with before they know what happened," she said.
But in order to do her job successfully, Grandin must keep her stock of mental images up to date. That requires paying close attention to the world around her and storing that information in her memory bank.
"It's important to get out there and see things, because I need to keep my visual library up to date," she said. "I'm always adding more information to my library."