Thinking Differently – Read Now and Download Mobi

Tyler Cowen:

I’m very interested in the importance of autistics for the economy and the productivity of autistics in the modern world.

Temple Grandin:

I certainly would like to talk about that.

You know, today, Einstein would be labeled autistic. He had no language until he was age three. He had many of the autistic behaviors. In fact, there’s several books out on famous people that probably can be labeled as having either autism or Asperger’s—people like Mozart, Carl Sagan, and Thomas Jefferson.

People in Silicon Valley, all the computer people, a lot of them have a lot of Asperger traits.

A little bit of autism in the genes gives you somebody that’s a great computer programmer, great scientist, musician, or artist. Too many autism-related genes and you get somebody that remains nonverbal. This is one of the reasons why the trait has continued. It’s a continuum of traits going all the way from Einstein to somebody who’s going to remain nonverbal.

Tyler Cowen:

In particular ways, autistic people can be very good at learning new skills in specialized ways.

There are a lot of autistic producers in the economy who don’t even necessarily appear like autistics to most of us. I think people, including autistics, cope in different ways and they adapt. And I think even in mainstream corporate America, there are probably a lot of autistics often in leading roles.

The general principle for me is that people who have different cognitive skills and who do things differently will have an extreme range of outcomes, some of them being very low status, but also some of them being very high status.

Temple Grandin:

Well, I think that’s really, really true because, I mean, I work in a technical field in the meat industry and, over the years, I’ve worked with many people that I know today would definitely be diagnosed with Asperger’s. So, a plant engineer, people that design equipment, computer people, I see them all the time. I see Asperger’s kids at talented and gifted conferences. And those kids are going to end up doing something really good.

Now there are areas where you’re handicapped. For example, I don’t remember sequence well. So I need to have written instructions. I can’t multitask. There are certain things I can’t do.

But I read profiles of a lot of people in the technology industry, and I’m like, boy, this person is just as Asperger as he can be.

Tyler Cowen:

In academia, where both of us reside, there are a lot of autistics. And there are other places in our economy where autistics are more likely to flourish than others: library science, the appraisal of paintings, work that requires pattern recognition or fine attention to detail.

Engineering is the most commonly cited case; mathematicians are another. But I think we’re just beginning to see how important this is for human creativity. If we look at the list of names you gave in your first comment—Thomas Jefferson, Mozart—maybe we don’t know for sure. But whatever the list turns out to be, what’s striking to me is how diverse the occupations are.

Temple Grandin:

Well, there are a lot of different occupations, but there are certain things they’re not going to be good at doing—there are certain jobs they’d be fired on the first day.

Tyler Cowen:

What do you think those are?

Temple Grandin:

Work as a cashier in a very busy store where change must be calculated on an old-fashioned cash register. I wouldn’t be able to do that.

Tyler Cowen:

Maybe you wouldn’t be able to, but say we take this notion of autistics as having a great variety of cognitive skills. Might not there be some autistics who are quite good at that particular activity, even if some autistics are very, very bad at it?

Temple Grandin:

There are two things that autistics tend to be really bad at. And the [first] thing is, high-level jobs do not require multitasking, having to do two different things at once. The other thing that we’re very bad at is following long strings of verbal instructions.

Those seem to be two things that are really quite universal. But in high-level jobs, you don’t have to do either. A lot of people with Asperger’s who are super smart are having problems with entry-level jobs.

I do a talk at Silicon Valley. The parents of a child with autism are working in the computer industry or the tech industry and they kind of apprentice their kid right into the industry. Well, there’s no multitasking when you’re programming a computer. You’re working by yourself, doing your work.

Tyler Cowen:

That’s right. In higher level jobs, people who have what is sometimes called a cognitive disability understand they need to delegate, and that makes them more effective. They don’t end up being micromanagers who want to run every part of the business.

There’s a well-known study on ADHD and entrepreneurship that essentially came to this conclusion that entrepreneurs with ADHD were much better at delegating, and then on average, maybe they were more successful for this reason.

Temple Grandin:

I’m absolutely frustrated—very frustrated with computers and not being able to get things to work. I have other people do that stuff.

But one of the things that I find interesting [is that] I really hate computers and interacting directly with them myself, but I put my stuff up on YouTube much earlier than many other people; I was one of the biggest users on the campus of video conferencing, especially when I got sick and I couldn’t travel. Some of the technology people aid me. It’s kind of amazing; I really, really despise computers, but I’m using them more than anybody else. And I make sure that I have IT people there to help me.

Tyler Cowen:

What don’t you like about computers?

Temple Grandin:

I get frustrated when things don’t work.

I was working on a book we’re doing on practical animal welfare, and one of the other authors sent in chapters. (I was the editor.) Microsoft came out with the new version of Office that wouldn’t talk to the other version of Office. The author e-mailed the chapter in and it caused an hour and a half of computer screw-up because of incompatibility. I’m glad my assistant is dealing with it and not me.

Tyler Cowen:

When I encounter problems like that with computers, as I sometimes do, I just walk away from it and don’t deal with it. And maybe that sounds a little silly, but maybe that’s a more productive response than someone who thinks they can fix the problem or somehow cope with it. I just know I won’t be able to do a good job—so, something else ends up happening instead.

There’s something you said near at the beginning that maybe I disagree with.

You drew a distinction between people who had what you call mild autism and then people who had more severe autism, who maybe have problems speaking. And my tendency is to think we don’t know how mild and severe autism in the cognitive sense correlate with outcomes. So, I think it’s possible that you have very severely autistic people, but they’re good at autistic learning. And they may actually have some of the better outcomes in the broader world because they’re more focused or more specialized in their cognitive abilities.

So, this notion that the people who do well are the mild cases and the people who don’t do well are the severe cases, I tend not to agree with that. What do you think?

Temple Grandin:

It depends on how you define mild and severe. I am aware of the work of Tito Mukhopadhyay. He’s got two books—The Mind Tree and How Can I Talk If My Lips Don’t Move? And Tito is completely nonverbal; he flaps, he shakes, he also has an extremely short attention span. His mother has to yank him over the computer and he can write down one sentence. Then he jumps off and has to flap. His world is very, very disjointed. And one thing that this shows is that while somebody is nonverbal, there can be a good intelligible brain hidden inside.

Let’s look at the severity thing. When I was two-and-a-half years old, I looked really, really severe. I had no speech whatsoever, no contact. You can’t just look at the severity of a little kid and predict.

Tyler Cowen:

I tend to think of autism, most of all, as a cognitive profile. How does the strength of the cognitive profile translate into outcomes? I don’t think I’ve seen any good systematic studies of that.

Temple Grandin:

Well, I don’t think there are any studies of that. People ask me if I could snap my fingers, would I want to be not autistic? I say, no, because I really like my clarity of thought.

I like being able to look for detail. In my work with the meat plants, I can just instantly find the things that scare the cattle. I remember one time I went into a plant. I’ve written in my papers that you have to get down into the chute and see what the cattle are seeing. So, they had found some of that stuff, but they forgot to look over the top of the chutes to see what the cattle were seeing. And they could still see flashing yellow light and a hose moving. I saw those things in the first five minutes….

Tyler Cowen:

What do you think of the claims sometimes found among the autistic community that autistics are more objective than non-autistic people in some ways?

Temple Grandin:

Autistics definitely can be more objective. I can be completely objective. When I get myself really calm, I can say, yes, I hate that person’s guts, but he’s a good scientist. I’m able to separate: analyzing his scientific paper from what I think of him as a person. And I’ve realized that most of the normal people are not able to do that. If they hate him as a person, they usually tend to hate his science, too.

Tyler Cowen:

And how do you think that’s connected to autism?

Temple Grandin:

There are some emotional circuits that are just not hooked up. I was just reading an article about PTSD, and when a person who gets PTSD or post- traumatic stress syndrome remembers this terrible thing that happened to them, all the emotions come back. The way they get rid of that is to put them on beta blockers, propranolol, and have them remember the bad event. And what happens is the emotional tag gets stripped off the memory. It’s still there, but the emotional tag is gone.

Well, when I was a lot younger, I almost got killed by a train. Me and a friend were out in the woods and we went to go fishing and she goes, “Oh, let’s walk across this railroad trestle,” you know, over across the river to my favorite fishing spot. Very, very stupid. We got halfway across and the train started coming. And we ran and we jumped off the trestle and the train went by, you know, like two feet away from our heads.

Tyler Cowen:

Uh-huh.

