Temple Grandin

by Annette Wood

  Temple especially hated loud, unexpected noises, like balloons popping. Imagine birthday parties. “When the governess discovered that I didn’t like loud noises, she punished me when I was bad by popping a paper bag in my ear,” she remembered. “Torturing should never be used as a punishment.”

  Things other children barely noticed terrified Temple. “One night it rained really hard and the roof leaked, leaving a small water stain in my room. I feared the ceiling would collapse. The pictures conjured up in my visual mind were of all the upstairs furniture crashing down on me.”

  She had a common symptom of autism: fixations. In fourth grade, Temple had one that nearly drove her family crazy. “I talked constantly about election posters, buttons, and bumper stickers. I was fixated on the election of our state governor. All I talked about was his election to office.”18 Sometimes the other children told Temple that she was a pest.

  She constantly asked questions and then repeated them. “I’d ask the same question and wait for the same answer—over and over again. If a particular topic intrigued me, I zeroed in on that subject and talked it to the ground.”19

  “We aren’t good at conversation,” said Naoki Higashida, a thirteen-year-old Japanese boy who wrote about his autism. “We’ll never speak as effortlessly as you do. We can repeat words or phrases we’re familiar with. It’s great fun. It’s like a game of catch with a ball. Repeating questions we already know the answers to can be a pleasure—it’s playing with sound and rhythm.”20

  Temple has always had strong visualization skills, making her atypical. “I think in pictures. Words are like a second language to me. I translate both spoken and written words into full-color movies, complete with sound, which run like a VCR tape in my head. When somebody speaks to me, the words are instantly translated into pictures.”

  For many years, Temple was unaware that others do not usually think in pictures. She also didn’t realize that she couldn’t read social signals; she missed all the nonverbal communication that passed between “neurotypical” (people who do not have a developmental disorder such as autism) human beings automatically. “Something was going on between the other kids, something swift, subtle, constantly changing—an exchange of meanings, a negotiation, a swiftness of understanding so remarkable that sometimes I wondered if they were all telepathic.”

  In the fifties, no one talked about autism. “I myself didn’t hear the word ‘autistic’ applied to me until I was about twelve or thirteen. I remember thinking, ‘Oh, it’s me that’s different.’”

  It’s remarkable that Temple functioned as well as she did in grade school.

  CHAPTER 2

  MIDDLE SCHOOL AND HIGH SCHOOL

  Autism, a complex neurological disorder, always appears before the age of three. The most common symptoms are: no speech or abnormal speech, lack of eye contact, frequent temper tantrums, oversensitivity to touch, appearance of deafness, a preference for being alone, rocking or spinning, aloofness, and lack of social contact with parents and siblings.

  People with autism can be brilliant, have average intelligence, or intellectual disabilities.

  Asperger’s syndrome is related to social deficits/behavior domain. People with Asperger’s have normal or advanced speech and language. Those with Asperger’s often have exceptional intelligence, but lack a sense of social exchange and empathy.

  When Temple went to junior high, she no longer fit in. “I couldn’t figure out why I was having a problem with other kids. I had an odd lack of insight that I was different, probably because what I did was more meaningful to me than outward appearance,” Temple recalls.

  Temple graduated from Valley Country Day School, a private elementary school, which had only thirteen students and one teacher in her grade. Then she entered seventh grade at the Cherry Hill Girls School in Norwich, Connecticut, a school for upper middle-class girls. Like most junior high schools, it had thirty to forty students in a class and a different teacher for every class.

  Neurotypical people frequently find the adjustment to junior high very stressful. This was magnified for Temple. A change in routine can cause an autistic person to have a tantrum. Now Temple faced multiple changes each hour. Not surprisingly, she melted down frequently. When Temple threw a history book at a fellow student and hit her in the eye, she was expelled.

