The Autistic Brain Quotes

“In dealing with autism, I'm certainly not saying we should lose sight of the need to work on deficits, But the focus on deficits is so intense and so automatic that people lose sight of the strengths.”
― Temple Grandin, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

“Label-locked thinking can affect treatment. For instance, I heard a doctor say about a kid with gastrointestinal issues, “Oh, he has autism. That’s the problem”—and then he didn’t treat the GI problem.”
― Temple Grandin, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

“Boys who cry can work for Google. Boys who trash computers cannot. I once was at a science conference, and I saw a NASA scientist who had just found out that his project was canceled—a project he’d worked on for years. He was maybe sixty-five years old, and you know what? He was crying. And I thought, Good for him. That’s why he was able to reach retirement age working in a job he loved.”
― Temple Grandin, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

“Neuroanatomy isn't destiny. Neither is genetics. They don't define who you will be. But they do define who you might be. They define who you can be.”
― Temple Grandin, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

“When something is "all in your mind," people tend to think that it's willful, that it's something you could control if only you tried harder or if you had been trained differently. I'm hoping that the newfound certainty that autism is in your brain and in your genes will affect public attitudes.”
― Temple Grandin, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

“The younger the subject, the earlier the possibility of intervention. The earlier the intervention, the greater the potential effect on the trajectory of an autistic person’s life.”
― Temple Grandin, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

“but quite to the contrary a result of an intensely if not painfully aversively perceived environment.” Behavior that looks antisocial to an outsider might actually be an expression of fear.”
― Temple Grandin, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

“Impaired social interactions and withdrawal may not be the result of a lack of compassion, incapability to put oneself into someone else’s position or lack of emotionality”
― Temple Grandin, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

“The “Intense World” paper proposed that if the amygdala, which is associated with emotional responses, including fear, is affected by sensory overload, then certain responses that look antisocial actually aren’t.”
― Temple Grandin, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

“Kanner had cause and effect backward. The child wasn’t behaving in a psychically isolated or physically destructive manner because the parents were emotionally distant. Instead, the”
― Temple Grandin, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

“You know how when you’re cleaning out a closet, the mess reaches a point where it’s even greater than when you started? We’re at that point in the history of autism now.”
― Temple Grandin, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

“The idea that hyperreactivity and hyporeactivity are two variations on a theme might even have implications for theory of mind. The “Intense World” paper proposed that if the amygdala, which is associated with emotional responses, including fear, is affected by sensory overload, then certain responses that look antisocial actually aren’t. “Impaired social interactions and withdrawal may not be the result of a lack of compassion, incapability to put oneself into someone else’s position or lack of emotionality, but quite to the contrary a result of an intensely if not painfully aversively perceived environment.” Behavior that looks antisocial to an outsider might actually be an expression of fear.”
― Temple Grandin, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

“Do not allow a child or an adult to become defined by a DSM label.”
― Temple Grandin, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

“So it’s not that autistics don’t respond to eye contact, it’s that their response is the opposite of neurotypicals’.”
― Temple Grandin, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

“By cultivating the autistic mind on a brain-by-brain, strength-by-strength basis, we can reconceive autistic teens and adults in jobs and internships not as charity cases but as valuable, even essential, contributors to society.”
― Temple Grandin, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

“During meals, I was taught table manners, and I was not allowed to twirl my fork around over my head. The only time I could revert back to autism was for one hour after lunch. The rest of the day, I had to live in a nonrocking, nontwirling world.”
― Temple Grandin, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

“In his book Be Different: Adventures of a Free-Range Aspergian, John Elder Robison described this progression of creativity—one that led to his career creating sound effects and musical instruments and designing laser shows and video games. He wrote that he first became interested in music as an adolescent, because he was fascinated with the patterns that music waves made on an oscilloscope, a device that displays electric signs and lines and shapes on a small screen. “Each signal had its own unique shape,” he wrote. These signals were the bottom-up details. He spent eight to ten hours a day “absorbing music and unraveling how the waves looked, and how electrical signals worked,” he wrote. “I watched and listened and watched some more until my eyes and ears became interchangeable.” In other words, he was storing up memories. “By then, I could look at a pattern on the scope and know what it sounded like, and I could look at a sound and know what it looked like.” Based on those memories of details, he had taught himself how to make the necessary associations. Then he was ready for the creative leap: If I set the scope to sweep slowly, the rhythm of the music dominated the screen. Loud passages would appear as broad streaks, while quiet passages thinned down to a single tiny squiggle. A slightly higher sweep speed showed me the big, heavy, slow waves of the bass line and the kick drum as wide squiggles. Most of the energy was contained in those low notes. Up higher, with a faster scope setting, I found the vocals. At the top of it all lay the jagged fast waves from the cymbals. Every instrument had a distinct pattern, even when they were all playing the same melody. With practice, I learned how to distinguish a passage played on an organ from the same music played on a guitar. But I didn’t stop there. As I listened to the instruments, I realized each one had its own voice. “You’re nuts,” my friends said, but I was right. The musicians all had their own ways of playing, but their instruments were unique, too. The emphasis is mine. The neurotypical response to his insight was to dismiss it. But Robison could hear what other people missed. Actually, he could see it: “I saw the whole thing as a great mental puzzle—adding the waves from different instruments in my head, and figuring out what the result would look like.” He was, he learned, working in a kind of waveform mathematics, even though he didn’t think of his work as math.”
― Temple Grandin, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

