Autism is a big continuum, going from someone who remains nonverbal, all the way up to geniuses on Silicon Valley. And some kids are visual thinkers like me. Other kids are pattern thinkers - your mathematicians, your programmers. And there are others, they are word thinkers. Uneven skills. You need to take the thing that they're good at and you need to work on developing it.

To understand animal thinking you've got to get away from a language.

Fear was my main emotion until I started taking anti-depressant medication. And I was one of the people where, as I got older, the fear got worse and worse. So I can really relate to an animal getting, you know, scared and traumatized.

I think a brain can be made "more thinking" or made "more emotional." At what point does this become abnormal? Autism in its milder variants, I think, is part of normal human variation.

You have got to keep autistic children engaged with the world. You cannot let them tune out.

What parents and teachers and caregivers did with me that actually worked and a lot of that was the old fashion 50s upbringing. They just gave the instruction when I did something wrong - life was more structured. So basically it's [my work] based on experiences with me that worked and it was teachers and parents that made me have those experiences.

For example, if ears are back on a horse, it's obviously not very happy. And the eyes show that it's not happy. Now, if the eyes are nice and soft and brown, then it's calm. You can see these things in horses and cattle, and I think that some of these people are just really good at picking up these signals, but they don't realize it.