Temple Grandin signed her books at a recent conference.
Not very often do I feel some emotion while watching a movie. Ironically, it happened recently with a movie about someone whose autism often interfered with emotion and expressions of affection in human relationships.
“Temple Grandin” is a 2010 Emmy award-winning HBO movie featuring Claire Danes. Danes did an excellent job (LA Times review) portraying Temple Grandin and her journey from a child with autism who did not even speak until nearly four years old, to a path toward being listed at 105 on Forbes magazine’s 2026 list of America’s 250 “Greatest Innovators” for “improved efficiency—and humanity— of livestock handling systems.”
Temple Grandin is not well-known outside the worlds of livestock agriculture and autism. These are connected by her innovative approach to handling livestock, primarily cattle, created by her “visual thinking” and ability to see and understand what the animals were seeing. She has written or co-authored more than 20 books.
At 13 Grandin got a job sewing; at 15 she cleaned horse stalls; at 16 she moved from Massachusetts to an aunt and uncle’s ranch in Arizona, eventually working her way into the cattle industry. Her career began as a correspondent for cattle industry magazine. Today, systems using her design of chutes handle about one-half of the beef cattle in the U.S.
Her journalistic research and accuracy increased her credibility in an industry unwelcoming to women in the 1970s. A movie scene expressing that view showed her truck at a cattle yard and its windshield covered in bull testicles, with a group of cowboys in the background laughing. She wiped the windshield with her hands and drove away.
“An Open Door” , a 2025 documentary about Grandin, drew a full house recently at the local high school. At 78, she currently is a professor in animal science at the University of Colorado, and has a full calendar of speaking engagements, with both livestock groups and the autism community. Her local appearance occurred at a conference of the Sustainable Farming Association in Minnesota.
The documentary title comes from a scene in the movie. Grandin had a phobia about automatic doors. Fearful of passing through one, she waited until a woman came by and Grandin followed her. Outside they spoke, leading to a work connection for Grandin at the cattle company of the woman’s husband. That and other experiences have Grandin advocating, ‘you see a door, go through it.’
Visual thinking
It may seem a bit incongruous for a column labeled “Words on Paper” to espouse “visual thinking.” In reading Grandin’s 2022 book Visual Thinking, I began to appreciate her insights. The book’s subtitle, The hidden gifts of people who think in pictures, patterns, and abstractions, argues that much creativity and talent is pushed aside by the mainstream of verbal thinkers.
“Being visual thinker helped because I looked at what cattle were seeing,” she says. “I designed the front end of every Cargill plant in North America. That’s pretty good for someone who can’t do algebra. I don’t even know if I could graduate from high school today.” With determination, family support, and strong mentors, she earned a PhD in animal science at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
Most people are a mix of object visualizer, spatial visualizer (math), and verbal thinking, but one usually dominates, she says. Language is not required for thought. Early hominids before spoken language obviously had thoughts, which must have been visual, as we see in prehistoric cave paintings, or the petroglyphs carved 7,000 to 10,000 years ago on the exposed quartz in southern Minnesota and elsewhere around the world.
Hands-on learning
Grandin strongly advocates for practical learning environments that benefit visual thinkers. She mentions inventors like Thomas Edison, or artists like Michelangelo, or the old guy in a machine shop with an 8th grade education who can build just about anything. “What would happen to yesterday’s great innovators in today’s education system?” she asks.
Today we hear politicians crowing about the need to bring manufacturing jobs back to America. If you could wave a magic wand and make those jobs suddenly appear, there wouldn’t be enough qualified people to take them. Much industrial equipment is now manufactured overseas, in Europe or China where the educational system still values technical and mechanical skills.
“I would put a lot of hands-on classes back into the schools and add a technical track,” she says. “I’m very concerned about the loss of skills.” Visual, math and word “must work together in a complementary manner.”
Our educational system has drifted too far from hands-on learning, internships, and practical skills. For 22 years my wife worked in elementary schools providing hands-on learning with “science kits” brimming with tools and artifacts, and organized visits from a variety of science education programs. Unfortunately, much of that ended at their schools when she retired.
Many of my good memories of school come from shop, phys. ed., and biology on the days we dissected frogs. And occasional films, even when as ‘student projectionist’ I struggled threading film through a projector. I have thought that had I been more proficient in math, that I could have succeeded in mechanical engineering.
No questions, please
When it became my turn in the book-signing line at the local event with my copy of Visual Thinking, her detail-oriented vision quickly noticed my name tag that identified me as Press. In a careful, almost meticulous manner, she printed my first name. Then, with a scrawling flair she quickly scribbled some zig-zag lines for her signature.
With her background as a reporter and author, I wondered what her thoughts might have been. Like an invisible wall there was no chance for further questions or comments; however, following her talks she welcomes audience questions. While her speech and mannerisms give clues about her place on the autism spectrum, she strives to make her work and presence available to all people.
I don’t clearly recall the scene in the movie that triggered an affective response. It may have been the one showing a home-made “squeeze chute” she built to give herself a big hug, which she could not do with people. The chute inspired one she designed for cattle to do the same thing, calm then down in a stressful environment.
Perhaps a bit like her, I sometimes feel more connected to animals – dogs, cats and horses. This thought appears in a line from my first novel, Good Ice, where the main character oscillates between protagonist and antagonist: “Dogs and horses are the only people you can really trust.” And visual thinkers like Temple Grandin. Words can be imprecise, or worse, may obfuscate; (real) pictures don’t lie.
