We Could Watch This Temple Grandin Animation All Day

Temple Grandin gave an oral history at Colorado State University in 2008, and only recently has the audio for her lecture surfaced online. PBS’ “Blank on Blank” web show is running a special series, “The Experimenters,” and they decided to use audio of Grandin’s speech set to an animated video.

In the clip, Grandin explains how having an autistic brain is much like a search engine:

My brain is visually indexed. I’m basically totally visual. Everything in my mind works like a search engine set for the image function. And you type in the keyword and I get the pictures, and it comes up in an associational sort of way.

Grandin was nonverbal until the age of 3, at which point she was diagnosed with autism. She rose to fame when she developed a more humane approach for cows being led to slaughter and has designed facilities in which half the cattle in the United States are handled. Grandin currently works as a Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University. All the while, she’s been a trailblazer in autism awareness.

In her speech, Grandin also mentions other public figures with autism:

[Nikola] Tesla definitely today would be diagnosed autistic. If you got rid of all of the genes that caused autism, you’d be rid of Carl Sagan, you’d be rid of Mozart, Einstein today would be labeled autistic. He had no speech until he was 2 years old.