Autistic scholar Temple Grandin: ‘The education system is screening out visual thinkers’

Temple Grandin is perhaps the world’s most famous scholar living with autism. In more than 50 years working in animal agriculture – specialising in designing more humane livestock handling facilities – she has improved cattle treatment internationally. She is also a prominent activist, author and speaker on autism. Her insights shared about her personal experiences – she struggled to talk as a child – have done much to increase our understanding of the condition. Her new book, Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns and Abstractions, argues that, in a world dominated by verbal thinkers, those with visual brains are being overlooked and underestimated – to the detriment of all of us. Grandin, 75, is a professor of animal science at Colorado State University.

What are the different ways of thinking, as you conceive them? I’ve come to gradually see, and it has been confirmed in the scientific literature, there are two kinds of visual thinkers: “object visualisers”, like me, who think in pictures (concrete, detailed images), and a second group who, different from me, are “spatial visualisers”. More mathematically inclined, they think in patterns and abstractions. They are distinct from verbal thinkers who perceive and process information primarily through language. Both types of visual thinkers tend to be more bottom up, details first. Verbal thinkers tend to be more top down, linear and sequential. Most people are mixtures of different kinds of thinking. What tends to happen in fully verbal autistic people is that you get the extremes of one type or another. That I am an extreme object visualiser is probably because I am autistic.

Your memoir, Thinking in Pictures, was first published more than 25 years ago and you have written books subsequently about autism and thinking differently. What’s new here? The biggest thing is I look at the skill-loss issue, which is gigantic in the US. We are losing essential technical skills at a time when we need to rebuild our physical infrastructure and make more hi-tech products here. I focus on the education system and how it is screening out our visual thinkers – particularly the object visualisers who thrive at building, making and mechanical things. At the feed yard I visited this morning, they are having difficulty finding people to fix the feed mill equipment and the specialised feed trucks: that fits right in with the book.

What would you most like to see schools do differently? Putting hands-on classes back. They fell away starting in the 1990s with more academic testing. That would include shop (with instruction in trades like metalwork, woodwork or auto mechanics), cooking, sewing, music, art and theatre (which needs set design and lighting). I’m a big believer in exposure: kids need to try different things and find out what they’re good at.

How have attitudes about autism changed in your lifetime? A lot more services are available. Little kids can get diagnosed early, there is better early intervention and better parent support; that is good. But I also worry too many kids, even fully verbal kids are so overprotected by their parents, who get locked into the autism label, they are not teaching them basic life skills like shopping or laundry, which I was taught.

The diagnostic criteria for autism were revised in 2013 so it is now on a spectrum and known as autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Has that been a good thing? The spectrum is so broad it doesn’t make much sense. Are we really going to put people with severe autism who cannot dress themselves in the same category as people with mild autism who work in Silicon Valley? It has also made this problem of not learning life skills worse – because even just slightly geeky kids are getting labelled as “on the spectrum”. Where this labelling can be useful is with relationships – it can help with misunderstandings.

Given your affinity with animals, how can you design better slaughterhouses for them? You’ve got to give animals a decent life worth living, where they can have some positive emotions. One thing that makes me angry is seeing cattle coming into the slaughterhouse lame. I’ve been seeing some problems with this recently for different reasons, including because animals are being grown to heavier weights. They have got to be able to walk – that is a basic behaviour they should have! And I’ve been in trouble with some people in the industry for saying that.

Where does your connection with animals come from? I think it is because, like me, they don’t think in words. They think instead through their senses. It used to be denied that animals had emotions, which has always seemed ridiculous to me. Back in my early scientific papers, I was not allowed to use the word “fear”. The reviewers made me call it “behavioural agitation”. That is slowly changing, but I think some of it gets down to verbal thinkers maybe finding it hard to imagine an animal can think and have feelings when they don’t use words.

You note in the book that many historical figures we regard as geniuses were also neurodivergent. Is it a prerequisite for genius? I haven’t researched everybody, but it can be a factor. Einstein, for example, had no speech until around age three or four. He would land in an autism programme today. I also discuss savants, who have extreme skills in certain narrow areas. They can perform amazing mathematical calculations in their heads, for example. A substantially higher proportion of people with autism have savant characteristics, compared with the general population.

A biopic about your early life was released by HBO in 2010 (Claire Danes played you). Do you still use the hug machine you invented as a student to give yourself the feeling of being hugged without being touched? And do you eat more than just jello [jelly] and yoghurt these days? The hug machine broke about 11 years ago. I never fixed it because by that time I’d been hugging real people (the machine helped me desensitise myself). I got the idea from a cattle squeeze chute: I had horrible panic attacks and anxiety and the deep pressure was calming.

The jello and yoghurt was because, in my late 20s, I found I was having terrible bouts of colitis. Everything else just went straight through me. Then I went on low-dose antidepressants for my panic attacks (which I have been on ever since) and the colitis cleared up. My abnormal fear response – I found from a brain scan that my fear centre, my amygdala, was three times larger than normal – was causing it.