Temple Grandin
Mary Temple Grandin is an American academic, inventor, and ethologist. She is a prominent proponent of the humane treatment of livestock for slaughter and the author of more than 60 scientific papers on animal behavior. Grandin is a consultant to the livestock industry, where she offers advice on animal behavior.
Grandin is one of the first autistic people to document the insights she gained from her personal experiences with autism. She is a faculty member with Animal Sciences in the College of Agricultural Sciences at Colorado State University.
In 2010, Time 100, an annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world, named her in the "Heroes" category. She was the subject of the Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning biographical film Temple Grandin.
Early life
Family
Mary Temple Grandin was born in Boston, Massachusetts, into a wealthy family. One of the family's employees was also named Mary, so Grandin was referred to by her middle name, Temple, to avoid confusion. Temple's mother is Anna Eustacia Purves, an actress, singer, and granddaughter of John Coleman Purves. She has a degree in English from Harvard University. Temple's father was Richard McCurdy Grandin, a real estate agent and heir to the largest corporate wheat farm business in the United States at the time, Grandin Farms. Grandin's parents divorced when she was 15, and her mother eventually went on to marry Ben Cutler, a New York saxophonist, in 1965, when Grandin was 18 years old.Grandin has three younger siblings: two sisters and a brother. Grandin has described one of her sisters as being dyslexic. Her younger sister is an artist, her other sister is a sculptor, and her brother is a banker. John Livingston Grandin and his brother William James Grandin were French Huguenots who drilled for oil. John Grandin intended to cut a deal with John D. Rockefeller in a meeting, but the latter kept him waiting so long that he walked out before Rockefeller arrived. The brothers then went into banking, and when Jay Cooke's firm collapsed, they received thousands of acres of undeveloped land in North Dakota as debt collateral. They set up wheat farming in the Red River Valley and housed the workers in dormitories. The town of Grandin, North Dakota, is named after John Livingston Grandin.
Although raised in the Episcopal Church, early on Grandin gave up on a belief in a personal deity or intention in favor of a more scientific perspective.
Diagnosis
Grandin was not formally diagnosed with autism until her adulthood. When she was two, the only formal diagnosis given to her was "brain damage," a finding finally dismissed through cerebral imaging at the University of Utah by the time she turned 63 in 2010. While Grandin was still in her mid-teens, her mother chanced upon a diagnostic checklist for autism. After reviewing the checklist, Grandin's mother hypothesised that Grandin's symptoms were best explained by the disorder. Grandin was later determined to be an autistic savant.Early childhood
When Grandin was a toddler, the medical advice at the time for a diagnosis like hers was to recommend institutionalization, a measure that caused a bitter rift of opinion between Grandin's parents. Her father was keen to follow this advice, while her mother was strongly opposed to the idea.Grandin's mother took her to the world's leading special needs researchers at the Boston Children's Hospital, with the hope of finding an alternative to institutionalization. Grandin's mother eventually found a neurologist who suggested a trial of speech therapy. A speech therapist was hired and Grandin received personalized training from the age of two and a half. Her mother later hired a nanny when she was aged three-and-a-half to take turns playing games with Temple and her sister. Grandin started kindergarten in Dedham Country Day School. Her teachers and classmates tried to create an environment to accommodate Grandin's needs and sensitivities.
While Grandin has said she considers herself fortunate to have had supportive mentors from elementary school onward, she has also stated that junior high and high school were the most unpleasant times of her life.
Middle school and high school
Grandin attended Beaver Country Day School from seventh to ninth grade. She was expelled at the age of 14 for throwing a book at a schoolmate who taunted her. Grandin described herself as the "nerdy kid" whom everyone ridiculed. She has described occasions in which she walked down the school hallway and her fellow students would call her a "tape recorder" because she would verbally perseverate. Grandin stated in 2012, "I could laugh about it now, but back then it really hurt."The year after her expulsion, Grandin's parents divorced. Three years later, Grandin's mother married Ben Cutler, a New York saxophonist. At 15 years old, Grandin spent a summer on the Arizona ranch of Ben Cutler's sister, Ann, and this would become a formative experience toward her subsequent career interest.
Following her expulsion from Beaver Country Day School, Grandin's mother enrolled her at Hampshire Country School in Rindge, New Hampshire. That school was founded in 1948 by Boston child psychologist Henry Patey for the students of "exceptional potential that have not been successful in a typical setting." She was accepted there and became Winter Carnival Queen and captain of the hockey team.
Several reports and sources cited the different names of the schools Grandin attended: Beaver Country Day School or Cherry Falls Girls' School ; and Hampshire Country School or Mountain Day School.
At HCS, Grandin met William Carlock, a science teacher who had worked for NASA, who became her mentor and helped her significantly toward building up her self-confidence.