Temple Grandin:

And I can remember just as well what happened yesterday and it’s like watching action movies, you know?

Tyler Cowen:

Right.

Temple Grandin:

There are some emotional circuits that aren’t hooked up. I had strong emotions when it happened. My emotions are more in the present when I recall information out of the database of my mind. The emotions are mostly gone and all that information is in pictures. It’s just like watching a movie.

Tyler Cowen:

You know, I think one issue is that the way memories are encoded, arguably, is different in autistic people. There is some evidence for that from laboratory experiments. So, if memories from the distant past are, in a way, weaker, you have a lot of autistic people who will use different memory tricks to remember things, but it also means they’re free from a lot of their past biases. I think in every possible issue that there’s some evidence that autistic people are less likely to think in terms of a narrative and they’re more likely to think in terms of a collection of assembled facts.

And, maybe, what narratives do is push us into these stories of good versus evil, or heroes versus villains, and that it can be a benefit to be somewhat free from always thinking in terms of narrative….

Temple Grandin:

I don’t think in language; I think in pictures. It’s like Google for images. I form concepts by sorting pictures and images. And I think the best way to determine how I think is to ask me to go and search my mind for something, sort of like Google for pictures. And why don’t you ask me something, but not about my house or car because I’m in my house right now? Make sure you ask me something I can’t see in my office right now and I’ll tell you how my mind calls up the information.

Tyler Cowen:

How good are your memories for, say, stories? If someone says, tell a story of something that happened to you eleven years ago, is that very easy for you to remember or very hard?

Temple Grandin:

Well, I can’t remember eleven years ago that accurately. I can tell you something that happened to me approximately at that time. Right now I’m pulling up something that happened fifteen years ago, when I developed a new piece of equipment—one of my major inventions. And I’m seeing now scenes of building the equipment and installing it at the plant and starting it up. That was about fifteen years ago.

I’m not the kind of person who remembers stuff on an exact date.

Tyler Cowen:

Uh-huh.

Temple Grandin:

Unless it was some very, very special date. I don’t remember numbers well. In fact, I can only remember about ten phone numbers. Because what I remember is pictures of things.

Tyler Cowen:

Right.

Temple Grandin:

And my mind is like Google Images. I am not one of the number kinds of savants who can tell you I went to Denver and I did this on a certain date.

Tyler Cowen:

Like Daniel Tammet.

Temple Grandin:

No. No, I’m not like Daniel Tammet. I have found that there are three different kinds of autistic minds. And the first type of mind—and they’re all special minds—is a visual thinker like me, who thinks in total realistic pictures. But I’m very bad at algebra. I never got to try trigonometry. This was a gigantic mistake because some people can do geometry and trig but can’t do algebra.

My thinking is photorealistic. Daniel Tammet is what I call the pattern thinker. It’s a more abstract visual thinking. Its patterns, things like extreme origami. I have a slide I show in my talks that shows the complex patterns of extreme origami. The slide shows the folding pattern for making an origami praying mantis. It’s a pattern thinker and I think it’s a different kind of specialist mind, where I’m the photorealistic visual thinker.

If you ask me to think about some of the things I’ve designed, I have those things coming up in my head and I can actually test run them. You want to put different kinds of cattle in them, I can run them with different kinds of cattle….

Tyler Cowen:

If autistics are in some ways more objective than other people or they can be more objective, it strikes me that there should, at least, be a few ways in which autistics are less objective than other people.

Temple Grandin:

Yes, sometimes…

Tyler Cowen:

But those are a little harder to pin down. I think for instance…

Temple Grandin:

Well, sometimes people with autism can get very, very rigid on something they believe in. There’s a tendency, sometimes, to be way too black and white. Dr. Nancy Minshew found that people with autism have a hard time making new categories, like, for example, you’re showing a bunch of objects and they might pick out the red things. But then if you ask them to figure out another category, like, maybe the metal objects, they have a hard time doing that.

At age sixty-two, I have kind of loaded enough information into my database that I’ve gotten much less rigid. You know, it’s like the more things I’m exposed to, then I can open up new categories because there is more information in my database to assemble into categories. You know, there’s not just black and white; there are also different shades of gray in between, sort of like mixing paints.

Tyler Cowen:

That’s right. I think, also, [there are] a lot of issues when it comes to paternalism; autistic people are less likely to be sympathetic to paternalism. They…

Temple Grandin:

What do you mean paternalism? You’re using a lot of abstract stuff that I have problems with.

Tyler Cowen:

Oh, by paternalism, the notion that someone will come along and tell you what is good for you and maybe even impose it on you. I think there’s a historical reason why autistics suspect paternalism. Do you know now what I mean?

Temple Grandin:

Give me specific examples.

Tyler Cowen:

Take for instance, in groups or families or even in politics, when people are not given the opportunity to make their own choices. So, a child is forced to go through applied behavioral therapy or, for instance, when laws limit the kind of actions we can take; the kind of drugs we can put into our own body. Or just when your friends think they know what’s better for you and try to push it on you. All of those are examples of different signs of paternalism.

Temple Grandin:

Oh, so that’s paternalism. Well, I think there are some rules you have to have. I mean, if we didn’t have any traffic rules, it would just be, you know, mayhem.

Tyler Cowen:

Oh, sure. Let’s say you want to smoke marijuana—and that affects only you—that’s against the law. I think an autistic person is more likely to be suspicious of paternalism.

Temple Grandin:

Well, yeah, and I think if you look at a problem such as drug use, trying to just ban all this stuff is not working. The problem is that when you have a substance that’s more valuable than gold, the economic forces are so great you can build The Great Wall of China and it’s not going to work. You know, not going to keep it out.

Tyler Cowen:

But is it possible that autistic people are, in some sense, too suspicious of paternalism—that there are examples, maybe, where paternalism would do the world some good, but autistic people, because of their history and, maybe, basic inclination will resist that paternalism because that resistance has become almost ingrained?

Temple Grandin:

Well, I think there might be some cases of that. I tend to look at things differently now. One of the things that changed a lot of my rigid thinking is that I’ve traveled a great deal. I read a great deal. I’ve been exposed to a whole lot of different things. And I found that I learned that things aren’t so black and white.

I have basic ways that I think. For example, you don’t kill people, you just don’t do this. I learned the Golden Rule as a child, one good example at a time. And there are some government policies and things that are not working. This country has more people in prison than any other developed country.

Tyler Cowen:

Okay.

Temple Grandin:

So, that’s not working; too many emotional decisions. But it’s not working if you just look at it very, very objectively. Our educational system is crumbling. We are way, way down in world educational rankings. I’m extremely worried about this.

I went on a trip to China about five years ago, into Hong Kong in the industrial area of China. And as we drove through there, I thought, I’m seeing the next superpower. I’m worried. You know, and I’ve had people say, “Well, oh, how does Temple Grandin make these predictions, how does she know that?” And then, yeah, they come true most of the time.

Well, this is one of the things about being a visual thinker. I pull a lot of information into my database and I can see what’s going to happen. What do the Chinese do with smart Asperger kids? I can tell you what Indian parents do with them. I had one mother from India say to me, “Yeah, Asperger kid is naughty, smart. Send them on to computer school. Send them off to engineering school.”

Tyler Cowen:

Uh-huh. What do you think it would be like if this country had an autistic President?

Temple Grandin:

It would all depend upon how the autistic President was trained. It could be very, very good or very, very bad. And if the autistic President had the right background, it could be very, very good; and if he did not, it could be extremely bad.

Tyler Cowen:

And by right background, you mean that sense of having been exposed to a lot of different ideas…

Temple Grandin:

He needs to be exposed a lot of different things.

Tyler Cowen:

…so that he or she would…

Temple Grandin:

He needs to be taught some basic values. You don’t just go out and mass kill people and things like that. When I was a child, right and wrong was taught in a very concrete manner. You don’t hit other kids because you would not like it if they hit you. You share your toys because you want another kid to share his toys.

Tyler Cowen:

You’ve mentioned a few times the issue with autism and Asperger’s diagnoses being problematic. And I tend to agree with this. I tend to think, for a lot of autistic people, it would simply be better if we call them gifted children and send them off to do some things they were interested in. And not every child would meet with success from that kind of an environment, but a lot of people would do much better. This strikes me as a way in which, in some ways, we’re going backwards; that there’s such a desire to get funding for special programs for autistic people, but the results have been a lot of labeling, a lot of stigma. In a sense, it’s that, simply, not very much is expected from these children. And that ends up being, to some extent, a self- fulfilling prophecy.

