Normal people have an incredible lack of empathy. They have good emotional empathy, but they don’t have much empathy for the autistic kid who is screaming at the baseball game because he can’t stand the sensory overload. Or the autistic kid having a meltdown in the school cafeteria because there’s too much stimulation.

Grandin contrasts two kinds of empathy: the immediate, instinctive kind many people feel toward familiar emotions, and the harder, more cognitively demanding empathy required to understand behavior that looks disruptive or “inappropriate.” By pointing to sensory overload in loud, chaotic public spaces (a baseball game, a school cafeteria), she reframes autistic “meltdowns” as responses to overwhelming stimuli rather than willful misbehavior. The quote challenges social norms that equate empathy with sympathy for conventional expressions of distress, arguing that true empathy includes recognizing invisible sensory and neurological burdens. It also implicitly critiques institutions—schools and public venues—for failing to accommodate sensory differences and for judging autistic children through a neurotypical lens.