female speaker: pleasewelcome dr. temple grandin. [applause] dr. temple grandin: it'sreally great to be here today. i'm gonna talk about alot of different things. i was one of those kids that waskind of different growing up, bullied and teased in school. and the thing that savedme was my science teacher. i had a greatscience teacher that got me interested in doing allkinds of interesting projects.
which brings it down toyou want to get kids doing interesting stuff,you're going to have to show them interesting stuff. there's a scene in the hbo moviewhere i got really interested in optical illusion rooms. well, and i actually sawthat optical illusion room on a bell labs 16millimeter movie-- now i'm showing how long ago thatwas-- on optical illusions. so you know, gotta get themout there and show them stuff.
now the thing is,what i want to do is to get you thinking aboutdifferent kinds of minds that think differently. when i was in 20s,30s, and early 40s, i thought that everybody thoughtthe same way that i think. then i asked thisquestion, and this is where i learned howthinking can be different. access your memoryon a church steeple. how does that informationcome into your mind?
i was shocked to findout that a lot of people get this vague,generalized thing. i don't have any vaguegeneralized thing. i only have specific ones. now you might ask, why am italking about church steeples? why don't i ask house or car? well, most people are sofamiliar with their own home or their own car, thatthey're going to see that. but i wanted to ask yousomething you don't own,
but they're out thereand you have to see them and everybody knowswhat they are. and you have to seea whole lot of them. you just can't even drivearound without seeing them. and that reallystarted giving me some real insight that differentpeople think differently. so then i dividedthe world into people that think in words andpeople that think in pictures. and then i started to--well, wait a minute.
there's this other kind ofperson that thinks in patterns. this is more themathematical kind of mind. now when does somethingbecome an abnormality? well, you get a littlebit of the autism trait, you take out some socialstuff in the brain, and you get geek traits forall kinds of fun tech stuff. i think a brain can either bemade more cognitive or more thinking, or a braincan be made more social. because after all, whoinvented the first stone spear?
it wasn't the yack-yacks aroundthe campfire, that's for sure. [audience laughs] dr. temple grandin: itwas some geek out there in the back of the cavechipping away at a rock and figured out how toget it fastened to a stick and make a stone spear. you see, you get a littlebit of that autism trait, you get some advantages. you get too muchof the trait, you
get a very, verysevere handicap. 'cause one of the big problemsthat you got with the autism spectrum is it's so huge. at one end, you have gotlot of people, probably people like tesla, whoinvented the power plant. you got a lot of peoplein silicon valley. there's a lot ofthem that are live. i don't talk about live ones. i'm only gonna talkabout dead ones
when i show their pictures. you know who allthe live ones are. you can look them up in"business week" magazine, and it's really, really obvious. but you get alittle bit of-- you know, you get thecreative people. there tends to berelatives of people that may have bipolar disorder. there's more techiesin the autism careers.
now the thing is, an autismdiagnosis is not precise. and over the years theykept changing the diagnosis. in the early '90s, theyput in asperger's, where now just geeks and nerds withno speech delay become autistic. then in 2013 they took that out. so now you've got this greatbig mucky autism diagnosis that goes from heads of siliconvalley companies down to people that remain nonverbal andcannot dress themselves. so you've got thishuge spectrum.
ok, maybe that's heresy thati put his picture up here. but i promised that i wouldonly talk about dead ones and stuff i could dig off ofpublicly available things, like a very popularbook that's out now. now the thing i want toget you to think about is what would happento little albert today. little albert einstein. he had no language untilhe was three years old. wasn't very social,liked to line up blocks.
he'd probably be labeledautistic spectrum today. and little stevie. oh, weird loner. this is right out of publiclyavailable information. a weird, weirdloner that brought snakes to his elementaryschool and turned them loose. and then he was bullied andbullied and bullied and teased, and what saved himwas getting out in the neighborhoodcomputer club.
this brings up areally important thing. getting these teenagersthat are kind of different, now today they're gettingaddicted to video games. sometimes gettingaddicted to video games and get an autismdiagnosis and get paid social securityto play video games. you have people saying i'mtoo much down on video games. well, i was just downat jpl yesterday. and if you want towork at jpl all day
and play video games at night, idon't have a problem with that. what i'm gettingconcerned about is the kid that's gettingaddicted to video games and they're notgetting a job at jpl. that concerns mevery, very much. and so he was bullied. and then when he wentto work for atari, he was such a filthy slob theymade him come in at night. no, being a filthyslob's not ok.
and there's a scene in themovie where they slam down a deodorant and theysaid, "you stink. use it." that actually happened. this is where bossesare gonna just have to give some instructionon how to behave at work. and being an absolutely filthy,dirty slob i don't think is gonna be veryacceptable here either. it's just too gross.
now i like to look atpersonality differences sort of like amusic mixing board. it's not black and white. if i get a diagnosis fortuberculosis, that's definite. i either gottuberculosis or i don't. or i've either hadtuberculosis or i didn't. so when i check theaustralian customs form, which i did two monthsago, i can check "i have never had tuberculosis."
that's definite. when you see autism, that'sa much more gray area. geeks and nerds, when doesthat turn into mild autism? no black or white dividing line. it's a continuous trait. and if you got rid ofthis trait completely, you won't haveany new employees. it's just that simple. dr. temple grandin: now iam a total visual thinker.
i think inphoto-realistic pictures. i don't think in words. so when i think aboutdesigning something, i can test run it andsee it in my head in 3d. before 3d virtualreality computer programs were invented, i couldsit in a conference room and they could try stuff. and i could say,well yeah, if you do that, that's not gonna work.