  In January 1960, twelve-year-old Temple arrived at Hampshire Country School in Rindge, New Hampshire, which had only thirty-two students when she enrolled. It was a boarding school for gifted, emotionally disturbed children. Other students besides Temple were probably autistic. Autism was not a word that was heard in the 1960s. Even professionals didn’t use it. The second edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published in 1968, did not mention autism.

  Hampshire Country School was founded by Henry Patey, a psychologist, and his wife Adelaide, a teacher. They considered kids like Temple not bad or stupid, but possibly gifted or just misunderstood. Surrounded by 1,700 acres of woods and streams, Hampshire had not only classrooms, but a working dairy, sheep pens, and a stable with horses. Other extras included arts, crafts, camping, and canoe trips.

  “Horseback riding was joyous for me,” said Temple. “I can remember being on a horse sometimes and we’d gallop in the pasture and that was such a thrill. Or we’d be out on a trail riding, and do a really fast gallop down the road. I remember what it looked like, the trees whizzing by; I remember that really well to this day.”1

  Temple was so wrapped up in horses, she spent every spare moment working in the barns. “I was dedicated to keeping the barns clean, making sure the horses were groomed,” she said.

  At Hampshire, the principal took away the privilege of riding to discipline her when she smacked a fellow student. Temple was crushed when she couldn’t ride. This encouraged her to behave.

  Temple said, “When I was on horses, I got away from bullying—no texts, no phone calls. Kids couldn’t do that today.” (There were no texts or cell phones in Temple’s day, but there were when she made this comment.)

  Temple could tell when a horse started to get nervous by the swishing tail, becoming more rapid with mounting fear. She noticed the same details that the horses did, such as a bale slightly out of place. She could make small changes to calm the animal’s fear before it turned to panic, demonstrating the ability to read animals that would make her famous.

  As with most autistics, Temple craved sameness. “I even wore the same jacket and dressed in the same kind of clothes day in and day out.”2 For this reason, she adjusted slowly to boarding school—a definite switch from her home environment of three younger siblings and two parents. However, there were many things she enjoyed at school, including skiing, riding horses, and participating in horse shows. She worked hard to make costumes for the school play. She helped workmen shingle a new house and was proud of the results.

  Temple had a blind roommate in high school. Her roommate didn’t want a guide dog to lead her. She needed to be walked through a new environment only once, then she knew her way. Temple admired her roommate for her ability to cope with blindness.

  Temple and her roommate got along, but getting along with others continued to be a problem. “When I was a teenager, I was aware that I did not fit in socially, but I was not aware that my method of visual thinking and my overly sensitive senses were the cause of my difficulties in relating to and interacting with other people.”3

  She didn’t realize how other people saw her. Her inability to read social signals was a major handicap. Consider that slightly more than 90 percent of communication among people is nonverbal. For instance, she did not know that not returning a smile puzzled people. She did not look into the eyes of someone who was speaking. She did not know that tears rolling down a face usually meant sadness, although it could mean joy.

  Curtly honest, Temple said what she thought without trying to soften her remarks. Although she didn’t mean to, she often sounded abrupt and abrasive. She hesitated freq
uently and had a flat tone to her speech. She liked to repeat words and phrases. Much later, she concluded that speech therapy would have helped her much more than seeing a psychiatrist, which she had done in elementary school.

  When Temple reached adolescence, raging hormonal changes swept over her. With them she developed panic attacks; fixations became her way to relieve the anxiety. Obsessions are great motivators. William Carlock, Temple’s science teacher, channeled her fixations into constructive projects. As a NASA scientist, he taught her that science is doing, building, creating. He made science fun and exciting. As an adult, Temple would stress the importance of mentors for people with Asperger’s.

