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tv   In Depth  CSPAN  November 27, 2009 4:00am-7:00am EST

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>> temple grandin, what due do for a living?
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>> guest: i'm an animal science professor. the only thing i do is i consult with the cattle industry, pork industry, on animal handling and i work with big companies like mcdonald's to implement animal welfare auditing programs. >> host: how did you get there? >> guest: i started in arizona visiting feed yards, and freelance. you start out one little project at a time, and then build up your business, and then after i had been in that industry for ten years, i went back to school to get my ph.d when the economy was kind of down. took me a while because i was still consulting, still doing lots of speaking engagements on the cattle and pig handling. >> host: why is it important that we know how animals think? >> guest: well, when i first start out in the industry, one of thingert first things i had
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to figure out, i had to figure out if the cattle know they're going to get slat slaughtered. so i went over a feed yard. and now, scientists know that animals can feel pain, and in my book, animals in translation, i talk about animal thinking. there's a lot of research now that shows that animals have thinking, ability to solve problems are in new conditions, but their thinking is sensory based, not language based. if you have an autistic person, i don't think in language. i think in pictures. language narrates manages. you think about how much a dog learns when he visits the local fire hydrant. who has been there, friend or foe, all sensory based detail. >> host: but again, why is that important for us as consumers of meat to know how animals are thinking? >> guest: well, we want to make sure we give animals a good
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life, and animals make a human -- i talk about this, what an animal would want. pig want things to manipulate and root in. you have to give them fibrous material to root in. dogs need a social life. they need to be socially interacting with people. each animal has different things that are important to them. i was just reading reading in "w york times" today that there are some dogs that will understand over 200 nouns. >> host: temple grandin is our guest this week on in depth, and if you would like to dial in, you can call in at 202-737-0001. if you leave in the eastern central time zones, 202-737-0002, in the mountain and pacific time end zone, send us an e-mail, book tv at
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c-span.org, or tweet us at book tv. what do you mean whenup say you think in pictures? >> guest: my thoughts come up in pictures. instead of asking me an abstract question, just think of me like google and consecutive me a key word. don't give me something i can see in a tv studio, a control room or something like that. just give me a noun and i will tell you how my mind searches the database. >> host: c-span. >> guest: i'm seeing a hotel room. i got the tv on this morning, and i was watching c-span. but the tv wouldn't turn off, and i had some other work i had to do so now i'm seeing the remote control and i'm pushing all the buttons, and that's how i got from c-span to the tv remote control, and i had to call the desk to get the remote control to work. now i'm in the hotel hassle
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file. >> host: corral. >> guest: i'm starting to see many of the facilities i went to they start coming up like slides. corral tends to be ranch facilities, so i'm seeing ranch facilitys. you ask me about thingeds i designed, feed box; you say meat plant. i see things i designed for the meat plant. that's something that's my business. i tend to see my own stuff. ask me about something that's not my business. >> host: book. >> guest: you're not being very creative. >> host: i don't know i was going be put on the spot. >> guest: that's the only way i can explain to you how i think. i have to show you how to -- it kind of gets off the subject the same way that a search does on the internet. you do a verbal search, maybe the first two pages are on the
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subject and then gradually gets off the subject. >> host: how many peep people in the u.s. think like that? >> guest: ira number of people who are people thinkers. one thing where i'm extreme, i design a piece of equipment in a drawing, i can test one in my head like a virtual reality computer system. i thought every designer can do that but i found out they couldn't. and i interviewed people how they think, and i was shocked to fine out most people didn't think how die. people say think about a church steeple. i think of specific ones. other people get a generalized image. i don't have that. i only have specific ones. >> host: you in thinking in pictures, dr. grandin, you talk about three different types of
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thinkers. what are those three different types? >> guest: i thought everybody on the autism spectrum was a visual thinker like me. i found out that's not true. from the revised edition in 2006 it changed that. i found out interviewing a lot of people, there's three basic thinking types. the think about the autistic mind or asperger mind, it's a specialist mind, strong in one area, bad in another. visual thinkers like me, think in photo pictures. they're bad in things like algebra. there is nothing to visualize. i talked to other people that skipped al green boo and went to gee onlity and they could do that better. the other mind is the pattern thinker. it's a more abstract visual thinking. think origami. it's patterns.
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and these are the music and math minds, and they're weak in reading and writing, and the third type is a word specialist. some of these people make good news broadcasters, reporters, they know every fact about their favorite subject, and they're just so-so in math and i found over and over again these three different thinking types or you get mix -- mix tours of them. found three people have the hat absolutely no visual thinking. if i say to you visualize walking into your house or getting in your car, most people can visualize that. i have found three people that could not do that. >> host: how do you define autism? >> guest: a developmental disorder that varies from genius like einstein, who was diagnosed
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awe cities tick to people who remain nonverbal. it's very, very variable. it's a continuous dissard. aspergees is a milder variant where there's no speech, and when a person becomes aspergers, and if you didn't have lot of people around with asperger straights, this people wouldn't exist. you won't have all these technical things. their more interested in things than they are in socializing with people. >> host: when were you diagnosed we autism? >> guest: i was born in 1947, so in 1949 i was taken into a neurologist in boston, wanted to make sure i wasn't deaf. didn't have epilepsy. and the neurologist didn't nope know what autism was, and they said it was brain damaged. and then a few years later i got the diagnosis.
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it was a long time ago. >> host: who is leo cantor. >> guest: one of the first people who identify what autism was. his papers were published prior to 1947, but back in those days, no internet, journalists didn't get around very far. >> host: has he definition of autism changed over the years? >> guest: well, not really. you see, the problem you have with something like autism or even dislex a ya is it's a behavioral profile, and when i was a little kid they used to think it was an emotional problem, like -- no it's something. you're born with it. a lot has been learned about it. it's brain development, and you have abnormalities in the white apartment white matter is the interoffice communications in your brain. so half your brain is white matter, the other half is gray matter, and where you have detects in autism is especially
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in the frontal cortex, there's a poor interoffice communication, and so some smart circuits back here, and that may account for some of the savants. >> host: when you were diagnosed with autism, what was your parents' reaction? >> guest: well, fortunately, the doctor referred manurer a very good speech therapy school, and could see i was improving, and they hired a nanny to take turns playing games with me and my sister. in those days people like me were put in institutions, and i have to credit my mother on making sure that didn't happen, and i cannot emphasize enough the importance of early educational intervention. you see the symptoms, you don't
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wait. you have to start working with them. many hours a day. one-to-one interaction if a a teacher. the worst thing you can do is nothing, and a lot of people are watching this program, some may be able to get good services, others not, but don't wait. if there's an area with no services, get a grandmother, student, somebody to spend 20 or 30 hours interacting with the kid, teaching them language. you have to work on getting interaction. >> host: as an autistic, is it easy to good in your own world? >> guest: not now. you keep improving, and people say my speeches at age 60 are better than when i was 50. it's a bottom-up thing. you put the pieces of the puzzle to form a home. i form my my -- hypothesis by peteing things together. >> host: how many books have you
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written? my first book was livestock handling and transport. i have humane livestock handling. that came out two years ago, and that has all my drawings and paper information in it. i have a book i edited on genetics and behavior of domestic animals. and then of course, there's thinking of pictures, and then the emergence of the autistic, and a lady helped me put that together, because one of the problems i have is organization. my purely professional books, humane livestock handling -- that was my writing. thinking in pictures, that was all writing, but my editor had to rearrange a lot of chunks. she rearranged structure. animals in extrapolation, and katherine johnson put together
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the structure, and i want to give her credit for linking these together. but the chapters i wrote in my lifestock handling and transport book, those are my chapters without any editing. and you we go to me web site, it's all my writing without any editing. i have to break things down into small outlines. i don't know how to do the kind of writing that katherine johnson does, where she makes it like a story. thinking in pictures, you have to read something that is my writing, thinking in pictures, that's that he will way i see it. magazine articles i did for an autism journal. >> host: when did you start writing and when did you start talking? >> guest: i started talking by three and a half to four. until i was pretty much fluent at four. then i was very lucky i went to a neurologist, because if i had
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gone to a psychiatrist, he would have tried to psychoanalyze me and that would have been useless. i was referred to a school where the teachers taught out of their home and knew how to work with these kids. >> host: is your sister autistic? no no, they're not. >> host: are your parents still living? >> guest: my mother is still around. she is 82 years old. >> host: where were you raised. >> guest: in massachusetts. and then when i was 14, i went away to boarding school, and i was kicked out of school for throwing a book at a girl who teased me. and i checked -- was kicked out of the girl's school. the teenage years were the worst part of my life. all the teasing and everything. some of these smart, geeky kids in silicon valley, those parents
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directed them from childhood into adulthood. half of silicon valley with heal some degree of asperger. >> host: why do you say that? >> guest: they do they're undiagnosed. i'm sure you have some worker here in this station, and none of this equipment would work if you didn't have these people. nature can decide a brain to be more cognitive or make a brain be more social. all that social emotional, it takes processor space up here, and you have a brain that does more thinking, they're going to invent things like tv station equipment. >> host: why did they call you tape recorder in school? >> guest: i didn't realize this at the time, is that whenever i talk it sounded like little scripting. and the way i had to learn language you learn a whole lot of scripts. children will repeat stuff from
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movies or tv commercials but they may not know what it means. some of these kids think of the tone of the voice instead of the word, and then you learn the words have meaning. like the way a kid might start singing a hamburger commercial at dinner time because that's associated with food. and as i got older, i got less and less like a tape word recorder, because if you load more information in, have to fill up inside my head. so if have more things understand things better in the future. >> host: our guest is temple grandin. she was an associate professor of animal science at colorado state university. where is colorado state? >> guest: fort collins. and we need to get the web site fixed. >> host: congratulations. >> guest: well, i'm a full professor now. i'm really happy with that. and i need to get that done. fixed on the web page.
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>> host: do you know how many books you sold? animals in translation sold way over 250,000. thinking in pictures sold about 35,000 hard copies originally, and it sold way, way over 100,000 copies. had a little problem tracking it to through the publishers, and the book stand data is missing so i'm not exactly sure. of course i have my livestock handling, that sold like 3,000 copies but that's a specialized book for ranchers. >> host: before we move on to calls, you talk about the live corrals -- i'm using the wrong terminology i'm sure -- that you designed. can you speak to that? >> guest: well, half the cat until this country go to the
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meat plant and they're handled by equipment. and they describe what they're thinking in pictures, and my livestock books are about handling livestock, and i helped develop odd odd auditing systems to count cattle, and i can determine it's getting better or worse. it's used by the major restaurant companies suchs a mcdonalds, burger king and wendys, and in australia many other countries. >> host: you worked with the u.s. department of agriculture?
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>> guest: yes. i was hired to do a survey of handling and slaughter plants, and that's where the america scoring system was developed. >> guest: it's a sensory thing. think about how much a dog learns. a man took some -- when i first started working on cattle, i noticed sometimes the cattle would go through the vaccinating chute easily and then they want. and it was a shadow, a people standing up in the way and a vehicle going by, and if you
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remove these distractions, then the cattle would walk up the chute, and i found in the meat plants where they used the electric prodder in there too much, and i went in there and put a piece of cardboard up and they couldn't see the people, and i changed the light on a chute entrance, the cattlele would move. i find the place -- i fix their cattle handling with cardboard lights and controlling what the cattle see. >> host: who is oliver saks. >> guest: an author of a whole bunch of books, an though polling gist from mars -- anthropology from mars. he profiled me in 1994. i thought it was a wonderful profile and he is a very nice, kind man. >> host: what made you write your autobiography in 1986? well, that started -- the organizer of the conference said i know a publisher that might be interesting in working with you
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on writing an auto guy bi-ography. and it was the first back where somebody on the inside was telling about it. at the time i was getting my ph.d the university of illinois. i was very busy, and i don't know how to write things up in story form, especially didn't back then. and so i was put in contact with this publisher, academic therapy publications arena press, and they had a writer that actually did children's books. and i said, yep, we'll do it so we did it. and then thinking in pictures came about after the sax piece came out. i had an agent contact me. >> host: how do you write? >> guest: well, all my writing i do on yellow legal paddings, and i found out all the dinosaurs that do that? stephen king wrote a little acknowledgment to the world's
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finest word processor, the parker fountain pen. and i talked to the drivers on the tours, and i said how many writesser do like i do? he said a lot of them do. i didn't learn how to type until i was 18. i never learned to type properly. >> host: what kind of instrument do you use, a fountain pen? >> guest: no. way to messy. i like to use a mechanical pencil with a soft lead, and i don't like cheap legal pads. i have to have an eraser because i erase lots and lots. i feel lost without mill -- my eraser. instead of marking out everything. even the things on my web site, that's my writing unedited. >> host: and then somebody else type ofs it up? >> guest: that's right. >> host: dr. grandin in school,
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were you in special ed classes? as a very young kid, i was in a little private nursery school. i went to a normal small private school school, but it was very old fashioned, structured classes, older experienced teacher, and i started out a half a day. goingletry school, i state d going to elementary school, a very small rural public school, 12-13 kids in a class, and then i did pretty school. and then high school. that was a disaster. a large girls school. all the special problems. that was absolutely horrible. when i was 14, was thrown out of the school for throwing books of all things. i went to the special boarding school for emotionally disturbed children that were gifted. in the 60s, everything was freud and emotional disturbance.