and you might wonderwhy is the chute curved? well, as the cattlecome on around the bend, they think they're goingback to where they came from. and that's one thereasons why that works. i always get asked allthe time questions like, do cows know they'regoing to get slaughtered? i had to answer that questionvery early in my career. and i found they behaved exactlythe same way at a slaughter plant as they behaved going upa chute for the veterinarian.
it's not stress free. but the amount of stress theyhave in both of those places is approximately the same. in fact, i just updated thatliterature for my class slides and it's still the same. they tell us to do bloodsamples in both places. yeah, it can vary from verylittle stress to higher stress, but it's about the same inthe two different places. well, when you're a weird geek,one of the things i've found
is that the way thati had to sell myself was by showing off my work. you sell your workrather than yourself. so i put portfolios together. ok, i'd say the quality of thisprojector's about medium good. dr. temple grandin:i've had ones where it's shown upbetter than this. now the thing is wheni first started out, i'd go to the agengineering meeting
and they thought iwas really weird. no one wanted to talk to me. and then i whipped outa big foldout drawing. then i started to get respect. that's selling your work. and the thing i learnedabout my portfolio, you want to make a portfoliowhere someone looks at it and 30 seconds later it's "wow!" don't put too muchjunk in a portfolio.
you just put enough stuff inthere so look at it really quickly, wow this personreally can do some stuff. now i used to joke aroundthat i had huge internet access to my visual cortex. well, turns out i've got apretty big circuit there. and that's probably in thetop 10% or so of circuits going from thefrontal cortex all the way deep to the backof the visual cortex where the graphics files are stored.
now walter schneider at theuniversity of pittsburgh has a new scanningtechnology, which i'm sure some asperger peoplehad to develop the computer to enable this scanner totrack white matter fibers. so your brain's got thegray matter on the outside. and the inside of thebrain is all white matter, big long axons that go allthe way across the brain that form cable bundles. and this newtechnology can actually
dissect out the cable bundles. it can tell the differencebetween a bridge that cross each otheror an intersection. and that took a lotof computer power, and they can fit it inside abox that walter can pick up. and so i'm anassociative thinker, so start thinkingabout that song. [sings] you can geteight great tomatoes in that itty-bitty can.
that's an ancient oldad for tomato sauce. so that came up. you can get lots of computingin an itty-bitty box. that's sort ofhow my mind works. ok, now this is the cablebundle for speak what you see. and it goes from the visualcortex up to the language area. that's the normal one. and that's mine. and those branches, you can seethey've been truncated there
on that rendering, theyactually go all over the brain. so i basically havegot a search engine-- it's a lot like googlefor images-- where you type in keywords andi get lots of pictures. and they are specific! the thing i find so fascinatingabout search engines is they work just likehow my mind works. well, who made search engines? some people that are muchmore linear in their thinking
don't like the way thesearch engine works. i like the way itworks just fine! and one of the things igotta teach my students is, you gotta use allthe different key words. all right, let's justtake cattle, for example. there's bulls, cows, cattle,bovines, calf, calves. you gotta use allthose different words. that's really obvious to me. and i find if you useall the different words,
you find a lot of papersyou wouldn't find otherwise. now the price i paidfor this circuit is i have less bandwidth forthe speak what you see. so i had speech delay. didn't talk until age four. and i couldn't get my words out. see, there's always a price. this scanner was originally paidfor by the defense department to look at veterans'head injuries.
and if this had beenan injured circuit, it would look like driedspaghetti and went [crunch] and broke about half of them. i'll tell you, thefootball players doesn't look very pretty. ok, now this isanother scan that was done at theuniversity of utah and presented at theneuroscience meeting. and the blue part is basicallyfull of cerebrospinal fluid.
it's full of water. and you can see, i've gota big asymmetry there. i got visual thinking and mymath department got trashed. see, where i think innatedifferences make the biggest difference is either inreal deficit in something or an extremeability in something. yes, there's brain plasticity. but that's happening in thegray matter out on the edges. those big white fiberbundles, i don't
think you grow thosebig axons back. i mean, they're that long. ok malcolm gladwell saysif you have enough practice and you have enoughaccess to services, anyone can learn anything. well, back in '68,bill gates and i had access to this exactsame computer system. i wanted to learn how to programit, it was just hopeless. algebra, just hopeless.
i wanted to becomean expert skier. i could never keepthem together. i could get to the goodintermediate stage. i mean, i couldski recreationally. but get really good? there were other kids, onewinter they'd be experts. well, i just couldn'tdo computer programming, no matter how hard i tried. i agree with gladwell aboutthe practice, and of course,
the access to the teaching. you know, you haveto develop abilities. this is probably one ofmy most important slides. the different kindsof minds slide. i am a photo-realisticvisual thinker. an object visualizer. lot of people in programmingare a pattern visualizer, a spatial visualizer. see, in your brain you havecircuits for what is something?
that's me. and then you got circuitsfor where is something? and people that aresuper good at the where is something locatedin space tend to not be so good at theobject visualization. and the pattern thinkersare also often good at math. these kids often havetrouble with reading. i hear stories where ok, they'rehaving handwriting problems and they won't letthem type a laptop.
that's just stupid. another thing thati hear that's really bad-- politicalcorrectness gone crazy-- is you've got a fourthgrader bored doing baby math. and they make them do babymath and they don't give them the more advanced book. that's just ridiculous. you can get intoa situation where a kid may be gifted in mathbut need special ed in reading.
now i like to bustout of the silos. everybody tends to getinside their own box. there's a text box. there's a farm and ranch box. there's a gifted box. and there's anautism box or silos. and i like to pick outmy speaking engagements so i like to get alittle mixture of all these different things.
