"[Grandin’s] most insightful work to date…The Autistic Brain is something anyone could benefit from reading, and I recommend it to anyone with a personal or professional connection to autism or neurological difference."—John Elder Robison, author of Look Me in the Eye "In The Autistic Brain, Grandin explains what she's learned in recent years about her brain and the brains of others with autism." -- USA Today "Grandin has reached a stunning level of sophistication about herself and the science of autism. Her observations will assist not only fellow autistics and families with affected members, but also researchers and physicians seeking to better understand the condition." — Jerome Groopman, The New York Review of Books "Her visual circuitry extends well beyond where neurotypicals’ circuitry stops. Grandin is wired for long-term visual memory. She is sure that one day, autism will be explained by neurobiology. Her new book, The Autistic Brain, outlines that quest." -- Los Angeles Times "Grandin has helped us understand autism not just as a phenomenon, but as a different but coherent mode of existence that otherwise confounds us…She excels at finding concrete examples that reveal the perceptual and social limitations of autistic and "neurotypical" people alike." — The New York Times "Autism is a spectrum, and Temple is on one edge. Living on this edge has allowed her to be an extraordinary source of inspiration for autistic children, their parents—and all people." —Time "The Autistic Brain can both enlighten readers with little exposure to autism and offer hope and compassion to those who live with the condition." —Scientific American "The right brain has created the right book for right now." — Pittsburgh Post-Gazette "An iconic example of someone who puts her strengths, and even her limitations, to good use." — KQED, San Francisco "Temple Grandin has yet again been of enormous service to the millions of autistic individuals worldwide, to anyone labeled with a disability, and to the rest of us curious about the brain and the intricacies of human experience." — New York Journal of Books "The Autistic Brain is an engaging look at life within the spectrum. It’s also an honest one." — HealthCare Book Reviews "A tremendous gift, not just to patients and their families, but also to teachers, mentors, friends, and everyone who is interested in understanding how our brains make us who we are…This is a book everyone should read." — Dr. Ginger Campbell, Brain Science Podcast "Highly recommended for anyone who knows or works with people on the spectrum." — Library Journal (Starred Review) "Grandin’s particular skill is her remarkable ability to make sense of autistics’ experiences, enabling readers to see ‘the world through an autistic person’s jumble of neuron misfires,’ and she offers hope that one day, autism will be considered not according to some diagnostic manual, but to the individual." — Publishers Weekly "An important and ultimately optimistic work." —Booklist "An illuminating look at how neuroscience opens a window into the mind." —Kirkus —
About the Author
TEMPLE GRANDIN is one of the world’s most accomplished and well-known adults with autism. She is a professor at Colorado State University and the New York Times bestselling author of several books, including The Autistic Brain, which have sold more than a million copies. Named one of Time's most influential people in 2010, the HBO movie based on her life, starring Claire Danes, received seven Emmy Awards.
RICHARD PANEK, a Guggenheim Fellow in science writing, is the author of The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality, which won the American Institute of Physics communication award in 2012, and the co-author with Temple Grandin of The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum, a New York Times bestseller. He lives in New York City.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Meanings of Autism
I was fortunate to have been born in 1947. If I had been born ten years later, my life as a person with autism would have been a lot different. In 1947, the diagnosis of autism was only four years old. Almost nobody knew what it meant. When Mother noticed in me the symptoms that we would now label autistic—destructive behavior, inability to speak, a sensitivity to physical contact, a fixation on spinning objects, and so on—she did what made sense to her. She took me to a neurologist.
Bronson Crothers had served as the director of the neurology service at Boston Children’s Hospital since its founding, in 1920. The first thing Dr. Crothers did in my case was administer an electroencephalogram, or EEG, to make sure I didn’t have petit mal epilepsy. Then he tested my hearing to make sure I wasn’t deaf. “Well, she certainly is an odd little girl,” he told Mother. Then when I began to verbalize a little, Dr. Crothers modified his evaluation: “She’s an odd little girl, but she’ll learn how to talk.” The diagnosis: brain damage.
He referred us to a speech therapist who ran a small school in the basement of her house. I suppose you could say the other kids there were brain damaged too; they suffered from Down syndrome and other disorders. Even though I was not deaf, I had difficulty hearing consonants, such as the c in cup. When grownups talked fast, I heard only the vowel sounds, so I thought they had their own special language. But by speaking slowly, the speech therapist helped me to hear the hard consonant sounds, and when I said cup with a c, she praised me—which is just what a behavioral therapist would do today.