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>> host: you have talk about nanny and special schools. did your parents have a lot of money? >> guest: yes. i was fortunate to have family that had enough money to do these things. i have taken the prices of things that were done with me and figured it all out and adding inflation, and my program as a little kid cost money, but it cost quite a less money than some of the expensive programs today. the nanny was $50 a week, and the other -- my other little school was for teachers, just free lansing out of their home. the think that got really expensive was going away to boarding school. when you get into mild aspergers, when i go out in these meat plants, there's asperger kids, 40-50-year-old ones everything doing jobs like plant engineer and computer guy, and they came from modest
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backgrounds. >> host: do you think the public schools today are doing enough to meet the needs of autistic children. >> guest: all depends on the school. they range from wonderful to awful. i travel all around the country. i go out and make a general statement about that. >> host: what about the national institutes of health? do you think that enough money is being invested into autism research? >> guest: one of the places i want to see more money put into in autism research are the sensory sensitivity problems. people with autism have them, defense licksics have them. men other learning problems, adhd. i have problems -- loud noise hurts my ears. other people have visual processing problems. they can't stand fluorescent lights, it's like being in a discotheque. i can't stand scratchy clothes on my skin. i have raggedy t-shirt, and it's
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a real rag but it's the softest one i have. the sensory problems are debilitating. they can range from nuisances to completely debill tating where cannot work in a normal school, normal office, sporting event or anything like that. there needs to be research on treatment for these sensory issues, because if you take something who can function onñia high spectrum, they can't tolerate a]iijjuá million are in a nuisance category. >> host: what about drug therapies? ü5rup big fan of powerful drugs given to little kids. i have a whole drug portion during my talks. a lot of the problems we have is drug companies advertising stuff that is patented and pushing it for the wrong reason. i had no medication when i was a
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child i know some families with some of the diets have worked. one of the problems i'm doing research on, wheat-free doing it, low sugar diet. autism is so variable. the diet helps one kid, does nothing for another kid. that's worth trying, and the other thing is getñi something good science right now on what the fishñr oil supplements. there's a paper that came out, and i prefer scientific studies before i recommend something, but the diets -- i talked to enough families, and i know there's people that the diets work. handing out powerful drugs to five-year-olds, it's a badqñ id. but on the other hand, i can't be against medication. believe you me, i read all this stuff. i subscribe to medicalçó journa. i needed in antidepressant medication. my anxiety attacks were worse
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and worse, horrible panic attacks. i say, imagine what would have been like to do the first interview, or if your had to live in a room full of poisonous snakes. that's the way i was all the time until i started taking antidepressants, this why i have too drink so muchñi water.ñi the antidepressant medication stoppetr the panic attackes. there'sçó a lot of controversy w about them. i don't what they do for depression but where they really work, there's literature to baci it up, is the anxiety and antic attack things. now people that are not autistic, a dab of prozac, turn them right around. then when they go off it, it's one horrible mess, and i want to warn people on the spectrum, tiny doses, one-third to one-fourth the starter dose. i bet over 100 parents say to
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me, gave them a small dose. they doubled the dose and it was was horrible. no sleeping and agitated. my feeling about medication is conservative. prozac won't do anything for repetitive behavior. where it works is anxiety, ananich attacks. and i -- panic attacks. >> host: two more questions, callers, and then i promise you will get a chance. you used the term asperger's several times. >> guest: it's defined by the american psychiatric association as no obvious speech problem, base cliff mild us a tim. asperge is simply mild autism where when the kid is three old, they're running to the doctor. he has no reason to be taken to the doctor.
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now, there's a lot of controversy when the dms-v comes out with the diagnosis. some people suggest they will merge it into the autism spectrum. depressant want to get rid of it. it's been around for too long. i would rather say it's part of the real high functioning end of the autism spectrum. it's definitely not a disorder of autism. that's been proven. >> host: and i either read in an interview you did or one of your books where you were talking about the mountains in colorado, and you told somebody that they don't bring you pleasure. you see them as being pretty, but you can't experience pleasure. >> guest: i do experience pleasure on some things. when i'm together with the building nerds and we're talking about building something, find that really a fun thing to do, solve problems. when i look at a pretty sunset, that's pretty, but i don't get
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quite so emotional. that doesn't mean i don't have emotions. i know pretty. and i know how to take pictures that are attractive. thees thetic sense is not sprayedded from the emotion. but i don't swoon officer. emotions are like a dog's emotions. happy one minute, wagging his tail, nextñi mint, snarling and barking. it's simple. in fact, animals make us human, katherine and i discuss the core emotional circuits inle animal brains. people brains have the same circuits, and when i worked on the reference list, i make sure i had the papers looked up. i spent a lot of time on the footnotes for chapter one, to prove that this exists, and those papers have been around fob a long time but they were hidden in the neuroscience
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literature and wouldn't getting into the veterinarian literature and the psychology literature. >> host: diane in arkansas you're on with temple grand din. thank you for holding. >> caller: what a joy. you are my hero. -- grandin? >> host: yes, we're listening. >> caller: i have a little boy in 1965, he had hypothyroidism and also autistic. now, what they're calling autism -- all these -- one out of every 140 children born are supposed to be autistic, it's nothing like the children -- my little boy and the children that i was around in all those years. he died at 13. we had wonderful schools in ventura county in colorado, anyone 1965, and they saved me. he was about four years old by
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the time we went there and found the schools, and i think -- one thing you have helped me so much in is i have -- everytime you went on television i taped you so i can always watch you, and i want to -- when you made the statement one time that -- about the sounds these little kids that shake their hands and all back and forth and scream? that they're hurting because of the noise, and you really enlightened me a lot, and i think you are doing so much good. you and your family are my heroes. you really are. >> guest: thank you very, very much. and i just want to say that i have information on these sensory sensitivity problems. >> host: next call, richards in sun river, oregon.
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>> caller: temple, you're me hero, too. i want to congratulate you on all your work. i teach what we call resistance free training for horses, and many times that jack russell a-type horse has been, you know, quoted as the one that is crazy and should be put down, and yet with your work, we have been able to realize that this is a very sensitive horse, that just needs quieter training. >> guest: training. >> caller: my question is, how do we -- there is any relationship between that little gene there and what we see in the a-person? the obsessive-compulsive person? there are some behavior traits that go contracts species. one is startle response. drop a chair, how much does the heart rate go up or judgment. i don't recommend that doing that to a horse, but put a fire
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cracker under the chair you will have a different reaction. the nervous systems are more reactive to stimulation, and that's a trait that is inheritable, startle and fearfulness. that are there traits and onees the separation anxiety trait or panic trait and it makes us humidity. and the research in france, it's called social reinstatement. i don't know why thigh call it that. i think it's a weird translation think. your get one who doesn't want to get separated from its mate so they measure how far the quail would go on a moving sidewalk to stay close to a cage full of their mates, and he was able to manipulate that genetically and make a high social and low social animal. some dogs really want to please you. others don't seem to have that same trait response. so, there's also some animals
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that are -- and people are high seekers. some people want to jump off mountains. it gives me the heebie-jeebies, people putting a suit on like batman and jumping awful a mountain -- off a mountain with a parachute, and a news man was freaking out. there's no way i would do that. that is strong seeking, strong novelty seeking. >> host: do you still ride hours? >> guest: i don't. my balance is bad. i have an autoimmune problem that trashed my hearing, and my balance is getting worse, and my cerebellum is 20% smaller, and when i tried to learn how to toe ski, i couldn't keep them together, i had to keep them apart because i would fool over.
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-- fall over. i'm scared to death of falling. i have had some bad falls, things like slipping at the mail box. >> host: riding was very important to you. >> guest: when i was a teenager, is what all about horses, showing horses, getting my horse ready for she show. one of the things that saved me when i was in high school, guy -- i got in fistfights and they took my horses away from me. i don't know how i did it. i don't get angry anymore. i just try. so i had to turn off anger. and in autism, you have trouble controlling emotions, so i tend to cry. i don't try to throw it through the window. i start to cry. but that's a much better adaptation. the only places where i had refuge away from teasing was the special interest, horseback
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riding, model rocket club, and science lab. if i didn't have those things i would have been done for. >> host: in your research, doctor, has there been the incident of teasing, asperger children, does that affect them in their lives? >> guest: once they get in a job where they're recognized for their skills, its stops. i gave a talk out a large computer convention on the west coast, and walk in the breakfast room, and everybody was on their laptops and nobody was talking. they weren't getting teased. and one of the things i had to do is get recognized for my skill. the way i sold jobs originally to show people drawings. i showed people pictures of jobs i had done. and they would look and say, wow, you did that? that's -- i had to sell my
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skill, not my personality. >> host: is there incidences of higher raids of alcoholism and drug abuse among autistic children? >> guest: not necessarily. when you gate problem like that, it's due to high anxious sit, and they have some that have gone that route. but word thinkers tend to be real calm. autism is very variable. i know a lot of people in the field that are not autistic that real high anxiety problems, got into trouble with drugs and alcohol, and they got over if witness -- with lots of counseling and little tiny doses prosack. >> host: hugh in virginia, you're on. >> caller: good morning. this is a delight. this is the first knowledge i have had of temple grandin and
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god bless her for all she is doing. have you ever worked with other than land-based animals? i'm talking about dolphins and whales. and ocean.com is a web site and she does a lot with dolphins and whales as far as communicating. i also have some creative powers i feel are self-taught, but the human mind is unbelievable. i would love to enter -- interact with you in some way. i want to see if your opinions on theology and religion and how that is in your mind, and i want to quickly read a poem to you i wrote to see how you would react. it's called, mind, your mind, mine, your mind. mind your mine and you may find now gems to be discovered and
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uncovered. the cure 0 for nilness-illness are two examples of what might come one someone minds their mine. perhaps that someone is you. be kinds a you open your mind and you will learn to care and ceremony once you become aware, you can change this world to love and understanding. it's not too late, don't hesitate. for today is tomorrow, and never comes. at the end of your days, willoff be in a haze or give up the quest for the rest? solution to pollutions are awaiting to be mined. it's all to you you to mine your mind and help in the betterment of all mankind. >> host: all right, hugh, thank you very much. >> guest: i'm getting some associations that are inappropriate, like a trap door in my head. enup your mind, and when he says preventing poverty, i'm seeing
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picture. love, i'm seeing a volkswagen beetle. i know that's inappropriate. i have problems with long strings of information. when i read a book i convert into it pictures, and deep verbal things i don't understand. as far as whales and dolphins, i am familiar with some research, fabulous research has been done on the ability of whales to make bubble rings and i talk about that in the animals make us human. this is an animal that has a brain, great, big, huge, come mess brain. it's assembled differently than our brain. >> host: how much speeches a year too do you give. >> guest: i give enter views, and in february hbo is having a
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movie about me starring claire danes. i had to make sure the did all the cattle stuff. i'm living on the road. >> host: are you you teaching this semester? >> guest: i have a short course i teach on tuesdays on livestock handling and cattle behavior. i have already turn that for the first half of the semester. next semester i do its twice. the second half of the semester, a class for animal science and one for animal behavior for veterinarians, and then i do a lot of talks to vet schools, colleges, autism talks, book talks. right now i'm just doing a whole lot of talks. i also have a -- four students got their ph.ds with me, and i have a fifth student right
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now, kurt, a real star and go-getter guy, and he will hopefully go out and keep doing the kind of things i'm doing to make real practical change. being a visual thinker, i'm into practical change. i hear all the stuff about banks and foreclosures and things like that. what i see is a shoe shine lady crying while she was telling me how she lost her house. i see a very angry shoe-sign man. i'm seeing a limo driver telling me about his neighbors house being foreclosed, and he had to get a dog to protect his house when hi was out in his limo business. >> host: do you follow politics? >> guest: yeah, i follow it quite a bit. i'm appalled just how abstract and divorced from reality it's become. we have people argue over things that have no touch anymore with the practical things on the ground. i do not talk about partisan politics but i will talk about
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abstract, and animals make us human and animals in translation. i think governments are having a summarize harder time getting stuff done. people are making policy are getting too far away from how the policy actually affects real people on the ground. >> host: and our next call for dr. grandin is from winston-salem. >> caller: i really admire what you do, and i admire c-span for devoting three hours though topic. my simple question is, over the course of your lifetime, how have you been able to process the words in your existence of life, the word "love"? i have been asked that question before, actually, and i see things and -- a mother nursing her baby and taking care of her baby. i see inappropriate associations
quote
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like love bug. now that's totally inappropriate. i tend to see it as what would be examples of loving behavior. people that take care of their kids well and help them turn into good people. that would be an example of love. i have to always refer it back to a picture. something i can put in the love file, and live the love bug and the love utility vehicle out of it, and put something in the nasty file, again, i have to put pictures into file folders in my brain. when i was a little kid. howl did i know a dog wasn't a cat? i sorted them for size. but when our neighbors go can a doc sunday, doc sunday so i used nose shape, a visual feature to categorize dogs and cats. i could do it by sound, barking, or by smell. >> host: do you have pets?