because i'm seeing somethingthat kind of disturbs me. i go to an autism meeting anda geeky little 10 year-old walks up to me, a realsmart little 10 year-old, and he's fixated on his autism. and sometimes they get kindof a handicap mentality and they're notlearning basic stuff, like saying pleaseand thank you. learning just basic skills. kind of get over protected.
then i go to a gifted meeting. the same little geekykid comes up to me, but he wants to tell me aboutwhat he saw under the brock magiscope, which is a reallycool little children's microscope. and then i go toa place like this, all full of undiagnosedlittle bit on the spectrum. dr. temple grandin: avoidthe labels like the plague, 'cause it might hold you back.
now where learning about autismcan really help some of you guys here is inyour relationships. you don't need to goout and get diagnosed, but just reading aboutit, that can help you out. and then i go over to the farmand ranch and the meat world, and i go to this bighuge meatpacking plant. and there's this oldgray haired hippie and he runs themaintenance shop. and he's out there playingwith the giant legos putting up
a new cooler. big huge concrete legos, youuse a crane to put them up. and he's pure spectrum, buthe had welding in high school. the worst things they'vedone in the high schools is taken the hands-on classes. in fact, at jpl they make allthe metal parts of something like the mars lander, theymake them there in shops. and they're havingproblems finding who's going to replace themachinists when they retire.
now a third kind of thinkeris the verbal facts thinker. they know everything aboutwhatever their favorite subject is and they're a verbal thinker. now so-callednormal people, they are mixtures of thesedifferent kinds of thinking. but i'm finding, when youget into autism programs, there's an awfullot of smart kids that ought to get headed downa track towards google or jpl, that the teachersand the schools
are having a hardtime shifting gears on how to deal withthe nonverbal kids and they got smart, geeky,kids in that same class. it's a really,really big problem. because i can think ofkids i went to school with when i wasin college that i know are on the spectrum today. but the problem that theparents of little kids have and the schools have,in order to get a service,
you have to have a label. now i don't think it hurtsa kid when he's three to put a label on himto get speech therapy. but then you get the kid that's10 or 12 years old getting bullied in school,and he gets a label because you getbullied in school. and steve jobs was oneof the kids with-- well, they had to take himout of one school, put him in anotherschool in cupertino.
and fortunately, he had adad that had a machine shop. that was another thingthat was his salvation. he was doing hands-on things. now i know thatsteve jobs may not be the best thing tobe mentioning here. but i only can talkabout the dead ones where i have informationi've gotten off of publicly available thingslike books and "business week" magazine, whichi've read carefully.
now in "the autisticbrain" book, i now show evidence thatthese two kinds of visualizers actually do exist. today the schools areall about evidence based. well, marie kozhevnikof's work. surfing the internet, threeo'clock in the morning, i, found her stuff about thetwo kinds of visualizers. this pet brain scanstudy show that these two kinds of visualizers exist.
i was so happywhen i found this. because i had just observedthese things just on my own. and when i did my ted talk, ihadn't found these references yet. and they weren'tvery easy to find. there's kind of a biasabout innate ability. no, everyone's not the same. yes, there's alot of plasticity. you got a lot of peoplehere in the middle.
you can get them prettygood at programming up to here or whatever,but you probably won't get them to here. they can move back andforth in the middle. that gray matter's gota lot of plasticity. but then you've got these greatbig huge white matter cables. well, you're kind ofborn with those things. ok, there's two waysyou can do the math. you can do it theverbal way, or you
can do it the morevisual spatial way. and there's kids that can justdo the math in their head. and the school sayswell, you can't do that. they don't get it thathe thinks differently. well, i'm saying lethim do it in his head. but we will take someprecautions against cheating. so we're going to puthim in a room stripped of everything electronic, andif he can do it, then just absolutely fine.
now i just want toshow you something that's definitely not my mind. that praying mantis ismade out of a single sheet of folded paper. no cutting, no tape. and what you seein the background, that is the folding pattern. and people look atthat and go, wow. well, there's noway i could start
with a square piece of paper andmake it into a praying mantis. that's not my mind. and here are somegreat little origami stars that some kids gave me. well, they need to be inthe advanced math class. now my thing was art. and when i was in elementaryschool, my ability in art was always encouraged. and i was encouraged to dolots of different things.
so i wasn't justdrawing the same horse head over and over again. you gotta take thethings they're fixated on and broaden itout, 'cause you've got to learn how to do stuffother people are going to want. i always like to showmy drawings off again. and here's a beautifulbridge that jessy park drew. she was more moderate. well, her favorite thing usedto be electric blanket controls.
well, we had to gether off of that. and while on thesubject of bridges, i think our governmentsare going crazy when you've got a governorand his aides are deliberately creating trafficjams on a bridge! the one that looksjust like this. this is absolutely ridiculous! they're getting totallyseparated from reality. we have great things goingon with private industry
docking with the space station. but instead wehave a stupid thing on the news this morningabout government officials messing up traffic onpurpose on a bridge, and some dumb thing abouti think sports players getting scared bytheir own mascot. i mean, that was onthe news this morning when i was having breakfast. i think there's moreimportant things
to have on the news than that. and these people, as faras causing a traffic jam on a bridge, that'sthe kind of mindset of about an eight year-old. it's also something thati would have learned when i was eight years oldthat you don't do stuff like that because itinconveniences other people. you don't do thosekind of things 'cause you wouldn't like ifyou were in that traffic jam.
