by Annette Wood
“Neuroscience is arguably the hottest field in science these days, and we’d be foolish not to try to take advantage of the potential it offers,” said science budget expert Al Teich of George Washington University’s Center for International Science and Technology Policy.2
Much interest has turned to understanding the neurological condition of autism. This is a priority since autism numbers continue to rise. “We still don’t have a litmus test for autism,” said the neuroscientist Joy Hirsch, director of the Functional MRI Research Center at the Columbia Medical Center. ”But we have a basis for it.”3 One review article summarized: “This body of research clearly established autism and its signs and symptoms as being of neurologic origin.”4
Autism really is in your brain.
Because Temple Grandin is such a well-known person with autism, many scientists have wanted to scan her brain for research. Seven or eight times Temple has stayed quite still in a large cylinder, waiting with anticipation for the racket to be over, while her brain was scanned.
Temple was one of the first autistic subjects to undergo magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI. Her first brain scan was in 1987 at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
She immediately noticed that a ventricle on the left side was much longer than the one on the right.
At the University of Utah in 2010, neuroscientist Jason Cooperrider and colleagues scanned Grandin’s brain using three different methods: high-resolution MRI, which captures the structure of the brain; diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), a method to trace the connections between brain regions; and functional MRI, which indicates brain activity.
Functional MRI is a type of specialized brain and body scan used to map neural activity in the brain by imaging the change in blood flow related to energy use by brain cells. Since the early 1990s, functional MRI has come to dominate brain mapping research.
Temple’s left ventricle is 57 percent larger than her right, as showed by a University of Utah study. In control subjects the difference between left and right was only 15 percent.
“Back in 1987, neuroimaging technology wasn’t capable of measuring the anatomical structures within the brain with great precision. But if the researchers had known that one ventricle was 7,093 millimeters long while the other was 3,868 millimeters long, it would have given them pause.”5
The University of Utah scans also showed that Grandin’s amygdala, which plays an important role in emotional processing, is larger than normal. This helps explain why she feels so much fear and anxiety.
“I want to emphasize that not everyone with autism has such a large amygdala,” said Temple. “Mine is three times as large as normal. The brain scan shows what showed up in the classroom and in life.
“I like knowing that my high level of anxiety might be related to having an enlarged amygdala. The problem isn’t out there, the problem is in here, the way I’m wired. The threat isn’t real. The feeling of the threat is.”6
“Researchers can’t be sure that an anomaly in one brain will have the same effect in a different brain. Just because you have an enlarged amygdala doesn’t mean you’re autistic,” Temple wrote.7 And not all autistic brains are alike. What’s in one autistic brain is not the same as what’s in someone else’s autistic brain.
Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, told USA Today in 2012,“Even when you look at a child who has no language, who is self-injuring, who has had multiple seizures, you would be amazed at how normal their brains look. It’s the most inconvenient truth about this condition.”8
HDFT (high-definition fiber tracking) was underwritten by the Department of Defense to investigate traumatic brain injuries. “They came to me saying we need something for brain injury like what X-rays do for orthopedic injury,” said Dr. Walter Schneider, professor of psychology and senior scientist at the Learning Development and Research Center (LRDC) and professor of neurosurgery at the University of Pennsylvania.
“Just like there are 2,006 bones in your body, there are major cables in your brain,” Dr. Schneider says. “You can ask most anybody on the street to create a drawing of what a broken bone looks like, and they would be able to draw something somewhat sensible. If you ask them, ‘So what does a broken brain look like?’ most people, including researchers in the field, couldn’t do it.”9
Temple has learned a lot from various scans. “Autistic brains aren’t broken,” said Temple. “My own brain isn’t broken. My circuits aren’t broken. They just didn’t grow properly.
“I know that my cerebellum is 20 percent smaller than the norm. The cerebellum helps control motor coordination, so this abnormality probably explains why my sense of balance is lousy.”10
It’s remarkable what it can tell you, but HDFT can’t tell what you’re thinking or feeling or what political opinions you have. HDFT can’t solve all the mysteries of the brain.
Temple often compares her brain with a search engine. When Dr. Schneider showed her images from her HDFT scan at the University of Pittsburg in 2012, Temple said, “Oh, you found my search engine.”11
She said that the original search engines were probably designed by people whose brains work like hers—“people with brains that have trouble with linear thought, brains that ramble, brains that have weak short-term memory.”12
The brain is amazing, and we still have lots to learn about it. Eleanor Maguire, a British neuroscientist, did a study in England in 2000 on taxi drivers that showed using your brain helps it grow.
She looked at the MRIs of the hippocampi of sixteen licensed London cabbies. The hippocampus is believed to house three types of cells that help us navigate: place cells, which recognize landmarks; head direction cells, which tell you which way you’re facing; and grid cells, which tell you where you are in relation to where you’ve been. What Maguire found was that the hippocampi of drivers who had mastered the “knowledge”—the location of every nook in the city and the quickest way to get there—were larger than those of control subjects.13
The longer the driver stayed on the job, the larger his hippocampus. When he left the job, his hippocampus returned to normal.