Temple Grandin:

Now, I’ve definitely seen some problems with that. I have seen a kid come up to the book table one time, a sixteen-year-old kid, IQ of 150. The mother couldn’t wait to put him on disability payments because she said he wasn’t social.

I get very, very concerned about smart people being held back. Where I think all the services have really made a difference is with severe cases. I know parents who have a nonverbal, low-functioning teenager going into puberty—he has punched walls up, he has pulled his parent’s hair, and they don’t know what to do with him. And he’s not going to work for Microsoft or for any other high-level company. And he can’t type like Tito. Working with some of these very severe kids who may have epilepsy on top of an autism diagnoses, is where special services have really made a difference.

What I’ve observed is that special educators do a much better job of working with very severe cases, which, oftentimes, have big medical problems in addition to autism. They do a much better job with those kids than with the smart, nerdy Asperger kids. These are the ones called geeks and nerds. And they don’t know what to do with the really smart kids.

One of the things that really saves the smart kids is a mentor. When I was in high school goofing around, getting teased, getting tortured, I had a science teacher. My science teacher got me interested in studying. And John Robison, who wrote the book Look Me in the Eye, he’s also Asperger’s and he had a mentor professor.

Tyler Cowen:

Sure.

Temple Grandin:

He also has a very successful car dealership—a specialty car dealership, not a regular one. And he had professors over at the university and he visited their labs while he was in high school. They served as mentors. Mentors are extremely, extremely important.

Tyler Cowen:

The more I’ve learned about this topic, the more suspicious I’ve become of what is sometimes called genetic engineering, or other times it’s called eugenics. But, maybe ten years ago, I would have thought that over time we’ll tinker with the genes of the human race and this is likely to be a good thing.

But my attitude is changing and I fear if we tinker with genes or use selective abortion, that the result will be we’ll get a lot of kids who are easy to raise or, maybe they’re tall and blonde and captain of the football team, but we’ll lose a lot of diversity. And it will be maybe what some parents want, but for the broader human race, I tend to be quite worried, actually.

Temple Grandin:

Well, one thing that’s going to help prevent that from happening with autism is that the genetics is extremely complicated and the variations in genetic code that cause autism are within a gene; a little, tiny variation, a little code reversal, little extra bits of code…And it’s very, very continuous. There’s no one single thing that causes autism.

It’s not simple like Down syndrome. It’s not simple genetics. It’s complicated genetics.

When I wrote my first book, Thinking in Pictures, I quoted an old text I found: A doctor wrote that if you got rid of all the crazy people all you would have left is dried up bureaucrats.

There have been other studies that show that depression is linked to creativity. A lot of famous writers were depressed. If you get rid of all of these things, the so-called abnormal things, you would lose a lot of creative people.

Tyler Cowen:

Uh-huh.

Temple Grandin:

I fact, I’ve often said that if you got rid of all the autism genes, you’re going to just have social yakety-yaks, because who do you think made the first stone spear? I don’t think it was the yak-yaks around the campfire. It was some Aspie at the back of the cave that figured out how to make the first stone spear.

Tyler Cowen:

So I’ve thought a good deal about the survival properties of autism in earlier times. Today’s society is wealthy and there’s a lot of technology. But as we go back to the Stone Age and ask, why did autism genes ever survive? That’s an unanswered question.

I think one possibility is, during times of urbanization, these autistic people had fewer social contacts and maybe they were less prone to pandemics. Another may have been it’s simply that they were more likely to have moved out on their own to places a bit away from other people. There might have been higher agricultural productivity or they had a chance to set up better farms.

But do you have any thoughts on this question? That since autism…

Temple Grandin:

I’ve often thought about the cathedral builders. Some of these people—probably the really good stone masons—may have been autistic.

Back in those times, there were a lot of the artisan crafts. People get recognized for being good at what they do. Oh, this guy is really, really weird, but he is a great stone mason and he’s recognized for his work.

And I have a little book called Developing Talents. And one of the things I talk about all the time is career development. I have to sell my work and not myself. I can remember early in my career, going to an agricultural engineering meeting and everybody thought that I was really, really super weird.

And then I whipped out a copy of my drawings that I had done, of a cattle- handling facility and they go, “Wow, you drew that?” And as soon as they found out that I had drawn that, they started to give me some respect. You know, people respect ability.

Back in ancient times there were so many different crafts, there were so many different things that a person could get good at and get recognized for being good at a skill that other people value. I’ve given talks in the Silicon Valley area. People out there teach their kids programming or something like that and they’re good at it—people respect that.

As an Asperger, or autistic kind of person, I am what I do, more than what I feel. I had a lady write to me from South America and she said, “Well, my daughter doesn’t really relate to me.” And I wrote back to her, “Well, your daughter just looks at the world differently than you do. She’s going to get satisfaction in life by being really good at doing something. Help her to get really good at doing a skill, whether it’d be art, music, math—maybe it might be cooking or sewing—but some skill that other people are going to appreciate.” And the lady wrote back to me and said, “Oh, I never thought of looking at it another way. Thank you very, very much.”

Tyler Cowen:

Sure, I agree with that.

Temple Grandin:

It was a really, really lovely email and I saved it.

Tyler Cowen:

Let’s say we go back to 10,000 B.C. or 20,000 B.C., where very little is produced. There aren’t many skills. There’s food gathering, there’s hunting, maybe there’s planting, and not much else. And the extent to which human genetic diversity evolved and survived in that environment, I find striking—unless one wishes to take the view that some of these cognitive abilities and disabilities evolved later on.

Temple Grandin:

I don’t think they did.

Tyler Cowen:

I don’t either. I don’t see all the evidence for a so-called autism epidemic in recent times. So, to think of the question in very fundamental terms, if all people are doing is hunting, even if an autistic person has a good idea and invents a spear, well, everyone else gets to benefit from this spear. What then is the survival advantage of autistic genes?

Temple Grandin:

And so he gets recognition for being the spear-maker.

Also, if you notice details really well, you’re going to be really good at hunting and gathering because you’re really good at figuring out, you know, where the animals are going to be at or where to find food…where you might find fruit. If you have a great memory, you’re going to remember where you can locate food.

Tyler Cowen:

Let me try switching tack into the modern world now. Another pattern which I find striking is the extent to which today, autism is a very low status phenomenon for most people. It’s called a plague; it’s called a horror. There’s a notion that it should be somehow completely stamped out. And this I find in stark contrast with how a lot of other disabilities—if even disability is the right word—with how a lot of other cognitive specializations are treated. But for a lot of other areas, there’s much more tolerance….

Temple Grandin:

Well, give me examples of the other areas. You tend to talk too abstract for me.

Tyler Cowen:

Okay.

Temple Grandin:

What other areas? Name them.

Tyler Cowen:

Take, for instance, people who have some kind of physical handicap.

Temple Grandin:

A physical handicap, okay.

Tyler Cowen:

That’s right. This would be—it would be considered quite rude to make negative comments about the fact that people have a physical handicap.

Temple Grandin:

Like they had a broken spine or something like that, you know, in a [wheelchair].

Tyler Cowen:

Right. Now you take an autistic person who has some cognitive disabilities and also a lot of cognitive abilities, and all of a sudden it’s not considered rude at all to make negative comments.

Temple Grandin:

Another thing is, psychiatric drugs, when they’re misused, have some really terrible side effects. If a blood pressure pill made you one hundred pounds fat, they’d take it off the market instantaneously. Unfortunately, people don’t seem to be very worried about some of the cognitive deficits caused by psychiatric drugs when they’re used wrong.

Now, I want to make it very plain that I’m not against psychiatric drugs, because I take antidepressants and they saved me. They saved me from [constant] panic attacks. But I make sure I tell you which ones are good for your memory—don’t hurt your memory. Prozac does not hurt memory where Paxil does. I want to make sure that when medications are used, you pick out medications that are not going to mess up your memory or ability to think.

Tyler Cowen:

Right.

Temple Grandin:

Some medications mess up your ability to think. I’ve tried some Buspar and it was horrible stuff. I was so spacey I couldn’t think. Well, I wouldn’t give that to anybody.

