MONTE VISTA — Colorado State University (CSU) professor and renowned expert on autism, Dr. Temple Grandin, gave the keynote address at the 42nd Annual Southern Rocky Mountain Agricultural Conference in Monte Vista on Feb. 7, "Visual Thinking: The hidden gifts of people who think in pictures, patterns, and abstractions," to a packed audience. Grandin gave a similar talk at Society Hall in Alamosa the night before. Grandin herself has autism.

Advocating new directions for the way people who have autism should be taught, Grandin said, "A lot of kids are not learning how to work," and suggested they learn job skills early including working at a dollar store, church volunteer jobs, or cleaning stables as she had done at a young age.

Grandin said there are visual thinkers, music and math thinkers, and verbal thinkers and we need to have them all at the table in any decision-making. She proposes educating, employing, and collaborating with visual thinkers who she says are essential for their perspectives.

Noting that many very, successful people think differently, Grandin said, "Michelangelo, filthy, dirty, naughty, 12-year old. He dropped out of school because he didn't want to become a lawyer, yuck, learning all that Latin. He was running around all those churches that were commissioning all that great art; that's exposure." Grandin used that as an example of how to cultivate the promise of a young person with different thought processes.

According to the CSU website Grandin has said "You think about the number of students that are forced to become a lawyer or a doctor, and then they find out they hate it later on," Grandin said. "There's a lot of people today that are going down that track, you know, and that's a bad one to go down. It's important to find out the things you hate doing."

Neurodivergent and neurodiverse are terms used to describe people like Grandin and others whose brain differences including autism, affect how they think and how their brain works. The term was introduced in the 1990s by sociologist Judy Singer who is autistic. People with autism are on a broad spectrum. Today, people on this spectrum are understood to be part of all normal human experience.

Grandin says the world is increasingly focused on verbal thinkers and we need to refocus on visual thinkers.

The print edition of the Valley Courier on Friday will have expanded coverage of this story.