This is the third and final segment of my interview with Dr. Temple Grandin, noted author and animal handling expert. You mentioned before that connection between autism and genius, Temple. And in fact you have a whole chapter in your book about that. I'm sure that some readers will find that controversial. Can you give some examples of what you're talking about?
Well,
Einstein today would be labeled autistic. He had no language until age three
and when you read
biographies of Einstein, when he was a child he had a lot of autistic traits:
not very social,
a lot of solitary play with blocks and with playing cards, a typical autistic
trait. There's
two ways nature can build a brain: it can build a brain to be more a thinking
and cognitive
brain or to be more social.
It takes a kind of process of circuits in the brain to make a person really social. Basically, with the mild form of autism, which is Asperger's, you think of all the people who work in the computer field. There are tons of them that are not diagnosed, that are just Asperger mild autism. Geeks and nerds and Asperger's are the same thing. People on the spectrum tend to be more interested in things than interested in just social chitchat. And if you didn't have any people in this world interested in things, we'd still be living in caves.
But let's take this from the other side. The other side is that autistic kids often suffer from the insensitivity and cruelty of their peers.
I had a terrible time in high school. I was just teased absolutely horribly. It was terrible.
You can speak about that personally. And I'd like to hear about that. But I'd also like to discuss something else. At some point, you learned how to adopt some social graces in order to be able to function.
You have to learn social rules like being in a play. I didn't even know that people had all these secret little eye signals until I read about them in a book when I was 50 years old. I didn't even know they existed. You have to learn social rules like saying "please" and "thank you" and being polite and not pushing in line just like being in a play. Sort of like, you go to a foreign country; what are the customs of the foreign country? You have to just learn social rules sort of like you're acting in a play.
It's like learning a foreign language.
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