The power of a different (very human) mind

When she was a toddler, her mother had been advised to put her in an institution and was told that she was “no use to you”. If adults spoke directly to her she could understand everything they said, but she could not get her words out. Screaming was the only way she could communicate.  She only began to speak at three years old but throughout elementary school her speech was still not completely normal. Her hearing was like having a hearing aid with the volume control permanently on maxiumum. Unable to modulate incoming sound, she either had to get overwhelmed with sound or tune it all out. Her mother reported that there times when she acted like she was deaf.  When puberty came, the crippling anxiety attacks started.  Medication could provide no relief for pounding heart, sweaty palms, and and feeling like her brain was running at 200 miles an hour. It was like living with constant stage fright. This was what it felt like being a young Temple Grandin. She had to wait until adulhood to be formally diagnosed with autism.

And then one day when she was sixteen years old,  she observed something that changed everything. She was visiting her aunt’s ranch, and she noticed that cattle being handled in the squeeze chute that held them for vaccinations would sometimes relax after the pressure was applied. “They would go in and the thing would clamp them on their head and then the squeeze sides would come in and squeeze them, hold them. Some calves got all excited, but other calves just sort of went aah. And they just kinda relaxed.” The cattle, she realised, were not just being restrained - they were being comforted. She spent the next several days studying every aspect of the handling facility. She observed how cattle moved naturally in circular patterns, how they balked at sudden changes in flooring texture or lighting. She noticed how small details – a piece of paper on the ground, a shifting shadow – could stop a whole herd. She even tried the cattle squeeze chute herself, and noted how for about an hour afterwards she was calmer.

Returning from visiting her aunt, she built her own squeeze machine.  Made with mattresses and plywood, it allowed her to have complete control over the duration and amount of pressure applied, helping her relax her “nerves” and providing the comforting feeling of being held. The high school school psychologist wanted to take her squeeze machine away, but her science teacher, Mr. Carlock, used her fixation on cattle chutes to encourage her to study psychology and science, and investigate the scientific journals so she could learn why the machine had a relaxing effect. She chased her obession and went on to obtain her MSc in Animal Science from Arizona State University. Her thesis was entitled (unsurpisingly) ‘Survey of behavioral and physical events which occur in hydraulic restraining chutes for cattle’. And that was the beginning of her extraordinary career.

Brain scans in later life would identify atypical areas in Grandin’s cerebellum that resulted in deficits in her short-term memory (she could not follow written instructions or pass subjects, such as algebra, that dealt with abstract concepts). However, the area associated with visual circuitry was found to extend far beyond that of a neurotypical brain, a factor that allowed her to maintain long-term visual memory. But Grandin already knew that. She had already found her superpower. She experienced the world through detailed visual images. "My mind works like Google for images," she explains. "When I design livestock facilities, I can test-run the equipment in my head like a virtual reality computer program." This unique way of processing information became her greatest asset, enabling her to design humane livestock facilities that would eliminate pain and fear from the slaughtering process.

Her methods upended the traditional practices. Instead of forcing cattle through straight chutes with excessive force, she designed curved corrals that took advantage of cattle's natural circling behavior. She insisted on solid sides to prevent animals from seeing distracting movements outside the chute. She developed non-slip flooring and eliminated visual distractions like dangling chains or bright reflections. "Animals don't think in words," she says. "They think in pictures, just like I do.”

The resistance she faced was formidable. In the 1970s, being both autistic and a woman in the male-dominated livestock industry that really did care much about animal welfare meant constant skepticism. One rancher told her bluntly, "We don't need no woman designing our facilities." But Grandin persisted, and her impact has been transformative. Today, her designs handle half of 87 million heads of cattle in North America, and her guidelines for humane treatment have been adopted by companies like McDonald's and Whole Foods. 

But perhaps even more significant is her influence on our understanding of autism and different ways of thinking. "Different kinds of minds are needed to solve problems in this world," she often says, and she’s been merceiless in her criticism of how we sort, rank, and categorize people by so-called intelligence: “Look at how confused you were during the accident at the Fukushima nuclear plant a couple of years ago. The people who designed the plant probably had high scores on tests of IQ and math skills. And then they put the backup power generator in a basement where it was going to be useless in a flood - just when they would need it most. And all the humans shook their heads and asked, how can smart people be so stupid?”

With books such as Emergence: Labeled Autistic, Thinking in Pictures, and Calling All Minds, her work has inspired parents and educators to look for strengths rather than deficits in autistic individuals. "If I could snap my fingers and become non-autistic, I would not," she states firmly. "Autism is part of who I am.”

For me, Grandin’s story is a reminder that everybody has a superpower. Everybody. And perhaps finding the most human superpower we have is becoming a pressing near-existential matter. I’m not here to make forecasts and guesses about what AI holds. However, Grandin’s story strikes me as good example of some. Of the ‘Nine Principles For Success In The Age of AI’ that Ian Leslie has put forward in his latest and always excellent newsletter:

Be difficult to model. If your job can be reduced to a series of operations, of procedures and rules, then even if you’re very competent at executing those operations, you may find yourself at risk from machines who don’t do it as quite well as you but are a lot cheaper and don’t take holidays. If you do your job in a valuable way that is also a very hard way to encode then you will be safer.

Maximise your flaws. We should all want to maximise our talents, but our talents tend to be similar to other people’s. It’s our flaws that mark us out and make us hard to copy, just as it’s the irregularities in the glaze that identify a Ming vase as authentic. If you can turn your flaws into advantages at work, you will put more distance between yourself and the machines... Have think about what you do in an odd or weird way, and ask yourself if you can make something valuable out of it.

Pretty good advice for brands, as well as humans, it seems to me.

Because everybody has a superpower.

Every human.

Every business.

Every brand.

Need help finding your superpower?
Let’s talk.

martin@emdub.co