00:10 I think I'll start out and just talk a 00:17 little bit about what exactly autism is 00:19 autism is a very big continuum that goes 00:22 from very severe the child remains 00:24 nonverbal all the way up to brilliant 00:26 scientists and engineers and I actually 00:29 feel at home here because it's a lot of 00:30 autism genetics here you wouldn't have 00:33 any it's a continuum of traits when does 00:40 a nerd turn into you know Asperger which 00:44 is just mild autism 00:45 I mean Einstein and Mozart and Tesla 00:48 would all be probably diagnosed as 00:50 autistic spectrum today and one of the 00:54 things that really is going to concern 00:55 me is getting these kids to to be the 00:58 ones that are going to invent the next 00:59 two energy things now that Bill Gates 01:01 talked about this morning okay 01:04 now if you want to understand autism 01:06 animals and I want to talk to you about 01:08 different ways of thinking you have to 01:11 get away from verbal language I think in 01:14 pictures I don't think in language now 01:18 the thing about the autistic mind is it 01:20 attends to details okay this is a test 01:23 where you either have to pick out the 01:25 big letters or pick out the little 01:26 letters and the autistic mind picks out 01:29 the little letters more quickly and the 01:32 thing is the normal brain ignores the 01:34 details well if you're building a fridge 01:36 details are pretty important because 01:38 I'll fall down if you ignore the details 01:39 and one of my big concerns is a lot of 01:42 policy things today is things are 01:44 getting too abstract people are getting 01:46 away from doing hands-on stuff I'm 01:49 really concerned that a lot of the 01:50 schools have taken out the hands-on 01:52 classes because art and classes like 01:54 that those are the classes where I 01:56 accept okay in my work with cattle I 01:59 noticed a lot of little things that most 02:01 people don't notice would make the 02:02 cattle book like for example is flag 02:04 waving right in front of the veterinary 02:06 facility this feed yard was going to 02:08 tear down their whole veterinary 02:09 facility all they needed to do was move 02:11 the flag rapid movement contrast in the 02:15 early 70s when I started I got right 02:17 down in the chutes to see what cattle 02:18 were seeing people thought that was 02:19 crazy a code on offense would make em 02:21 block shadows would make them bark a 02:23 whole 02:24 was on the floor people weren't noticing 02:26 these things a chain hanging down and 02:28 that's shown very very nicely in the 02:30 movie in fact I loved the movie how they 02:32 duplicated all my projects 02:34 that's the geek side my drawings got the 02:37 star in the movie too and actually it's 02:39 called Temple Grandin not thinking in 02:41 pictures so what is thinking in pictures 02:43 it's literally movies in your hat my 02:46 mind works like Google for Images now 02:49 when I was a young kid I didn't know my 02:50 thinking was different I thought 02:51 everybody thought in pictures and then 02:53 when I did my book thinking in pictures 02:54 I started interviewing people about how 02:57 they think you know shocked to find out 02:59 that my thinking was quite different 03:01 like if I say think about a church 03:03 steeple most people get this sort of 03:05 generalized generic one now maybe that's 03:07 not true in this room but it's going to 03:09 be true in a lot of different places 03:11 I see only specific pictures they flash 03:15 up into my memory just like Google for 03:17 pictures and in the movie they've got a 03:19 great scene in there where the word shoe 03:21 is said in a whole bunch of 50s and 60s 03:23 shoes pop into my imagination okay 03:27 there's my childhood Church that's 03:28 specific there's some more Fort Collins 03:31 okay how about famous ones and they just 03:34 kind of come up kind of like this just 03:36 really quickly like Google for pictures 03:38 and they come up one at a time and then 03:41 I think well okay well maybe we can have 03:42 it snow or we can have a thunderstorm I 03:45 can hold it there and turn them into 03:46 videos now visual thinking was a 03:49 tremendous asset in my work designing 03:52 cattle handling facilities and I've 03:55 worked really hard on improving on how 03:56 cattle are treated at slaughter plant 03:58 I'm not going to go into any gucky 03:59 slaughter slides I've got that stuff up 04:01 on YouTube if you want to look at it but 04:04 one of the things that I was able to do 04:06 in my design work is I could actually 04:08 test run a piece of equipment in my mind 04:10 just like a virtual reality computer 04:12 system and this is an aerial view of a 04:16 recreation of one of my projects that 04:18 was used in the movie that was like just 04:20 so super cool and there were a lot of 04:22 kind of Asperger types and I had autism 04:24 types working out there on the