Tyler Cowen:

So, why do you think a public discourse on autism in particular has remained so backward? There’s so many…

Temple Grandin:

Well, I think part of the problem is…

Tyler Cowen:

…the irrational fear of vaccines…

Temple Grandin:

I know people who are dealing with some of the very, very severe cases, where they’re not going to be working for Microsoft or any computer company; they’re not going to be like Tito, who can type. They’re not potty- trained; they’re taking you-know-what and spreading it all around. They’re pulling their parents’ hair out. Their parents can’t go out to a restaurant by themselves and there usually is much more wrong with the person than just autism. A lot of these severe cases have other medical problems such as severe epilepsy. There are no hidden cognitive skills inside.

I think there are some cases that are getting labeled autism that should not be. They’re getting labeled autism to get services. I have seen individuals labeled autism who could barely walk. People with autism can walk.

And so, you get these very severe cases where the families’ lives are wrecked. And then you get the smart Asperger kid. Now the families’ lives are not wrecked in that situation.

Tyler Cowen:

Sure. And there’s a selection bias, that the people who show up for aid or who show up for studies or who get diagnoses, on average, they’re the people with the greater number of problems and a smaller number of successes.

Temple Grandin:

I am worried about the smart Asperger kids. I’m more concerned about the Asperger diagnosis than I am about the autism diagnosis, because by definition, to be autistic you have to have early onset. But I’m seeing too many kids I would just label “geek” or “nerd” headed down a handicap route. And that really, really concerns me.

And there’s not enough concern about careers. There are only about five books on the market on careers. I mean, decent careers for people with autism and Asperger’s. My Developing Talents is one of them.

And it just sort of blows my mind that I go to an autism meeting and you get this single-minded attitude towards Asperger’s. All many parents and teachers can think about is that they’re not social. Yes, they need to learn social skills, but you can’t take the geek out of the [geek]. And then I go over to Talented and Gifted meetings and you’ve got the same students over there doing really well. Some people at the autism meetings just don’t get it.

The other problem is, a lot of the people who are working in education don’t know anything about industry; business in technical fields; or specialized skills in math, music, or computers. Many educators are just not into that. Their emphasis is all social, but social without doing. And these smart Asperger kids get hung up. The best way to get Asperger kids to be social is through shared interests in their favorite topics. Social for the sake of social is boring.

A mild Asperger’s is just a personality variation. Simon Baron-Cohen has talked about this.

Tyler Cowen:

Well, isn’t there another way of looking at it, though? And that’s to ask whether at the genetic—in the cognitive level—whether there’s much of a difference between autism and Asperger’s at all, and that maybe the people who we’re calling Asperger’s are just those who are better at learning the trades and the skills they need.

Temple Grandin:

The ones that they’re calling Asperger’s are the ones where there’s no speech delay. I think there are different levels of severity. And there are people labeled autism where they’re not going to be typing independently, and they have a lot of severe neurological problems and really are handicapped. And they are being mixed in with the ones that are not.

Einstein, after all, by the time he was three, did talk and did do things. By the time I was four, I was fully verbal. By three and a half, I had started to talk. The ones that are the very severe cases, the most severe, are not going to be doing any of these wonderful things.

Tyler Cowen:

So, say, if we look at…

Temple Grandin:

This is part of the problem. And it’s the Asperger’s diagnosis where you’re labeled—you’re getting a label. There’s something wrong with you when there’s no speech delay….

Tyler Cowen:

Right.

Temple Grandin:

And then some of these other kids ought to be just called speech delay.

There’s another book called Late-Talking Children, and…

Tyler Cowen:

By Thomas Sowell, yes.

Temple Grandin:

…yeah. And he talks about the same problem. And I get worried about these kids who get labeled and get put in a rut.

And one thing I’m finding happening is, I’ll have dads come to me because their son has just been labeled autistic, and the dad goes, “Well, I think I’m Asperger’s, too.” Now here’s a dad who’s maybe forty-five years old, and I ask him, “Are you gainfully employed in a good job with health insurance?” When the answer is, yes, “I would strongly recommend that you not get a formal diagnosis on your medical record because you’re going to trash your future health insurance.”

And I just got an e-mail recently from a guy who was fired after he came out of the closet and said he was Asperger’s. And he was in a good job where he didn’t need any accommodations of any kind. I said, “Yeah, go to the meetings, read the books, keep it off the medical records.” That’s what I tell him.

Tyler Cowen:

Uh-huh.

Temple Grandin:

I tell these dads this.

Tyler Cowen:

You know, often in the mainstream media, the word autistic will be used as a kind of insult. So, if you’re someone, a non-autistic person who doesn’t understand a particular social factor or social nicety, that person will be insulted by being called autistic.

Temple Grandin:

Well, yeah. Malcolm Gladwell, you know, did some stuff like that. And Malcolm Gladwell kind of just totally discounts ability. He totally…

Tyler Cowen:

Sure.

Temple Grandin:

…just discounts it. And I do not agree with that. Like, he used the example of Bill Gates, and that the reason why Bill Gates got to where he was, is because he had access to this fancy computer and he also had people to teach him how to use it. He also did lots and lots and lots of practice.

Now, I agree with the lots and lots of practice. I did not learn cattle-handling stuff overnight; I spent three years teaching myself that. But also, innate ability does matter because…

Tyler Cowen:

Absolutely.

Temple Grandin:

In college, I had access to that exact same mainframe computer teletype [terminal] that Bill Gates did. And I was very interested in wanting to learn to talk to Rex—that was the name that they’ve given to that computer—and I couldn’t talk to Rex. I just couldn’t do the programming even though I wanted to do the programming. So, innate ability does make a difference.

And Malcolm Gladwell totally discounts that. I completely disagree with Malcolm Gladwell in that Outliers book because I had access to the same computer and I had very good teachers teach me how to do the programming. But I simply could not do it. That’s the pattern-thinking mind; that’s not the photorealistic, visual-thinking mind.

Tyler Cowen:

That’s right. Or, if there’s someone, say, who is born hyperlexic, it will be hard for other people to read at the rate that person can. I think there’s just no way, in most cases, that practice can overcome that kind of difference.

Temple Grandin:

Well, no. You do have to practice, because my book is called Developing Talents, it’s not called just Talents. And learning cattle handling was not done overnight. You do have to practice. I agree with Malcolm Gladwell about all the practice to develop a usable skill. You’ve got to develop talents.

I think Mozart was another great example. Well, of course, Mozart has already had the musical genes—but again, he had to have lots of practice.

Tyler Cowen:

Sure.

Temple Grandin:

But I took piano lessons and it didn’t catch on. I have some motor skill problems and I just couldn’t learn how to finger an instrument correctly or play the piano right.

I had lessons. We had a beautiful old grand piano in our house and access to instruments and everything. I just didn’t have the ability.

Tyler Cowen:

You know, one issue you’ve…

Temple Grandin:

Drawing. Drawing was my thing. My thing was drawing.

Tyler Cowen:

And visual images.

Temple Grandin:

That’s right.

Tyler Cowen:

That’s right.

One issue you’ve raised in your books is our religion and autistic perspectives on religion, which I think is also a fascinating topic. In my own book, Create Your Own Economy, one point I made is that non-autistic people are more likely to falsely interpret situations and think that there’s human intention involved when there isn’t….

Temple Grandin:

In what situation?

Tyler Cowen:

They are excessively inclined to give an anthropomorphic interpretation of social events. Some social event will happen and non-autistics are very likely to think: That was someone’s human intention. Someone wished us ill or wished us well. And they ascribe so many events to human intention when many events are accidents or the results of evolution or the result…

Temple Grandin:

You said autistic people tend to do that or don’t tend to do this?

Tyler Cowen:

Autistic people don’t tend to do it.

Temple Grandin:

Yeah.

Tyler Cowen:

Non-autistic people tend to do it. They tend to see active human intervention even when it’s not present.

Now, when you apply this perspective to a religion, I think one implication—a testable implication—is that, on average, autistic people will have different religious world views from non-autistic people. Is this consistent with your views and your experience?

Temple Grandin:

Well, one of the things that kind of just blows my mind is just how irrational normal people are. Just blows my mind. I am totally a logical person, who follows certain rules to guide the things that I do. I don’t hurt other people and follow the golden rule. Jesus had a lot of very, very, wonderful teachings and we need to be following those teachings. You need to adhere to those teachings.

The golden rule is in every religion. Basically, it says, treat others the way you want to be treated. Mother taught that one concrete example at a time. You take turns when you’re doing things because other people have to have their turn. You share your toys. You don’t steal other people’s stuff because you wouldn’t like if they stole your stuff. If you did something nice for somebody else, hopefully, they’ll do something nice in return. That’s the golden rule, taught one concrete example at a time.