“The brain behaves like a muscle,” Maguire said. “Use brain regions and they grow.”14
If you don’t use a brain region, it doesn’t necessarily wither. Even though they can’t see, blind persons use the visual cortex to navigate. Temple had a blind roommate when she was in high school.
Temple said, “‘I called her a ‘cane master.’ She didn’t want a guide dog leading her. She wanted to learn how to guide herself. And boy, did she ever. She needed to be walked through a new environment only once, and then she knew her way. Outside our dorm was a busy intersection; she navigated it as well as any sighted person. Maybe she wasn’t using actual images, but her visual cortex was allowing her to build a vivid, knowable, and navigable world.”15
Mark Deesing, Temple Grandin’s assistant, explains how Temple’s method of keeping information straight reflects how her brain works.
“Temple keeps her calendar on an old-fashioned paper, one with big boxes. She has ten pages of phone call notes a day, scribbled in little handwriting only she can read. She fills in her whole schedule, names, contact information, flight numbers, and so on into that box.
“She takes apart the calendar and zeroes it, then staples it together. She keeps her calendar every year and knows just where to get it. One drawer has several million bits of information and she can find it just like that.
“Her filing system is similar to how her brain works. Pictures with text that trigger information. Each box is compact. She recalls the data completely.”16
Brain wiring also affects the ability to handle transitions. People with autism can have trouble with even simple transitions. The brain seems to become overwhelmed.
”Temple talked, for example, about how difficult it is to transition from one sensory mode to another, like switching from visual to auditory awareness,” says Valerie Paradiž in Elijah
’s Cup. “The world for an autistic person is a highly fragmented place, and any traditional cohesion it might have is constructed through a long and arduous process of piecing together disparate sensory elements.
“Not only does Temple’s thinking go from specific to general, so do her emotions and social behaviors. She was able, over the course of many years, to integrate various functions that most of us take for granted. She did it by accessing a vast catalogue of images she had built up in her mind: ‘This thing that people call thought, facts and emotions all merged together … I don’t have that. My memory works like slides. I speed-search the Internet. If I hold it up on the screen in my mind, it turns into a video. Then it gets sound, and then it gets emotion. But they don’t all come up together.’”17
Sensory sensitivities are a well-known aspect of an autistic brain.
“Autistic brains, it turns out, have a much greater number of nerve cells than ‘neurotypical’ brains,” says Rupert Isaacson, author of Horse Boy. “The result can be extreme sensory overload….The fluorescent lights of a supermarket or daycare facility could look like lights being strobed at one million times a second.”18
Researchers are constantly working on studies that will be helpful to persons with autism. Occasionally, there’s a breakthrough.
In August 2014, Michael Halassa, principal investigator and New York University Langone Medical Center assistant professor, published a study in Cell. It noted that “The brain juggles two different sets of information. Input from the world around you, like sights and sounds, has to be processed. But so does internal information—your memories and thoughts.”19
Some people, especially persons with autism and schizophrenia, have difficulty knowing what is occurring internally and what is occurring externally. Researchers observed the switching mechanism in mice for the first time. Halassa said, “This is going to translate to humans.” He and other researchers will try to find the same mechanism in people. If they find it, the result could be a range of treatments for persons with varying degrees of severity in autism and schizophrenia.
Brains are wired differently. Some people respond much more readily to social information while others—like scientists, researchers, and engineers—key in on details. “We need detail-oriented people in this world or there would be no electricity, cars, or beautiful works of music,” said Temple. “Detail-oriented engineers make sure the lights stay on and the bridges do not fall down.”20
Temple is confident there are design miscalculations she wouldn’t make. “I use object visual thinking so I’m able to see a catastrophe before it happens,” she says.21 She says she could have foreseen the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident in 2011. “Where was the backup located? In the basement of a nuclear power plant that is located next to the sea. As I read many descriptions of the accident, I could see the water flowing into the plant, and I could see the emergency generators disappearing under the water.”22
Temple says, “Everyone in life has a different set of strengths and challenges within a unique personality. I am a pure techie and having a good career gives my life meaning. I’ve learned to make the most of the way my brain is hard-wired and I don’t feel remorse over missing cables in the social parts of my brain.”23
CHAPTER 24
TEMPLE GRANDIN’S LEGACY
Temple Grandin’s favorite quote is by Alan Ashley Pitt: “The man who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd. The man who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been before.”
Temple has been a mold-breaker and an important role model for educators, parents, and those with mild autism. She’s also explained autism from the inside, but her autism remains secondary. “Don’t focus so much on autism that you forget everything else,” Temple says. She certainly follows her own advice.
Though born with severe autism, Temple has become a beacon of hope for those with autism. “Temple broke through the barriers of autism to show that people with autism and Asperger’s add value to our society,” said Dr. Kurt Vogel of the University of Wisconsin in River Falls, one of Temple’s former students.