  “After seeing an illusion called Ames Trapezoid Window, I wanted to build one,” said Temple. Mr. Carlock encouraged Temple to try it, giving her a glimpse in a textbook of how to do it. “He gave me a hint without telling me exactly how to do it. He helped me develop problem solving skills.”4

  Temple often found refuge in Mr. Carlock’s science lab. He encouraged and mentored her. “Teaching a person with autism the social graces is like coaching an actor for a play,” Temple said. “Mr. Carlock did more for me than teach me science. He spent hours giving me encouragement when I became dejected by all the teasing from classmates.”5

  Mr. Carlock identified Temple’s strengths in mechanics and engineering. He ran the model rocket club and got her interested in all kinds of electronic experiments. But he wouldn’t let her skip algebra and move on to geometry. He didn’t understand that Temple’s brain didn’t work in the abstract. He didn’t realize that she had limitations in that area. “Instead of ignoring deficits, you have to accommodate them,” said Temple.6 Along with not being able to work in the abstract, she can’t balance on one foot, walk a chalk line, or do algebra.7

  Hampshire Country School required chapel study, which usually bored Temple. She was apparently a typical teen in that regard. One Sunday, a loud knock interrupted her thoughts. The minister, who had knocked on wood to make a point, was preaching about doors: “I am the door, by me if any man enters, he shall be saved.” The minister also talked about joy and love, which eluded Temple due to their abstraction.

  Like most autistics, Temple took things literally. ”For the next few days, I viewed each door as a possible opening to joy and love. The closet door, the bathroom door, the front door, the stable door—all were scrutinized and rejected as the door.”8

  Then she discovered another door. She found a ladder against a dorm that was in the process of being renovated, and she climbed up to the fourth floor. There she found a small platform and an entrance that opened out onto the roof.

  ”I stepped into a small observation room. There were three picture windows that overlooked the mountains.” Temple decided she’d found her door to heaven. “In the days and months that followed, I visited the observation room or Crow’s Nest, as the carpenters called it, often.”9

  In 1962, when Temple was a vulnerable adolescent, her parents divorced. Their relationship had deteriorated for years. Her sister Jean had long ago asked, “Do you think Mom and Dad will get a divorce?” Now it became a reality.

  A marriage is complex and mysterious, and both sides play a part in its success or failure. Still, Dick Grandin would have been hard to live with. “Dad would blow up in restaurants if the food took too long to arrive. He also had a tendency to fixate on a single subject,” said Temple about the infamous Grandin temper. “One time he got obsessed with shutting down the riding stable next door to his house. He spent days and days writing letters to the city officials and measuring the amount of manure that was thrown in the dumpster.”10

  Temple thinks her father had Asperger’s. People with severe autism frequently have a family member or members with Asperger’s, a mild form of autism, or dyslexia, also thought to be a form of autism.

  Fortunately for Temple, her mother married Ben Cutler in 1965. Thus she inherited a number of relatives, including Ann Beecham, Ben’s sister. Aunt Ann lived on a guest ranch in Arizona and invited Temple to spend the summer. Though Temple hesitated to go, the summer on a ranch in Arizona changed her life.

  Her mother pushed her to go. She always wanted Temple to try new things. “I didn’t want to go, but instead of letting me stay home, Mother told me if I didn’t like it, I could go home in two weeks,” Temple remembers.

  Ann was patient with Temple in ways that few people had been. She listened as Temple repeated stories over and over. Ann suggested constructive ways to channel her energy and fixations. She encouraged Temple to do physical labor, which Temple had always been good at and enjoyed. For instance, she rebuilt the roof of the pump house and repaired a railing on the fence. She invented a device she called the Magic Gate: “All you had to do was pull a rope, which you could easily do from the driver’s side window, and the gate would swing open. Weights attached to a pulley system would swing the gate shut after your car pulled through.”11

  Temple learned to drive on the dirt roads of Aunt Ann’s ranch. She drove three miles to the mailbox every day all summer. The ranch pickup had a manual clutch, which didn’t work quite right. Temple mastered both steering and the tricky clutch while Aunt Ann sat beside her. Her aunt made sure she gained command of steering, braking, and changing gears before she let Temple drive on a paved road with traffic.12

  In Arizona, Temple discovered a world where she felt comfortable. She had horses to ride and found she related well to cows. At a neighboring ranch, Temple saw a herd of cattle being put through the squeeze chute, an apparatus used to hold still a cow for medical shots by squeezing her so tight she can’t move. The squeeze chute looks like a big V made of metal bars hinged at the bottom. When a cow walks into the chute, an air compressor closes up the V, which squeezes the cow’s body in place.