I’m not a deep philosophical thinker. I’m a very, very practical person. I want to do stuff that makes a practical change on the ground. When a mother tells me that one of my books really helped her understand how to teach her child, that makes me happy. I’m not into philosophy; I’m into concrete reality improving something on the ground.

Tyler Cowen:

But, in my view, you are a philosophical thinker even if you don’t intend to be. But by focusing on something quite practical and detail-oriented, you’ll actually get a better grasp of some big broad important issues than if someone just sits around on a stone and scratches his head all day.

Temple Grandin:

Well, the problem I’m seeing today with an awful lot of policymakers—and I think this problem is getting worse—is we’re getting people further and further and further away from practical things.

Tyler Cowen:

Sure.

Temple Grandin:

And you’re getting more and more policy that’s just sort of divorced from reality. And this is getting worse. Kids aren’t playing outside; they aren’t getting together and playing a game just on their own.

I’m finding that people are having a harder time just figuring out how to do stuff. I’m even finding that with teachers. When I talk about the different cognitive types, I am finding more and more teachers who have difficulty figuring out which type a child fits in. There is the visual thinking type, the pattern thinker, the mathematics mind who often has trouble in reading, and then the word thinker mind. I’m amazed just in the last few years the number of people who have difficulty figuring out if a kid is a visual thinker. Visual thinkers produce excellent art by the time they are in third or fourth grade.

Tyler Cowen:

Uh-huh.

Temple Grandin:

Ten years ago, I didn’t get those kinds of questions. I’m finding that some people are now worse at practical problem-solving. When I was a little kid, we spent a whole weekend trying to put up a tent. The parents didn’t come out and help; they let us figure it out for ourselves.

Tyler Cowen:

Just to return to my earlier question. If social contact is a big motive for religious behavior and if religion is, to some extent, based on a particular kind of abstraction, do you think it’s true that autistic people will be, on average, less religious for cognitive reasons?

Temple Grandin:

Well, Einstein, for example, was very, very religious when he was younger. I think what a person is exposed to affects their beliefs. Normally, I don’t like to talk about religion because it’s really, really controversial. So, I usually just try to avoid that because…

Tyler Cowen:

Okay.

Temple Grandin:

…I’d rather talk about other things, like helping smart Aspergers to get into really good careers. And if I discuss religion and I get some people angry about that, that may interfere with my goal of helping people—get good careers or working on some of my animal welfare things. So, I usually just don’t talk about it.

In fact, in my Developing Talents book, I said there are three subjects that you do not talk about—sex, politics, and religion—at work. Just leave them at home. You don’t want to get fired from a job over talking about these things that people get so emotionally upset about. Some normal people are just totally irrational about those subjects. At work you just don’t talk about them.

Tyler Cowen:

Okay. That’s fine.

Let me ask you a very concrete question. Take how autistic people were fairing in relative terms forty years ago and compare it to today.

Temple Grandin:

I think…

Tyler Cowen:

Which do you think was a better time to grow up autistic, and why?

Temple Grandin:

I think it depends upon how severe the autism was. For the geek and the nerd—just the plain garden variety of geek and nerd kind of kid—I think they were better off twenty to fifty years ago, because social skills were pounded into all children. My fifties upbringing helped me avoid many problems. I’m seeing smart geeky kids getting fired from jobs for the stupidest things, such as making rude comments about fat people that can’t fit in the elevator. I wouldn’t have lost the job over that. Mother taught me when I was eight years old to not say those sorts of things. During my work in the meat industry I see many successful undiagnosed Asperger people in good jobs they have kept for over thirty years. These people run the computers, work in the maintenance shops, or run the box storage room.

And when you get on the lower end of the spectrum a child may remain nonverbal all his life. He may have an additional medical problem on top of autism such as epilepsy. I think the services are much better today for the more severe cases.

These are the kids they used to just put into institutions. I sometimes visit the Tufts veterinary school in Grafton, Massachusetts. It is on the site that was originally the campus of the old Massachusetts state mental hospital. If you go out into the woods behind the Tufts veterinary school, there are old boarded up brick buildings. I could have been sent to that place—fortunately, I started talking. But the real severe ones in those days, they just warehoused them in these great big, horrible institutions. Walking through the woods past these old, boarded up buildings on the Tufts campus was like really, really creepy. These places were snake pits.

Tyler Cowen:

Let me just push you a bit on your terminology because you’re referring again to lower-end autistic people. And the question is…

Temple Grandin:

A lower-end autistic person is somebody who never speaks or types. They do not type independently and they usually have a whole bunch of other medical problems. Their behavior cannot be controlled. They are hitting people, they are punching out walls. The family can no longer keep them at home, because it is too difficult and stressful.

Tyler Cowen:

But why describe it in such a way? There will be many intermediate cases…

Temple Grandin:

Yeah.

Tyler Cowen:

…but it’s taking a whole class of people who are quite aware and are quite conscious and telling them that they are, in some sense, just bad because of who they are and what they are. So, why not use a more neutral terminology?

Temple Grandin:

Tell me the terminology you want to use.

Tyler Cowen:

I think we should help them with services, yes. But I prefer to use the terminology “low-social-status” and “high-social-status” autistics. And a person, of course, can move across the categories. By some of your descriptions…

Temple Grandin:

Well, some of these are not going to move across the categories.

Tyler Cowen:

Certainly, but consider yourself.

Temple Grandin:

They’re just…they’re miles away from the smart Asperger kid.

Tyler Cowen:

Consider yourself or consider someone like Michelle Dawson. At some stages in your life, you might have plausibly been labeled what you’re calling lower- end autistic.

Temple Grandin:

It’s possible that I could have been labeled that under age five. In very young children with autism, one cannot predict which child will respond to intensive early intervention and which one will not. Three children can have the same full-blown autistic symptoms and one will respond and start talking and the others will not. Maybe one child will be able to type like Tito, but the other one will not be able to do it.

Tyler Cowen:

Sure. But why have the label at all in a way that, to a lot of people…

Temple Grandin:

With little autistic kids, you need to work really hard and see if you can pull them out of it. I don’t even want to judge severity at age two or three. When I’m using this term, I’m talking about the kid who is now ten years old, or a teenager.

When they’re little kids, you want to do ABA [Applied Behavior Analysis], or other intensive teaching methods and see if you can get them talking. A lot of ABA kinds of things were done with me. And, if the ABA things had not been done with me when I was two and three years old, I would not have pulled out of it. Early intervention is extremely important. You need to take every little autistic kid and work on them really, really hard when they’re really little kids because you can’t tell how severe they’re going to be when they’re two years old. You’ve got to work with them.

Tyler Cowen:

Let me also ask you about that. In terms of randomized control trials and real statistical evidence with controls and also comparing against placebo effect, is there a lot of evidence that ABA works? There are many different things that are tried; a lot of it seems to do harm. Isn’t it more correct to say, we just don’t know at this point what works and what doesn’t?

Temple Grandin:

I think there’s good evidence ABA does work in young children. I’m only talking about ABA in real little kids under age five. I think there’s a lot of ABA stuff done in older individuals that’s just crap. But under age five, the child needs many, many hours working one to one with a really effective teacher. Some teachers have the knack to work effectively with these kids and others do not.

Tyler Cowen:

I’m sure. That’s good for anyone, not just autistics.

Temple Grandin:

Yes. Yeah.

Tyler Cowen:

That’s just attention. That’s focus; that’s teaching a smart ABA…

Temple Grandin:

As I said before, you got to work really hard with young autistic kids. I’m talking about under age five. They need the very intensive form of teaching, lots of one to one.

They didn’t prove that ABA worked better than some other intensive teaching method. Okay? I’ve got my journal editor’s hat on now. What they proved was that ten hours of one-to-one intensive teaching was less effective than forty hours.

Tyler Cowen:

There is truth in that.

Temple Grandin:

They definitely did show that. In other words, what it showed was the intensity of teaching of little kids is really, really important. They never tested forty hours of ABA against forty hours of some other intensive one-to-one teaching methods. But hours of one-to-one teaching does work.

The worst thing that you can do with the young autistic kid—and I’m talking about under age five—is nothing.

Tyler Cowen:

Uh-huh.

Temple Grandin:

That’s the worst thing you can do. And here, in Colorado, we’ve got really rotten services. There are families where the child is getting up to age five and he just sat home and watched TV. That’s atrocious.

Tyler Cowen:

You know, teaching is very good, but aren’t there many aspects of ABA focused on the idea of really punishing kids for autistic behavior or autistic features if they really probably can’t change?

