Ladies and gentlemen, it's my pleasure to
welcome to the stage tonight
Distinguished Speaker Dr. Temple
Grandin.
It's really great to be here, lots of
things to talk about tonight. I think one
of the first things talk about is always
get asked about, what exactly is Autism.
Well it goes all the way from uh,
someone like Einstein who had no
language 'til age three, to somebody that can't dress
themselves. See a little bit of that trait
gives some advantage, too much of the
trait, you're going to have a whole lot
of problems. And I want to help the kids
that think differently to go out there
and be everything they can be. Let's
look at research of some of the really
creative minds out there. Uh, many of
them did not complete a conventional
path, now there's a lot of others that did. I
looked up a lot of people putting a
slideshow, and I found a lot of people
that did go on a conventional path. But
I'm worried today with the way education
is going, that a lot of that sort of
kind of different kind of creatives are
going to get screened out. Uh, they also did
not over specialize. Okay, this is one of
my most important slides. This is a
different kinds of thinking. When I first
started my career, I thought everybody
was a visual thinker like me, because I
think in pictures. Everything I think
about is in pictures.
I'm a photo-realistic visual thinker. Now
another kind of mind is the pattern
thinker, this is your mathematician. Thinks
in patterns instead of pictures. So that
was your engineers, your mathematicians.
And then the object visualizers, they're the
industrial designers. Then you have the
word thinker.
These are the kids that love history,
they love words. They're not
mathematicians, they're not visual
thinkers are not the kids that are going to
go into engineering. But they might be
really good at something like
specialized retail, they'll know everything in
the store. Now there's scientific
evidence to show that these different
kinds of thinking actually exist, and
those references to those scientific studies
are in my book, the um,
The Autistic
Brain. You want evidence-based, I can give you
evidenced-based on this. Well artificial
intelligence is going to not replace the
general practitioner, I talked to some
students today, and they thought the general
practice doctor would get replaced by
AI no, it's going to be the super
specialist that's gonna get
replaced. Radiology, yup AI can already do
that better. Now the thing is, both an artificial
intelligence program and someone like me
is a bottom of thinker. You take
information and put it into categories,
so when you train the AI program you
showed a whole bunch x-rays, ok he's this
these ones got cancer, and these ones
don't. Then you have a whole lot of experts put the data
in there. In Autism, concepts are formed
from specific examples. When I was a
little kid, I sorted dogs from cats, and I
did it by size. And then our next door
neighbours got a dachshund, I could no
longer sort dogs and cats by size. So I
had to find another sensory-based
feature I could sort them with. Barking
and smell, also nose shape. Now the
problem with top-down thinking, is they
tend to over generalize. When you think
in words, you overgeneralize. One thing I'm
very concerned about, a lot of policy
stuff, is people are getting too
abstract. Let's just take animal issues, for
example. Back in the seventies you had
people right and left on the issue,
things were more moderate. But now you've
got people where it's all theory, they're a
philosopher or they're lawyer. They haven't
been doing hands-on. See, hands-on stuff
in anything teaches practical problem
solving, and, and top-down thinking and
policy, overgeneralize. They gotta
get out in the field and find out what's
happening. Okay, what would happen to
child-like me today? I had no speech until
age four, I would get really good early
intervention. That is something that
would be done with me today. When I was
three, I had really severe symptoms of
autism. And then you can add the kid that
has no speech delay. Those have a lot of
overlap with ADHD. People get way too
hung up on these labels, they're not accurate.
I'm trained as a hardcore scientist. You
know, if you got tuberculosis or
something like that, they can tell you
exactly what
strain of tuberculosis you got. It's a hardcore
definitive test. You know, Autism, you know a little
bit of Autism is geeks and nerds.
I've been out to Silicon Valley, I've been
to those places.
Well half the programmers are a little bit on
the spectrum. The thing is, a brain can
be more thinking, or brain can be more
social-emotional. Now, I get asked all the
time how do you tell what kind of
thinker a little kid is? It's not gonna
show up in kindergarten, it usually
really shows up third or fourth grade.
