Temple Grandin on the connection between autism and genius

‘I am what I do more than what I feel.’

Born with ‘full-blown autism symptoms’, Temple Grandin is a renowned animal behaviour expert and autism spokesperson. She found success in the livestock industry by embracing her idiosyncratic, visual brain, which, in her words, functions like a ‘search engine set for the image function’. In this cleverly animated interview excerpt from 2008, Grandin describes how she gets great satisfaction from practical achievements rather than emotions, and how some of history’s most original thinkers might have been on the autism spectrum.