Temple Grandin:

Well, I think that’s some of the old-fashioned kind of ABA. I do not like the old-fashioned ABA, where they just sit them at a table. The new methods of ABA are much more flexible; they’re not punishing kids. And I also think that the child needs to have a certain amount of time during the day where they can revert back to autism.

I was allowed to have an hour after lunch where I could revert back to autism. You know, autistic kids need to have some downtime. But when I was sitting at the dinner table, I was not allowed to rock or flap or, you know, play with my food, or do any of that kind of stuff. And I’m really glad that my parents brought me up the way they did or I don’t know what would have happened to me.

ABA done right, you’re not punishing kids. Also, what I have found is that really, really good teachers make a big difference. And I’m talking here about treatment for kids under age five right now.

Tyler Cowen:

Right.

Temple Grandin:

Use a variety of methods. I find that ABA starts to look like floor time and floor time start to look like ABA. Everybody gets too hung up on their favorite therapy. But the one thing I’m adamant about is that you need to have thirty or forty hours a week with a really great teacher. There are some bad ABA programs. As the kids get older, especially a real smart, verbal ten-year-old, and you do ABA on him…well, that’s just stupid.

Tyler Cowen:

Of all the ABA done in the United States today, what percentage of it do you think meets your notion of good ABA?

Temple Grandin:

Well, that’s very difficult, you know, difficult for me to say.

Tyler Cowen:

Roughly.

Temple Grandin:

What I tell parents is, there are going to be good teachers and there are going to be bad teachers. I remember talking to one family—they had three different teachers coming in doing ABA with their three-year-old, and one of the teachers didn’t understand autistic sensory problems.

There are some autistic kids who are not going to be able to tolerate going into the big supermarkets. They get sensory overload. This teacher didn’t understand sensory overload and she pushed on the kid too hard and the kid went into sensory shutdown. And there were two other teachers who worked just fine with the kid. They were all doing ABA. One of the teachers was bad and the other teachers were effective and I said, well, you’re just going to have to get rid of the bad teacher. I said, you got to look at each individual teacher; a good teacher knows just how hard to push. Autistic sensory problems are often not recognized.

I have also talked for years that people need to recognize the sensory issues in autism. Sensory issues are variable. They’re very variable. One kid will have sound sensitivity and another kid is going to have problems with [fluorescent] lighting and things like that.

I’m very glad that I got into a very good early intervention program. My speech teacher did a lot of ABA type of things with me. But that was only done when I was two and three years old. It wasn’t done once I started talking; I no longer needed those things.

And basically, with a lot of repetitions, she’d hold up a cup and she’d say, “cup.” And then when I said, “cup,” she’d praised me.

Tyler Cowen:

If we look towards the future, say ten or twenty years from now, where do you see discourse about autism and Asperger’s headed? Do you think it will be something viewed more rationally in the future? Or you think it will be a bigger stigma in a negative sense? Or, where do you see that the dialogue is heading?

Temple Grandin:

Well, I think, eventually, twenty years from now, we’ll get rid of the labeling. What the genetic research is showing right now was discovered using a big computer and masses and masses of data from many families. There are different genetic patterns for the different subparts of autism. Okay, speech delay, there’s a certain genetic pattern. Abnormal movement, there is another genetic pattern, and some of the social relatedness problems have another genetic pattern. Ten to twenty years from now there will be high-speed brain scanning to diagnose sensory problems. One person may have a visual processing problem where fluorescent lights bother them and their visual system is not working right; visual input is distorted. Another person may have a sound sensitivity problem. The scan will be able to determine which system in the brain is not working.

Right now, the computer in the brain scanner is not fast enough to do this sort of thing. Ten to twenty years from now and we can get rid of this profiling and labeling.

I call it behavioral profiling because it was developed by a committee of doctors. You don’t have doctors sitting around in a conference room deciding what the diagnosis for tuberculosis is. That’s done with the lab test. They can tell you exactly what kind of tuberculosis you have. But that’s not being done with autism and Asperger’s. Right now they’re working on the next diagnostic guideline and they made all the doctors sign a nondisclosure agreement. Well, usually in science you don’t do things like signing nondisclosure agreements.

The problem is that the diagnostic system we have now is just behavioral profiling. And I can’t wait until we can get rid of that. In the future they will be able to look at the brain and say, yeah, this person is going to have a problem with multitasking or doing algebra. For me, trying to learn algebra was like totally impossible. The mistake that was made with me was not letting me try other types of math. I’m finding lots and lots of students now who can’t do algebra but they can do trig and geometry.

Tyler Cowen:

Or maybe topology you should be good at.

Temple Grandin:

And look at the more specific problem you might have with the brain and how it can be worked with, in a more objective manner.

Tyler Cowen:

So, I’m relatively optimistic about the future. But I’m still puzzled at why there are so many, what I would consider, insulting uses of the word autistic. If we take Down syndrome, which, at least in cognitive terms, doesn’t even have a lot of the offsetting advantages that many autistics have, it would be considered completely unacceptable in a public setting to insult someone using the word Down syndrome or…

Temple Grandin:

Where are some of the examples where, other than Malcolm Gladwell’s book, you’ve seen that?

Tyler Cowen:

I’d see them in The New York Times, which, I might add, also goes through editing. A number of people have used the word autistic or Asperger’s in a negative way. I see it in a lot of…

Temple Grandin:

And what kind of articles?

Tyler Cowen:

Just op-eds. Like, if the politician is not very good at, say, reading public opinion and that politician will be called autistic. Not as a literal description, but as a kind of insult saying, well, he’s not very good at this.

And if someone did something that wasn’t very intelligent, you wouldn’t compare them to someone with Down syndrome. That would be seen as unacceptable.

But this norm has not spread to discourse about autism, and I wonder if there isn’t something about autistic individuals that make them, for a lot of people, harder to accept, for a reason that’s somewhat intrinsic or, maybe, even genetic.

Temple Grandin:

I think human beings are social and people with autism are not social and I think that’s probably part of the reason.

The other thing I’ve noticed is social bias in the research. Scientists spent years and years doing all of this research on the social stuff and all the social deficits on face recognition. We probably have a thousand papers on MRIs and brain scans on face recognition stuff. And it has only been recently that they started doing research on the sensory oversensitivity.

I’ve been talking about the sensory sensitivities for years and people didn’t bother to research them for many years. Fortunately, scientists are doing more sensory research. It’s interesting that a big portion of that research is being done outside the United States.

Tyler Cowen:

Uh-huh.

Temple Grandin:

You can go on the [Pubmed] database on the internet. I was there yesterday looking up some stuff and I’m finding a lot of the research is European, lots of European studies. Sensory issues can be very debilitating. It’s very debilitating if you’re not able to tolerate going to a large supermarket or tolerate noises. And some people on the spectrum can see the flicker of fluorescent lights like a strobe in a disco.

Tyler Cowen:

Sure. But it may also get you…it may get you superior musical pitch or certain musical abilities…

Temple Grandin:

Yup.

Tyler Cowen:

…which are very important for being a composer or an instrumentalist.

Temple Grandin:

It is sad when kids are forced to conform. I’ve seen sad situations where art or music ability was [stomped] out of a kid. You need to be nurturing. If they’re good at art or music, you need to be nurturing that. The child needs to be working on developing it and practicing. An innate ability should never be sacrificed to make a child socially normal.

I can remember students when I was in college that today would be labeled Asperger’s. They were kind of the weird kids, but they were recognized for the things they were good at. One of them did a lot of photography.

And one of the ways to be a geek and get accepted is to sell your work, not your personality. You get recognition from peers for your high quality work.

Tyler Cowen:

Sure.

Temple Grandin:

I’ve been doing that all my life. I figured out very early on to sell my cattle- handling skills by showing people drawings and photos of my projects. I made a portfolio of my work—pictures of projects and drawings—that I put together and mailed to people. When they saw my work, they’d go, “Oh, well, that’s really nice. Yes, I would like to have you design the corrals.”

Tyler Cowen:

I wouldn’t even quite say, as you did, that autistics are antisocial. I would focus more on, what you call, the sensory issues that, I think, most autistics have trouble for sensory reasons being….

Temple Grandin:

Well, sensory makes…

Tyler Cowen:

…social in mainstream ways.

Temple Grandin:

Well, sensory…

Tyler Cowen:

Usually, you know…

Temple Grandin:

Yeah.

