particular pitches and frequencies. When certain musical instruments were played, he responded, while other instruments produced no effect. I still have problems with losing my train of thought when distracting noises occur. If a pager goes off while I am giving a lecture, it fully captures my attention and I completely forget what I was talking about. Intermittent high-pitched noises are the most distracting. It takes me several seconds to shift my attention back. Several research studies have shown that rapid shifting of attention between two different stimuli is very difficult for people with autism. Eric Courchesne and his colleagues at the San Diego School of Medicine found that people with autism could not rapidly shift their attention between a visual and an auditory task. Further research by Ann Wainwright Sharp and Susan Bryson, in Canada, suggests that there is a fundamental impairment in the brain's ability to process incoming information rapidly.
When two people are talking at once, it is difficult for me to screen out one voice and listen to the other. My ears are like microphones picking up all sounds with equal intensity. Most people's ears are like highly directional microphones, which only pick up sounds from the person they are pointed at. In a noisy place I can't understand speech, because I cannot screen out the background noise. When I was a child, large noisy gatherings of relatives were overwhelming, and I would just lose control and throw temper tantrums. Birthday parties were torture when all the noisemakers went off. My mother recognized that I had difficulty with noisy gatherings of people, but she did not know why. Fortunately, I attended an elementary school that had quiet classrooms where all the students worked on the same task. I would have drowned in a cacophony of confusion if I had been in an open classroom with thirty students doing ten different projects.
Recently I was given a highly sophisticated hearing test that was developed by Joan Burleigh, in the Electrical Engineering Department at Colorado State University. The combination of her expertise in speech pathology and the electronics skills of the engineers there created a test that is able to determine the degree of autism-related hearing problems people have. People with autism usually seem to have normal hearing when tested with the standard test, which measures the ability to hear faint pure tones. My hearing tested normal on that test. The problem arises in processing complex sounds such as spoken words.
I did very badly on two segments of Joan Burleigh's test, both of which measure the ability to hear two conversations going on at once. In the first test, a man spoke a sentence in one ear and a woman spoke another sentence in the other ear. I was instructed to ignore one sentence and repeat the other. This task was hard and I got only 50 percent of the sentence correct. A normal person gets almost 100 percent correct. On the next test, two different voices said different sentences simultaneously in the same ear. I was instructed to ignore one voice and tell what the other one said. My left ear was very bad compared to my right ear. Performance in my left ear was only 25 percent of normal, whereas my right ear was 66 percent of normal. These tests showed very clearly that my ability to process and attend to one voice against the background of another voice is severely impaired. On some of the sentences I could distinguish only one or two words, usually from the middle of the sentence.
Here I am as a toddler. At that time, my retreat from touch was the only obvious sign of autism.
At two and a half, I had no speech and no interest in people. I appeared to be deaf, and often threw tantrums out of frustration at not being able to talk. Like many autistic children, I looked normal.
In high school, my life revolved around 4-H and showing horses. A deep connection with animals has been a constant in my life.
One of my mentors, Aunt Brecheen, helped me channel my fixations. This picture was taken in front of her ranch house in Arizona, where I first observed the cattle chute and made the connection between its calming pressure and my own hyperaroused nervous system.
Here is an example of the kind of cattle chute used for holding animals during veterinary procedures. Two panels apply pressure to the animal's body, and its head is restrained by a stanchion closed around its neck.
I constructed my first makeshift version of the squeeze machine out of used plywood. Here I am in the current version of the machine, which I also constructed. By manipulating the lever, I can precisely control the amount of pressure applied to my body. (Photograph copyright © by Rosalie Winard)
This is a commercially available squeeze machine manufactured by the Therafin Corporation, based on my design and used in the treatment of people with autism. (Photograph copyright © by Rosalie Winard)
One of my first designs for a curved lane leads into the dip vat at John Wayne's Red River feed yard. I figured out that cattle would move more easily through a curved lane because it makes use of their natural circling behavior.
I later applied the curved-lane design to systems for meatpacking plants. When I designed this chute, I was able to visualize the whole system in my imagination.
Here is one of my blueprints for a curved-chute system. As I draw, I visualize how each part will operate from every angle in my imagination. Many autistics share these intense visualization skills.
Even though I had little experience with drawing in perspective, I was able to come up with this blueprint in one try. Drawing skills often appear in young autistic children, perhaps as a compensation for their lack of verbal skills.
I call this my ground sculpture. In fact it is a truck loading and sorting facility in Nevada.
I love nothing more than surveying a plant I've designed where the animals are calm and quiet. One third of the cattle in the United States are moved through handling facilities that I have designed. (Photograph copyright © by Rosalie Winard)
This is an aerial view of my most intricate design, a buffalo-handling facility at the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge. It took 26 drawings to complete this facility, which is operated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
I have designed humane restraint systems for both sheep and cattle. As a result of my autism, I have heightened sensory perceptions that help me work out how an animal will feel moving through the system.
In my work on cattle behavior at Colorado State University, I sometimes like to get a cow's eye view of the situation. (Photograph copyright © by Rosalie Winard)
I met Dr. Oliver Sacks when he first wrote about me in An Anthropologist on Mars. His groundbreaking descriptions of people with various neurological disabilities have improved our understanding of the often enigmatic workings of the human mind. (Photograph copyright © by Rosalie Winard)
In 1994 I testified at a congressional hearing on the humane handling of crippled animals. (Photograph copyright © by Rosalie Winard)
I regularly lecture all over the United States on livestock handling and autism. Here I am addressing the annual meeting of the Autism Society of America. (Photograph copyright © Rosalie Winard)
A third test given by Joan Burleigh, called the binaural fusion test, showed that I have a distinct deficiency in timing sound input between my two ears. In this test a word is electronically split so that the high-frequency sounds go to one ear and the low-frequency sounds go to the other. When the low-frequency part of the word went to my right ear, I was able to hear 50 percent of the words correctly. When the low frequency was sent to my left ear, I became functionally deaf and only got 5 percent of the words correct. «Woodchuck» became «workshop,»