there's some othergorgeous artwork made by a person that wasat mid-level on their autism spectrum. all right, nowi'm gonna tell you math people why you needto have us art minds. one of the things that reallyworries me, with all the stem emphasis-- and we're goingto have to have algebra now. how could i get throughcollege with algebra? know how i got through college?
because thank goodness forthe educational fads of 1967. and in 1967, the requiredmath class was finite math. probability, matrices,and statistics. bit more visual,tons of tutoring. i managed to get through it. but the engineering minddoes need the art mind. 'cause i've learned there'scertain things the engineering mind doesn't see. now what's there?
i don't know if that camefrom-- i got a satellite image. i don't know if it'sgoogle's or not. i did get that off the internet. i certainly wasn't gonnafly over it and get my own picture of thefukushima nuclear power plant. not something you wantto get very, very near, that's for sure. 'cause sometimes the mostobvious is the least obvious. so i was getting all thesenewspapers, all this stuff,
and reading aboutit on a plane 'cause i find this stuff interesting. and when i found outwhy this happened, i'm going how could you do this? i can't design a nuclearreactor, there's no way. but if i had been drawing theconcrete work for the plant and doing my siteelevation drawings, there's no way i would havemade a mistake they made. all i have to knowabout a nuclear reactor
is if the emergency pump failsto work after you've scrammed it-- see it doesn't quite getturned off all the way-- it burns up and you're in somuch trouble it's not funny. that's all i haveto know about it. well ok, earthquake broke allthe power lines and everything. there's no electric powerto run the main stuff, so they had to scram it. and what happened isthe emergency generators that ran the emergencyequipment were
in a non-waterproof basement. how could you make amistake that basic? now when i was young, i usedto think, well stupidity. no. i found the mathematicalmind doesn't see it. i could see the water smashingout the baby blue louvers. this plant was paintedbaby blue, of all colors, with little clouds onthe top of the boxes, make it lookinnocent and pretty.
see those baby bluelouvers getting busted out. and two seconds later,those big generators, all the electricpanels under water, and it's not going to work. there's no way iwould have done that. i mean, i would've been goingto every shipbuilding company that there was and say, i wantcatalogs on all your waterproof doors. i want to try out allyour waterproof doors.
i want to find waterproof doorsthat are really easy to open, don't have to have trainingto open and close them, close really tight, obviouswhen they're closed. and it wouldn't have happened. this is why you really need allthe different kinds of minds. now i've been thinking abouta lot of other things too. you see, 'cause i can visualizeways that it can break. especially anythingmechanical sort of stuff. ok, steve jobs went to college.
and he also did a calligraphyclass, which he didn't pay for. but it reallyinfluenced computing, and all the computers havenice fonts as a result of that. and he was an artist. he developed theinterface for the phones. oh, and i know there's alot of bad blood going on with the lawsuits. i read all about that. steve wanted to gothermonuclear on android.
i know all aboutthat kind of stuff. but again, i can onlytalk about the dead ones. so that's the reasonwhy i have these slides. but one of the pointi'm trying to get across is he wasn't an engineer. this is where youneed to have the art mind and the engineering mindsworking together on projects. they have complementary skills. well, there's a bigdebate right now
that maybe humanities programsare just useless in colleges. i was at a state about two yearsago that'll remain nameless. but their governorsaid they wanted to charge extratuition at the state university forhumanities classes. and so the "chronicleof higher education" david barash said that theconnection between steve jobs and so-called useless humanitiesprograms, such as calligraphy, cannot be ignored.
now one thing about calligraphyis it's a hands-on class. you actually have to do it. and there is a needfor humanities. i thought this wasreally interesting. you want evidence based? "science," thepremiere journal, that when students readserious literary fiction, helps them with someof their social skills, rather than just readingthe latest steven king
or something like that,or michael chrichton. i have to say,those are the kind of books i like when i'mon a long airplane flight and it's really boring. ok, some of the other worki've done with livestock was to look at the thingsthat they're scared of. they're going up a chutein a strange place, meat plant for example. they were afraid of alot of little things.
shadows, reflections,chains hanging down, seeing people standing up ahead. things that wetend to not notice. and if you take thosedistractions out, maybe change a light to get rid of areflection, add a light 'cause they don't likegoing to a dark hole, then they would move throughthe chute more easily, especially when it wasin a strange place. now how many peoplehere noticed this animal
is locked onto thatsunbeam like radar? raise your hand ifyou noticed that. ok, we're doingpretty good here. jpl a little bitbetter than here. well see, that's purely thevisual thinking sort of stuff. well i know there's some peopleinterested in animal issues, so i think i'lltalk a little bit about some of thethings i've done. when i was young,i used to think
i could fix everythingwith equipment. if i could just buildthe right magic system, everything would be perfect. what i found is equipment'sonly half the equation. the other half ismanagement, and management wanting to do things right. now i have a saying. heat softens steel. and then people like me whowant to reform things can now
shape it and bend itinto pretty grill work. and when mcdonald's,back in 1997, decided that they weregoing to do something about bad stuff goingon in slaughterhouses, that resulted ina lot of change. and it was my jobto implement it. and i came up with a verysimple scoring system that was like trafficrules for slaughter houses. and if you didn't follow certainrules and make certain numbers,
you failed the mcdonald's audit. 95% of the cattle deadon the first shot or you fail the audit. you've got to get them alldead before you hang them up. only three animals areallowed to moo and bellow in the stunning area. only 1% falling. and if you want a realexcellent score, only 5% can get hit withthe electric prod
if you want excellent score. simple, very simple. you see, these areoutcome measures. i'm not telling youhow to build the plant. they are very simpleoutcome measures. and it worked because it wasvery objective and very, very simple. when big customers say thatsomething's got to be changed, then things aregoing to be changed.