Tyler Cowen:

In a way…

Temple Grandin:

…sensory makes…

Tyler Cowen:

…you’re a very social person yourself. You write books, you travel, you communicate with many people, you take a deep interest in their welfare, you do a lot to make them better off. Those are ways of being social, which are quite powerful and beneficial, even if they are not always the mainstream ways of being social.

Temple Grandin:

But there are certain things where I do have a problem. Like, I interrupt you. And one of the reasons why I interrupt is because I don’t get the timing.

Tyler Cowen:

I’m sure.

Temple Grandin:

I don’t [know what] makes timing. I don’t know when I should break into the conversation. And I don’t do well in social chitchat. It’s sort of an emotional relatedness, chitchat stuff. So, I just get totally bored with it.

Tyler Cowen:

But maybe some of the chitchat is partly narcissistic and selfish for people and not truly social. And maybe, in part, you’re frustrated because it doesn’t correspond to what you want sociability to be, which is some other model based on a different style of communicating.

Temple Grandin:

Well, I think it’s just…

Tyler Cowen:

It’s really just differences in cognition.

Temple Grandin:

…I think it’s hardwired in a normal human being to do that sort of chitchat stuff. And I noticed a lot of people just get such enjoyment out of it. You see, people chitchat for hours about sports and I’m amazed; there’s no informational content in what they’re talking about.

Tyler Cowen:

Well, I’m not sure that it’s that. I mean, a lot of autistic people actually are very interested in sports. If you’ve read, like, reports of Mark Donohoo, who…

Temple Grandin:

Oh, yeah, I happen to be one of the ones that’s not. But the thing that I noticed when these real social people talk about sports is what they didn’t talk about. Autistic people are really more likely to talk about why this guy is a good coach, or the kind of strategy he used to win the game. An autistic sports conversation would contain more information.

Tyler Cowen:

Right, exactly.

Temple Grandin:

When I went to a dinner with some salesmen, they got pretty drunk and they just chitchatted—two hours of sports-themed chitchat. And the thing that amazed me is that the conversation had no information in it. It was silly: little jokes about the color or the salesman’s product and the color of the competing teams’ uniforms—just silly things.

Tyler Cowen:

I think, maybe, what they’re doing is they’re trading information about how they read rhythms because they’re testing whether they want to build a social alliance with each other based on how well they read each other’s rhythms—and that, if they’re good at it, they’ll build the alliance; if they’re not, they won’t build the alliance. And to me, it seems like a costly way of making that decision; there ought to be a cheaper way. But I guess that’s how I understand what’s going on in those situations. It’s the…

Temple Grandin:

Well…

Tyler Cowen:

…an exchange of a kind of information.

Temple Grandin:

…I think it’s just hardwired human behavior, and there are some emotional circuits that are left out in me. For example, when I told you earlier, when I was [almost killed] by a train—I can play that video in my mind. The memory of almost being rolled over by a train is like an action movie. Somebody else would have gotten PTSD over that….

Tyler Cowen:

Uh-huh.

Temple Grandin:

The emotional tag never got put on the memory. I was really scared at the time it happened. Oh, man, was I scared. And I can tell you right now—to walk across another railroad trestle? You won’t get me near one. My emotions are all in the present. When old memories are recalled I have little or no emotion.

Tyler Cowen:

But again, I would want to say this: It is the difference between memory and emotions. It sounds like the emotion was quite real and vivid. It just gets…

Temple Grandin:

At the time…

Tyler Cowen:

…encoded into your memory in a different way.

Temple Grandin:

Well, what’s happening…

Tyler Cowen:

But in part, by having a freer memory, you’re, maybe in some ways, more open for subsequent emotional experiences.

Temple Grandin:

I can be totally objective and think about political events with no emotion. I look at all the stuff that goes on in politics. I don’t really want to talk about specific political things. I have a no-politics policy because it’s too controversial. But just in general, the thing that amazes me is just how irrational some of the decision-making is.

Tyler Cowen:

Sure.

Temple Grandin:

Totally irrational. It’s just totally emotional.

Tyler Cowen:

If you had another, you know, ten or twenty years of time and it wouldn’t take away from the work you’re doing and you could learn a new area of some kind and then apply it, what would it be?

Temple Grandin:

That’s a real, real interesting question. What would be my new area?

Well, one thing I’m very concerned about is career development for really smart people with the Asperger label, the nerdy kind of kids. I want to help them get into good jobs. That’s what I would have done.

What could have happened to me? I had trouble in high school. I got decent grades in college, but I didn’t get good enough grades to do something, like go to vet school. You know, to get into…

Tyler Cowen:

Right.

Temple Grandin:

…things through the front door.

So, one of the reasons why I ended up designing slaughterhouses is because this industry has no barrier to entry.

Tyler Cowen:

Sure.

Temple Grandin:

You can start out even without a high school education and you can end up as the plant manager. You can work your way up.

And I know a lot of kids who say, Oh, I want to go to vet school. Well, there are five kids for every vet school slot. And so, then they end up doing something else. They don’t realize there are a lot of other careers with animals.

One of the things that got me interested in animal behavior when I was in college was an excellent teacher in animal behavior. One thing that affects your career choices is having an excellent teacher.

I remember one time I was having some eye surgery and I was talking to the eye doctor during this and I said, “Well, be thankful you don’t have to be doing colonoscopies all the time.” And then he told me that his best friend did that. Why did he end up in that field? He had a teacher that made it just so interesting. This shows the importance of good teachers.

I’ve tried to be a good mentor for my four Ph.D. students. One of them is defending her thesis this afternoon. I want to be a good mentor to students to help them get into good careers. A good teacher can make any subject interesting. In whatever I do, I want to do things to improve things.

Tyler Cowen:

Okay.

Temple Grandin:

I certainly wouldn’t have become a mathematician.

Tyler Cowen:

Sure.

Temple Grandin:

But I could have gone into some other kind of industrial design.

What I basically do designing equipment is what is now a college major called industrial design. And I possibly would have gone into industrial design. [I had an] industrial designer on my master’s thesis committee. But I don’t think I would have gone into industrial design to design toothpaste tubes because that is just kind of silly. People don’t need a better toothpaste tube.

Tyler Cowen:

Well, it can matter. I don’t think we should spend a lot of money on designing toothpaste tubes, but it saves resources if the tube works well. And…

Temple Grandin:

If you do want to save resources, that could be a good reason to design a better toothpaste tube. If you just do it to change it for the sake of changing it for marketing purposes, that’s not a good reason for doing it.

Tyler Cowen:

Yeah. Do you think the universe…

Temple Grandin:

I think, you know, I think…

Tyler Cowen:

Sorry.

Temple Grandin:

I know you keep trying to pull me into talking about a lot of political things, and I tend to just avoid all the political controversies.

When I do my talks on autism, I talk about the importance of early intervention. I talk a lot about sensory issues. I talk about the different kinds of minds and developing those different kinds of minds. I talk about careers—you know, things that parents and teachers can take home and use.

Tyler Cowen:

Talking about intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, does that count as politics?

Temple Grandin:

No, I’ll talk about that.

Tyler Cowen:

Do you have a view on it? My view is there are many forms of intelligence. Autism is one of them. We tend to underestimate or underappreciate the forms of intelligence which are nonmainstream or nonstandard. So, my suspicion is the universe is teeming with intelligent life but in very different ways that we’re not expecting.

It’s not that necessarily there are a lot of planets and beings that resemble our human beings, but that intelligence is somehow woven into the structure of the universe. And to me, it’s a puzzle why we don’t see more of it—why no one has visited us. And this is again, a question I bring up…

Temple Grandin:

Well, I’ve always been a science fiction fan. A hardcore Star Trek fan. The minute that new Star Trek movie comes out, I’m going to go see it.

Tyler Cowen:

It’s here.

Temple Grandin:

I think there’s going to be other beings in the universe. There are probably other beings out there. I don’t rule that out. I love Star Trek; I really like science fiction—reading descriptions of faraway places, different planets with different kinds of civilizations. I’ve been following some of the reports where astronomers have found other planets that would be capable of supporting life. I think in Star Trek it’s called the “Class M” planets.

Tyler Cowen:

Yes.

Temple Grandin:

Astronomers are finding planets about the same size as Earth. I find that really, really interesting.

Tyler Cowen:

Other than Star Trek and science fiction, what else do you like to read or view or experience?

Temple Grandin:

Oh, I like to read lots of science magazines. I have…

Tyler Cowen:

[Okay.]