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>> guest: i can't. i am traveling all the time give. home tonight, and then i have to turn around and after i have washed my clothes and stuff and take a 7:30 plane to omaha. >> host: do you get reask nationed in airports? >> guest: yeah, die lots of time so i have to dress better. >> host: one of the things you have written about and people written about you, you have developed a sense of humor. >> guest: the first talk i did, i panicked and walked out. when i first started doing my pour point talks, i was pretty awful. one of the things that saved me, i was a good photographer and i had fantastic slides. showing all the different things about things that would scare cattle that you need to take out, chains hanging down,
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pictures of right and wrong design, and that's one of the things that saved me. i tell my students when they're nervous, make sure you have a fantastic set of slides because the worst thing that can happen when you present the paper testify animal science meetings, you read your power point slides, and for beginning studenting first talking at a national meeting, that's note the end of the world. >> host: cindy in ventura, california. good afternoon. you're on with temple grandin. this is book tv. >> caller: thank you. hi, dr. grandin. i saw you on tv the first time you were on television, and you are now much -- you're not monotone when you speak. you make contact and smile when you're talking to the person, and you didn't used to do that. so i wondered how you worked on that. my main question, do you still sleep in the machine? thank you very much. >> guest: i never actually slept in the machine. i just get in there to calm
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myself down. getting back to not talking in a mono monotone, you can continually keep improving. i learn more and more and more. and i just am amazed when people say the difference between my talks at age 50 compared to age 60. the autistic person is always developing and learning. you have to expose them to a lot of different things. when i was a little kid, i work a lot of different job things. i worked with different internships when i was in college. get kids out and expose them to interesting thing. >> host: what is the hug machine? >> guest: when i got puberty i had panic attacks and i was desperate for relief. i was at my aunts ranch and i watched the cattle go through a squeeze chute. so i made the padded squeeze
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chute i could get into, and pressure i calming. a lot of therapists will get a child on cushions, apply pressure because it's calming. you do it for 20 minutes and then you get taken out. the mistake a lot of people make is they leave it on too long and then the relaxing effect wears off. >> host: do you still use a hug machine? >> guest: well, it broke and i haven't gotten around to fixing it, and if you want to read more about it, it's described in thinking in pictures, and plans are on the internet. you can type in squeeze machine and you will fine it. >> host: we have them on the screen. tough a pattern on that? >> guest: no, i don't. i invented it when i was in high school. >> host: next call is jane in parkersburg west virginia. jane, go ahead, place. >> caller: yes. thank you for taking my call.
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temple, i have not read all your books but i have read adolescents on the autism spectrum. i'm calling after a distraught couple weeks. our son is 14, almost 15, on the spectrum, was not diagnosed until 11 with ptd, after i quit home schooling and sent him to a private school. things did not work out. gradually got worse and worse. finally i went to the public school for help, and when he was 12, his first day of school he hit his teacher. he is also ocd. they put a charge on him, and since the state said they tried to help us, right? they have not helped us. we still don't have the services we need here in west virginia. we live in a pretty productive city, but i have hired attorneys to try to protect my son.
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they sent him away for 60 days, put him on drugs, and as far as i'm concerned, he is worse now than he was when we just had him on omega 3 supplemented and kept him on a schedule. and even to the weekend, when the schedule changes from school to the weekend, he is only up until 1:30 now, and he just -- he just goes off. and the was two weeks he has declined. he is a great athlete, a wonderful baseball player. i would consider him more asperger when he was younger, but now he can barely write. he can barely stick with anything. we don't know what the next step is. i have even looked into a special residential thing. >> guest: a lot of the problems, you get people loaded up on too
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many of the wrong drugs and they turn into a zombie. if he can't write -- used to be able to write before, now he can't, people look at all the drugs he is on, maybe the wrong stuff. i have found in traveling around the country there's very few doctors who really know, and very good doctor are conservative with drugsful they try one drug at a time and see what it does. they certainly wouldn't give a lot of drugs to get somebody where they couldn't wife. one of the problems on a tv show, i can't give you any specific advice. i recommend that you read thinking of pictures. i have a lot of medical information there. , recommend trying to get with local support groups. the other thing that helped me a lot was mentors. i was a goof-around student. i didn't want to study until i got a science teacher who got me interested in becoming a scientist. one of the things your son
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probably needs, he needs to have a goal, so then i studied all through college because i wanted to become a scientist, and if i hadn't had that goal i wouldn't have done that. unfortunately i can't really trouble shoot your problem right now. i'd have to talk to you for a half area. >> host: who is an bricine? he was my stepfathers sister. she brought a ranch into the family. i was afraid to go to the ranch. i talk about they ranch a lot in thinking pictures, and my mother said you can go for two weeks or the summer. you have to push kids to do stuff. i went out to the ranch, and i loved it. i would have never gotten into any cattle career without going to the ranch.
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there's a fantastic scene in my movies about doors and how they symbol rised my life. >> host: speaking of the hbo movie, what was your involvement or your comfort level if they took theatric cal license with your live? >> guest: i realized they had to this is one thing i learned in books. i learned from my editor. when i did emergence, i messed up some things. i learned a lot prom the book editing, and i learned in a movie, you can't put in everything, so you have to do a little fictionalization. the thing wanted to make sure it was clinically accurate. i wanted to be doing something that would -- didn't want to be doing something that was out of character. they did a fantastic job. watching claire dane play me was like going back in a weird time machine in the 60s and 70s. the whole movie is in college
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and high school and getting my career started. lots of discrimination against women. that's really shown very well. i spent a whole half a day with claire dane, talked to her. i sent her all this old videotape of me on tv shows in in the 80s so she would get a better idea when my mannerisms were more extreme. i talked with the screen writers, the director. he came out and visited my house. there was something in the script i hated that they changed it. and then the thing i worked with them on was cattle accuracy. they built one of my dip baths. i said you can't get cattle in there. city slicker was like the dumbest movie. everything was wrong. anything about cattle was just stupid. and their cattle accuracysive was beautiful. >> host: i'm going to say something rather impolitic. a lot of autistic children and or adults cannot live by
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themselves throughout their lives. i presume you do. >> guest: yes. >> host: fully. >> guest: yes, i do. autism is very broad spectrum. there are some kids wisconsin w- with enhis si, and you have people like einstein who didn't talk until age three, and he would he baseballed awe cities stick. i don't want to be complete my logical here. there's going to be about half the people in the spectrum that will not be able to live independently. and the other half can. i was talking to shirl, my assistant, she said a nice e-mail came in from a girl that said i motivated an autistic
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lady -- i motivated thor study hard in college. that makes he happy. i think sometimes when you get into the higher end over the spectrum, there's not enough expectations. i was expected as a little kid to have table manners. if laughed at fat people, my mother made it plane plain that was not acceptable. then you take the asperger kids, they're just geeky? i see lots of those that are undiagnosed that work in the meat industry that would have come out of modest backgrounds, but i see a 16-year-old today coming up to the book table, and hes headed down the wrong path. he is smart, but he had a mentor. the lucky ones have somebody that teaches them auto maybe mechanics. i think it's a shame the schools have taken out the hands-on classes.
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music, art, auto mechanics. and i have another book called developing talents. that's my career book. i talk about the new beginning -- getting people, teaching them job skills before the graduate from college. i saw a 23-year-old graduate from college, never even mowed a lawn, never delivered a paper. that's ridiculous. >> host: next call, karen in greenville, north carolina. you're on. are you with us? >> caller: yes. can you hear me? >> host: mess go ahead. >> i have a son who is eight years old, named jack, who was diagnosed at the age of two with autism. since that time he has become a very socialable little bit but -- but he still struggles with language. and he will script entire movies and it's like a record that is scratched and keeps repeating itself.
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the brain is short-circuiting. my question for you, is was thinking about musical training for him. >> guest: kids that are -- one one of the best ways to learn is these scriptses mean something. they don't know what it means. you want to start teaching nouns. and i have talked to three people that are fully verbal now and they learned language because they had a therapist that gave them flash cards where you have a picture of a cop, a picture of a book, a picture of a shoe, and if this was the flash card you have the picture on here and the words on the same side of the card. so you hold it up and say shoe. then the person starts to pick that out of conversation, and you start with nouns. so the person learns shoe, give them shoe. he says juice, somebody will give him juice. and then you might be able to take some of these phrases out of these movies and use it in a situation where it can be used
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where they would have meaning. this is the -- same way i learn language. i hear a word i know the meaning. garbage, garbage, garbage, and then a word i know. so i don't know about this program but i worked with hundreds of flash cards starting with nouns. and then for action words, the first sign says wave, and you wave, that's wave. i can't get up because i pill pull the microphone out. that's wave. and a sign that says clap, and you do this. and then learn action words. start with nouns, start with things the child may want, and then action words, your verbs. how about over and under? a toy air plane, flies over the table. it lands on the table, it flies under the table. >> host: you talk about over and under and thinking in pictures and how you associate that. how do you associate over and
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under when you hear those terms. >> guest: i have to actually see something. right now we're take bath toy airplane. i'm seeing, okay, i have like an airport play set you can buy at the airport. you want the united jet and a little fat funny looking jet? either one. and i take that plane out of the united airlines play set, and i am going to fly the plane over the table. i land the table. i take the plane under the table. someone says the dog is under the table. i actually -- i saw a picture of a dog are in a piano. that's not under the table but that picture came up. >> host: when it comes to left and right, i remember an
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interception when i was a child. >> guest: there are a lot of people that are visual thinkers. i had problems learning left and righten in i broke my collarbone and learned it was on the right-hand side. and i mix up right and left. hotel room, gist off the elevate for and they say room 502 is that way, and i go the wrong way. >> host: do you autistic or asperger children recognize you as somebody they can relate to? >> guest: a lot of them do. you know, i really want to -- one of the things in the high end of the spectrum, they need to realize there's a lot of thing toes you can't do some kids cannot tolerate going to wal-mart. they feel like the inside speaker at the boiler factory. they just can't do that. multitasking is a real problem. i cannot multitask. i cannot remember long strings of verbal information. i have to write it down.
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as long as i do those things there's a lot of things i can do. and my mother realized good table manner is something i can do. being on time is something i can do. i had an alarm clock and i was expected to use it. >> host: next call from california. >> caller: hello. i trained dogs for 20 years doing -- giving them a purpose to help them overcome their fears and it's very physical work, but the most critical factor is emotion and dealing with their emotions and your own. i have been following you for years now. >> guest: hello? >> host: any response for that caller? >> guest: oh. i'm sorry. i didn't realize he had gone off the air. well, i'm really glad that my
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information has been helpful. i try to do in both animals in extrapolation and animals make us human is to try to get people to understand a world that is not language-based, and, yes, dogs have the same emotional systems but it's going to be simple, and you saw the awe cities tick thing there. touched the computer mouse and that distracted me because it made the computer move, and i lost track with the caller jay apologize. i was multitasking. >> guest: a little rapid movement. if somebody is fanning themselves like this in front of me in the front row, it distracts me so much it's hard to give my talk. >> host: when you get in a space or area that is uncomfortable, what do you do? >> guest: give me an example. >> host: if i was over here and
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not looking at you -- >> guest: i would ask you to stop doing it. >> host: next call, ben in north carolina. >> guest: the other thing i find very difficult. if if -- if i had to do the interview facing the control room. i'm seeing paint hearing of books. but looking right at the control room, they're waving, that. >> host: that is distractioning. >> guest: the fact the control room is off though side doesn't bother me. i have been stuck in studios where they want to night the news room. absolutely hate being out in the news room. i can. people walking by and everything. because they're asking you questions. i have the ear piece on and they're asking me questions.
