Dr Temple Grandin and the Squeeze Machine

Today is World Autism Awareness Day and we meet Dr. Temple Grandin, innovator, author, activist, autistic.

She changed the face of the livestock industry with her deep personal insights into animal behaviour and is a powerful advocate for people with autism.  But first let’s review one of my favorite YouTube videos is called “Free Hugs.” The clip was filmed here in Australia, where one day a young man, then a group of people decided to stand in a mall and offer free hugs.  People’s responses, including the police trying to shut them down, are quite profound and moving. Each time I see it, it brings tears to my eyes.

Temple Grandin

So now to Dr Temple Grandin: The best case I have ever seen made for hugs was by someone who has spent most of her life avoiding them.  Dr. Temple Grandin is a leading professor of animal science and an outspoken advocate for people with autism.  The movie about her life tells the story about the way the young autistic Temple learned to soothe herself.  When she was visiting her aunt’s ranch, she saw ranchers prepare to inoculate cattle by putting them in a squeeze machine to calm them down.  One day, Temple had a panic attack.  She ran to the squeeze machine and demanded that her aunt close her in it.  The squeeze brought her comfort and relief. Her peace was restored.

A machine that squeezes may seem like a far cry from a hug, but in Temple Grandin’s case, it is not.  As an autistic, Dr. Grandin shied away from human touch because she found it unpredictable. The movie shows that human hugs could sometimes overload her already highly perceptive nervous system.  For Dr. Grandin, the benefit of the squeeze machine (compared to human hugs) was that she could reliably control and predict the pressure of the squeeze.

The squeeze machine changed Temple Grandin’s life, providing her with the soothing that she needed to face some pretty remarkable hurdles.  When she went to college, she fought to have her squeeze machine, doing research with non-autistic subjects to prove that they too showed physical signs (lowered heart rate and blood pressure) of being calmed when they were in her machine.  Although at first the school administrators demonized the squeeze machine fearing it was a deviant sexual device, Dr. Grandin’s research and tenacity proved that there was a biological basis for its efficacy. It was an essential tool that gave her the comfort and bravery she needed to become a preeminent scientist, author, and educator.