Temple Grandin is a scientist and industrial designer. She has her own unique experience with autism which funds her own professional work in which she created systems to counter stress in humans and animals. 

She was diagnosed with autism at the age of three.  She went to private schools rather than an institution in order to nurture her IQ. She graduated in 1970 with a bachelor’s in psychology from Franklin Pierce and then earned her master’s and a doctorate in animal science from Arizona State University and nd the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, respectively. Her main area of interest in animal science at Colorado State University where she also managed Grandin Livestock Systems.

Grandin devoted her life to devising systems to alleviate the anxiety of both groups. During her high school years, one of her first inventions was a “squeeze machine” to relieve tension and then modeled this machine to hold animals in place during procedures done on them. Her machine was used in autism schools. Grandin’s cerebellum resulted in damage and deficit in her short term memory. The area that is in relation to visual circuitry was found to extend far beyond that of a normal brain. This factor allowed her to have long term visual memory, this helped her in her career to focus on designing humane facilities fro animals that would at least take away some of their pain and fear before the slaughter process. 

Grandin is the author of many books including, Thinking in Pictures, and Other Reports from My Life with Autism (1995), and The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum (2013; with Richard Panek).

Resources

Grandin, T. and Johnson, C. 2005. Animals in Translation. Scriber, New York.

Grandin, T. and Johnson, C. 2008. Animals Make Us Human. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York.

Demuth, Patricia Brennan/ Who Hq (COR)/ Squier, Robert (ILT). (2020). Who Is Temple Grandin? Follettbound.

(n.d.). Retrieved September 08, 2020, from https://www.grandin.com/references/thinking.animals.html

 

 

 

The Protection of Nature Starts in Our Mind
by Robert Luck

Luck is a neuroscientist at Heidelberg University in Germany who studies the development of the cerebellum, located where the spinal cord meets the brain. Alarmed by climate change and deforestation, he created a “mind forest” that resembles birds-eye-view photographs of real forests. The “trees” are 65 individually traced images of mice’s Purkinje neurons, which play important roles in controlling coordination and movements. “I chose the number 65 to represent the number of years needed for the rainforest to regrow and gain back at least 80% of its diversity,” Luck wrote in his statement. “[Sixty-five] years—a human lifetime!” (scientificamerican.com)