“Raven’s Coloured Progressive Matrices.”
― Temple Grandin, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

“under the DSM-5 guidelines, I would be diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorder. If you look at the description of what constitutes social impairments and repetitive behaviors, I definitely qualify. Extreme distress at small changes? That was me as a kid. Fixated interests? Boy, I had that. Hypersensitivity to sensory input? Let me tell you about the squeeze machine.”
― Temple Grandin, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

“What other tactile experiences present problems? You’d be surprised. Here are some examples from the website Wrong Planet (wrongplanet.net) about autistic sensitivities involving the sense of touch.”
― Temple Grandin, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

“Language input. One type of language-input problem is not being able to hear hard-consonant sounds. When I was a child, I had difficulty differentiating hard-consonant sounds. To me, cat, hat, and pat sounded the same, because those consonants are quick. They’re spoken fast. I had to figure out which was which by thinking about what word made sense in a particular context. This description certainly fits the “World Changing Too Fast” article’s hypothesis that I discussed earlier. The other type of language-input problem is hearing the words but not being able to connect meaning to them, a syndrome that Donna Williams calls being “meaning blind.” Language output. I describe this problem as “a big stutter.” As a child, I could understand the words that people spoke slowly but I could not get my speech out. The solution my speech therapist proposed was the same one suggested in the “World Changing Too Fast” paper: Slow down. Attention-shifting slowness. Once a sound has my attention, I have trouble letting go and moving on to the next sound. If a mobile phone rings during one of my talks, it totally disrupts my train of thought; it grabs my attention, and my ability to shift back is slower than most people’s. Hypersensitivity to sound. The Internet is full of autistics’ testimonials to the problem of loud and sudden sounds of all sorts—balloons, sirens, fireworks. But some of the problematic sounds are the kind that you would think would be more mundane: “I can’t tolerate the sound of noodles being stirred (that horrid squishy sound).” Sometimes, though, hypersensitivity involves not a specific sound but a wealth of sounds: “You may have to ask the guy talking to you to repeat himself a few times because you were trying to get past the cars going by, the dog barking three blocks away, and the bug that buzzed past your ear.”
― Temple Grandin, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

“Impaired social interactions and withdrawal may not be the result of a lack of compassion, incapability to put oneself into someone else’s position or lack of emotionality, but quite to the contrary a result of an intensely if not painfully aversively perceived environment.”
― Temple Grandin, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

“when these researchers slowed down spoken sentences, they found that ASD subjects experienced an increased understanding of meaning.”
― Temple Grandin, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

“The idea that hyperreactivity and hyporeactivity might be two sides of the same coin carries several important implications. One is pharmacological. “While most [of] the commonly prescribed medication [tries] to increase neuronal and cognitive functioning, we conclude that the autistic brain needs to be calmed down,” the “Intense World” authors wrote, “and cognitive functions need to be diminished in order to re-instate proper functionality.” In my own experience, I found that when I began taking antidepressants to manage my anxiety—old-fashioned antidepressants like Zoloft and Prozac—the drugs calmed me down enough so I could learn social behaviors. And studies have shown that although risperidone (brand name Risperdal), an antipsychotic drug, doesn’t directly affect the core deficit of social impairment, it does reduce the irritability that causes aggression.”
― Temple Grandin, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

“oppositional defiant disorder and social anxiety disorder.”
― Temple Grandin, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

“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.”
― Temple Grandin, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

“Even though I was not deaf, I had difficulty hearing consonants, such as the c in cup. When grownups talked fast, I heard only the vowel sounds, so I thought they had their own special language. But by speaking slowly, the speech therapist helped me to hear the hard consonant sounds,”
― Temple Grandin, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

“For a person with autism who is trying to navigate a social situation, welcoming cues from a neurotypical might be interpreted as aversive cues. Up is down, and down is up.”
― Temple Grandin, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

“People with autism are really good at seeing details. “When”
― Temple Grandin, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

“Only about 10 percent of autistics belong in the savant category (though most savants are autistic).”
― Temple Grandin, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum