This book was absolutely fascinating. Some of the science parts are a bit dry, but Temple Grandin does a superb job explaining things. I read Thinking in Pictures many many years ago, and I forgot how funny she is! The studies she's explained in this book really opened my eyes to some of my students' behaviors. I really recommend this book for anyone living with or teaching an autistic child. Don't be afraid of the science stuff.

Temple Grandin is so honest, so forward-thinking, and has such a great sense of humor too. Her voice is forthright and passionate, and her writing is clear and engaging. The book is full of insight and wisdom; such a pleasure to read, and so much to wonderful information to absorb!

The first half of the book is interesting enough. Grandin mentions a lot of recent ASD research and shares information on the biology of ASD. After the first half she comes to her own opinions and either keeps on gabbing about her different sorts of intelligence and about how ASD people should behave. To me this seems the very opposite of what I would advise and it seems very unhealthy and badly reasoned. (Grandin finds frustration preferable to anger. I don't necessarily agree, for example). I skipped large parts and was very surprised to read her (in my opinion) unhealthy advice. Maybe Grandin should stick to cattle rather than people in this matter. This was the first and will be the last book of her that I read.

Interesting info. I really appreciated Grandin's perspective and learned a lot. I didn't know that there were hereditary components to Autism, nor that the Autistic Brain grows differently. (Seriously, I knew NOTHING about Autism before my son's diagnosis, and the "Newly Diagnosed" parent packet from Autism Speaks was less than helpful.) There were some really interesting neuropsych tidbits here.
I also like her parenting suggestions for parents of Autistic children with low support needs, and her list of career ideas for visual/object thinkers, pattern thinkers, and word/fact thinkers. I have always been fascinated by Temple Grandin and so admire the way she has made her way in the world.

I'm reading a bunch of books about neurodiversity to understand it and neurodiverse people more. I find what I'm reading about autism to be fascinating. My mom worked with autistic children in her career, but I never thought much of it. I'm glad I watched the movie, Temple Grandin, so I can better understand some of her story and way of speaking and thinking. And the references made to the squeeze machine in this book.

“The paper presented the case histories of eleven children, who, Kanner felt, shared a set of symptoms—ones that we would today recognize as consistent with autism: the need for solitude; the need for sameness. To be alone in a world that never varied.” pg. 5

“My amygdalae are larger than normal. . . And since the amygdala is important for processing fear and other emotions, this large size might explain my lifelong anxiety. I think of all the panic attacks that plagued me through much of the 1970s, and they begin to make sense in a new way. My amygdalae are telling me I have everything to fear, including fear itself.” pg. 32

“Naturally, I find these results fascinating because they highlight some of the odd things going on in my brain that help make me who I am. But what I find reallyfascinating is that they match the results of studies of some other people with autism.
- Preferring objects to faces? . . . ‘One thing that seems to be coming up repeatedly in these scanning studies with individuals with autism is the marked reduction in the cortical activation to faces.’
- Enlarged amygdalae are also often seen in people with autism. Because the amygdala houses so many emotional functions, an autistic can feel as if he or she is one big exposed nerve.
- And then there’s this, in an e-mail from Jason Cooperrider, a graduate student who led the 2010 imaging study at Utah: ‘Dr. Grandin’s head size is large by any standard, consistent with larger than average head/brain size/growth in autism.’ An enlarged brain can be caused by a number of genetic misfires, any one of which can result in an early spurt of neuronal development. The growth rate eventually normalizes, but the macrocephaly remains. The latest estimate is that about 20 percent of autistics have enlarged brains; the vast majority of those seem to be male, for reasons that aren’t at all clear.” pg. 33

“Personally, I like knowing that my high level of anxiety might be related to having an enlarged amygdala. That knowledge is important to me. It helps me keep the anxiety in perspective. I can remind myself that the problem isn’t out there . . . The problem is in here—the way I’m wired. I can medicate for the anxiety somewhat, but I can’t make it go away. So as long as I have to live with it, I can at least do so secure in the knowledge that the threat isn’t real. The feeling of the threat is real—and that’s a huge difference.” pg. 38

“Between birth and the age of one, Schneider explained, infants engage in two activities that developmental researchers call verbal babbling and motor babbling. Verbal babbling refers to the familiar act of babies making noises to hear what they sound like. Similarly, motor babbling refers to actions such as waving a hand just to watch it move. During this period when babies are figuring out how to engage with the world, their brains are actually building connections to make that engagement possible. During verbal babbling, fibers are growing to make the connection between the ‘what you’re hearing’ and ‘what you’re saying’ parts of the brain. During motor babbling, fibers are growing to make the connection between the ‘what you’re seeing’ and ‘what you’re doing’ parts of the brain.
Then between the ages of one and two, children reach a stage where they can say single words. What’s happening in the child’s brain at this point is that fibers are forming an interlink between those two fiber systems that were constructed during the verbal and motor babbling period. The brain is connecting ‘what you’re seeing’ with ‘what you’re saying’ until out pops Mama, Dada, ball, and so on.” pg. 45