  Temple had dreamed for years about a device she could control that would “hug” her. She coveted touch, but, like most autistics, shrank from it because “my nervous system does not have time to process the sensation.” She would not even let her mother hug her.

  She had built her life around avoiding anxiety attacks. When she noticed how a cow relaxed after being put into the squeeze chute, she decided she wanted to get into it. Finally she told her aunt, who agreed to let Temple try it.

  “Ann pulled the rope, which pulled the sides of the squeeze chute together. Soon I felt the firm pressure on my sides. Ordinarily, I would have withdrawn from such pressure, but in the cattle chute, withdrawal wasn’t possible. The effect was both stimulating and relaxing, but most important for an autistic person, I was in control. I was able to direct Ann to the comfortable degree of pressure. The squeeze chute provided relief from my nerve attacks.”13

  That summer Temple made her first connection between cows and herself. She also became addicted to the effects of the squeeze machine. When she returned to school, she built a crude replica of it. Unlike the rest of the school, Mr. Carlock did not scoff. “If you want to know why this relaxes you, you’ll have to learn science,” he said.

  He took her to the library and showed her how to use the books that scientists used. Temple found the language of science and technology easy to understand. For Temple, technical language was far simpler than negotiating the world of irony, metaphors, allusions, and jokes. She studied hard so she could get into college and be a scientist. She had found a reason to study.

  She used her fixation on the cattle chute with good results. She explained fixations this way. “Stubbornness is related to perseverance and perseverance is a good trait. The traits in an autistic are the same as the traits in a normal person, but in an autistic some of the traits have gone haywire.”14

  When she graduated from high school on June 12, 1966, she was chosen to give one of several speeches. Temple said, “In looking back on the door now, I realize that it represented my maturing and getting ready to graduate from high school. The unknown that lay beyond the door represented what was beyond high school for me. I had the typical teenager’s question,
‘Is there life after high school?’”

  CHAPTER 3

  FRANKLIN PIERCE COLLEGE

  After her senior year in high school at Hampshire Country School, Temple again spent the summer in Arizona on her aunt’s ranch. This time, she was with old friends, so she was much more relaxed.

  The next fall, she entered Franklin Pierce College, a small college in New Hampshire in the same town as her high school. Franklin Pierce was surrounded by mountains, lakes, woods, and meadows. About four hundred students entered her freshman class. She was grateful for its relatively small size.

  “Had I entered a large university, I would have been lost in the maze of many buildings and thousands of students,” Temple said.

  Best of all, she could still see Mr. Carlock, her mentor at Hampshire Country School. He knew how her mother and the school psychologist objected to her squeeze machine. “Well, let’s build a better one and do some scientific experiments with college students,” Mr. Carlock said. “Let’s find out if the squeeze machine really does relax. Find out if the effect is indeed real.”

  “I spent hours at the library looking up everything I could find on the effect sensory input into one system had on sensory perception in another,” Temple said. She found a world of information she didn’t know existed. Then she built PACES, or Pressure Apparatus Controlled Environment Sensory. “This model with its foam-padded panels was a Cadillac compared to my first Spartan wooden chute,” said Temple.

  Next, Temple designed a psychology experiment in which she tested the squeeze machine on other college students. From the experiment, she found that twenty-five out of forty neurotypical college students who tried it found the squeeze machine to be pleasurable and relaxing. She later published a scientific paper about the results.