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>> caller: i'm enjoying your talks. she mentioned how her teenage high school years were the worst. as a daughter who has been diagnosed with asperger, it took me until she wasno carrierringc0
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don't recommend you don't recommend medications. i happen miss daughters is on theres speaker roll, and she has terrible panic attacks. and anxiety that causes her to have total meltdowns and everything. and you mentioned prosack being the answer for you as far as her getting over anxiety and panic, and i have heard horror stories prozac. >> guest: most of the problems, the here stories with prozac or other antidepressants is overdosing. too much and they're horrible. and as soon as you see those symptoms where they can't sleep and agitated, you have to cut doses. doctors are increasing doses
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when they should be cutting doses. now there's some situations where it mightbe the wright choice, especially the anger outburst, but the others have more severe side effects, weight gain, shaking. one of the things you have to ask yourself when you do it, does this drug have an obvious beneficial effect? and when you try a drug, you don't want to try a diet or new school at the same time, otherwise you don't nope what is working. and if the drug is working like magic for you, then it may be worth the risk, and you want to make sure your daughter didn't get too heavy. some kid get 100 pounds of weight gain. make sure she isn't getting bad changes in her blood and doesn't get the diskin niece ya. >> host: shake. >> guest: the problem with the antidepressant is if you overdose someone, often times the dosees recommended in the
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physician's desk reference are too high. if you use those doses that -- e are going to be problem. >> host: here's some e-mails. how can we help a nonverbal child deal with the frustrated related to limited communication still. >> guest: get him away -- get him away -- the picture exchange program, you can just make a think -- thing out of cardboard and he can point to things he wants. there's fancy talking things you can get when you press a button and it says something. there's an app for the iphone. you talk in iphone, autism in
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>> guest: i talked to a lot of families, and let me tell you some things that need to be done before the book can be completely closed on that subject. one of the things that needs to be done is to look at regresssive us a tim as a separate study. these are the children that seem to be normal, and then at age two, they lose language. they need to be studied separately. another thing that needs to be done is to go back and get all the original papers, not just the summaries, and look at a thing called significant difference. does the vaccinated group have a veriability and if the vaccinated group has a bigger
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variability, that's a sign that there may be some bad vaccine reaction. we can't just stop vaccinate. i remember whole rooms full of iron lungs. we can't go back to polio and all these horrible, sick children's hospitals. space the shots out. maybe one at age three. interesting thing about cattle vaccinations, they are spaced out. nobody shoves every shot in the book into the calf the minute it drops on the ground. >> host: why are you not mentioning your book, developing talents and encouraging parents to work with their children's talents? >> guest: well, i should have been mentioning it more but we talk about other things. of i want to spend time talking about careers because you get on the high end of the spectrum, not enough is being done. i'm seeing too many smart as
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asperger kids being trained to sweep the floor, and they're more capable than that. you have to final the right jobs for the thinking style. visual thinkers are good at industrial design. likestock handling equipment is industrial design. ipod is maude, the industrial designer brought up the control wheel. the engineers figure out how to make it work. they do the graphic designs, artist, photographer, a whole lot of different jobs. how about a music and math class. there's a shortage of electrical engineers. i just got back from a trade show and they had cool robots that moved like a human being. they're made by an american company. they hired engineers from china and india to program the robots.
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i wasn't happy about that. you get out in silicon valley, they ask kids to get in the industry. a kid in the midwest. they don't know what to do with it. then you have -- i have been interviewed we a lot of journalists they i know are on the mild end of the spectrum. >> host: am i a word thinker? >> guest: i haven't quizzed you on your thinking style. when we doc about church steeples, how does it come into your mind? >> host: childhood church. >> guest: that's a setup. person that tens to be more visual will see more specific church steeples. a world think egg -- thinker will get a vague outline. >> host: zina, california. >> caller: okay. i'm on the right. >> host: what's your question,
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william? >> caller: okay. sorry. i just wasn't sure. there's a lot of callers. my question was, if that you didn't -- during your show you talked about white matter and gray matter. what about the black matter? black matter -- you have to have black matter to make gray matter. >> host: william, how old how and why are you interested in this topic? >> caller: ten, and i'm interested in it because i am watching in the morning and imall-ly in church that morning. >> host: all right. dr. grandin, any answer for william? >> guest: well, just the gray matter of the brain is just made that way. leave it at that. >> host: you talk about your cerebellum being 20% smaller than normal. howl dowel know that?
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>> guest: i was brain-seasoned -- brain-scanned years ago. they found out there's a gigantic internet table in your cortex, it's twice as big as the control, and that explains my visual thinking. >> host: so you have a broadband cable. >> guest: it goes from the front tall cortex back to the primary visual cortex, fat, and that big rolled, and the control is have the size and doesn't extend all the way to the primary visual cortexment people with autism think will the primary visual cortex rather than the other portions of the brain. >> host: do you do any work with the nih. >> guest: i know people that work with grants from nih. they need to be working on the sensory issues. there's so debilitating.
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i talk about those in all the books. they are the barrier to living independently in a lot of things. of the if going to the supermarketfield feels like inside the speaker at a rock concert, how can you function? >> host: what kind of situations do you avoid? i don't like noisy restaurants, but if i have to eat in one i can tolerate it. it's nuisance. for somebody with nor severe sensory sensitivities, it's not tolerable. >> host: gloria in connecticut go ahead. >> caller: hello. i am so excited to see you. in 1986 you were in bakersfield, california, and my son attended a school in japan, and dr. grandin, when i heard you my son was five years old, and you were very robotic in your speech, and now your speech is just wonderful, and i am so
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excited to hear that. >> guest: well, thank you. >> caller: my son, he cannot -- he says words and sometimes whole sentences, but he can't really carry on a conversation. what can i do for him? he is now 25 years old. >> guest: autistic person always keeps improving. it's sort of like the more experiences i had and the more information i load into the database of the brain, then the google inside any head has more web pages to search through. the thing you can do with your son is more experiences. more going into that brain than you think. there's a very interesting book called, how can i talk if my lips don't move. this is a person that is totally nonverbal, and he can type independently, and the describes a world of sensory fracturing and describes how his mother
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read him all kinded of grownup books and the information was going in, even though it's not obvious. he flaps and was very, very low function. just keep exposing your son to different things. they gradually -- you gradually improve. >> host: another e-mail for you. this is from a secondary teacher who has taught mild, moderate, regular and gifted students with autism and asperger, her question is, nyeed to know what you think is most important for teachers to do when teaching children with autism or asperger? >> guest: the won't thing is clear directs. clear instructions about what is expected. no long strings of verbal information. no multitasking. a quiet structured classroom is a whole lot better. that works better than the
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chaotic classroom with people doing five different things. figure out where a kid's strength is. there's always an area of strength. build on that strength. the other thing is if the kid likes airplanes, teach math with airplanes. if he likes to draw pictures and always draws airplanes, then get him to draw a picture of a place an airplane flies to. there you have an association back to his fixation, but that fixation is a great motivate for, but broaden it out. >> host: what do you think about mainstreaming. >> guest: for little kids i want to mainstream as much as possible. you have to be reasonable. much bigger proponent of mainstreaming little kids, elementary school kids. autistic kids have to have contact with normal children to learn social behavior. sometimes some of the nonverbals do better in a mainstream high school class because the students know hay have an
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abnormality and they leave him alone. some of the aspergers need to be taken out. they put them in the computer field. some of those kid need to grow up and be a grownup. socializing with teenager is i not a life skill i needed and i say that socially. on the other hand, some kid does fine in high school. so it depends on the school and the teachers. there are some that are doing great in high school and not being teased, and others being tour tortures. >> host: we heard from a lot of caller, perk stories and anguish. do you hear that same anguish? do you have a desire to help them all? >> guest: very definitely. some people there, if we had been in -- i would have talked to them for half hour, but i can't be giving out specific advice over a tv thing where i
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don't know anything about the case. if it had been at a conference, could say do this and do this and the next step. and i do. and i have had people write back to me and say, something you told me or something i read in your book really helped themment that makes me happy. but there were a couple people that called in, there's no way to troubleshoot their problem in a question on a tv show. >> host: tough a do you have a photographic memory. >> guest: i have one for people i'm interested in. the australians were making a secret cattle handling simple. i got a five, second look at it. you better believe it. and then the houses on the way to school, i could care less about those houses. i have to press the save buton to remember.
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>> host: one caller said you spoke in bakersfield, california in 1986. did that bring become a visual memory. >> guest: unfarm i have done so many conferences that file gets overwritten, and i don't remember the meetings unless there was something that was really striking about them. sometimeses when they tell me about my particular conversation i will remember, but at the age of 62, things that are very similar now are starting to mix together. time and news week, i mix up whether i read an article, or a article in science and nature. when i was 30 i wouldn't have done that. i would not mix up time magazine with nature bought it's totally different kinds of magazines. >> host: next call for temple grandin, bob in north carolina. >> caller: yes, i was wondering just purely when it comes to space, like when they're showing a long shot of -- you and the
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doctor -- this shot i'm looking at right now, the guest and the moderator seem to have more distance than usual. is that just the way it happened to be set up today or is that an issue that. >> guest: no. that's just they will way the studio is set up. >> host: we made no changes in the studio. what is deceiving about the shot. >> guest: i'm looking at the monitor now. >> host: we look -- we are closer than it appears. wouldn't you agree? >> guest: yeah. i can touch you foot. >> host: exactly. katherine in new hampshire. >> caller: hello, and thank you for this program. i appreciate hearing all the news and information. i have two questions. if a young child has visual or auditory problems, they use
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glasses and hearing aids so they can see and hear. why is the child who is diagnosis it at a young age with autism or asperger -- they can't put a hearing aid device or glasses that would mute the noise and the chaos and the confusion. it would make it less loud and so forth. that's my first question. my second question is, when people used to live in rural -- >> host: katherine, katherine, if you could hold on, please. >> guest: let me answer the first question. one thing i found on then sensory issues, normal people have a hard time imagining an alternate reality. they can imagine i stuff any ears with cotton, might simulate def deafness, and a hearing aid that can mute out those sounds haven't been invet because the people that make hearing aids
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don't recognize that value. i have been talking about sensory issues for 25 years, and only in the five years i have started seeing on the public med site studies on sensory problems. i think a hearing aid but normal people have a hard time imagining the alternate reality where a specific sound, like a smoke alarm, hurts the ears and another sound doesn't. >> host: katherine, second question. >> caller: thank you. the second question is, we -- society lives in quieter environments, farms, rural areas and so forth, and today the noise level of everywhere is just -- i mean, it just goes on and on. and i'm wondering if a rise in seeing autism and asperger is
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because we have changed from rural to urban sort of areas, and, therefore, that counts for the increase in us a tim and asperger. >> guest: i doubt seriously. autism has a very strong genetic basis. one of the things that is talked about, huge amount of autism in the tech areas. when i look on my web site, i cannot track users. i can only track domain names and users. an awful lot of cities that are tech centers. you put those geeks towing and concentrate them, counts for more cases of autism, and those are hod hotbeds of activity. there are concerns about environmentam contaminant, but its strongly genetic, and today it's the fluorescent lights.
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they're the saying single biggest problem and not people with autism. some people with dyslexia have a problem, people with adhd, other learning prop problems. i had a student who just spaced out when she was in the room with the flores sent lights. so we have to convert over to higher frequency flores sent lights that may solve the problem. but until they man the incandescent lights, that's what people in the spectrum need to ba. merit europe they're going to ban them. i don't have a problem with fluorescent lights but i would be ordering cases of light bulbs. >> host: with the new regulation? about new -- >> guest: yeah. yeah. the problem is with fluorescent lighting, if it's a 60 second cycle, they can see flicker. and it drives them crazy. there's some things you do to
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help. colored glasses help, a lamp with a 1line what bulb. a lap-top computer is often a better screen because the lcd screens don't flicker. instead of using white paper, print on light blue or tan or gray. some people are helped by colored lenses. ...
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>> guest: autism books, but it took me quite a bit of time to troll through the database like looking through the amazon website to find, to write down my books. i don't know if we'll get to
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discuss this, but i had this because i would be sitting there on the show for 15 seconds trying to access these books. i have to have key words. i had to have keywords. the questions i've been getting so far have been standard questions. >> host: we are going to show you those in just a minute. will show you some of the books that temple grandin has influenced her. will show you that into second. the second part of doctor frost question, have you had have you had to station where the environment you perceived is altered, such as seeing things in slow motion, or seeing things larger or smaller as someone else might? track you know, i don't have that problem. there is a thing though with a slow motion where certain situations you have time to act. i had one thing happened one time, i was driving on the freeway, right hand lane. this idiot polls by me with a
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two by six about as long slid off the back of that traitor and it was gliding across the freeway this way. and it did slow down. it was like floating on the freeway. i was like a fighter pilot and i move my car over tracking the board all the way over into the breakdown lane, straddled, successfully, avoid accident and in fear came on. every swear word i can't say and heart pounding also came out. but that's something that happens to normal people in certain situations. it actually speeds up. the board was like floating. i had plenty of time and i just moved over and get a perfect bit of driving and i avoided hitting that board. >> host: driving and multitasking, do you have trouble with it? >> guest: the secret to driving is multitasking only when you're learning. when you are learning to drive, shift, work the steering, work breaks and gas, you have to think about it. driving eventually becomes a
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learned motor skill. it goes back here, and so what i would recommend on learning to drive, is a year on real easy roads were operation of car is fully, completely automatic. back here in the motor for plenty for you struggling freeway and traffic. drama doctor temple grandin is our guest this month on in depth on book tv. back in march we met up with the dr. grandin dr. grandin and tucson, arizona. she was doing a book signing. we're going to show you part of that followed by some of the book that dr. grandin says have influenced her and we will be back with your cars and e-mails and weeds. -- and tweets.