“In fact, researchers are finding that some mutations can contribute to a range of diagnoses, including intellectual disability, epilepsy, ADHD, schizophrenia—a one-to-many relationship. Again, heterogeneity is the problem, because the diagnosis of autism is based on behaviors, and autism shares those behaviors with other diagnoses. If researchers knew which traits—if any—were specific to autism, the search for a genetic cause might be a lot easier.” pg. 57

“For me, the multiple-hit hypothesis is supported by observations that I’ve made again and again when I’ve met with families over the past twenty years. I’ve noticed that in a lot of cases, a kid with autism has at least one parent who exhibits a mild form of autistic behavior. A kid with severe autism often has two parents who exhibit this behavior. If both parents are contributing copy number variations of a kind that pose a higher risk for autism, then the incidence of autism in the children in those families is naturally going to go up. The more you load the dice on both sides of the family, the likelier you are to have a kid with a problem.” pg. 60

“These self-reports reinforce my longstanding hypothesis that some nonverbal autistics might be far more engaged in the world than they seem to be. They just happen to be living in such an extraordinary jumble of sensations that they have no way of productively experiencing the outside world, let alone expressing their relationship to it. . .
The difference between the observer’s view and the subject’s experience—between the acting self and the thinking self—is the difference between what sensory problems look like and what they feel like.” pg. 82-83

“In either case, the lesson isn’t that some people with autism receive too much information and are therefore overresponsive while other people with autism receive too little information and are therefore underresponsive. The lesson is that if your brain receives too much sensory information, your acting self might easily look underresponsive but your thinking self would feel overwhelmed.” pg. 84

“The autistic author Donna Williams wrote that ‘the constant change of most things never seemed to give me any chance to prepare myself for them.’ That’s why, she said, she’d always loved the saying ‘Stop the world, I want to get off.’
Or if not stop the world, at least slow it down. ‘The stress of trying to catch up and keep up,’ Williams wrote, ‘often became too much and I found myself trying to slow everything down and take some time out.’ . . . J.G.T. van Dalen, an adult with mild autism, was quoted in the “World Changing Too Fast’ paper as saying he is ‘constrained to digest each object piece by piece.’ For him, this period of extraordinary focus doesn’t feel normal. ‘Time seems to flow out rapidly,’ he said. For an observer, this period doesn’t look normal either. The difference, he said, was that ‘a nonautistic person sees me as living slowly.’” pg. 85

“The addition of Asperger’s to the DSM-IV in 1994 validated the idea of an autistic spectrum, but the meaning of ‘on the spectrum’ itself has changed over the years. ‘In scientific circles,’ a 2011 article in Nature reported, ‘many accept that certain autistic traits—social difficulties, narrow interests, problems with communication—form a continuum across the general population with autism at one extreme.’
In other words, you don’t have to have an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis to be ‘on the spectrum.’” pg. 104

A Simon Baron-Cohen, who is a psychologist, is mentioned in this book (pg. 104) and I immediately assumed he must be related to Sacha Baron Cohen. And I looked on Wikipedia and they are cousins—how cool!

“I think that bottom-up, details-first thinkers like myself are more likely to have creative breakthroughs just because we don’t know where we’re going. We accumulate details without knowing what they mean and without necessarily attaching emotional significance to them. We seek connections among them without knowing where they’re taking us. We hope those associations will lead us to the big picture—the forest—but we don’t know where we will be until we arrive there. We expect surprises.” pg. 131

“But if you really want to prepare kids to participate in the mainstream of life, then you have to do more than accommodate their deficits. You have to figure out ways to exploit their strengths.
How do you do that? How do you recognize a strength when you see it? This is where the three ways of thinking—picture, patterns, and word-fact—come in handy.
I recently had a conversation with a parent whose fourth-grader was exceptional at art, but the school wanted to discourage him because his extreme devotion to drawing was ‘not normal.’ He’s a picture thinker! I thought. Work with it! Don’t try to make him into something he’s not, or, worse, into something he can’t be. What you want to do instead is encourage his art—but broaden what his art encompasses. If he’s drawing pictures of race cars all the time, ask him to draw the racetrack too. then ask him to draw the streets and buildings around the racetrack. If he can do that, then you’ve taken his weakness (obsessional thinking about an object) and turned it into a strength (a way to understand the relationship between something as simple as a race car and the rest of society).” pg. 184-185

Music as a Möbius strip (image), pg. 143

Jason Padgett’s fractal art (images), pg. 152

The AQ test at the end was helpful too. I found an online version and took it. I got 20 out of 50. It says 80% of people diagnosed with autism or a related disorder scored 32 or higher.

Book: borrowed from SSF Main Library.

The same as Thinking in Pictures, only less about her own journey.