Temple Grandin:

…I subscribe to Science, Nature, and New Scientist, and lots and lots of science magazines…Discover magazine…Scientific American…

Tyler Cowen:

I like Arthur Clarke, I like Asimov…

Temple Grandin:

Yup, I do, too.

Tyler Cowen:

…I like most hard science fiction. I like Greg Bear. I like Dan Simmons. I like…

Temple Grandin:

Yup, I like Greg…

Tyler Cowen:

…I like Robert Silverberg.

Temple Grandin:

Yup, I like them, too.

Tyler Cowen:

Fantasy? Do you read Tolkien and…

Temple Grandin:

Now, I’m not into that as much. No, that doesn’t interest me as much.

Tyler Cowen:

Do you think there’s a…

Temple Grandin:

And so…

Tyler Cowen:

…cognitive reason or is that just a kind of aesthetic accident?

Temple Grandin:

If the plots get too complicated, I have a hard time following them. I really enjoy different ideas and reading about different civilizations. I love lots of description of interesting places.

Tyler Cowen:

I like the counterfactuals in science fiction; the fact that you have a kind of model of how an alternative world works and has usually a relatively small number of principles.

What I find frustrating in fantasies is the arbitrariness of it. You know, just the proliferation of rules. You know, there are not even rules about falcons and magicians and this and that. And to me, it feels a bit like a swamp.

So, I enjoy reading Tolkien, but most fantasy to me is frustrating. And I’ve never completely been sure why, but I think it might have to do with this arbitrariness.

Temple Grandin:

Well, I think I have read some of those. I think I have some of those same problems with it that you have. In hardcore science fiction, the planet may have a different atmosphere or gravity or something like that, but then, once you accept that, things are logical.

Tyler Cowen:

That’s right. And I enjoy that part of the story—to see the working out of the logic…

Temple Grandin:

Yes.

Tyler Cowen:

…in ways that are a combination of both predictable and surprising. To me, that’s rewarding.

Temple Grandin:

Yes, but I just find fantasy not as satisfying for me as science fiction, like Asimov, Greg Bear, or something like that.

Tyler Cowen:

I like Ursula Le Guin. Her works are very good…Frank Herbert—I enjoyed the Dune series.

Temple Grandin:

Yeah. I got a little lost in the Dune series. But I had a hard time following the complicated plot.

Tyler Cowen:

Volume Two is very weak, if you got lost there. So, I would just say, skip it and go to Volume Three, which is as good as Volume One, and don’t worry about it.

Temple Grandin:

Okay.

Tyler Cowen:

Or, read the summary on Wikipedia.

Temple Grandin:

Yeah.

Tyler Cowen:

It’s interesting to me that science fiction has never achieved much social status in the way of high culture or critical recognition.

Temple Grandin:

It has never achieved much social status, but they sell a lot of it. Bookstores have gigantic, big science fiction sections. Even the little, tiny airport bookstores will have a big selection, a science fiction section.

Tyler Cowen:

People who read it care about it—which I also like.

Temple Grandin:

Yup, they do.

Tyler Cowen:

I think it’s another example that there can be a different form of beauty or intelligence which is not recognized by a lot of people simply because it’s strange. I’ve never seen a study, but my guess is that autistics read science fiction at higher-than-average rates.

Temple Grandin:

Oh, I think they do. And I think a lot of people with Asperger’s like Star Trek. When the Star Trek show first came out, some of the producers hated the show. They just actively hated it. And then there was another show that was on. I think it was called Alien Nation. I really liked it.

Tyler Cowen:

Yes.

Temple Grandin:

And they killed that show. And they killed it because one higher level producer hated it.

Tyler Cowen:

I think we’re very pressed—out of time. Just one final question: Do you watch Battlestar Galactica? And, if so, what do you think of it? It’s one of my favorites.

Temple Grandin:

I [haven’t been watching] Battlestar Galactica, but I have been a Lost fan.

Tyler Cowen:

As am I.

Temple Grandin:

And I’m definitely a Lost fan. Some of the threads of some of the character stories I get lost in, but there’s one part of it I’m just fascinated by. Well, what were all those strange research stations on the island? What were they for?

Tyler Cowen:

Okay.

Temple Grandin:

In the last episode I watched last week, I’m getting little glimpses of what might be the more hardcore science fiction part of it. And that’s the part of it that I like the best. The two-hour finale is coming up on Wednesday and I’m supposed to go to a dinner. So, I think I’m going to get halfway through the dinner and then I will tell them that I feel sick. I’m really…

Tyler Cowen:

Exactly.

Temple Grandin:

…just sneaking back up to my hotel room so I can watch that two-hour special of Lost.

Tyler Cowen:

Lost and Battlestar Galactica are now my two favorite shows. What I like about Battlestar Galactica, for one thing, the characters of the Cylons, to me, have some odd parallels with autistics—that, at first, they’re viewed as being quite robotic or lacking in emotions or less than human, but, as the series goes on, you see how rich their internal mental lives are. And that’s been a theme in some of my writings and, of course, some of yours. And to see that reflected in some other settings, and to see what they’ve done with it, I found very interesting.

Temple Grandin:

I haven’t followed Battlestar Galactica. Star Trek, I’ve watched all the different forms of Star Trek. And one of the things I really liked about it was its logic and its ethics. You know, like classic Trek, the original show, had really, really good ethics. And there was a book…

Tyler Cowen:

Absolutely.

Temple Grandin:

…on the ethics in Star Trek. There was a very clear-cut sort of morality about right and wrong, which I really liked.

Tyler Cowen:

Okay. I hope you’ve enjoyed this chat. It’s been great for me.

Temple Grandin:

I can understand why some people on the spectrum are objecting to some of the ABA stuff that’s been done with older [folks]. You know, I only endorse ABA for kids under age five.

Tyler Cowen:

Uh-huh.

Temple Grandin:

It’s basically a little kid’s program to get language started. And I don’t like the real rigid forms of it. And I tell parents, you’ve got to have an effective teacher. I always ask parents, “Is your child making progress?”

Tyler Cowen:

Sure.

Temple Grandin:

Try to get progress such as getting more and more useful speech.

Tyler Cowen:

Sure. I think the idea of the teacher is the key there.

Temple Grandin:

I think the teacher is the key. I tell parents, “You’ve got to have good teachers.” Now, these people that are objecting; what exactly are they objecting to?

Tyler Cowen:

Many of them are objecting to some of the punishments. I read reports which worry me. I’m not sure how true they are.

Temple Grandin:

Like, what do they say?

Tyler Cowen:

You withhold all rewards until the kid stops behaving austistically. And that…

Temple Grandin:

Well, that’s not a good ABA if that’s what they’re doing. That’s a bad idea. Good teachers don’t do that.

Tyler Cowen:

But I think the problem is, a lot of ideas get abused in practice. A lot of good ideas…

Temple Grandin:

Well, and I tell parents—especially parents of little kids—it all gets down to who the teacher is.

Tyler Cowen:

Uh-huh.

Temple Grandin:

And there are effective teachers and there are bad teachers and there are some teachers who are not going to work with your kids. You need to get rid of them.

Tyler Cowen:

Right.

Temple Grandin:

And so much of it depends on the teacher. That oftentimes, is more important than what the name of the method is.

Tyler Cowen:

Right.

Temple Grandin:

And there are a lot of different things being called ABA and good teachers don’t do bad things to children.

Tyler Cowen:

Yeah, I agree.

But, you know, keep in mind your own point about how irrational people can be.

Temple Grandin:

Well…

Tyler Cowen:

And you’re taking an irrational person and putting them in a position of extreme power over a child. And it can work great, but it can be problematic, you know?

Temple Grandin:

Well, yup. And I’ve also seen parents get very, very irrational about treatments. They’ll go out and do all kinds of really wild stuff and they believe it’s working. And then when I ask them, “Well, did you start an intensive early intervention program at the same time?” I find out they did. Well, the early intervention is probably the reason. They get to believing in certain kinds of wild [treatments], almost like it’s a religion.

Tyler Cowen:

Sure.

Temple Grandin:

That’s bad. That’s really bad.

Tyler Cowen:

Yeah.

Temple Grandin:

They are not logical. And when I talk about these things, I try to get parents to carefully think. “I want you to think in a logical manner about the program you’re doing with your little kid. You’ve got to be logical.”

Tyler Cowen:

Thank you so much.

Temple Grandin:

Okay.

Tyler Cowen:

Take care. Bye.

Temple Grandin:

Yeah, bye. Bye.