LD Resources

Temple Grandin, a noted animal scientist and professor at Colorado State University, who is also one of the world’s best known people with Asperger’s Syndrome (a form of high-functioning Autism) is often fascinating to listen to. She sometimes pops out with little gems, with a completely uncomplicated turn of phrase, that can go by so fast you might not even notice it.

In this video interview, listen later on (at about the 2:20 mark) when she describes how she went from being fixated with watching cattle go through squeeze chutes for vaccinations, to learning more and more about them. Eventually she not only reinvented various processes related to the raising of livestock, but noticed that she herself would become noticeably calmer while being in one of the cattle squeeze machines.

Later on she helped adapt some of these for kids on the autism spectrum. It apparently helps provide the right amount of deep pressure on large muscle groups, which in turn helps to calm down the person’s sensory system. They are now used in schools and occupational therapy offices across the country.

Temple says, “You have to take the fixations and broaden it out.” Brilliant.

She’s proving one of Mel Levine’s axioms about kids with LD; that you help kids capitalize on their “affinities” (areas of natural interest), and use that singular focus and knowledge-base to help them to broaden the focus and to develop other areas of expertise. People with Asperger’s often show hyper-focused interests in specific and somewhat idiosyncratic areas. Our choice is in how we respond to that. Our responsibility it seems to me is to use it as a positive. It’s called going with the path of least resistance. A child who’s fixated on trains and train schedules for example can then expand to learn more and more about trains and then eventually about other forms of commercial transportation.