She may be 60 years old, but Temple Grandin, Ph.D., knows what she’s talking abut when she gives lectures across the country. “If I could snap my fingers and become non-autistic, I would not because then I wouldn’t be me,” she says in her book, Thinking In Pictures: My Life with Autism. (It’s one of five books she’s published on the topic).

She’s a professor of animal science at Colorado State University, and designed a hug machine using a cattle restraint as a model. Her machine is used for children who don’t enjoy human touch.

As a child, she says in her book, she couldn’t stand to be held, threw tantrums and didn’t speak until she was three years old. “I’ve had parents come up and say I gave them insight that their child could really have a future,” she recently said.

"Words are like a second language to me," she writes. "I translate both spoken and written words into full-color movies, complete with sound, which run like a VCR tape in my head. When somebody speaks to me, his words are instantly translated into pictures. Language-based thinkers often find this phenomenon difficult to understand, but in my job as an equipment designer for the livestock industry, visual thinking is a tremendous advantage.

"One third of the cattle and hogs in the United States are handled in equipment I have designed. Some of the people I've worked for don't even know that their systems were designed by someone with autism. I value my ability to think visually, and I would never want to lose it.

One of the most profound mysteries of autism has been the remarkable ability of most autistic people to excel at visual spatial skills while performing so poorly at verbal skills. When I was a child and a teenager, I thought everybody thought in pictures. I had no idea that my thought processes were different. In fact, I did not realize the full extent of the differences until very recently. At meetings and at work I started asking other people detailed questions about how they accessed information from their memories. From their answers I learned that my visualization skills far exceeded those of most other people.

I credit my visualization abilities with helping me understand the animals I work with. Early in my career I used a camera to help give me the animals' perspective as they walked through a chute for their veterinary treatment. I would kneel down and take pictures through the chute from the cow's eye level. Using the photos, I was able to figure out which things scared the cattle, such as shadows and bright spots of sunlight. Back then I used black-and-white film, because twenty years ago."

Have you been affected by Grandin’s work somehow? Do share.