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>> how are you? >> thank you very much. i. >> both of these two emma. >> hi, how are you? >> thank you so much. >> i love your books. i have written everything you have written. >> i have many friends whose children are autistic. >> i appreciate your work. thank you. >> thanks. >> a pleasure to meet you.
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both on the autistic and animal perspective. i am a special ed teacher. thank you so much. >> and that one as well. >> thank you very much. >> oh good, you got my career book. >> what is he interested in? >> is interested in art, and he is an amazing skateboarder, if you can believe it. he is very physical. >> you need to find something he's good at that he can turn into a career. one thing that he will learn do is an assignment. i had to learn how to take my obsession and turn it into designing things that people
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want. they don't want to just talk about it, they want to design. he has to learn how to do artwork that is artwork that somebody else wants. he can't just draw pictures of mickey mouse all the time. and some kids are doing the. all they do is just the one cartoon character and they won't do anything else. you have to decide, okay, let's say he's drawing pictures of mickey mouse all the time, maybe draw mickey mouse's house, his car. you see, then you still get that connection into the obsession. >> thank you so much. >> it is an honor. i have two daughters that are special ed teachers here. >> wonderful. >> thank you very, very much.
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>> dr. grandin, the reason for autism ever been discovered? >> guest: autism has a very big genetic, genetic is a very big part of it. there's a lot of controversy about other environmental factors that might be causing it but it would be interacting with susceptible genetics. it is a competition genetics. the thing i've observed is more of a marker you have in the family issue like whether or not you have one autistic kid, anxiety and depression in family history, allergies and the family history, other girl logical problems, other learning problems in the family history, those can increase the risk of having an autistic child. >> we just heard you talking and you're absolutely wonderful. >> thanks. >> this is one who is 14 who was diagnosed at age four, and he is always then worked with.
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>> how is he doing? >> good. >> he attends the number one high school animation, straight a's. >> you need to get this book here on careers. >> to her quickly what you are doing. >> i am doing the geography, it's national geographic. and i'm going to be doing this and representing my school. >> that is really, really good. the other thing you need to be doing at age 14 and start getting some job skills. when i was your age my mother had me working with a lady who did dressmaking out of her home. you have to learn how to do a sinus. when you do a job you have to do an assignment. like my cowhand links to. >> what kind of things would you recommend for a kid who is
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academically gifted. >> get involved in specialized activities. you have to get social interaction to a shared interest for school clubs. what's your best subject in school? >> history. >> you like history. let's think about the kind of things you could do. there's not that many jobs except history professors but there's a lot of journalism jobs, writing jobs, you have to start thinking about what you going to do when you grow up. >> i write stories. >> novels. >> maybe you can be a novelist. >> enjoyable. >> get involved in book clubs. get involved in a book club. you're here at the book festival, you should find that where the book clubs are here in tucson. that's where you're going to get your social interactions and shared interest. you can find a specialized history book club even. the thing that saved me when i was in high school and i was
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getting teased, the only thing that saved me where the special interest. horseback riding, nobody was teasing in those places. >> luckily his cool, number one in the country, is full of nerds. >> off course. i'm so glad that he's at that school. i've seen too many kids like you getting tortured, teas and having a terrible time. i was one of the. i got thrown out of school for throwing the book at a girl who tease me. my weapon of choice was a book. >> thank you very much. you are wonderful. >> i had a terrible time in high school. it was the worst part of my life. >> luckily this is a school full of highly gifted kids who are probably all over the spectrum. but high functioning. thanks very, very much.
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>> host: doctor temple grandin, what is it about now gladwell that you like? >> guest: i liked his book the tipping point because when i worked with mcdonalmcdonald's on happening products back in 1999, it was a wild ride with the tipping point just tipped. what started out as a little
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training session, training safety, turned into a gigantic change in the industry. that was an example of the tipping point. i absolutely do not agree with some things that i think the tipping point is one of his best books. i agree with them that you need lots of practice because i didn't learn my cattle handing stuff overnight. i had to go out to all these feed yards and study all lot. and mentoring is extremely important. but how does make a difference because he has a chapter in there where he talks about bill gates having access to this wonderful computer in 1968, teletypes and these computer terminal. it was having access to the computer that was so important. i had access to that same computer and i couldn't do it. no matter how hard i tried i couldn't keep my ski poles
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together. i think any talent does make a difference. delivery, you have to develop, nurture talent. you have to have mentors. you need to get nurturing. but i think any of those he does make different. i have had students with visual problems in my class. they absolutely cannot focus. in my class they have to draw a line like this, three intersecting half circles like this just free hand. they can't do it. >> host: as a visual person how do you approach reading a book. >> guest: i see pictures. you know, red water for elephants and i thought that was just a wonderful fun book to read. there was all of this vivid description of the surface back during the depression. and i could make the movies in my head of all the things that were described. i love books like that with a lot of description but i don't like some of the mystery novels because there's so much plot and i can't follow the sequence.
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>> host: what about them now gladwell, how do you make a movie out of that? >> guest: he has little vignettes in the. one about hush puppy shoes and i saw the shoes and stupid ad was a bassett hound. even that, i make pictures of each individual thing that he is discussing about. >> host: we are back live with temple grandin. this is book tepees monthly program in depth. two '02 is the area code if you'd like to talk to hocker granton. book tv asks would've.com if you go to twitter.com, follow the tv or you can send a tweak to dr. grandin. in fact we had a tweak here from colleen. please ask the doctor if she sees a girl logical similarity between nazism and some aspects of alzheimer's sensitivity.
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>> guest: well, one thing that is similar is this type of alzheimer's where this type of funnel beats out the language parts of the brain. and the art count may come out of somebody who's has no previous interest in art. language covers up all the math stuff and art stuff. one of my slideshows, one of my lectures i call autism, animals and design i have a painting of then goes. they look at those worlds and said they followed the statistical mathematical pattern. i don't think van gogh knew anything about that. >> mike in bloomington minnesota. you are on with doctor temple grandin. >> caller: thank you. i would like to talk to, dr. grandin. i am curious. i see interacting with public. we saw on the intermission here on the book festival.
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you able to exchange small talk with people who came up and also you on the lecture suite quite a bit. i am wondering, if you are introverted or not, but are you able to cope with obviously the interaction, the extensive interaction you have with the public and when you get to these public events, do you have to go to hotel room and decompress? thank you. >> guest: i always need a little time of time to decompress. there's other kinds of more positive social interactions i have problems with. singles, bar seen. i go up to the room and stay in her own. i will go up to the restaurant and eat. i'm usually reading a book. last night it was right next to another, to ladies and were almost right at the same table. and i told her the soup was really good and she might want to order it.
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but i know enough not to engage in total conversation. >> host: what are you reading right now? thank you what was i reading? i was trying to read "the new york times." there was an article in there about small toymakers that were getting in problems with the law, not having dangerous material in toys. some of the extensive lab testing. i wanted to read that because we need to figure out why to have the safety that it does about small toymakers out of business. like for example they have to use ingredients to paint toys that are known to be safe. they would use beeswax to ask them what was. that is generally accepted as safe. there shouldn't be any problem with that, and then you don't have to test every toy which would make as a garage shop company cope roberval is try to read that in the dark last night because i'm very concerned. it might be a good job of
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somebody with asperger's might be making estimate was. somebody's small freelance businesses. i know a lot of people who run freelance businesses that are kind of asperger's. when i went out on the movies that i saw 45 asperger is there. everybody that works on movie sets are freelancers. the lighting i had his own business. a set designer has their own business. but caution is there a business. the dressing room, traders and other business. these are great little freelance jobs, you know, for a lot of people on the high end of the spectrum. so i'm concerned about ideological little toymakers out of business. there's a way to fix that so they don't have to do $30000 worth of lab work every year. >> host: how often do you write and do you write a certain time of day? >> guest: i like to write early in the morning. my most meisters writing i do in the morning. i don't do it late at night. i get to try. i tend to pay bills. >> host: next call for temple grandin comes from idaho.
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>> caller: hi. doctor, i am familiar with your and had he came to that diagnoses of recognizing when cows displace beer. you also speak of the emotional similarity that cows and other farm animals and humans, so understanding how similar we all are, what are you still advocating animal slaughter and eating meat? >> guest: first of all, i cannot function on vegan diet. i have tried to. i have terrible yeast infections, and i had some lapses in my diet eating reese's peanut butter cups and things like that at the airport and and not get the animal protein and now my yeast infection has cleared a. last night i was having soup and salad and that didn't work. i get lightheaded if i don't eat. the other thing i've seen beef cattle really done right. when i first started out mike weir, and i talk about this in
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the afterword, in the '70s there were some rages that really raised cattle right. their cattle had a great run and when i worked at end of the jars they work muddles. in arizona you have 6 inches of rain every year. at the george headshake and cattle state spotlessly clean. where the cow was living is good. i have seen places where things could be done right and i feel very strongly that we've got to give those animals a decent life. that's just a center. also i think grazing animals have a place in the ecosystem. there was a great article in the saturday new york times, i think the book was something pork chop. and talking about how right now in brazil are not clearing the land for cattle. they are clearing the land for soybeans. and soybeans aren't all that great for you either. they are loaded with hormones but i've been too much of that stuff and i got a sore right here. that's not good.
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but we've got to give animals a good life. the éclairs, they have the most problems. animals that have a really good life. and when slaughter plants working right. and love nonindustry people through the slot that and they watch the candidate off the truck, watch the cavaco of the ribbon is the only walk up so quietly that they just can't believe it. that's the way it should be. >> host: what dog is on the cover of animals make us human? >> guest: that was a dog, a picture that the publisher found. >> host: next call, mary in greensboro north carolina. >> caller: thank you for taking my call. i have first to comment and they questioned. my comment is about the fluorescent lights, not only do they flickr but they also have a high pitch sound so that people who are not only light-sensitive but auditory sensitive have a big problem with those lights and they do need to be taken out. public places.
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my question is we have recently had a young boy relocate to north carolina who was diagnosed with asperger's but he does not have a good oral communication skills. is there a place that you are aware of or some places that you can give as resources were we might have this young boy revaluing? >> guest: i don't know about your particular place. i would recommend you get in touch with the parent support groups. that would be the best thing to do because other parents would've the best place. also, if the child has poor speech because he probably should not be diagnosed with asperger is because the way the guideline is written right now, asperger's has no obvious speech and most asperger are very, very verbal. >> host: next call for doctor grandin comes from steve in l.a. >> caller: i wanted to ask if you could speak more as to why you believe that genetics is so
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much a part of all of this. i have my own personal belief. i think postindustrial revolution, we can see an explosion of all these things. >> guest: i think there's a lot of research that's been done on genetics. let's go back on the original studies and i covered those earlier. all that means is if one twin has the disorder, does the other twin had it. we have one autistic twin, you have something like a 60% concorde and ray. if they are fraternal twins, in other words, not identical, much lower, or siblings, much lower. there is a lot of research. if you want to look at that, go to the pub med database. i will take you into the national library that is something you can type into google. i think that is a possibility could be environmental contaminants making some of his worst. it is probably interacting with susceptible genetics.
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what's been found in the research is it's not simple like down's syndrome where there's a abnormality. its little tiny code variations inside of genes. and possibly genetics could be interacting. you might have a situation where somebody that should have just been a mild asperger maybe a little bit eccentric, now that turned into a low functioning. i'm concerned about some of these things, classifiers and water bottles. what i've read in science and nature i would not feed a baby out of a plastic nursing bottle. i am not an alarmist kind of person, but the kid out to be drinking out of glass or if you traveled and used the one that has the polyethylene bag that doesn't have that hard plastic. that's the bad kind. >> host: what do you think about testing for autism in vitro? >> guest: well, if you got rid of all of the autistic genetics, you simply wouldn't have any scientist, any artist. all you have are the socialist. it is a continuing trick and a
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bit of the trade gives the trade disadvantaged. as i said before you can design a mind to be more cognitive, disconnected to social circus or totally, totally social. there's a big range in the middle. in fact, on the guidelines, the committees thinking about having a category called socially awkward but within normal limits. autism is not a black and white disorder. it is not like hunting where you have a specific thing or down's. is a continuous trait. when does moody turned into manic-depressive? there is no black and white dividing line. >> host: and other tweet come in to you. what is known with people with asperger to have children? how might they be affected and what can they do to overcome deficits? >> guest: one thing i observed unfortunate is if you take may be high function autistic and asperger's and you put them
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together, your chances of having low functioning kids is hi. and that is a reason why the website gets hits from top text city. i think on the name is out but doesn't take much imagination to figure where the cities are. they are in my top 10, been there for years. what i observed is the more you concentrate and both sides seem to, my brother and sister got married, there were no autistic kids. but the family history of spouses were completely clean. let me to winning by that. no asperger, autistic traits are i do, no depression, no food allergies, no learning problems, no epilepsy. these are all markers that you can concentrate these things for your chances on both sides of found at chance of having a kid with problems, you know, it tends to go up. >> host: what your brother and sister to? >> guest: my brother works for a bank and has been very, very successful and is a very, very honest, good person. doesn't like all the stuff that
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has been going on. my sister has done into your design. she did wear a french château. and my other sisters run a restaurant. she has done sculpture and runs rental properties. >> host: sounds like an overachieving family. >> guest: well, everybody, my brother really works hard, has a long two hour commute each day on the train which is really hard. >> host: do you know what your iq is? >> guest: when i was tested in elementary school it was 138 and i did my best test and the object is silly, which is pretty typical for the high functioning autistic. there is another that is the word thinker and a test result is the opposite. the more verbal things are the best guest. >> host: genius typically start at 135, 140? >> guest: well, these iq things are pretty fake. i mean, i think you can just say, one thing you have to look
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at, when little kids, would you test them is you can't do it needs to be differentiated from refuses to do it. you have to find where the kid's strength is. one thing that seems to happen, a lot of kids with problems, not just autistic kids, lots of different learning problems. there's an area of strength and an area of weakness. you have to build on the area of strength. again, i think it is terrible that schools have taken out so much of a hands on. these are classes were some of these kids can excel. now a boy doesn't have a chance to get interested in auto mechanics because they got rid of that class. there's a shortage of auto mechanics right now in this world of unemployment that they're not going to outsource that job overseas. . .
