Word: grandin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...most illustrative essay in Anthropologist, Sacks introduces Temple Grandin, who in her childhood was found to have Asperger's syndrome, a high-function form of autism. Grandin now holds a Ph.D. in animal science and a teaching post at Colorado State University. She is well known not only on the medical-conference circuit for her insights into Asperger's but also in the meat-packing business for her advice on the humane treatment and disposal of livestock. Among her contributions is a design for a curved slaughterhouse ramp that is said to reduce animal anxiety by keeping hidden the high...
...know what the cow is feeling," Grandin, a realist, tells Sacks over a dinner of spare ribs. But while she has animal rapport, her neurological wiring bypasses most human emotions; the upheavals of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet leave her unmoved. The characters closest to her heart are Star Trek's android Data and his poignant predecessor, the supercognitive Mr. Spock...
...With Grandin and other subjects, Sacks has refined the case history into an art form. As his friend and colleague New York City neuropsychologist Elkhonon Goldberg puts it, "Oliver has salvaged the uniqueness of patients from statistical averaging." Indeed, each essay seems like an extended house call from an old-fashioned family doctor. There is also Sacks' open, encompassing style that welcomes the reader into his esoteric world. "A neurologist's life is not systematic," he writes, "but it provides him with novel and unexpected situations, which can be windows, peepholes, into the intricacy of nature-an intricacy that...