Temple Grandin

Horizon did a (video link) programme about Temple Grandin, an autistic American lady who gained an awareness about her condition and realised she had an affinity with animals. She's now very respected in the US meat industry because of the work she's done to reduce animal suffering, all because she can kind of understand how animals (she mostly works with cattle) experience the world. The programme suggests a metaphor for understanding how autism makes you different from non-autistic people - the parts of your brain don't have such good connections and this inhibits intuition about some very complex processes, e.g. social interaction. Temple describes her emotional life as very simple and consisting of just a few emotions, principally fear. She says a lot of her energy throughout her life has gone into avoiding situations that she would find difficult, but that other people would not think twice about. It's her insight that this is similar to the way animals live that has helped her to be so successful in her work with animals. I wrote earlier about the British autistic guy Stephen Wiltshire.