Autism's an important part of who I am, but I'm a college professor and an animal scientist first. And I wouldn't want to change 'cause I like the logical way I think.
Animals do have emotion. But fear tends to be one of the most primal emotions.
I think a brain can be made "more thinking" or made "more emotional." At what point does this become abnormal? Autism in its milder variants, I think, is part of normal human variation.
One of the things I want to do is be a decent role model. I've got a lot of emails and stuff from children. They look up to me. Kids get different labels and things like that and I want those kids to succeed.
If you see a child with autistic-like behaviors at age two and three, the worst thing you can do is just let them sit and watch TV all day. That's just the worst thing you can do. You need to have a teacher working with that child, working on teaching language, working on social interaction, working on getting them interested in different things, and keeping their brain connected to the world.
I'd rather see a kid get fixated on something they can turn into a career.
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.
I had people in my life who didn't give up on me: my mother, my aunt, my science teacher. I had one-on-one speech therapy. I had a nanny who spent all day playing turn-taking games with me.
Some children may need a behavioral approach, whereas other children may need a sensory approach.
The thing is, autism is all different, you know, variables. And you start out with a certain amount of, you know, the point where the differences in the brain are going to just be a personality variant and, like, for very mild Asperger's. But you get into more severe kinds of autism where there's obvious speech delay, obvious abnormal behavior in a two and three-year-old child, you know, the initial neurology is different from case to case. But all children with autism are going to do better if they get really good educational intervention.
I don't like the way most people think. It's imprecise. I find that when parents ask me questions, they ask very imprecise questions. They say, "My kid has behavioral problems at school." Well, I have to say, "What kind of problems? Is he hitting? Is he rude? Does he rock in class?" I need to narrow questions to specifics. I am very pragmatic and intellectual, not emotional. I do get great satisfaction when a parent says, "I read your book, and it really helped me."
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.
I feel very strongly, we've got to give animals a good life. I've worked really hard improving slaughter plants and animal handling and transport. And people have said to me, why don't you work on improving conditions on pig farms? And basically, to be effective on making real change out there on the ground, you can only work on so many things. You know, you get too distributed, you're not effective.
I can remember being bullied and teased. It was absolutely horrible. I got kicked out of ninth grade for throwing a book at a girl who teased me. It was absolutely terrible.
Steve Jobs was probably mildly on the autistic spectrum. Basically, you've probably known people who were geeky and socially awkward but very smart. When does geeks and nerds become autism? That's a gray area. Half the people in Silicon Valley probably have autism.
I'm a visual thinker, really bad at algebra. There's others that are a pattern thinker. These are the music and math minds. They think in patterns instead of pictures. Then there's another type that's not a visual thinker at all, and they're the ones that memorize all of the sports statistics, all of the weather statistics.
A cat can be social, but a dog, we've bred this hyper social animal that's really truly different and will do stuff for us just to please us with praise and stroking.
I'm seeing too many smart kind of socially awkward kids, a lot milder than I was, not getting employment because they're not learning job skills.
One thing I'd like to just keep on doing is I want to educate people about animal behavior and about autism. I've been doing autism talks for the last 20 years and there still are people out there that do not want to, they can't recognize that these sensory problems are real. That, for some of these kids when that fire alarm goes off, that really hurts the ears, it's a really real thing.
What parents and teachers and caregivers did with me that actually worked and a lot of that was the old fashion 50s upbringing. They just gave the instruction when I did something wrong - life was more structured. So basically it's [my work] based on experiences with me that worked and it was teachers and parents that made me have those experiences.
When kids are really little, they all look the same. No speech, no social relatedness, cannot emphasize enough the importance of early educational intervention.
I'm a child of the 50s. I was expected to have table manners. There needs to be some expectations for behavior. I'm seeing some children today, they don't push them enough.
But my favorite of Einstein's words on religion is "Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind." I like this because both science and religion are needed to answer life's great questions.
There is a small segment of people with autism that have savant skills, where they can memorize entire maps of whole entire city. They can do calendar calculations. And this is similar to some of the skills that animals have.
Giving those animals [in shelter] quality time - now, I have been in some of the shelters where the cats have been in group housing. Well if you have a cat that never gets out of sternal recumbency, now what that means is that [inaudible] - that's a stressed cat. If they lay on their side, then they are not stressed out.