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>> well, there is some symptoms of dyslexia that are related. you know, the thing i found in looking at the literature and i just recently got on a website and looked at the sensory issues on add and dyslexia and there's an awareness, the ability to hear hard consonant sounds. you go to some other paper they call it auditory processing disorder but i think it's the same thing. i have problems with awareness. when i was a little kid grownups talked really fast. i just heard the vowel sounds so
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my teachers would enunciate the consonants so i could hear those consonants. the sensory issues, some of those things are similar. but where autism would be different than dyslexia would be the social aspect, you know, the social/emotional relatedness, problem with eye contact, repetitive contact and a lot of these sensory problems and sensory issues, problems with auditory processing there's a lot of crossover with dyslexia because also there's a lot of mixing up add and the real smart kids. those get mixed up all the time and interestingly enough the adhs drugs things like ritalin work on those asperger kids and they won't work on the classically autistic.
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they are not the same but there are symptoms that cross over. >> what do you think about mental institutions or group homes for severely autistic children? >> well, i'd like to try to work on little children, mainstream as much as possible. but for adults, they cannot live by themselves. a group home is going to -- a good group home is the best place they can go and a lot of parents worked really, really hard on establishing, you know, good services. and what i've observed is i travel around the country that the places that have good services have a very strong parent support group. that's what makes good services. the ones that are getting united way money and stuff like that, they got a super organized, well-done parent support group. >> are there certain states that do better than others in your view? >> yes, there are and then there's states where it's real spotty. california is real spotty. it ranges from good services to
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terrible services you get in the upper midwest that tends to be better than down in the south probably has the worst services. some of the worst medical horror stories like overdoses with 10 zillion drugs and awful stuff -- some of the worst stories come out of the southeast. they have the worst services but then you can have other states where it's real spotty. you can have one school that's real great and another school that's terrible. so many things depend on the particular people involved. but if you're in an area that's got bad services you need to get all the parents together and form a really strong support group. one of the problems i found with some of these support groups parents get in there fighting with each other rather than working together, you know, for common goals. >> another tweet for you, dr. grand justin. -- grandin. what goes inside the head of a kid with severe autism? what do think about? >> you need to read books
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written by people that have severe autism. donna williams, somebody somewhere but her best book you have to order online is autism an inside out approach by donna williams. and these people describe fractured sensory processing. like, for example, teeto describes if he looks at a blue door he might see the color first and then he sees the shape that it's a door. you have shape, color and motion circuits in your brain. they have to work together to form a graphic. and what happens in severe autism is these circuits are not working together. so they're seeing, you know, fractured, you know -- fractured visual images. their hearing may be fading in and out like a bad mobile phone connection. they go into wal-mart. they feel like they're inside, you know, a bucket and feel it pounded on. and smell and touch and that's why they do a lot of smelling and touching because those circuits still work. they're less complicated than
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seeing or hearing. they live in a real fractured world but on the other hand if somebody can appear low functioning and have a good brain -- tito looks low functioning and he shakes all the time but when i showed him a picture of a astronaut on a horse he types out really quickly apollo 11 on a horse and he jumps up and flapping. and i showed him in cattle. he didn't say cattle. he has problem with word finding. he has to come in the back door like to define a flower. you ask him what a flower is, he might say the colored fleshy part of the plant is called a flower. you've got to come on the back door on the word finding but lots of times more information is going into that kid than you think. i talked to one parent -- her kid was nonverbal kid who's typing iraq and depression into the computer.
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those words were not used in school. you download that cache memory. he may be reading and you don't you introduce a key part and make sure it's a laptop problem and won't get a flicker problem and a external keyboard so they don't wreck the laptop. some of these things who are nonverbal and they can learn to type and they can learn to type independently. >> next call, pam in bozeman, montana. please go ahead with your question. pam, are you with us. whoops, it helps if i push the button. . >> caller: i'm a 57-year-old woman all through my life has been misdiagnosed with a problem. as a child i instantly fit in with horses, living in a city at
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8 years old, a movie horse training business had me working with horses to get them to do what they needed. my mother saw that and put me into horseback riding lessons. my entire life's career was a breeder of arabian horses and training them and it provided me with a livelihood. when she passed away, it was quite a blow. and i changed my career into the normal pork place. -- workplace. that's when i became homeless, poverty stricken. not accepted into the normal work force because of my disability that had not been diagnosed. i then became employed in the movie industry and luck had it, i was an assistant to henry winkler on a film -- >> pam, to get to your question.
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>> he has dyslexia but he said possibly i had a high functioning asperger's syndrome so i've not been diagnosed but i've become qualified for social security disability. they imposed a payee and all these people managing my income that has worsened my condition to the point of -- it's killing me. can you recommend a source for me to prove to social security that i can manage my own finances? >> i would recommend again trying to get in touch with a support group in your area. if there's any way you can get back into horses and this brings up another thing. i've seen situations where someone has been in a really good career where things were working and then switch. there was a lady that was a great -- a numbers analyst for the government. she went and got hired by a trade association to do web pages. it was a disaster.
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she didn't know how to do web pages. it was a mistake to leave a job where she was doing well and i recommend people that are in employment that's working with them to stay with it. >> another email. this is from sandy. she has a himalayan cat, 14 years old and she says i have the original scarity cat. is there any hope she will be more social and tolerate handling. >> i don't know about the history of the cat. and in solving any animal behavior problem and i talk a lot and animals make us human. i've got to get a complete history about this cat. what is it afraid of? because if it was a ferrell cat originally, where they missed the critical social period, they're very hard to tame down. they stay wild kitties because they weren't petted. was this cat traumatized i don't know. i don't even know what the cat
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is afraid of. to solve behavior problems they've got to have detail. there's a really great dog behavior patricia mcconnell. she's done a lot of great books and she told me she tells clients to imagine a videotape of what their dog is doing and then explain to me in detail exactly what that dog is doing. sometimes you can gradually desensitize the animal of what it's afraid of. one thing i definitely am against would be taking a cat and shoving it into whatever it's afraid of. for a cat that would be a really bad day. >> how much time do you spend around animals? >> i spend a lot of time. when i get back home tomorrow i've got to do this auditor training thing tomorrow. you know, doing last because of all the speaking and stuff i'm doing now. you know, one of the things i'm trying to work on right now and i wish i had time to do fun stuff. one of my big concerns and i've gone around these book signings there's not that many students going to book signings. are they not reading?
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that concerns me. and so i've been taking a lot of speaking engagements whev i can talk at colleges, talk at vet schools. i want to get students turned onto to animal behavior and doing interesting things with animals. i've gone a lot of dog training conferences and a lot of horse training conferences and i'm not seeing that many young people getting training dogs and training horses. i asked one dog trainer why is it happening? he said well, you got to be really patient to train dogs to do agility. i'm happy now i've got a young student, you know, getting his ph.d. and he's doing really, really good. but, you know, i'd like to go out and do the fun stuff but i feel i'm in the part of my career, 62-year-olds right now to try to get out and get the next generation interested. >> has the computer era been good for autism and asperger children? >> one thing getting -- getting online and meeting other people, that part has been really, really good.
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i'm all for that. what i'm against is the constant video game playing. what i'm seeing with some of these young kids they're playing games for six to seven hours a day and you can't get them to do other things. i would have been a video game addict. i don't do the kind of artwork that they want for video games. and if i'd been addicted to video games i wouldn't be out taking care of horses riding horses. doing carpetry work, making signs, building all kinds of things. they could start forming the basis of a career. so my feeling about the video games is, one hour a day. you don't ban them. i would allow them an hour a day that could revert back to autism and the rest of the time i had to get tuned in and we need to use computers to help open up a kid's mind, you know, like really teach them how to get into the google and find things and look up scientific databases and there's wonderful stuff on the internet, you know, like all the physics lectures at mit. >> do you have to force yourself sometimes to socialize?
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>> yeah. i get tired. i get very tired of just social chitchat. you know, analysts talk about the weather and things like that. and it's kind of a social emotional connection. i remember one time going out to dinner with a whole bunch of pharmaceutical salesman and it was four hours of drunken chitchat. there was no information. they didn't talk about why is this a good coach or why that was a brilliant play or analyze the game. it was just chitchat. and i'm sitting there and i found it just incredibly boring. i just don't get much out of that. >> next call for temple grandin, christine, please go ahead with your question. >> caller: hello, this is christine and i'm just enjoying you so much. i wanted to talk about something fun. are you there? >> yes. >> we're listening, christine. please go ahead. >> i have found it incredibly therapeutic for my kind of brain
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that i have and i'm an artist and everything is very visual. i sit and watch the animals out by my place and just am totally entertained. well, this morning i was watching some wood ducks. they've all been born out here in the last 10 years and we started with, you know, a couple of them and now we've got about 40 of them. and they were doing a very intricate patterned dance. it looked like it had been choreographed. it was the most amazing thing and i was wondering is this typical or is it just something i haven't seen before or is it because they're all related and they've all been -- you know, they've known each other's behaviors for a long period of time? >> well, birds have a hardwired very choreographed mating rituals. you know, the male will fluff up his females and strut around and
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the female will wheel her butt and it works like interactive computer patterns. you may have been watching bird mating dances. of course, i don't know what the age of these ducks if they were ducklings but the mating rituals of birds are going to look like they're choreographed. >> who is b.f. skinner and what's your connection to him. >> well, b.f. skinner is the father of behaviorism and i talked about him in animals in translation. and in the '60s he was the god of psychology. behaviorism explains everything. i went to visit b.f. skinner and the old man put his hand on my leg and i asked him, well, if you could just learn about the brain. he says we don't need to learn about the brain. we have conditioning. but i couldn't believe that. because i was taking an animal behavior class from an retired animal behaviorist dr. evans and he was a reptile specialist who
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studied the natural behaviors of reptiles which are hardwired. they're sort of like a more extreme version of the bird mating dances and i never could buy, you know, the total behaviorism stuff. yes, behavior stuff is important and i'm a believer in doing behavior interventions on very young autistic children but it doesn't explain herring it explains about half of it. >> so b.f. skinner research goes back 40 years. how much of it is still valid today? >> well, a lot of it is still valid if you click or train your dog in "animals in translation" that's b.f. skinner training. all the stuff about forward, backward chaining that works in animal training, that works with some of the very young austic children. yeah, those things are valid but it doesn't explain everything in animal behavior because you've got a lot of hardwired behaviors.
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if a dog wants to play puts his front end up and the butt up in the air the dog is happy. the dog is angry if he does this. if a bull does that he's smelling females. bulls fight by butting like this. horses do this. those are the differences in how their nervous systems are wired and animals aren't capable of solving and solving problems on the new conditions and there's been some really interesting studies done with crows. they figured out how to bend paper clips and reach down in a little tube and snag a bucket >> sarah in queens, new york, please go ahead. >> caller: hi. i'm enjoying listening to you. my question is, how do you -- is it -- what do you think about late diagnosis? i always kind of wondered if i happen to have asperger's.
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it seems like -- it seems like i can't -- is there a place i can do to explore that seven and is there some kind of way to show it. >> there's no brain scan or medical test to diagnose asperger's. it's also a behavioral profile on the dm-v comes out. i recommendf[qñ you read the bo join support groups. i don't know what your employment status is. if you're employed in a good job with health insurance right now, i'd recommend keep it off your medical record because i don't know what it's going to do to your health insurance. . if you need services then it might be a good idea, you know, to get a diagnosis. but the most important thing is getting your life to work right. and i think my books will be helpful. there's some other books that would be helpful. and i have found -- the books that have been most helpful to me and had been written by other people on the spectrum.
