"Where do they go?"

The Weekend Interview with Temple Grandin: Life Among the 'Yakkity Yaks' - WSJ.com

Interesting article (also an interesting HBO movie simply called, Temple Grandin), about a young woman suffering from autism who went on to earn advanced degrees in agricultural sciences. Today her chute and mechanism designs to handle cattle in feed lots and slaughter houses are widely employed throughout the country. She teaches at Colorado State today, and is also sought after as a speaker on autism. My interest in her reflects her acute awareness of visual patterns, and her capability to utilize her unique individual perception to model systems. This, of course leads back to the question of "What is intelligence?". How do we see things? How do we recognize things? Temple had very little use, or interest in social relationships, and yet took her unique perspective and capabilities to engineer devices that met a variety of requirements better than their predecessors (some requirements weren't even recognized by their users).

I think part of this achievement reflected a freedom from the tyranny of majority suppositions. Temple simply observed from within the edifice of her own mind. Once she could model the behaviors she was interested in, it was a much smaller jump to design devices intended to complement them. Perspectives, to be useful, are not limited to a majority view.