Temple has written several books for persons with autism and those interested in the subject. She wrote Emergence: Labeled Autistic; Thinking in Pictures and Other Reports from My Life with Autism; The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism and Asperger’s; The Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships: Decoding Social Mysteries Through the Unique Perspectives of Autism with Sean Barron; and The Autistic Brain: Helping Different Kinds of Minds Succeed with Richard Panek.
A highly acclaimed speaker about autism, Temple’s TED Talk, “The World Needs All Kinds of Minds,” in February 2010 has subtitles available in thirty-six languages.
Temple is known worldwide for overcoming the challenges of autism, but her primary identity isn’t autism. She thinks of herself as an expert on livestock, a scientist, and a professor.
“Temple has been to domestic animals what Jane Goodall has been to primates,” said Dr. Bernard Rollin of Colorado State University.
Temple stresses measurement in her work with livestock. She measures the number of moos (cattle that moo and bellow, no more than 3 percent) and the number of falls (cattle that fall, no more than 1 percent). She trains others to stick to definite standards, too. Because of her autism, Temple doesn’t understand abstract ideas, but she’s used this to her advantage and that of animals. She stresses what you can and should test. Ironically, many of the things important to her career—hard work, persistence, and insight—are not measurable.
Conditions for animals have much improved because of Temple’s requirements. “Audits required by McDonald’s, Whole Foods, and other companies have forced plant management to monitor, measure, and improve employee behavior. Plants are maintaining their equipment better and reassigning/firing employees who abuse animals,” reports Temple.1
Especially for women, she created jobs. “Until I came along, secretaries were the only women in this industry,” said Temple. “I opened many jobs for females in the cattle industry.”
Temple has provided many tools for progressive practices using principles from scientific literature and personal experience. “If the animals on America’s factory farms got together to award an Animal Nobel Prize, they would surely give it to Temple Grandin,” says Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food.
In August 2014, Temple attended the sixtieth International Congress of Meat Science and Technology in Punta Del Este, Uruguay. She was one of five hundred participants from more than fifty countries. Temple spoke at the conference, one of thirty-one national and international speakers recognized worldwide to speak. She continues to speak at conferences around the world, spreading her expertise on livestock.
Temple also defines herself as a scientist. “For a scientist, the lack of knowledge is thrilling. A new field to explore. A chance to do fundamental, big-picture research before the field gets really narrow and specialized! Questions that lead to other questions! What could be more fun?” she asked.2
Science has fascinated Temple since childhood. In grade school, she flew kites behind her bicycle that she had cut from a single sheet of heavy drawing paper. She discovered that bending the tips of the wings up made the kite fly higher. The same design started making appearances in commercial aircraft thirty years later.
In high school, she used science to develop the squeeze machine after researching principles of sensory interaction. Her science teacher, Mr. Carlock, encouraged her to do research. She’s been intrigued with science since then. She considers herself a totally logical and scientific person.
One of Temple’s idols is Albert Einstein. He said, “Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.” Temple said, “Both are needed to answer life’s great questions.”
“I continually add to my library of knowledge and constantly update both my scientific knowledge and my beliefs about God. It is beyond my comprehension to accept anything on faith al
one,” said Temple.3
In The Autistic Brain, Temple showed her willingness not only to study science, but also to allow scientists to study her brain. As she has done many times, Temple shared the results with us, opening herself to the world.
“Perhaps in the future,” said Dr. Simon Baron-Cohen, a leading autism expert in Cambridge, England, “it is going to be increasingly controversial whether autism is something that needs to be cured or not. Perhaps it is more a personality type.”4 Temple would certainly agree with that.
Temple also defines herself as a professor, and her colleagues and students agree that she is both effective and beloved.
“Temple has affected me very deeply. Temple and I share a passion for teaching,” said Dr. Kurt Vogel of the University of Wisconsin. “It’s unusual for someone of her stature to concentrate so much on teaching.
“Because she understands them, Temple uses word pictures in her teaching. During the 2008 financial bailout, she said that the bailout cost approximately two Denver airports for every state in the union. The Denver airport cost almost $5 billion.” Her unique way of thinking and teaching resonates with her students.
“She’s much beloved by her students. She’s utterly devoted to them. They follow her around like puppy dogs,” said Bernard Rollin.
“Temple puts her students above her work,” said Mark Deesing. “She has dozens of students imprinted with Temple Grandin ideas out there.” She’s given seminars in many other countries, so she has spread her ideas to students across the world.
“I want to inspire students to make a positive difference,” said Temple. ”I hope they will do well.”
Undoubtedly, through her expertise on animals, scientific accomplishments, and success as a professor, Temple will get the permanent recognition she longs for.
ENDNOTES
Chapter 1
1. Eustacia Cutler, A Thorn in My Pocket: Temple Grandin’s Mother Tells the Family Story, Arlington, Texas: Future Horizons, 2004, 195.