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of course, my book. and there's john robeson. he worked for kiss on special effects. leon holiday's book pretending to be normal. i have found myself that the books of other people on the spectrum which is some of the most important books for me to read and the other stuff that i got a lot of insight out was the brain research. but try to find a support group in your area, too, to help you. >> have you been following the healthcare debate that's been going on in capitol hill? >> i'll be perfectly honest. i don't understand it. they've got something there so complicated i don't understand exactly what they're doing. most things on capitol hill i follow and understand. this has gotten so complicated. this percentage of people have got health insurance.
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well, yeah who is over 65 is on medicaid or medicare. but the segment of the industry that has the least amount of health insurance are the self-employed. you're going to have like 80% of those. and then the insurance policies that they sell to self-employed they're so expensive it's outrageous. and then as you get older they jump those premiums up to $1200 a month. who can afford that? you know, i don't really understand what they're doing. what exactly -- okay they pass this bill what exactly is it going to do? i hate to say it, most things on capitol hill i understand. >> i say that because you told that last caller to keep it off her insurance. >> well, i don't know what's going to happen. i had a guy come up to me. he was a colonel in the national guard. and he said -- and he thought -- he had an asperger. i see a lot of dads who has autism and that may explains me. did he get diagnosed, no, i
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might get kicked out of the military for that. if you're employed and doing really well, i really would recommend keeping it off your medical record. yeah, go to the meetings, read the books, participate in the stuff. but keep it off your records. keep it out of the computer systems. >> what do you think about electronic medical records? >> well, there's a lot of good things. there's a lot of things that -- certain things i'd probably be paying cash for to keep it out of there. i don't care that they know i had a hysterectomy or i had a yeast infection or i had a little cancer taken off my eye or i've got something wrong on my ear. i don't care about that. the other stuff i'm going to pay them a cash and give them a fake name. there are certain things i don't want on medical records. >> tom in minnesota. you're on with temple grandin. >> it's a real privilege to talk to you. i wanted to ask you if you've
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seen any research that correlates neurological problems such as ocd or tourette's syndrome and asperger's. i've had both. >> you've got autism and asperger's and something else. it is common in autism and asperger to have some ocd along with it. that's common. even and there's anxiety and depression that are not autistic and asperger's. >> doctor, you've partially answered this question but i want to go a little bit more in depth about the quest to cure autism. you already talked a bit about those that are more coming actively able and how they may make a contribution to society. but what about the more very severely affected?
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those that don't make progress in behavior treatment programs and other types of programs. what are your thoughts about trying to help them have better quality lives through a cure? >> well, it'swúg a better qual of life and if you could prevent some of that most severe form, that probably would be a good idea. it looks like it's a continuum. as you get into the more severe forms there's more problems with the interoffice communication in different parts of the brain but this gets into a really, really controversial issue 'cause you have a trait here where in the milder forms definitely can give some advantages but in the very severe forms -- i mean, there are individuals where they are not functioning at all. wall-to-wall epilepsy. you know, the thing is you get into all the controversy about genetic testing and things like that. all i'm going to say it gets into some very, very difficult questions. we need to be learning more and more about how to treat autism. i think there are going to be
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more things and some of the so-called biomedical approaches, things like the diets, different supplements, maybe some better ways to treat it. it's being researched done. i'm sick and tired of the fight between alternative medicine and regular medicine. i actually use of some. i take an antidepressant for my anxiety and i have to take water pills for my ears and i take some yeast cleanse stuff and doing diet to help control some of my yeast problems 'cause let me tell you some of these kids with a lot of problems they got yeast infections so bad that's driving them so crazy no wonder they're behaving badly. >> an email for you from stacy lee. could you please contribute to the debate over euthanasia methods used at local animal control facilities? >> well, of course, the guidelines recommend overdose of anesthetic as the gold standard method of euthanasia for pets.
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and you've got to have skilled people to do it. it's a really unpleasant job. also we need to be working on cutting down on the amount of dogs and cats that are getting bred and most responsible animals shelters don't let them get spade and neutered so we don't have so many cats and dogs but you've got to have the right people doing it. there are some methods that are clearly not acceptable. and the reparable shelters don't use them. >> jenny from baltimore emails in. she has a 5-year-old daughter with autism. we are thinking of using monnesoori over that. >> there's a lot of controversy or ava, or floor time. every expert will agree with young autistic kids, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 years old it's really important you've got to keep them engaged with the world, 20 or 40 hours a week of one-to-one interaction with a really good teacher.sis you need to make sure they
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turn-taking and i was taught with turn-taking. one-to-one interaction, lots of intensive interaction and i was allowed to have a little bit of down time by myself where i could act autistic but the rest of the time i had to be tuned in. three miss manners meals every day. i had to behavior in church. and if you find other methods working fine. it's important getting enough hours and whatever you're doing are you seeing nice progress with your kid? if you're seeing nice progress with your kid, then you're doing something right. i'm also a believer in something some of the sensory therapies like the occupational therapy as part of a treatment. there are some kids you can get a bean bag chair over them and put some pressure on their body and you can do the aba better 'cause it kind of clears some of the problems with their hearing with the auditory processing. >> you used the phrase i was allowed to act autistic for a day? >> what did i do. there wasn't video games. . there was a brass on the bedpost
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and i spun this thing around around and around and i was into some spitting stuff, chew up puzzles and i was allowed to do an hour after lunch and the rest of the time i had to be tuned in. >> could you go back to that behavior today? i mean, if nobody wanted your attention right now and you were on your own? >> well, i'm certainly not going to go back to spitting but i do have some doodling things and i'll take a piece of paper and make designs until the whole note pad is full of designs. i still do that. you know, i usually have something to read. >> all right. carla, roanoke, virginia. you're on with temple grandin >> caller: thank you so much for taking my call and it's a pleasure to talk to you an honor and a pleasure. i have actually two questions and if you want to take them separately that's fine. i have a 14-year-old son with asperger's and sensory processing disorder.
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and basically he does fairly well academically. however, he has a real problem with reading comprehension with regards to the abstract or, you know, idioms or anything that's innuendo of that nature. do you have any recommendations regarding how we might be able to help him understand, you know, the subtle nuances of reading so they expect more than thomas the tank engine and the reading is getting more difficult. and my second question is how do you feel about faith and god and do you believe in -- do you believe autistic children have any concept of that. >> carla, thank you. >> i'll start with the reading comprehension. first of all, start with real concrete things. okay, if there's a story about, you know, explorers in the arctic and how many dogs they
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had on the sled team what color was the leader's coat. don't start asking abstract coat when are coats needed in antarctica. when it comes to idioms strike when the iron is hot and you're hot to trot, i had to learn those just by straight memorization. and then i use a lot of those idioms but then i say is it hot to trot and i see a horse in the starting gate and wanting to go and hot to trot you're ready to do something but i had to just learn them, you know, just like learning stuff in a play. >> her second question. >> the second question about god. i've done a lot of thinking about that and i'd recommend that you read the last chapter of thinking in pictures 'cause that's going to answer that question. >> another carla, this one from tacoma, washington, please go ahead >> caller: a pleasure to talk to you. i recently saw a program about autistic people in scandinavia
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where they are having work programs where they go into industry because a lot of people and autistic people in particular need to be productive. they enjoy doing engineering-type things and they very much enjoy being out there work force. and contributing to society. which is something i think here in the u.s. we seem to be not seeing that potential in our autistic population but i was wondering if you knew something about that program and if you know of anything that's starting up in the u.s. where more autistic people with a person who kind of helps them through the ins and outs of a workplace, if we have anything like that starting up in the u.s. >> well, there's a program called -- something, something cistern where people with asperger's are doing electronic computing jobs. i wrote about it in my book "the way i see it."
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i can tell you out in silicon valley there's lots of asperger-friendly workplaces, too. we've got to get creative. how did i get into college? i got in college through the back door. i didn't do well on the s.a.t.s. find a professor that's willing to work with a kid and find that by showing a portfolio. i've got lots of employment ideas in my book on developing talents. and you got to figure out what can you do with the skill that the person has and mentors are so important. you know, one kid went in to doing programming after his mother taught him programming. she taught him old-fashioned stuff. it doesn't matter if it's old-fashioned stuff because what you're doing is getting the kid turned on. there's a disciplined learning a school like programming or learning auto mechanics, you know, if somebody has to teach it to them. i would have been lost without my science teacher and we need to find these good teachers that are willing to work with these kids. and they also need to get creative on starting some of these businesses.
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>> dr. grandin, kids who are diagnosed with autism or asperger's, would you recommend that the parents get them in the social security disability system early or get them in the public health services early so that they are taken care of when the parents aren't there? >> well, i think it depends how severe the person is. you have someone who's a smart asperger they can take care of themselves. isn't going to need that because i just was talking to a lady where she's kind of gotten into that system. she used to be an executive and now she's sort of gotten into a handicap mentality. you have somebody severe and nonverbal, yes, you're going to have to make planning when the parents are no longer there but you take somebody who's real smart asperger's, you know, i don't think that's the thing you'd want to do. one of the problems that educators they have they are good at dealing with the severe ones and they don't know how to deal with the smart ones. in the sixth grade you have a
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separate asperger's kid who ought to be taking twelfth grade math with the severe handicapped kids because they don't know what to do with them and you get out away from the tech areas. they'll say there's nothing interesting for these kids to go. i go, wait a minute, there's -- this was kansas. there's feed yards, oil wells, power stations, there's meat plants, you know, irrigation equipment, combines, there's all kinds of interesting stuff. you got to take kids and show them interesting stuff to get them interested in it. and in the movie, the door of opportunity is going to open and it just illustrates that very thing. >> you're looking to this hbo movie. it comes out in february? >> february. >> you have written if you could do it all over again you wouldn't want your autism to be removed from you. >> well, i like the precise thinking that i have. you were asking about all the political stuff. they are such fuzzy thinkers. they are fighting over stuff instead of trying to figure out
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sit down how much budget do we've got and what kind of programs can we actually do. you see being a bottom-up thinker my approach to a problem like the health thing is to look at everything every other country is doing first and there's actually a book about that. i've forgotten the title of it. i heard an interview from this book. and all these other health things -- what are other countries doing 'cause one thing i learned on inventing equipment you don't want to reinvent the wheel so the first thing you do a complete patent search and the complete search of the state-of-the-art and find out what's out there 'cause reinventing the wheel is stupid and you sit down in a logical way and you figure out how to design it. this is not what happens -- what's happening in politics and it's gotten worse is it's just so much fighting and stuff. i remember back in the '50s the government actually got stuff done. and i write about that in "animals in translation." i mean, they built the interstate highway system in the '50s. >> another tweet has come in for you. have you found a way to
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understand the humor of neurotypicals? is there a particular type of humor you enjoy? >> well, i think it's funny to watch these programs where they do satires on certain famous people. i think that's really funny. a lot of humor i do understand especially visual humor. people say well, how do you think of something humorous. well, i have this line in my talk where i show this big bison facility slide and i go like to fantasize 1,000 years from now the archeologist they are dig this thing and they're going to talk about its religious significance. now i see a learned archeologist and some futuristic building and they've got powerpoint, you know, version 100 or something up there showing, you know -- showing this thing. and, you know, a lot of humor i do get. but i still again i convert most of it to pictures. and i like, you know, visual humor. i don't think it's america's
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funniest visuals and they have people falling down and people -- baseball hit somebody in the crotch. that's not funny. that's just not funny to me. i actually got to where i got to really dislike that show. >> "saturday night live"? >> "saturday night live" i like. the only reason i stopped watching it, it comes on too late for me. i used to watch it all the time. >> caitlin, pittsburgh, pennsylvania >> caller: yes, hello. i have asperger's syndrome and i work doing sensory integration with children with autism. i'm going to be attending graduate school for occupational facility so i can work as an o.t. for children. i'm wondering what recommendations do you have for someone with -- on the spectrum going to graduate school. thank you. >> well, one of the most important things to get a professor that's really, really interested in working with you. i mean, these are the things that helped me. you know, this gets back to the whole thing of mentoring. another thing i'd recommend
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while you're in school is make sure you get hands on time out in the therapy room so you start learning your job, you know, before you even graduate. so you have a slow transition from the world of school to the world of work. i think that's really, really important. and i had to learn -- in my freelance business not to tell clients off. clients -- i mean, plant manager might be the stupidest person in the world but you don't tell that to his face. i talk a dea with a lot of these problems in developing talents and also in thinking in pictures but get that work experience before you graduate. and the other thing is, build up a portfolio of satisfied clients, too, because that can help you get other jobs. >> did you learn that the hard way? >> well, yes, i had some very bad things where -- it was very difficult for me to understand that i'd be hired by a plant manager to come in and design a cattle handling facility. the resident engineer at the plant would get jealous that
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this nerd was coming in on his nerve and i had several situations where equipment was broken and damaged due to jealous si. and it was very hard this person would break his company's equipment and i calculated the cost of the down time it cost $2,000 worth of down time. because the plant wasn't running or $10,000 worth of down time. and that human emotions could be so illogical. now today i just put it up to normal behavior and you find a jealousy problem and pull them in and give them a piece of the action so they won't be jealous. >> when you handle your business affairs, economic affairs, you have a lot of difficult income streams? >> i have to hire a professional accountant to do all that. i have a professional accountant do it but no, but i keep track of all the income comes in and i have to give all that stuff to the accountant like i got, you
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know, book money for this and i was paid this and i have to give that -- i have to keep track of that enough to give it to the accountant but i let the accountant do the taxes. it's way too complicated. >> brandi in nashville, tennessee. go ahead. >> caller: good morning. . how are you. >> fine. >> caller: i have two questions i hope you don't mind. i previously in my life since i've been very young have been an animal behavioral therapist and i'm licensed to be so, i train dogs, horses, birds. i recently in '06 was running a large equine facility out in las vegas and i had two autistic clients. 7 and 9 years old. one boy was not as debilitated as the other but the one that was quite unfocused, random behavior, et cetera, what i did and i found very interesting and i just want you to comment on this is, i could not get him to
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focus in the lesson compared to his brother. he was a basket case so to speak. i then did something very brave one day and i took the saddle off and i put him on and i had him in the arena. and i'll tell you what, i saw a whole new kid. when he did not have the security of the saddle and he had to stay on that horse, that autism left. >> 'cause he knew he'd fall off if he didn't pay attention. >> it overrode his behavior as soon as that fear factor came into his environment. >> well, he didn't want to fall off the horse. there is a real problem in autism with distractibility like when i had a chance to visit with tito he would type one sentence and he said flap and his mother would get him over to the computer because distractibility was a problem.
