I’m seeing too many smart kind of socially awkward kids, a lot milder than I was, not getting employment because they’re not learning job skills.
I’m seeing too many kind of socially awkward kids that get through schools and then they can’t hold a job because they haven’t learned the discipline of get up in the morning.
I’m seeing too many geeky, nerdy kids get addicted to video games and they’re going nowhere. It’s making me crazy.
People are getting too far away from the real-world. Politics is just ridiculous, it’s totally dysfunctional.
What do I do when I go home? Work. That’s basically my social life. I’m married to work.
I tend to be much more in the present and my emotions are simpler. I can be happy, I can be sad, I can be depressed, but there’s a complexity that I don’t have. I don’t brood the same way. Fear is my main emotion.
I’ve got a lot of other people who do a lot of things for me, so I’ve gotten to a part in my career where I’m doing a lot of talks because I want to get kids turned on. I want to see these kids, these geeky nerdy kids, go out there and do something.
I think a brain can be made “more thinking” or made “more emotional.” At what point does this become abnormal? Autism in its milder variants, I think, is part of normal human variation.
People need to learn how to work, learn how to support themselves. I think it’s just fine to be eccentric.
I believe that the best way to create good living conditions for any animal, whether it’s a captive animal living in a zoo, a farm animal or a pet, is to base animal welfare programs on the core emotion systems in the brain. My theory is that the environment animals live in should activate their positive emotions as much as possible, and not activate their negative emotions any more than necessary. If we get the animal’s emotions rights, we will have fewer problem behaviors... All animals and people have the same core emotion systems in the brain.
I believe that the place where an animal dies is a sacred one. There is a need to bring ritual into the conventional slaughter plants and use as a means to shape people’s behavior. It would help prevent people from becoming numbed, callous, or cruel. The ritual could be something very simple, such as a moment of silence. In addition to developing better designs and making equipment to insure the humane treatments of all animals, that would be my contribution.
The world needs all types of minds.
The Internet may be the best thing yet for improving an autistic person’s social life.
Boys who cry can work for Google. Boys who trash computers cannot. I once was at a science conference, and I saw a NASA scientist who had just found out that his project was canceled – a project he’d worked on for years. He was maybe sixty-five years old, and you know what? He was crying. And I thought, Good for him. That’s why he was able to reach retirement age working in a job he loved.
Teachers who work with autistic children need to understand associative thought patterns.
My thinking pattern always starts with specifics and works toward generalization in an associational and nonsequential way.
It is human nature to strive.
Label-locked thinking can affect treatment. For instance, I heard a doctor say about a kid with gastrointestinal issues, “Oh, he has autism. That’s the problem” – and then he didn’t treat the GI problem.
It’s OK to be an eccentric; it’s not OK to be a rude and dirty eccentric.
For example, the main reason zebras never got domesticated is that they’re ultra-high-fear. Zebras may bite people and not let go. They injure more people in zoos than the tigers do.15.