What is it like to be keenly intelligent and to care deeply about science and animal life—but to feel absolutely alienated from even the simplest human emotions and interactions?
She had just finished the story when we arrived at her home—a small two-story town house, some distance from the campus. Downstairs was comfortable, with the usual amenities—a sofa, armchairs, a television, pictures on the wall—but I had the sense that it was rarely used. There was an immense sepia print of her grandfather’s farm in Grandin, North Dakota, in 1880; her other grandfather, she told me, had invented the automatic pilot for planes.
Being of a practical turn of mind, she soon made her fantasy come true. The early models were crude, with some snags and glitches, but she soon evolved a totally comfortable, predictable system, capable of administering a “hug” with whatever parameters she desired. Her squeeze machine had worked exactly as she hoped, yielding the very sense of calmness and pleasure she had dreamed of since childhood.
After twenty minutes or so, she emerged, visibly calmer, emotionally less rigid , and asked me if I would care to try the machine. She had been primed to this knowledge, she felt, partly through the experience of her own autism and partly because she came from a long line of farmers and, as a child, had spent much of her time on farms. And her own mode of thinking allowed her no escape from these realities. “If you’re a visual thinker, it’s easier to identify with animals,” she said as we drove to the farm.
As an undergraduate in New Hampshire, she had written to B. F. Skinner, the great behaviorist, and finally she had visited him. “It was like having an audience with God,” she said. “It was a letdown. He was just a regular human being. He said, ‘We don’t have to know how the brain works—it’s just a matter of conditioned reflexes.’ No waycould believe it was just stimulus-response.
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