It was Carlock who encouraged Grandin to develop her idea to build her squeeze machine when she returned from her aunt's farm in Arizona during her senior year of high school. At the age of 18 when she was still attending Hampshire Country School, with Carlock's and school owner/founder Henry Patey's support, Grandin built the hug box. Carlock's supportive role in Grandin's life continued even after she left Hampshire Country School. As a favor to Henry Patey, the president of the newly founded Franklin Pierce College agreed to accept Temple as a student without the typical records and files of a typical High School student. When Grandin was facing criticism for her hug box at Franklin Pierce College, it was Carlock who suggested that Grandin undertake scientific experiments to evaluate the efficacy of the device. It was his constant guidance to Grandin to refocus the rigid obsessions she experienced with the hug box into a productive assignment that subsequently allowed this study undertaken by Grandin to be widely cited as evidence of Grandin's resourcefulness.
Higher education
After she graduated from Hampshire Country School in 1966, Grandin went on to earn her bachelor's degree in human psychology from Franklin Pierce College in 1970, a master's degree in animal science from Arizona State University in 1975, and a doctoral degree in animal science from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1989.Career
Autism spectrum
In his book NeuroTribes, Steve Silberman wrote that Grandin helped break down years of shame and stigma because she was one of the first adults to publicly disclose that she was autistic. Bernard Rimland, a father of an autistic son and author of the book Infantile Autism, wrote the foreword to Grandin's first book Emergence: Labeled Autistic. Her book was published in 1986. Rimland wrote "Temple's ability to convey to the reader her innermost feelings and fears, coupled with her capacity for explaining mental processes will give the reader an insight into autism that very few have been able to achieve."In Developing Talents, 2nd Edition, Grandin explores many unnoticed aspects of vocational rehabilitation programs that provide job training and placement for people with disabilities, as well as Social Security Administration programs that offer vocational assistance.
In her later book, Thinking in Pictures, published in 1995, the neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote at the end of the foreword that the book provided "a bridge between our world and hers, and allows us to glimpse into a quite other sort of mind."
In her early writings, Grandin characterized herself as a recovered autistic and, in his foreword, Bernard Rimland used the term recovered autistic individual. In her later writings, she has abandoned this characterization. Steve Silberman wrote, "It became obvious to her, however, that she was not recovered but had learned with great effort to adapt to the social norms of the people around her."
Grandin has said that when her book Thinking in Pictures was published in 1995, she believed that all individuals with autism thought in photographic-specific images the way she did. By the time the expanded edition was published in 2006, she had realized that it had been wrong to presume that every person with autism processed information in the same way she did. In the 2006 edition, she wrote that there were three types of specialized thinking: 1. Visual Thinkers like she is, who think in photographically specific images. 2. Music and Math Thinkers – who think in patterns and may be good at mathematics, chess, and programming computers. 3. Verbal Logic Thinkers – who think in word details, and she noted that their favorite subject may be history.
In one of her later books, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum, the concept of three different types of thinking by autistic individuals is expanded. This book was published in 2013. An influential book that helped her to develop her concept of pattern thinking was Clara Claiborne Park's book entitled Exiting Nirvana: A Daughter's Life with Autism. It was published in 2001. The Autistic Brain also contains an extensive review of scientific studies that provide evidence that object-visual thinking is different from spatial-visualization abilities.
Grandin became well-known beyond the American autistic community, after being described by Oliver Sacks in the title narrative of his book An Anthropologist on Mars. The title is derived from Grandin's characterization of how she feels around neurotypical people. In the mid-1980s Grandin first spoke in public about autism at the request of Ruth C. Sullivan, one of the founders of the Autism Society of America. Sullivan writes:
Based on personal experience, Grandin advocates early intervention to address autism and supportive teachers, who can direct fixations of the child with autism in fruitful directions. She has described her hypersensitivity to noise and other sensory stimuli. She says words are her second language and that she thinks "totally in pictures", using her vast visual memory to translate information into a mental slideshow of images that may be manipulated or correlated. Grandin attributes her success as a humane livestock facility designer to her ability to recall detail, which is a characteristic of her visual memory. Grandin compares her memory to full-length movies in her head, that may be replayed at will, allowing her to notice small details. She also is able to view her memories using slightly different contexts by changing the positions of the lighting and shadows.
Grandin does not support eliminating autism genes entirely or treating those she labels "mildly" autistic. However, she believes that autistic children who are severely disabled and nonverbal need therapies "like to function", and stated in her book, Thinking in Pictures, "In an ideal world the scientist should find a method to prevent the most severe forms of autism but allow the milder forms to survive." In a March 2022 update to the frequently asked questions section of her official website, Grandin rejected critics' characterization of her position as eugenic.
Grandin has criticized autism-related diagnostic updates originally implemented in 2013 in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. When asked about the updates in a 2022 interview, Grandin stated the following:
For roughly 15 years following the release of Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent 1998 study that falsely linked autism to the MMR vaccine, Grandin publicly speculated that there might be a causal link between vaccines and autism, especially in cases involving children who became non-speaking after the administration of vaccines. Grandin refused to revisit the topic during a January 2022 interview with The New York Times, despite the interviewer repeatedly prompting her to do so.
In March of every year, Grandin hosts a public event at Boston University.