It would take several more years until they diagnosed her with autism. Now remember, this is all coming from a brain that doctors in the 1950s thought was damaged. RAZ: So this, all of this, from the word dragon. Now when I take it out, it tricks the printer into thinking that it's getting changed, and it's not.

So now I'm taking it out, and I'm furiously shaking it because if I find if I shake HP cartridges, I can get a hundred more copies out of it. And now I'm seeing a printer's jammed up, and I'm unjamming it. Now I've got an association of a ream paper in my office. RAZ: Just one after another like a slideshow. I'm now - I'm, you know, seeing Peter, Paul and Mary singing, you know, 'Puff the Magic Dragon.' I'm seeing the dragons in 'How to Train Your Dragon' movie. And the cute little - he's actually a dinosaur, but he looks like a dragon. I'm seeing - I went on a wonderful trip one time to Disney Imagineering. RAZ: So if I say the word dragon, you think of a, like, specific. And don't give me something boring like house or car or something that I can see in this room where I'm at now. GRANDIN: You want to find out how it works? Give me a keyword, and I'll tell you how my mind accesses information. Like when her mom would say, stop, like stop doing something, Temple would see a stop sign in her head, and not just any stop sign, but a very specific stop sign at a specific intersection that she'd seen 10 years earlier. RAZ: And it's not just random pictures she sees in her mind but very specific pictures. I mean, you give me a keyword, I see pictures everywhere I go, everywhere I go. You know, it's been an interesting journey for me as I've learned how not everybody thinks in pictures. GRANDIN: Well, I sometimes just couldn't figure out why I just didn't fit in. RAZ: But the most unusual thing about Temple Grandin was something she didn't even realize made her different. GRANDIN: And everything to do with the horse barn. GRANDIN: Model rockets, electronics and riding horses. And as she got older, she would fixate obsessively on just three things. And it would be another year and a half before she uttered a single word. RAZ: And after that trip to the neurologist in 1949, the doctors told her mom that Temple had brain damage, that she would never live a normal life.

And I would sit and rock and dribble sand through my hands and was not behaving like the little girl the same age next-door. TEMPLE GRANDIN: Well, at 2-and-a-half, I was taken into the neurologist because I had no speech. And on today's show, how some people, despite everything that was thrown in front of them, overcame and figured out how to turn what most people think of as limitations into sources of strength, which is exactly what happened to Temple Grandin who was different from the moment she was born.

Visual thinking by temple grandin