The world needs all kinds of minds - Temple Grandin

[Music] [Music] I think I'll start out and just talk a little bit about what exactly autism is autism is a very big Continuum that goes from very severe the child remains non-verbal all the way up to brilliant scientists and engineers and I actually feel at home here because there's a lot of autism genetics here you wouldn't have any um it's a Continuum of traits when does a nerd turn into you know the Asperger which is just mild autism I mean Einstein and Mozart and Tesla would all be probably diagnosed as autistic Spectrum today and one

of the things that really is going to concern me is getting these kids to to be the ones that are going to invent the next things you know that Bill Gates talked about this morning okay now if you want to understand autism animals and I want to talk to you about different ways of thinking you have to get away from verbal language I think in pictures I don't think in language now the thing about the autistic mind is it attends to details okay this is a test where you either have to pick out the big

letters or pick out the little letters and the autistic mind picks out the little letter matters more quickly and the thing is the normal brain ignores the details well if you're building a bridge details are pretty important because it fall down if you ignore the details and one of my big concerns with a lot of policy things today is things are getting too abstract people are getting away from doing Hands-On stuff I'm really concerned that a lot of the schools have taken out the Hands-On classes because art and classes like that those are the classes

where I excelled okay in my work with cattle I noticed a lot of little things that most people don't notice would make the cattle bunk like for example this flag waving right in front of the veterinary facility this feedyard was going to tear down their whole Veterinary facility all they needed to do was move the flag rapid movement contrast in the early 70s when I started I got right down in the shoots to see what cattle were seeing people thought that was crazy a coat on a fence would make them B Shadows would make them

b a hose on the floor people weren't noticing these things a chain hanging down and that's shown very very nicely in the movie in fact I loved the movie how they duplicated all my projects That's The Geek Side my drawings got the star in the movie too and actually it's called Temple grandon not thinking in pictures so what is thinking in pictures it's literally movies in your hat my mind works like Google for images now when I was a young kid I didn't know my thinking was different I thought everybody thought in pictures and then

when I did my book thinking in pictures I started interviewing people about how they think and I was shocked to find out that my thinking was quite different like if I say think about a church steeple most people get this sort of generalized generic one now maybe that's not true in this room but it's going to be true in a whole lot of different places I see only specific pictures they flash up into my memory just like Google for pictures and in the movie they've got a great scene in there where the word Sho is

said and a whole bunch of 50s and 60s shoes pop into my imagination okay there's my childhood church that's specific there's some more Fort Collins okay how about famous ones and they just kind of come up kind of like this just really quickly like Google for pictures and they come up one at a time and then I can think well okay well maybe we can have it snow or we can have a thunderstorm I can hold it there and turn them into videos now visual thinking was a tremendous asset in my work designing cattle handling

facilities and I've worked really hard on improving um how cattle are treated at Slaughter plant I'm not going to go in any gucky Slaughter slides I've got that stuff up on YouTube if you want to look at it but one of the things that I was able to do in my design work is I could actually test run a piece of equipment in my mind just like a virtual reality computer system and this is an aerial view of a recreation of one of my projects that was used in the movie that was like just so

super cool and there were a lot of kind of Asperger types and and autism types working out there on the movie set too but one of the things that really really worries me is where's the younger version of those kids going today they're not ending up in Silicon Valley where they belong [Music] now one of the things I learned very early on because I wasn't that social is I had to sell my work and not myself and the way I sold livestock jobs is I showed off my drawings I showed off pictures of things another

thing that helped me as a little kid is boy in the 50s you were taught manners you were taught you can't pull the merchandise off the shelves in the store and throw it around now when kids get to be in third or fourth grade you might see that this kid's going to be a visual thinker drawing in perspective now I want to emphasize that not every autistic kid is going to be a visual thinker now I did the had this brain scan done several years ago and I used to joke around about having a gigantic

internet trunk line going deep into my visual cortex this is tensor Imaging and my great big internet trunk line is twice as big as the controls the red lines there are me and the blue lines are the sex and age matched control and there I got a gigantic one and the control over there the blue one has got a really small one and some of the research now is showing that people on the Spectrum actually think with primary visual cortex now the thing is the visual thinker is just one kind of mind you see the

autistic mind tends to be a specialist mind good at one thing bad at something else and where I was bad was algebra and I was never allowed to take geometry or trig gigantic mistake I'm finding a lot of kids that need to skip algebra go right to geometry and trick now another kind of mind is the pattern thinker more abstract these are your engineers your computer programmers now this is pattern thinking that praying mantis is made from a single sheet of paper no Scotch tape no cuts and there in the background is the pattern for