walmart has just comeout with a big statement they came out with two daysago on putting video cameras in swine houses to makesure people aren't beating the pigs up with gate rods orthrowing up piglets or doing some other reallynasty thing like that. i'm sure you've all seenthat show "undercover boss." i think that's a great show. i saw those kind of bosses'eyes opened up moments when i took someof the executives
from some of the large hamburgerrestaurants on their first trip to farms and slaughterhouses. i remember the day-- thiswas back in 1999 or 1998, around that time-- whenone of the executives saw a half-dead dairy cowgo into their product. boy, that was a realundercover boss moment. i'd like to doanother show called "undercover legislature." dr. temple grandin:ok, let's take
people who do thingslike deliberately cause traffic jams. and we've got a real, realspecial trailer set up for them. it's about 10 milesfrom the local walmart. and we're going todrop him off there. he'll just have his licensein his wallet, that's all. there'll be a $50 debit cardon the counter, a walmart pen, couple of beans on the shelf,this much gas in the car.
ok, you report to worktomorrow at walmart. you're going to bethere for two months. and we've taken away yourmedical insurance card. let's let them get a taste ofwhat some people are actually up against. living in a totalrarefied world. now look at how thehorse and the zebra put an ear on each other. and then the other ear is on me.
watch, animals it'sall about details. all about details. well, there's what theentrance to a slaughter plant looks like. in fact, i saw your greatgoogle earth thing there. think i'll go googleearth a few of my jobs. that's always fun. and i show thisslide to my students and i'll say, oknow tell me what
i can improve here,what is bad here. well, with one thing that'sgood is inside the tunnel, i got white translucent plastic. so they're not goinginto a dark hole. but the bad thing is--and i'd say about half my students don'tnotice it-- is you've got three people standingright where they should not be standing. then sometimes the mostobvious is the least obvious.
now there's evidence thatin the normal human brain, language covers upart and mathematics. because there's a typeof alzheimer's that when the language parts ofthe brain get wrecked, art comes out for aboutthree or four years. and when van gogh waspainting "starry night," i don't think he realized hewas putting mathematics on it. and there's going to bea new book coming out on a guy who got in a bar fightand got bashed on the head.
and now he's a mathematicianstudying physics. sort of got his innermathematician turned loose. yep, there's a lotof things that we don't know about the brain. now an important thing,understanding someone who thinks the way i do,is i'm a bottom up thinker. my approach to things,it was my same approach on developing equipmentfor livestock, was to go around and look atall of the state of the art.
you go download, you'dget all the patents. well, we couldn't downloadthem when i was doing it. we had to write to thepatent office and get them. it was a real pain. but you'd get allthe patents, you'd get all the state of the art. go around, visitall these places and try to get the good ideas,chuck out the bad ideas. in other words, it's bottom upthinking rather than top down.
well today what's happening,especially in those government stuff, too much top down. very vague things. but concepts are formedby specific examples. when i was a youngchild, cats and dogs. ok, all the cat picturesin this file, all the dog pictures in this file. well, when i was very young,i could sort cats from dogs by size.
until our next doorneighbor got a daschund. ok, now i can no longer usesize as a visual criterion for cat versus dog. so then i noticed theyall had the same nose shape if they were dogs. so that was a visual featurethat every dog has got. everything's learnedby specific example. so how do i learn whatbeing nice or being bad is? well, my mother wouldjust correct me.
forgot to say please? well, say please. that's nice behavior. you wait politely in lineat the movie theater. you want to teach somethinglike up or down, gotta use a lot of different examples. because there's some kidswith autism where if you say, put that in, justgoes in the garbage. they need to learn that couldbe put that in the drawer,
in the cupboard,in something else. not necessarily inthe garbage can. so up can walk up thestairs, i lifted up a cup, the plane flew up in the air. lot of different examples. my thinking is associative, justlike how a search engine works. so if i'm at the chicagoairport-- there quite often-- ok, i'll look at that. now i can start looking throughgoogle for images of my head.
a glass structure category,start going through that. or i could start offin an airport category. there are nogeneralized pictures. this was somethingthat was really a breakthrough in my thinkingwhen i did the church steeple as my questionrather than house or a car. something that people weren'tquite so familiar with. ok, glass structure. biosphere in arizona,crystal palace,
greenhouse at colorado state. now when i'm onthis subject, i now am seeing a building that'snow under construction. now i'm seeing other buildingsthat were under construction and the contractors used up 25of our super valuable parking spaces for their trailers. ok, so that's how i gotfrom glass structures to contractor trailers. real sore point with me.
i wasn't home whenthey did that. i think i would have walked outthere like i owned the place and told them tomove their trailers. but once they got established,then you're just stuck with it. did they ask permission toput those trailers there? i'm sure they did not. ok, airport category. now when you think aboutreally big amounts of money, let's start thinkingabout it in something
the public can understand. this is worth $5 billion. and they're building a newlight rail and a new westin. i gotta get the pricefor that 'cause that's going to be quite a lotmore than $5 billion when that's done. but if we startthinking about some of these big amounts of moneyin something real like airport units, then people canreally put it in perspective.
so you got denver airport,dallas-fort worth, minneapolis, atlanta. and you've got the grungyold terminal at laguardia. and it'd be fun toexplore that place. and when i asked anastrophysicist about the church steeples, he saw a motion ofpeople singing and praying. i go, oh wow. trippy. that is definitely not my mind.
now cattle will make a category. if they get used to beinghandled by a man on a horse, they've learned that's safe. the first time they see theman on the ground, they panic. you see, it's different. it's a different picture. i've learned man onthe horse is safe. man on the ground'snew and scary. i can also learn that manon the ground is safe.