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you have to be careful that he doesn't fall off the horse. and there would be a point if you did that for too long it would get to be really stressful. but this does bring up the thing if you got -- you got to get the kid's attention as long as he didn't have a tantrum or start screaming or anything when you did that a little bit of doing that is probably a good thing. just make sure he doesn't fall off and you don't push him to the point where you go into sensory overload and then he starts have a tantrum and maybe scare the horse. >> another tweet. what does dr. grandin think about the role of mirror neurons and empathy as related to the social aspects of autism. >> well, thing mirror neurons explain a lot of behavior. there's been tons of research and find a zillion papers. if you watch somebody in pain the mirror neurons get activated so you kind of could feel how they feel.
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now, i have like visual sort of like empathy. you know, if a gate slams on a cow, i imagine a gate slamming on my back and that would be really nasty. >> kathleen in lawrence, new jersey. i think that's right. or laurence harbor, new jersey. go ahead, kathleen >> caller: laurence harbor, new jersey. i have a question for dr. grandin. you've used the phrase a few times during the interview we get our asperger's kids apprenticed. new jersey is close to new york and our 23-year-old son was -- is interested in finding some connection into the silicon ally of new york city. is there any contact that i can make through you. he is diagnosed with asperger syndrome. he's 23. it was a late diagnosis and they
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thought he would have no problem graduating going on to school and finding a good career but after graduating, his social functioning basically ceased. >> well, he no longer had anything to go on to. the thing about finding a back door to get into these places you never know where they're going to find them. back in the '70s i wanted so bad to get in the swift plant and i went up to the front receptionist and they said we don't do tours well, then one day at a arizona cattle feeder's banquet. and she let me in. their son-in-law, you know, works in that silicon alley. it might be somebody you bump into the supermarket. people have these id cards working around their neck. one of the ways to get those mentors turned on is to show a
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portfolio of something your son did. i mean, that's how i sold my original cattle handling jobs. but the thing is, those people could be anywhere. you kind of got to look for the back door. it's there. it's right there in front of you but you just don't see it. like with my -- you know some of my ph.d. students i just happened to give a talk at a livestock meeting and i thought, oh, boy this place would be a great place for wendy to work and i went up to them and i talked to them about wendy. it's called networking, too. and you need to just find all the people you can find that are in that field and, you know, usually there has to be some kind of link through a friend or whatever. but, you know, get creative in finding it. also if your son has got, you know -- if he's interested in electronics, make a portfolio of some of his best electronic work that you could show to somebody. something -- and don't put too much junk in it. it's got to be very neatly presented.
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you want them to open it up his s.a.t. scores that's great and some mathematics stuff that they did and they can look at it in about 30 seconds and oftentimes if you have to send it, send it by postal mail 'cause people don't open strange attachments. >> next call, angela in rigby, idaho. please go ahead. >> yes, i have a son who is 6 and he's been diagnosed with autism. he does really very well academically. he is mainstream kindergarten, he does special ed. occupational therapy but there is a huge hole in our school system for the support for them socially. he really does have a lot of problems socially so i wondered if you could give me books to read, programs to implement. what to say to the teacher or principal so i could get some sort of social program going for him at school. >> well, there's a lot of books out there on social. i've got a book on unwritten social rules.
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tony atwood has a great book. some of the book vendors future horizons, jessica kingsly. the other thing to do is maybe get together with some other parents and put together a social skills group. you know, the thing is, that in the '50s kids were taught table manners. they have to be taught what to do in any situation. if i made a social mistake and i reach at the table and reach across the table for the mash potatoes my mother would say ask your brother to pass it. i had to learn not to talk on and on and on about the same subject all the time. some kids have a problem with interrupting class and i had a rule one question per class. get with some of your support groups and there's a lot of parents who got together and they put together some social skills training groups. >> dr. grandin, you talk about learning behavior like when you refer to driving is now a learned behavior for you.sq
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>> it was unlearned behavior. >> automatic. is that the same thing with the -- >> saying please and thank you. i mean, that was drilled into me like mother would say, well, you didn't say please and you forgot to say thank you and it get to where you automatically do it. it's just drilled into you. . and in the '50s boy, they drilled that into kids. all kids. >> here's an email about something you've written about in your book. can you ask temple grandin to speak about her views and experiences regarding jewish ritual animal slaughter, kosher slaughter. >> i've done a lot of work in improving kosher slaughter. kosher slaughter is basically slaughter with no stunning. they cut the animal's throat and you have two welfare animals how you hold the animal and some hold the animal horrible and they put a chain and hold them up in the ankle and whether the throat cut hurts and the thing i've worked on is, you know,
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getting plants to get rid of this horrible shackling and hoisting and put in a chute that the cattle could stand in. and then the other issue, of course, is, you know, does the throat cut hurt and there's some research there may be some pain there but the restraint, you know, is the thing that's absolutely the -- absolutely the worst. now, the kosher slaughter and have an acceptable level of welfare requires a plant to pay much more attention to details, procedure than regular slaughter. i have a lot of stuff on my went on grandin.com. it's just my last name, grandin.com i've got stuff on kosher slaughter you may want to read that. >> dell from florida, the government is advocating meatless mondays in schools because animals emit methane. >> well, if methane comes from other sources, too. rice patties emit a lot of methane, landfills emit a lot of methane.
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there are some ways to, you know, feed cattle differently so they don't emit so much methane but there's other sources of methane out there that are way, way greater than livestock. >> many doctors advocate going to a vegan lifestyle as the best way to combat heart disease and cancer. >> well, i think the important thing of combating cancer is eating lots of veggies. people that tend to eat a high meat diet tend to just eat potatoes and meat and they don't eat a lot of fruits and veggies and they have a lot of beneficial things in them. you got to separate meat-eating out from a lack of fruits and vegetables. i'm one of the kind of genetics cannot function on a vegan diet. i get light headed and the old thing about the blood timing and i went to have my blood type tested just recently. i said to my doctor, i just want to politically find out what my blood type is it's 0 positive
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and that's the carnivore blood type. eating tons of fat is bad. eating a pound of steak a day is probably not a great thing to do. i think on so many different things, it's moderation. but i make a point of eating lots of fruits and vegetables. i also eat quite a lot of meat but i eat lots of fruits and veggies. >> joyce in warren, michigan, we have five minutes left with our guest on "in depth." so please go ahead. >> caller: i'm so glad to see you on tv. i'm a registered nurse. i'm 60 years old. my son-in-law is very high functioning asperger's with a ph.d. in mathematics. my grandson i am certain he has asperger's as well. and i'm just wondering -- i mean, there's always been asperger's cases but the frequency now that -- the communities that have them, what do you think is the basis for this besides genetics?
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>> well, i think the asperger's have always been here. i don't think asperger's has increased. i find tons of them undiagnosed out in the meat industry doing a lot of technical jobs. i've been interviewed by a lot of journalists. i've seen radio station engineers, tv engineers, cameramen and stuff that i know are on the spectrum all undiagnosed asperger's always has been here. more are getting diagnosed here and more are getting into more and more problems and i think some of that is our less structured society. i think our less structured society today hurts the asperger people a lot more than it hurts the so-called normal people. i can think of kids i went to school with, went to college with that today would definitely be diagnosed as asperger's. >> walter in wilmington, north carolina. >> caller: yes, good morning. a question for dr. grandin. i'm just curious if she was familiar with howard gardener's theory of multiple intelligence. and if so, could you comment for a brief period. >> yes. i am familiar with that.
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and the thing is i think there are different people are good at different things. some people are good at art. some people are not. and then you get into the whole debate about talent. i think it has the biggest effect on the extreme ends like no matter how hardy try i couldn't keep those skis together right and there's a big huge middle ground where you got average abilities in a lot of different things. you can push the brain either way. but the thing that i can do with test running equipment in my head i've talked to a lot of other designers they can't do that. there are differences in brains. it gets into the old nature nurture controversy. i read a lot of stuff. i think it's half and half. what we are is half our genetics and what we're born with and the other half is the environment. >> dr. grandin you recommended a lot of sites for people to go to. but none have been government sites. nih or cdc or anything like that. >> the cdc -- nih sites and cdc
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sites i mean, they tell some things about autism. but in a local area it doesn't really help people that much. you know, if there's something on a government site that's really good, i'd like to know about it. you know, i have found, you know, again, the places that have strong support groups are the places that get the good services. i really recommend parents forming good support groups. >> i thought of a noun to ask you. >> okay. >> basketball. >> okay. i'm seeing when i was in high school one of the few places i wasn't teased we would go out and shoot baskets and i had to eat up fast so you could get up and get a ball. i really enjoyed doing that. now i'm seeing a tv documentary i watched about the history of basketball. i don't have that many things in the file 'cause i'm really not interested in sports.
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it's not interesting. i'm seeing quite a few restaurant tvs, you know, bars with a whole lot of -- a whole lot of tvs. my assistant, mark, loves basketball. you know, utah jazz and now i've gotten out of the basketball file. i'm now seeing mark. i'm seeing his dog now. >> big dog or big red? >> no big red -- red died of old age, unfortunately. he's got a new dog. it's a little small dog and i'm seeing her. now i worked with mark on the humane livestock handling book. you can see how i got from basketball to dog. you see there is an association. it's an associational. it's associational thinking and it's not linear when i first started messing around with search engines, wow, this is exactly how my mind works. >> president obama. >> i'm seeing different pictures of him.
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in fact, there was a picture in the airport a big cardboard cutout last night. and right beside the picture was a guy that looked just like president obama and i said are you the obama stand-in for the store and he wasn't. >> last call we have about 27 seconds. prescott, arizona, go ahead, kay. >> yes, my son has been autistic since he was born. he was born with low birthrate, 4 pounds 2 ounces. cord wrapped around his little body and he does have brain damage but he's high functioning and he's been diagnosed adhd plus he was not diagnosed as autism but i see signs of it. my husband and i were his advocates for years. we had no support from other people because they believed differently than we do. my question is, he had worked at a job for almost four years. and now it's hard for him to find a job because the only thing he knows how to do was a janitor. he was a high class janitor he
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had to wear a bow tie and black hat. would you have any suggestions including college for him 'cause he got a 4.0 in high school. it was not a regular school. it was a charter school. >> i don't have time to answer. i don't know what his skills are. i'm just going to have to read some of my books. i hate to say that but i'd need to talk to you for 15 minutes and we don't have the time and i'm sorry. >> here are temple grandin's books very quickly. "emergence," thinking in pictures, "developing talents," "animals in translation," "the unwritten rules of social relationships," the way i see it the personal relationships and autism and asperger's.
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>> fourteen year-old carlotta walls a 15 year-old terrance roberts stood on the stairs of little rock central high school in september of 1957. the two mirrors of the "little rock nine" recalled their participation in the integration of the arkansas high school and the years that followed. the little rock central high school national historic site in arkansas posted this 45 minute event. >> i have to tell you, it is such an honor to be sitting here signing my book at the table with carlotta walls lanier and tarrant roberts. when i started my journey as a professional writer in 1984, i could never imagine that i would be signing books with two recipients of a congressional gold medal, the highest civilian

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