folding it here are the types of thinking photorealistic visual thinkers like me pattern thinkers music and math Minds some of these often times have problems with reading you also will see these kind of problems with um kids that are um dyslexic you'll see these different kinds of minds and then there's a verbal mind they know every fact about everything now another thing is the sensory issues I was really concerned about having to wear this gadget on my face and I I came in half an hour beforehand so I could have it put on and and

kind of get used to it and I they got it bent so it's not hitting my chin but sensory is an issue some kids are bothered by fluorescent lights others have problems with Sound Sensitivity you know um it it's going to be variable now visual thinking gave me a whole lot of insight into the animal mind because think about it an animal's a sensory based thinker not verbal thinks in pictures thinks and sounds thinks and smells think about how much information there is there on the local fire hydrant he knows who's been there when they

were there are they friend or fo is there anybody he can go mate with there's a ton of information on that fire hydrant it's all very detailed information and looking at these kind of details gave me a lot of insight into animals now the Animal mind and also my mind puts sensory based information into categories man on a horse and a man on the ground that is viewed as two totally different things you can have a horse that's been abused by a rider they'll be absolutely fine with a veterinarian and with a horseshoer but you

can't ride him you have another horse where maybe the horseshoer beat him up and he'll be terrible for anything on the ground with a veterinarian but um a person can ride him cattle of the same way man on a horse a man on foot they're two different things you see it's a different picture so I want you to think about just how specific this is now this ability to put information into categories I find a lot of people are not very good at this like when I'm out of trouble shooting with equipment or problems with

something in a plant they don't seem to be able to figure out do I have a training people issue or do I have something wrong with the equipment in other words categorize equipment problem from a people problem I find a lot of people have difficulty doing that now let's say figure out is an equipment problem is it a minor problem with something simple I can fix or is the whole design of the system wrong people have a hard time figuring that out let's just look at something like you know solving problems with you know making

Airlines safer yeah I'm a million mile flyer I do lots and lots of flying and um you know like if I was at the FFA what would I be uh doing a lot of direct observation of it would be their airplane tails you know five fatal wrecks in the last 20 years tail either came off or steering stuff inside the tail broke in some way it's Tails pure and simple and when the pilots walk around the plane guess what they can't see that stuff inside the tail you know now as I think about that I'm

pulling up all of that you know specific information it's specific see my thinking's bottom up I take all the little pieces and I put the pieces together like a puzzle now here's a horse that was definitely afraid of black cowboy hats he' been abused by somebody with a black cowboy hat white cowboy hats that was absolutely fine now the thing is the world is going to need all of the different kinds of Minds to work together we've got to work on developing all these different kinds of minds and one of the things that's driving me

really crazy as I travel around and I do autism meetings is I'm seeing a lot of smart geeky nerdy kids and they just aren't very social and nobody's working on developing their interest in something like science this brings up the whole thing of my science teacher my science teacher is shown absolutely beautifully in the movie as a goofball student when I was in high school I just didn't care at all about studying until I had um Mr carlock's science class he was now do Carlock in the movie and U he uh he got me challenged

to figure out an optical illusion room this brings up the whole thing of you got to show kids interesting stuff you know one of the things that I think maybe Ted ought to do is um tell all the schools about all the great lectures that are on Ted there's all kinds of great stuff on the internet to get these kids turned on because I'm seeing a lot of these geeky nerdy kids and the teachers out in the Midwest and other parts of the country when you get away from these Tech areas they don't know what

to do with these kids and they're not going down the right path the thing is you can make a mind to be more of a thinking and cognitive mind or a mind can be wired to be more social and what some of the research now has shown on autism is there may be extra wiring back here in the really brilliant mind and we lose a few social circuits here it's kind of a tradeoff between thinking and social and then you can get into the point where it's so severe you're going to have a person that's

going to be non-verbal in the normal human mind language covers up the visual thinking we share with animals this is the work of Dr Bruce Miller and um he studied Alzheimer's patients that had frontal temporal lob dementia and the dementia ate out the language parts of the brain and then this artwork came out of somebody that used to install stereos in cars now van go doesn't know anything about physics but I think it's very interesting that there was some work done to show that this Eddy pattern in this painting followed a statistical model of turbulence

this brings up the whole interesting idea of maybe some of this mathematical patterns is in our own head and the Wolf Ram stuff I was taking notes and I was writing down all the all the search words I could use because I think that's going to go on in my autism lectures we've got to show these kids interesting stuff and they've taken out the auto shop class and the drafting class and the art class I mean art was my best subject in school we've got to think about all these different kinds of minds and we've

got to absolutely work with these kind of Minds because we absolutely are going to need these kind of U people in the future and let's talk about jobs okay my science teacher got me studying because I was a goofball that didn't want to study but you know what I was getting work experience I'm seeing too many of these smart kids that haven't learned basic things like how to be on time I was taught that when I was years old you know how to have table manners at Granny's at Sunday party I was taught that when