That's when my art-ability really showed up.
You got a third-grader they can do
higher math, don't make them to the baby
stuff. Like Catherine Johnson, they were
giving her college books like in sixth
grade, let her move ahead. I've had
teachers go, "oh but that's not
age-appropriate," I'm going bull, you know
what.
That's just bull, that's all this is. 'Cause
I wanna see the kid go out and be successful.
Get into a career that they are going to
like. Take the thing the kid is
interested in, and broaden it. He likes trains,
ok let's do mathematics with trains, we can
read about trains. Let's uh, draw a picture
of the station. You know, take that thing
and broaden it out.
I spent hours experimenting with
little kites. There's a lot of kids today that, they're scared
to make a mistake. I spent hours and hours
making things. In high school I rode
horses, I worked with cattle, I learned
carpentry. Um, I had a very
interesting experimental psychology
class where that optical illusions in it.
And I was a poor student except for
reading, writing, and biology. My reading
and writing was, by the time I was in
seventh grade, was real real super good.
Math, well that was terrible. Uh, here's my work
experience. Mother got me a little sewing
job at 13 and the cash economy. Horse, uh,
horse stall cleaning at 15, I basically
ran a horse barn when I was 15, 16, 17,
years old.
Roofing at sixteen, most fun I ever had.
Now I was weird.
So when you're weird, what you gotta do
is you gotta show off your work. You sell
your work, rather than yourself. So I go
into an interview, I put the drawings out
on the table. And when I'd whip one of
those out, and it was not a powerpoint
back in these days it was a big foldout
thing, they went wow, you did that?
Showing off the work, you sell your work.
There's my brochure, real professional-
looking brochure, nothing on there about
autism. And I lived in the, and I lived
in The Oasis Apartments, doesn't sound
real classy, does it. So I renamed it the
Oasis Building Suite 218.
Not Oasis Apartments,
apartment 218.
No Google street view to give me away in
the seventies.
Let's look at who builds a big
complicated place, like a big food plant.
This has been true for everyone I've
worked at, every, all of the major
companies. The visual thinkers work down
in the Drafting Department, and they lay
out the complicated conveyors. And then
the quirky guys in the shop invent
the new equipment, and you degreed
engineer, we need you!
Boilers, refrigeration, the soil work,
civil engineering stuff. We need the
different kinds of minds. But you know what,
having problems today finding a good
visual thinkers, yeah they're addicted to
video games
rather than, uh, building things with
welders and building things in the shop.
The drafting has gotten
absolutely positively disgusting because people are
drawing things on a computer, but they're
not seeing the drawings. See the problem
is, is that the person that draws that
drawing has never drawn by hand. So, you
make mistakes like not knowing what's
out of the circle is and they've never built
anything. And uh, it's not good because you
need that visual side of engineering.
Oftentimes it doesn't get enough credit.
One thing I can say for meat clients, is they're
really Democratic. The engineers and
the drafting all get to located in the
boiler room. Another big argument that
you get into in science, is observation
part of science, yes it is!
What's astronomy, you observe. You know, some
people think to be science you gotta
have a controlled experiment. Yes, that's an important
part of science, but how about
epidemiology? Get a case of food
poisoning here, and get another case over
there and you have to piece the pieces
together. See that's bottom-up thinking; it's
a science.
And when I learned that my visual
thinking was different, it gave me a
lot of insight. I made the mistake on one
job, they yanked a bunch of rails out of the
ceiling, and I said well couldn't they see
it?
Well I found out the mathematicians
don't see it.
Let's take the iPhone. Steve Jobs was an
artist. He made the interface that's easy
to use. The engineers had to make it work.
That's the different kinds of minds
working together. But I'm getting
concerned that with some of the changes in
education we're screening out too many
of our visual thinkers we need them.