HER EYES DART away and then come back to make contact. She reaches for her visitor's hand and shakes it firmly. This is one of the lessons Temple Grandin learned 20 years ago, midway through her life: When people extend their hand, they expect to be touched.
Touch has been the theme and the mystery of Grandin's life. Diagnosed autistic at age 2, she has spent the intervening 44 years learning to live in a world that is often too loud and tactile and perplexing.Her childhood was full of ringing telephones that hurt her ears, petticoats that scratched her skin, the hugs of well-meaning relatives that made her flinch. Overwhelmed by her senses, Grandin did what many autistic children do: She retreated into her own world, spending silent hours rocking and spinning.
But Grandin was lucky. Convinced that her daughter was intelligent beneath her withdrawal and her rages, her mother tried speech therapy instead of institutionalization. It turned out that Grandin was indeed a "high-functioning" autistic child. She learned to speak and she was mainstreamed in regular classes, though she was often called "weird" by her classmates.
She eventually went on to graduate from college and earn a Ph.D. in animal science. She became a world authority on the design of livestock facilities and assistant professor at Colorado State University. She co-authored a book, "Emergence: Labeled Autistic." Last weekend she was the keynote speaker at the annual conference of the Autism Society of Utah.
To talk with Temple Grandin is to get a rare look at autism from someone who understands both the physiology and the loneliness of being always a little off kilter.
When she was in the second grade, Grandin began dreaming of a magical machine that would hug her whenever she wanted. From her vantage point now as an adult and a scientist, Grandin knows that her damaged nervous system was craving tactile stimulation - the same stimulation that she also avoided because it was painful and overwhelming.
Although she ran away from human hugs, little Temple enjoyed the sensation of being squeezed between the sofa and the sofa pillows. It was this kind of pressure and confinement, under her own control, that she imagined when she designed squeeze machines in her mind.
As she got older, Grandin fixated on other things, too - election posters caught her fancy for a while - but she still daydreamed about a machine that would embrace her.
And then, the summer when she was 17, she lived with an aunt who owned a ranch in Arizona. That's when she saw a real version of her magical machine - a squeeze chute for holding cattle so they could be branded and vaccinated.
Before the summer was over, Grandin persuaded her aunt to let her try out the chute. She was an exceptionally nervous girl, plagued by anxiety attacks. But, like the nervous cattle, she would calm down once she was snugly inside the machine.
When she got back to her boarding school in Vermont she built her own crude version of a squeeze chute out of scrap wood. The school psychologist hinted that she was nuts, but Grandin was certain she was on to something useful for herself and other people with autism.
The deep pressure not only calmed her nerves, it also seemed to tap her into emotions she otherwise did not feel. "It enabled me to learn to be gentle, to have empathy," writes Grandin in "Emergence."
Her search for the perfect human squeeze machine became her fixation. She has spent most of her waking hours for the past two decades thinking about such a machine and about cattle and about autism - and about the connection between all three.
Cattle, says Grandin, are a lot like autistic children. They are frightened by human touch and startled by sudden noises and unexpected movements. Like cattle, autistic children need to be "tamed" by gently desensitizing them to touch. This is where her hug machine would be helpful, she thinks, although she knows it won't work for all autistic individuals, and it isn't a cure by itself for anyone.
In fact, it was anti-depressant drugs, which she first tried in 1981, that really saved her from debilitating anxiety attacks, she says. She also believes, however, that if she had used the drugs earlier in her life she might not have had the impetus - the nerves and the fixation - to design the squeeze machine and later to earn her Ph.D.
Her machine - by now much more sophisticated, with compressed air and padded sides - is currently being tested on autistic individuals and hyperactive children in several U.S. clinics. The results have been positive but mostly anecdotal so far.
Her impact on the meatpacking industry is less theoretical. She has designed so many stockyard restraining systems that she estimates that nearly one-third of the world's cows and pigs now live in or pass through one of her designs.
Her facilities, she says, have made stockyards more humane. Instead of lining up for slaughter in a straight line that gives them a view of the scary people up ahead, the cattle now approach their fate along curved ramps, using no electric prods.
Because she is a visual thinker she can see her entire finished design in her head before she sits down to draw. Einstein was a visual thinker too, she notes. And so are cows. That's just one more reason why she feels an affinity for them, she says. Cattle are much easier to understand, and empathize with, than humans.
The emotional and social language of people has always baffled Grandin. The glances and body cues and tones of voice that most people intuitively understand are like foreign idioms to her - nuances that don't come naturally and must be studied and memorized.
"An anthropologist on Mars" is how she described herself last year to Dr. Oliver Sachs in The New Yorker. But by playing "videos" of people's actions and responses over and over in her mind, Grandin has learned over the years to decode human behavior. She can now usually spot sarcasm and boredom and the subtle signs of depression in others, she says.
While she was growing up she had a real lack of awareness, she says. She knew she didn't fit in but couldn't figure out why. It was only after she saw a video of herself at a livestock conference that she realized that she spoke in a monotone and has worked since then to speak with more inflection.
She speaks quickly and intensely about her technical interests and about her autism. But she has no interest, or natural ability it seems, to engage in what she calls "idle chit-chat." She is interested in an intellectual way in music and art, but none of these things move her, she says. Neither do sunsets or the other kinds of things that typically stir the human soul.
Despite the peculiarities that keep her isolated from most other people, however, Grandin says she would still choose to be autistic. "If they could get rid of the genes for autism, or manic depression or schizophrenia," she told her Salt Lake audience, "there would be a horrible price to pay. You'd have a world of accountants."
To talk with Temple Grandin is to not only appreciate the richness of her differences but to catch sight of how normality is simply a continuum, with the vaguest of boundaries.
Despite the ways she has learned to get along in the world, Grandin suspects that she is still different, probably even a nerd. She cares nothing about fashion and chooses her cowboy outfits purely for comfort, knowing that she still can't stand how her body feels if she varies her routine and wears another fabric or puts on a dress.
Relationships confound her. She spends all of her time working and has no really close friends. "I keep myself really busy so I don't have time to think about it," she says. She repeats the exact same phrase when the reporter tries to get her to elaborate.
She will never get married or have children, she says, but she hopes the changes she has made for cattle and for autistic children will be a legacy. "When I go up the ramp, so to speak," she says with a smile, "I hope that my life has made a difference for the better."
As the interview draws to a close, she shakes the reporter's hand again and steps into the elevator. Then she seems to remember another lesson: "It was good to see you," she says.