but that's somethingtotally novel. you see, most people wouldn'tthink the man on the ground is something novel. now i find when you're tryingto categorize problems, a lot of people havetrouble categorizing where's a problem coming from? ok, if i got somethingwrong in a factory, is there's something wrongwith the equipment or something wrong with how people areoperating that equipment?
i find people often don'tmake that differentiation. if it's equipmentproblem, is it a glitch? course with the meat plant--and i've done a lot of work with them- stuck trolley. or is it a fundamentaldesign problem? they don't make thatdifferentiation. i've got a problemwith a kid in school. does he have abiological problem? maybe his tummy hurts so muchthat he can't pay attention
in school. or does he just notwant to do the work? it's just strictly behavior? top down thinkers tend toovergeneralize, especially when they're not doingpractical things anymore. well, i got this out ofone of the tech magazines about dog fooding. you know, you gotta usethe stuff that you make. then you really find outif it actually works.
policymakers need tobe directly experience the consequencesof their policies. and if you want to mess uptraffic and cause a traffic jam, then you need to be stuckin the middle of the worst traffic jam. well, there arethe guys up at jpl. it was very cool toget to meet them. you know, kind ofunconventional. it's ok to be eccentric.
that's ok. some of the most creative peopleare really, really eccentric and they're doingmarvelous things. and in talking tothe public, we need to tell the public well,what are some of the spin offs from maybe someof the jpl stuff? not stuff from the '60s. that's ancient history. let's look at inventionsin the last 10 or 15 years.
how about theactive pixel sensor? that's the heart ofthe cell phone camera. how about codingthat's involved that will help the phone to workfrom one cell phone tower to another cell phone tower? how about a massspectrometer this big? yeah, we have mass spectrometersthe size of a giant desk. well, you can puta sample in that and it'll tell youwhat chemical's in it.
well that would have a lotof really good useful uses. well, i was more interested inlooking at pictures of things than pictures of people. but we need peopleinterested in things. 'cause the socialyakity-yaks aren't going to solve someof the energy problems and stuff like that. let's have some of thekids that are different. i don't care ifthey're labeled gifted,
they're labeled quirky,weird, nerds, or mild autism. one thing you gotta do withthese kids when they're young is you gotta stretch them justoutside their comfort zone. and the other thing is we needto be learning job skills. that needs to start at age 12. we need to find paperroute substitutes. things like walkingdogs for the neighbors, things like maybe settingup chairs at the community center, something like that.
one place where all my teachersand everybody drew a line, i wasn't allowed to becomea recluse in my room. that was absolutely not allowed. i had to get out and do things. kids aren't doingfree play, which teaches valuable social skills. you know, dogs need to dothis too when they're young. because if dogs don't dothis when they're young, then they fight other dogsreally viciously 'cause
they never learnedhow to get along. taking out the hands-onclasses was the worst thing the schools ever did. they took out cooking, sewing,woodworking, machine shop, welding. we have a shortageof skilled trades. i mean, jpl needs peopleto make the wheels and stuff for the mars lander. oh, there's somethingreally cool and really geeky
about the wheels of "curiosity." i'm gonna just letyou figure it out. and i don't know if i'msupposed to tell you or not. but it's so geeky and anti-suit,it's just really, really cool. but they need to havethose machinists. it's not going towork without them. the other thing that's bad abouttaking out hands-on classes is we're losing resourcefulproblem solving. even something assimple with cooking.
you're missing an ingredient? can you do it withanother ingredient? 'course in the '50s,girls were taught sewing. so i had a wonderfultoy sewing machine. i was in fourth grade. and i remember one projectwhere i cut the fabric wrong and i ruined itas i got in rush. some of the things you learnfrom doing hands on things. this is the stuff that saved me.
these were things that wererefuges away from teasing. kids that did the teasing werenot interested in woodworking or interested in riding horses. i was also an estesmodel rocketer. a i loved model rockets. i was in the model rocket club. and i was horrified goon the estes website about a month ago, and youcan buy a ready-made rocket. that is disgusting!
dr. temple grandin: thewhole point is to build them. and i made a few pointswith the other kids when i made a rocket thatlooked like our headmaster, a mr. [inaudible]. and he was aerodynamicallystable and he flew. dr. temple grandin: and ididn't do much studying, but i was in a specialboarding school for gifted kids with alot of emotional problems. and instead of studying,i was remodeling
our [inaudible] house. but the headmaster letme do that because i was learning work skills. and a lot of these kids arenot learning work skills. i cleaned a lot of horsestalls too when i was 15. lots and lots of them. and i was responsiblefor the horse barn and making sure i alwaysclosed the feed box. gotta always close thegrain box because a horse
dies if eats outof the grain box. you've got to close it. i think we need to limitscreen time with little kids. the thing that i'mfinding with electronics and with little kidsis yeah, little kids want to play with electronics. but we need to getthat teacher in there and get them taking turns. these kids have got tolearn how to take turns.
well, i think we need tostart making connections, physical connectionsbetween the virtual world and the real world. and one really enterprising mom,she went to the lumber yard, got some two by fourscut up, and then she brought them allhome to the driveway and had the kidspaint them to make minecraft blocksin the driveway. in other words, linking theonline world to the real world.
then her little autistic kidhad lots of friends coming over to play with theminecraft blocks. activities with animals. get kids involved in activitiesthey can do with other kids. 4h, ffa, robotics clubs,maker bot, 3d printing clubs. get them involvedin these things. my ability in art wasalways encouraged. we need to be workingon building up the area of strength.
