Normal people have an incredible lack of empathy. They have good emotional empathy, but they don't have much empathy for the autistic kid who is screaming at the baseball game because he can't stand the sensory overload. Or the autistic kid having a meltdown in the school cafeteria because there's too much stimulation.
Temple GrandinPeople are getting too far away from the real-world. Politics is just ridiculous, it's totally dysfunctional.
Temple GrandinThe people that were socially awkward from my generation, they all had paper routes and that taught them the discipline of work.
Temple GrandinI studied a lot of animal behavior and one of the things I find really interesting is the whole idea that animals are sensory based thinkers and I wrote about this in my book, Animals in Translation. That an animal's memory is not in words, they've got to be in pictures - it's very detailed so let's say the animal gets afraid of something - they'll get afraid of something that they're looking at or hearing, the moment the bad thing happens.
Temple GrandinI'm a believer in biochemistry. But I tell people to try only one thing at a time to see if it works. And if you do give a powerful drug to a kid, it better have a big wow factor.
Temple GrandinA real common problem with a lot of animals is that guys are bad, hate to say it, but they will tune into some big feature like the glasses, maybe the beard, baseball hats, you know some unique feature like that. And they'll generalize like, "Okay! All people with baseball hats or black rimmed glasses are bad."
Temple Grandin