I was very very young and when I was 13 I had a job at a dress makers shop selling clothes I did internships in college I did um I I was building things and I also had to learn how to do assignments you know all I wanted to do is draw pictures of the horses when I was little mother said well let's do a picture of something else they got to learn how to do something else let's say the kids fixated on Legos let's get them working on building different things the thing about the autistic

mind is it tends to be fixated like if the kid loves race cars let's use race cars for math let's figure out how long it takes a race car to go a certain distance in other words use that fixation in order to motivate that kid that's one of the things we need to do and really get fed up when the you know the teachers when you especially when you get away from this part of the country they don't know what to do with these smart kids it just drives me crazy what can visual thinkers do

when they grow up they can do graphic design all kinds of stuff with computers photography uh industrial design um the pattern thinkers they're the ones that are going to be your mathematicians your software Engineers your computer programmers all of those kinds of jobs and then you've got the word mins they make great journalists and they also make really really good stage actors because the thing about being autistic is I had to learn learn social skills like being in a play you just kind of just have to learn it and we need to be working with

these students and this brings up mentors you know my science teacher was not an accredited teacher he was a NASA space scientist now some states now are getting it to where if you have a degree in biology or a degree in chemistry you can come into the school and teach you know biology or chemistry we need to be doing that because what I'm observing is the good teachers for a lot of these kids out in the community colleges but we need to be getting some of these good teachers into the high schools another thing that

can be very very very successful is there's a lot of people that may have retired from you know working in the software industry and they can teach a kid and it doesn't matter if what they teach them is old because what you're doing is you're lighting the spark you're getting that kid turned on and you get him turned on then you'll learn all the new stuff mentors are just essential I cannot emphasize enough what my science teacher did for many and we've got to um Mentor them hire them and if you bring them in for

internships in your companies the thing about the autism Asperger you kind of mind you got to give them a specific task don't just say design new software you got to tell them something a lot more specific well we're designing a software for a phone and it has to do some specific thing and it can only use so much memory that's the kind of specificity you need well that's the end of my talk and I just want to thank everybody for coming it was great to be here a question oh you a question for me okay

thank you thank you so much for that you know you once wrote um I like this quote if by some magic autism had been eradicated from the face of the Earth then men would still be socializing in front of a wood fire at the entrance to a cave because who do you think made the first stone spear was the asberg guy and if you were to get rid of all the autism genetics there'd be no more Silicon Valley and the energy crisis would not be solved so I want to ask you a couple of the

questions and and you know if any of these feel inappropriate it's okay just to say next question but if if there's someone here who has an autistic child or knows an autistic child and feels kind of cut off from them what advice would you give them well first of all we got to look at age if you have a two three or four year old you know no speech uh no social interaction I can't emphasize enough don't wait you need at least 20 hours a week of one toone teaching you know thing is autism comes

in different degrees there's going to about half the people on the spectrum that are not going to learn to talk and they're not going to be working Silicon Valley that would that would not be a reasonable thing for them to do but then you get these smart geeky kids you know the touch of autism and that's where you've got to get them turned on with doing interesting I got social interaction through shared interests I rode horses with other kids I made model rockets with other kids did electronic slab you know with other kids and in

the 60s it was gluing mirrors on the on a rubber membrane on speaker to make a light show that was like we cancern that's super cool is it unrealistic for them to Hope or think that that child loves them as as somewh most well let me tell you that child will be loyal and if your house is burning down they're going to get you out of it wow so most people if you ask them what are they most passionate about they'd say things like my kids or or my lover or what are you most passionate

about I'm passionate about that the things I do are going to make the world a better place when I have a mother of an autistic child say my kid went to college because of your book or something or one of your lectures that makes me happy you know I the slaughter plants I've worked with them in the 80s they were absolutely awful I developed a really simple scoring system for Slaughter plants where you just measure outcomes how many cattle fell down how many cattle got poked with the pter how many cattle are mooing their heads

off and it's very very simple you may you directly observe a few simple things it's worked really well I get satisfaction out of seeing stuff that makes real change in the real world we need a lot more of that and a lot less abstract stuff when we were talking on the phone one of the things you said that really uh astonished me was you said one thing you were passionate about was serath Farms tell me about that well the reason why I got really excited when I read about that it's contains knowledge it's libraries and

to me knowledge is something that is extremely valuable so maybe over 10 years ago now our library got flooded and this is for the internet got really big and I was really upset about all the books being wrecked because it was knowledge being destroyed and server Farms or data centers are great libraries of knowledge Temple can I just say it's an absolute Delight to have you at Ted thank you so much so much thank you