Weird Kids

Weird Kids

A friend who really has my number sent me home from a recent visit with a copy of the movie "Temple Grandin." I was curious to watch it, having read about this very high-functioning autistic woman fifteen or twenty years ago in a New Yorker article. It's a wonderful movie. Ms. Grandin made a very successful career designing humane and cost-effective animal-handling systems for cattle feedlot and slaughter operations. Her view is that nature is cruel, but we needn't be. If she were a cow, she wouldn't want to be ripped apart by a large predator but would prefer to have a painless death preceded by a serene life. Realizing that cattle would exist only in zoos if we didn't raise them for our good, she nevertheless felt that we owed them some respect. She persuaded so many feedlot operators of the practicality of her designs that a large fraction of this country's operations use them.

Always baffled by people, Grandin was drawn to cows early in life when she saw the chute used on her uncle's ranch to restrain the animals for innoculation. She realized that she, too, would find the squeezed-in retractable walls soothing during one of her frequent over-stimulated panic attacks, so she built a version for her own use. It raised many eyebrows in her dorm room at college. Later in life, she would explain that autistic children need hugs to calm down, but can't bear to receive them from people.

In the same vein, I'm reading Thomas Sowell's "The Einstein Syndrome," about children (like Einstein, and like Richard Feynman) who begin to talk very late, at age 3, 4, or even 5. We had a family friend like that, one of my father's colleagues, who never said a word until he was about 4, then burst out with "Look at the little bird up in the tree." Those children tend to grow up to be a little ways down the autism spectrum disorder, and very often become yet another mathematician or musician or engineer in a family already unusually full of them. Sowell's own son was that way. His family installed child-gates in the open doorways, with supposedly childproof locks. When the infant boy instantly got the first one open, they installed a more complicated one. He stared at it for quite a while without moving, then opened it on the first try. At age 3, he was forbidden to touch his father's chess set, which normally stood in his study with the pieces in mid-game. One day his father came in and found him playing with the pieces all over the floor. When he angrily demanded that his son put the pieces back on the board, the boy instantly replaced them in exactly the mid-game position in which he had found them.

There's a lot we don't know about how the mind works.