Temple Grandin

Tonight I went up to Edmonds, a town north of Seattle, to listen to Temple Grandin who was speaking at Edmonds Community College. Dr. Grandin is a professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University, and is most popularly known for two things: her design of livestock handling facilities used in meat plants around the world to help reduce anxiety of livestock, and the fact that she has autism.
I was interested in listening to her speak this evening on her book Thinking in Pictures, especially because I have my nose in the world of verbal language development so much of the time, it's wonderful for me to listen to someone else describe a phenomenon that I'm concerned about (language development) but in a completely different way than we study in grad school for Speech-Language Pathology.

The lecture hall was packed, in fact they had to turn a lot of people away, and she took us on a great journey into the mind of individuals with autism who think in one or three ways: visual (photorealistic), numbers/patterns/math, and verbal. Dr. Grandin is a visual learner and literally must have a visual representation of EVERYTHING in order to understand it. She goes into great detail about this in her book (shown above).

Anyway, the real reason I wanted to share this was because not only was she an incredible speaker, but she said some of the funniest things. One specifically I don't want to forget. Now, she is high functioning, but even in her lecture it could be observed that some of the stereotypical traits of autism are very much a part of her life, like social interaction skills. She was answering a question during the Q&A about medication and she was talking about how at times she takes a tylenol at night if she is feeling overly stimulated (itching, nervous, etc--physical conditions of discomfort that characterize her autism) more for the placebo effect instead of taking an actual sleep inducing drug. Then she said, "I just really don't want to get addicted to any sort of sleep medicine. In fact, I see that Lunesta moth on television, and all I want to do is go over and stomp on it till it's dead". The lecture hall burst into laughter. I guess it was the way she said it, and in the context of the evening that made it such a hilarious moment. I totally hate that Lunesta "moth"[butterfly] too. In fact, my friend Emily and I used to joke about how damn annoying the female voiceover is for the commercials, let alone the absinthe colored/hallucinogenic butterfly that can put you to sleep no matter where you are (even the astronauts in outer space...watch the commercial to understand the reference). Leave it to Temple Grandin to put my thoughts into words. :)