‘Great Minds Are Not All The Same’

Last week, Temple Grandin visited Asheboro for the first time, speaking to a sold-out house at the Sunset Theatre downtown. With a PhD in animal science, Grandin is an animal behavior expert, inventor, author, and professor of animal science at Colorado State University. She’s also autistic.

Though not diagnosed until adulthood, autism shaped Grandin’s life — a major theme of 2010’s Emmy and Golden Globe award-winning biopic, in which Claire Danes played Grandin. The Trump administration’s embrace of controversial views on the causes and best treatment for autism has given new relevance and urgency to Grandin’s life experience, which she has been sharing for decades.

Her talk, entitled “Great Minds Are Not All The Same,” was part of the Friends of the Library Sunset Downtown Series. It drew admirers who said they were inspired by her work and her life story.

Grandin sat down for an interview with The Assembly in the theater’s foyer. Surrounded by vintage projectors and sporting slicked-back silver hair, Grandin wore one of her signature western shirts—a black long-sleeve with embroidered horses and flowers accented by a red kerchief and bolo tie stamped with her initials: “TG.”

Grandin declined to answer questions about the Trump administration or its positions on autism, saying she doesn’t discuss politics. Her personal story, however, she’s been discussing freely for much of her adult life.

There were “high expectations, but some accommodations” for her when she was a child, Grandin said. She was non-verbal until she was four years old.

When it was time for a 5-year-old Grandin’s family to ride a ferry with a very loud horn that hurt her ears, she rode in the cabin underneath, which muffled the sound. 

When they visited relatives, Grandin needed to channel her abundant energy.

“We were going to have family gatherings without me wrecking them, but I had a designated place to exercise,” she said.

That’s a habit she still carries with her to relieve stress, doing 120 “old lady push-ups” every night on the hotel room floor.

For some autistic people, human touch—like a hug—can overload their senses and be distressing. 

“To understand any animal, whether it’s an antelope or it’s a dog, you need to get away from words,” she said. “What is it seeing? What is it hearing?”

Inspired by the cattle squeeze chutes that calm cows so they can be safely handled, Grandin designed the “hug machine,” a device that delivers deep pressure, which has helped her and other people become more comfortable being touched.

Grandin is a visual thinker with a photographic memory. While she doesn’t remember every hotel room she’s stayed in, it’s the interesting ones that are burned into her brain. 

“There was a French upholstered chair with the jaws of a giant Rottweiler,” she said, describing her weirdest hotel memory, “So when you sit on this, you get bitten.”

“Super weird,” she said.

Her upbringing in the Boston area didn’t exactly predict a career designing systems that would revolutionize the way cattle and other farm animals are handled today.

“There’s not many cattle there,” Grandin said of her hometown. But when she was 15, she spent time at her aunt’s ranch in Arizona.

Experiencing different environments and career opportunities is crucial for young people, she said.

“If they don’t get exposed to things, how could they get interested?” she said.

“Find out what you like,” Grandin said. “But you also might go, ‘I tried that, and I hated it.’ 

“It’s also equally important to find that out.”

“One of the most useless questions you can ask a kid is, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’” Grandin wrote in an article for The Atlantic. “The more useful question is: What are you good at? But schools aren’t giving kids enough of a chance to find out.”

It’s important not only for a future career, but because it can lead to people with the same interests, she said. That’s a great way to make friends, Grandin said, who was bullied and teased mercilessly during high school. Through horse-riding and the model rocket club, she found stimulating hobbies and friendship.

In school, Grandin also struggled with algebra and other branches of mathematics. Half of North American cattle are handled in equipment designed by Grandin, but the required coursework for an engineering degree usually involves high levels of math, such as calculus and differential equations. 

“Our education system doesn’t seem to recognize the value of the visual thinking side of building things in engineering,” she said.

“I’m very concerned that we’re screening out our visual thinkers who are not mathematicians,” Grandin said. “They’d be some of our best doctors, our best veterinarians.”

“We also need visual thinkers to fix things,” she said. 

The U.S. is facing a shortage of skilled tradesworkers—according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, around one million trade jobs are unfilled, as well as 495,000 manufacturing jobs.

A long line stretched down the block in front of the theater. Parents with children, older couples, teenagers, and laughing friends all waited to take their seats and hear Grandin speak.

Wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with the words: “Refusing assimilation into neurotypical society,” Pamela McAfee, a community organizer and disability rights activist, waited in line with her friend Felicia. McAfee was first introduced to Grandin through her HBO biopic.

“You know, being an older person and not having the answers of why I was always different, I watched that film, and I started finding similarities. And it helped,” McAfee said. “A lot of women my age are now starting to be diagnosed. And watching that movie was a big step toward finding out more and understanding myself.”

Jane Hoonhout, a local psychiatric nurse practitioner, works with autistic patients. She started reading Grandin’s books a few years ago.

“It’s really just opened my mind. I thought I knew a lot about autism, and she gives you new insight,” Hoonhout said.

For those struggling, Grandin has a piece of advice: Ask for help.

“Too many people—when they don’t know how to do something—they try to wing it, when they should be asking for help,” she said. “I want to see these kids get out and be successful.”

Grandin said that she used to think about the “deep meaning of the purpose of life.”

“I’ve now figured out it’s much simpler than that,” she said, “The things you do each day, do something constructive. There’s too much stuff going on in the world that’s destructive.”

“It makes me very happy when somebody writes to me and said one of my books helped a kid go to college, or, ‘My kid got a good job because I took some advice in one of your books,’” she said.

“I think that’s purpose. If the things that you do, do something to make something better, then that’s purpose.”