the kid's good at math, lethim do more advanced classes. use fixations to motivate. great online sources. now i was readingthat on audacity or some of these thingslike this, that only 4% of the people tookthe entire class. i don't consider that a failure. because there's anawful lot of people that might want to just lookat some programming stuff
and just take a couple oflessons to learn something they needed for work. because back when i was doinghydraulic stuff all the time, i had all thesebooks for hydraulics. and i didn't needalgebra, 'cause i had all these tables forthings like fluid flow. look it up in the tables. and when i first startedout, i took the first book and i did read thefirst book pretty well.
but i didn't read all the books. i used them as reference books. i think the thing they need tolook at is how many of those people that went on udacity tooka few lessons as a reference and it helped themin their work. i think that's somethingthat needs to be looked at. but i show this toa lot of parents that don't realize there's alot of free stuff out there. and we gotta do somethingabout rural internet access.
it is beyond awful. you cannot play videos. and you go out inthe rural areas, you still got the momand pop dvd stores because they don'thave movies otherwise. it is atrocious. well, there's theoptical illusion room. i got fixated on that. and the movie did a nicejob of showing me making it.
and there's one of mydesigns in sketchup. i know you don't own itanymore, but it's great. i've seen some reallygreat things going on with teenage kidsdoing sketchup, and then they're printing theirstuff out with 3d printers. really, really cool stuff. and i really likedthis warning they had on the maker bot website. you need patience-- that's kindof a fiddly little machine.
you get mad at it,you're going to break it. knowhow and a senseof adventure required. i really liked that thingthey wrote on the website. yeah, you don't design itright, your little thing is going to collapse in goo. you're getting backto the real world. the other thing on somethinglike this, people say well, they can't afford that. ok, it's $1,500, $2,000.
look at all the money'sgetting spent on sports. that's the price of one majorleague football uniform. it's all it costs. maybe two high school uniforms. it's not very much money. i don't want to hear that. now that's just a kind ofneat little thing i made. and this is some viewsthrough the brock magiscope, a great little really adorablelittle child's microscopes.
it's $150. no fiddly mirror. very easy for kids to use. you don't have aglass slide in it. and i was so happy togo to gifted conference. it wasn't the autism conference. i wish this had been atthe autism conference. it was at the gifted conference. we had a hotel roomabout the size of this.
and all these kids, they'dput the electronics away and they were playingwith the brock magiscope. and they're looking atpond scum and leaves. and it was really cool. just got to show people. and you guys know about thisstuff that's on the internet. but i do a lot of talksin a lot of places, and i just want to givepeople ideas of cool things that are out there.
there's some evidence that kidslearning to write sometimes can help them on reading. on learning reading, maybe turnoff all the bells and whistles and use the plain ebook, maybejust with still pictures. and you have them read to them. and they're learninga story better. and again, this is refereed. scientific stuff. we're going evidence based here.
well, people need totouch to perceive. i had a really goodtime over at pixar. they found thatsometimes they gotta get them off the computersand get them actually drawing. and when they printtheir figurines out on their 3d printer, they putthem around the computer mouse so they could touch them. you gotta touch to see. gotta do that.
science teacher. boy, he helped me. well, he was a nasaspace scientist. was he a credited teacher? no stupid ed courses for him. we gotta get back to doingreal things in this country. that's what we gotta do. dr. temple grandin: onething a lot of employers want today is studentswho know how to work.
this came up in a lot of things. i learned to sellmy work, not myself. also in working with some ofthe people that are different, you don't take thatemployee and go, well just develop some new software. you want to say ok, i want tomake an app for the android phone and it doesthis specific thing, it uses thislanguage, this memory. you don't tell themhow do it, but it's
got certain parameters. then ok, that's easy to do. and when mistakesare made, the boss needs to just pull themaside in the office quietly, no yelling and screaming,and say, well you know, we had the projectmeeting last week and you called jim a jerkin front of the other five colleagues. that's not the googleway of doing things.
just don't do that. and i learned you canget some people that will sabotage a projectdue to jealousy. that was very, very difficultfor me to deal with. and then you get otherpeople where they just think differently. you kind of differentiatebetween the two. well, if i in was in a plant,on of my meat plant projects, and the plant engineer'ssitting like this--
i was hired by themanager, he didn't like this weird geekcoming on his turf. i would pull him into project. and that oftentimesstopped that. ok, tour guide. great job for 12 year-olds. you gotta demonstratethe correct distance to get from the visitor. demonstrate thecorrect greeting.
it's just like coachingsomebody in a foreign country. and there's sensory issues. some people just can'tstand a lot of noise, can't stand 60 cyclefluorescent lights. you got a lot ofsensory issues, and they can vary from being verymild to being very severe. this needs to beresearched, and how to treat some of these problems. when i was a little kid,loud sounds hurt my ears.
i still absolutely hate thevacuum toilets in airplanes. and if i'd had to dealwith those when i was five, i would have been sure i'd besucked out of the airplane. my visual thinking mind wentwild when i was six years old and they wereremodeling our house. they had this big circularsaw and i was afraid that maybe itsblade would come up through the floor of my room. which was just ludicrous.
but when you'remaybe six years old, it wasn't quite so ludicrous. i had trouble hearinghard constant sounds. so my speechteacher slowed down, enunciated the hard consonants. she'd say cup, andthen shed say cuh-puh. slow down, enunciate itso that i could hear it. attention shifting. i have problems with this.
somebody rings acellphone off, i orient. takes me much longerto shift back. attention shifting slowness. some people whenthey go to read, the print willjiggle on the page. that's probablyabout 10% of students that are having sometrouble in college. doesn't explain all autism. it doesn't explain all dyslexia.
