Temple Grandin, animal behavorist and sufferer from autism
Larry Brownstein
Monday, 01 June 2009 10:57 UTC
Temple Grandin is a remarkable person by any reasonble definition. I have been aware of her work and the insights she has into animal behavior for a number of years. A film of her life and achievements is due to come out this year entitled simply Temple Grandin.
Her achievements are all the more remarkable because she is severly autistic. As terrible as this is, she has been able to utilize her autism in some way to better understand the ways in which animals “see” their world. She is an animal behaviorist at the University of Colorado and a consultant to livestock producers, solving some of their most perplexing problems; she has also designed livestock enclosures and related apparatuses that she contends renders the animals’ treatment more humane. She is also a superb draftswoman.
However, don’t take my word for this. She describes herself in terms of Oliver Sacks’ phrase, ‘an anthropologist from Mars’ and I highly recommend her own writing – the content I found astonishing.
Thinking in Pictures (1995);
Animals in Translation (2005); and the newly published
Making Animals Happy: How to Create the Best Life for Pets and Other Animals (2009).
She has her own web site and there are videos on youtube.
A critical assessment of Grandin’s thesis, put forward in Animals in Translation, that animals are cognitively much like autistic humans, including a response by Grandin, can be found at Are Animals Autistic Savants (2008). Grandin contends that humans think narratively with language, while animals, lacking language, think in sensory terms. Animals also attend to details at the expense of the overall picture, which she claims is what those with autism do. The authors disagree with this and contend that animals and humans are not dissimilar in the ways they attend to detail, using data from brain function studies in animals to support their case.
The article is exceedingly interesting and I recommend it without endorsing its conclusions. I am neutral with respect to Grandin’s hypothesis as well. The article and Grandin’s response is a prime example of how scientific discussion should proceed, imho.
Updated 02 June 2009 12:07 UTC
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Replies
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Hi Larry,
Grandin is very inspiring. At work we focus on gender equality, but disability is an important concern for us, and one we find harder to address. Many of the women we work with do not disclose issues to do with disability either because they view it as private or – more significantly for us – because they are concerned it will impact negatively on their work and career. We want to help women who feel held back in any way to have rewarding careers in science/engineering/technology, and we want to work with employers and policy makers to make work environments as inclusive as possible.
Grandin is so impressive because her disability is a major one: she has to face enormous challenges, and has used her condition to carve out an extraordinary specialist career with great expertise. It shows great talent and dedication.
Three of our recent guest bloggers have referred to disability: Maggie Aderin and Liza Brooks, plus Sara Fletcher who also has a blog on Nature Network.
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Animals in Translation is an amazing book. This book states that by looking at human autism, we can better under animals, the way they think, the way they behave, and how they see the world.
Before reading this book, I had very little comprehension about the way that autistic people see the world. I simply had no idea that seeing the world in a visual way was that much different than the way that I think. I now see that this different way of thinking has a lot of really interesting benefits, particularly when it comes to understanding other visual thinkers like the animals around us. As I read this book, I started to comprehend how much detail in life we normally ignore. So much of what we need to understand animals is simply looking at life from their perspective, both literally and figuratively speaking.
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