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If language naturally evolves to serve the needs of tiny rodents with tiny rodent brains, then what's unique about language isn't the brilliant humans who invented it to communicate high-level abstract thoughts. What's unique about language is that the creatures who develop it are highly vulnerable to being eaten.

Temple Grandin

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Temple Grandin
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: August 29
Academic
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Non-Fiction Writer
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Screenwriter
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University Teacher
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Zoologist
Boston
Massachusetts
Mary Temple Grandin
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More quotes by Temple Grandin

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Half of Silicon Valley's got a little bit of autism.
Temple Grandin
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What I've tried to do is combine both my personal experiences with scientific research. I like to cross the divide between the personal world and the scientific world.
Temple Grandin
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In fact, there are autism clusters, you know, around some of the big tech centers. You take two socially awkward computer programmers and put them together, that can kind of concentrate the autistic genes.
Temple Grandin
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I can explain how a person with autism thinks. I am very, very interested in how people think. It's been a gradual process of learning more and more about how my thinking process is different. You know it's bottom up - you take specific examples to make concepts and then I put them in categories.
Temple Grandin
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We've had several cats. I had a cat when I was a kid. My Aunt had lots of cats and I got lots of calls about cats.
Temple Grandin
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I think that the definition of autism is too broad. You got to remember, autism definition is a behavioral profiling.
Temple Grandin
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I feel very strongly that we need to give beef cattle a really good life. When they go to slaughter, it needs to be painless.
Temple Grandin
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I'm seeing too many kids where they get fixated on their own autism. I'd rather have them get fixated that they like programming computers or they like art or they want to sing in the church choir or they want to train dogs, you know, something that they can turn into a career.
Temple Grandin
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To understand animal thinking you've got to get away from a language.
Temple Grandin
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One of my sensory problems was hearing sensitivity, where certain loud noises, such as a school bell, hurt my ears. It sounded like a dentist drill going through my ears.
Temple Grandin
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As you may know, some of the stereotyped behaviors exhibited by autistic children are also found in zoo animals who are raised in a barren environment.
Temple Grandin
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People talk about curing autism. But if you got rid of all those traits, who's going to make the next computer?
Temple Grandin
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Sometimes you have to go outside your field of study to find the right people.
Temple Grandin
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It is important that our relationship with farm animals is reciprocal. We owe animals a decent life and a painless death. I have observed that the people who are completely out of touch with nature are the most afraid of death.
Temple Grandin
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You have got to keep autistic children engaged with the world. You cannot let them tune out.
Temple Grandin
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These diagnostic profiles like depression, ADHD, autism, dyslexia, it's half science and the other half is a committee of doctors bickering over what it should be, and it has changed. It's not precise like a diagnosis of tuberculosis would be very precise.
Temple Grandin
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I get satisfaction out of seeing stuff that makes real change in the real world. We need a lot more of that and a lot less abstract stuff.
Temple Grandin
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I don't define myself as autistic first. I don't want to be a professional autistic. I think it's important to have a real job.
Temple Grandin
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Who do you think made the first stone spears? The Asperger guy. If you were to get rid of all the autism genetics, there would be no more Silicon Valley.
Temple Grandin
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I tend to be much more in the present and my emotions are simpler. I can be happy, I can be sad, I can be depressed, but there's a complexity that I don't have. I don't brood the same way. Fear is my main emotion.
Temple Grandin