but there's something wrongwith the circuits back here. shape, color, emotion, texture. they're not mergingtogether right. and sometimes they can befixed with a very simple thing. like pale pink glasses,pale lavender glasses, different print your work onsome different colored papers, maybe try differentbackground on colors on the computer screen,different fonts. now wouldn't it bestupid to lose a job
or flunk out of school'cause you didn't do this? i'm finding oneout of 50 has got this problem in mylivestock handling class. because they do really horribleon my drawing assignment. they cannot draw. if i say draw this,they're drawing. that's what they draw. they don't see it. well, there's my head.
well, and that's all thewhite matter that's inside. and the gray matter-- thisis not lining up right. something got changed here. there should be a little spacethere for the gray matter. something got out ofsync there on that. and that's all thecircuits, the cable bundles that are the interofficecommunication. that's where youhave differences in developmental problem.
well, my fear centerwas bigger than normal. well, that's controlled nowwith antidepressant medication. little prozac us visualthinkers, panic monsters. i know a lot ofvisual thinkers where a little dab of prozac in themorning, or lexapro or zoloft, stops the anxiety. then you're not getting whackedout on drugs and alcohol. cerebellum's smaller, soi've got really bad balance. simple accommodationsin the workplace.
some people have gottaget away from the 60 cycle fluorescent lights. they need a quiet place to work. open office plan and i gotta doserious writing, doesn't work. the other thingthat doesn't work with people that areon the autism spectrum is a sudden changein work routine. they come into workand they just go ok, we're yanking out allthe office cubicles today
and we're going to move them. ok, if we're going to dothat, let's have some warning. maybe a week atleast of warning. and i still can'ttolerate scratchy clothes. scratchy clothes just horrible. like sandpaper. some cotton itches, othercotton doesn't itch. now the thing is it'sok for geeks to cry. when the spaceshuttle got shut down,
there were a lot of peoplecrying on "60 minutes." and i got thrown outof a large girls school for throwing a book ata girl who teased me. and when i went toboarding school, i got in a fistfightin the cafeteria after a guy calledname some name. and they took horsebackriding away for two weeks. i still had to clean thebarn, but no horseback riding. and somehow iswitched to crying.
it's ok for geeks to cry. that's perfectly ok. and i would go and hidein the electrical room, because the tech companiesdon't tolerate any violence. dr. temple grandin:i have to say that it made me chuckle tolook in the clean room at jpl and here's this big giantcraftsman tool chest there. to think that bolts on the marslander were tightened by a tool kept in a craftsman tools chest.
but you better notthrow that tool, otherwise it's bye-bye job. it's that simple. it takes a villageto raise a child. we gotta figureout how we can all work together tomake things work. because i'm seeingtoo many smart kids going down the wrong road. i go to the gifted meeting,he's going down one road.
i go to the autismmeeting, and you've got one situationwhere a kid that ought to be headed forgoogle is put in a class with kids that don't talk. then i go to anotherschool system and he's headed in the rightdirection really beautifully. it's very, very, very variable. but these two silos don't talk. because if i look at the booktable for the gifted meeting
and the autismmeeting, there might be a 5% overlap in the books. there should be more likea 25% overlap in the books. they're not talkingto each other. we gotta get people together. as i say, one geek goes togoogle in silicon valley, maybe jpl. there's another geek that goesto hollywood and that stuff. and unfortunately,there's a brilliant geek
that is going to the basementto play video games for 10 hours a day and he getssocial security for it. that's not wherei want him going. we've got to reachout, get to these kids. and you know what? we gotta hook themin middle school. middle school is wherewe gotta hook them. and some states now areputting skilled trades back in. ok, i think that finishesup what i have to say.
but i've got time for questions. always like to dosome questions. audience: i'm curious overthe course of your career, you've shared a lotof the insights you had about the experience ofanimals in slaughterhouses. i'm curious aboutwhat kinds of things you learned over your career. like where maybeyou can look back on some of your earlierwork and see oh, this
is what i understand somuch more deeply now? dr. temple grandin: well,there's a lot of things, i mean, for onething in the '70s, my first professional groupwas the american society of agriculturalengineering i thought i could fix the worldwith engineering. i absolutely believedthat everything could be fixed with engineering. i now realize only half of itcan be fixed with engineering.
and i had a majorequipment failure, which was a real epiphany. i was hired by a company in1980 to run the old slaughter plants. the pigs had to walkup to the third floor in the real old plants. and they wanted me tobuild a conveyor system to put in the floor of the chuteto take the pigs up this ramp. and i said, i'll design that.
well, the problem is it flippedall the pigs over backwards. and it did not work andwe had to tear it out. but then i startedrealizing now why are some pigs not capableof walking up this ramp? well, i start gettingthe id numbers off of the differentpigs and i found out that all the pigs that aproblem came from one farm. and they had a genetic problemcalled spraddle leg, where the hips are very, very weak.
what i should have done, bytrying to make a conveyor, that was treating asymptom of a problem. we should have goneback to the source. for a fraction of the costof this mess that we had, we could have bought thatfarm new boars-- five or six new boars is all itwould have taken, just a few thousanddollars-- and gotten rid of that genetic problem. would have solved it.
one thing i learnedfrom that is you've got the treat problemat its source, rather than treating asymptom of a problem. now i went into about a sixmonth depression over that. that was not fun. but i learned a reallyimportant lesson from that. audience: thank you. female speaker: sowe're out of time now. so please everybodyjoin me in thanking
temple grandin forcoming to google. [music playing]