movie set 04:26 too but one of the things that really 04:29 worries me is where's the younger 04:32 version of those kids going today 04:33 they're not ending up in Silicon Valley 04:36 where they belong 04:39 now one of the things I learned very 04:46 early on because I wasn't that social is 04:48 I had to sell my work and not myself and 04:52 the way I sold livestock jobs as I 04:54 showed off my drawings I showed off 04:56 pictures of things another thing that 04:58 helped me as a little kid is boy in the 05:00 50s you were taught manners you were 05:01 taught you can't pull the merchandise 05:03 off the shelves in a store and throw it 05:04 around now when kids get to be in third 05:07 or fourth grade you might see that this 05:09 kid's gonna be a visual thinker drawing 05:11 in perspective now I want to emphasize 05:13 that not every autistic kids going to be 05:15 a visual thinker now I did the head this 05:19 brain scan done several years ago and I 05:21 used to joke around about having a 05:23 gigantic internet trunk line going a 05:25 deep into my visual cortex 05:27 this is tensor imaging and my great big 05:30 internet trunk line is twice as big as 05:32 the controls the red lines there are me 05:34 and the blue lines are the sex and age 05:37 matched control and there I got a 05:40 gigantic one and the control over there 05:43 the blue one has got a really small one 05:46 and some of the research now is showing 05:49 that people on the spectrum actually 05:51 think with primary visual cortex now the 05:53 thing is the visual thinker is just one 05:54 kind of mind you see the autistic mind 05:57 tends to be a specialist mind good at 06:00 one thing they added something else and 06:03 when I was bad with algebra and I was 06:05 never allowed to take geometry or trig 06:06 gigantic mistake I'm finding a lot of 06:08 kids that need to skip algebra go right 06:10 to geometry and trick now another kind 06:13 of mind is the pattern thinker more 06:15 abstract these are your engineers your 06:17 computer programmers now this is pattern 06:20 thinking that praying mantis is made 06:21 from a single sheet of paper 06:23 no scotch tape no cuts and there in the 06:25 background is the pattern for folding it 06:27 here are the types of thinking 06:30 photorealistic visual thinkers like me 06:33 pattern thinkers music and math minds 06:36 some of these oftentimes have problems 06:38 with reading you also will see these 06:40 kind of problems with them kids that are 06:42 dyslexic you'll see these different 06:45 kinds of minds and then there's a verbal 06:47 mind they know every fact about 06:49 everything now 06:50 another thing is the sensory issues I 06:51 was really concerned about having to 06:53 wear this gadget on my face and I came 06:56 in half an hour beforehand so I could 06:58 have it put on and kind of get used to 07:00 it and like they got it bent so it's not 07:02 hitting my chin but sensory is an issue 07:04 some kids are bothered by fluorescent 07:06 lights others have problems with sound 07:07 sensitivity you know on it's going to be 07:10 variable now visual thinking gave me a 07:14 whole lot of insight into the animal 07:17 mind because think about it an animal's 07:19 a sensory based think are not verbal 07:22 thinks in pictures thinks and sounds 07:26 thinks and smells think about how much 07:28 information there is there on the local 07:30 fire hydrant he knows who's been there 07:32 when they were there are they friend or 07:35 foe 07:35 is there anybody they'll mate with 07:37 there's a ton of information on that 07:39 fire hydrant it's all very detailed 07:42 information and looking at these kind of 07:45 details gave me a lot of insight into 07:47 animals now the animal mind and also my 07:51 mind puts sensory-based information into 07:55 categories man on a horse and a man on 07:59 the ground that is viewed as two totally 08:01 different things you can have a horse 08:03 that's been abused by a rider they'll be 08:05 absolutely fine with the veterinarian 08:07 and with a horse sure but you can't ride 08:09 you have another horse where maybe the 08:11 horseshoer beat them up and he'll be 08:14 terrible for anything on the ground or 08:15 the veterinarian but a person can ride 08:18 them cattle are the same way man on a 08:21 horse a man on foot there are two 08:23 different things 08:24 you see it's a different picture see I 08:26 want you to think about just how 08:28 specific this is now this ability to put 08:31 information into categories I find a lot 08:33 of people are not very good at this like 08:36 when I'm out troubleshooting with 08:38 equipment or problems with something in 08:39 a plant they don't seem to be able to 08:41 figure out do I have a training people 08:43 issue or do I have something wrong with 08:45 the equipment 08:46 in other words categorizing equipment 08:48 problem from a people problem I find a 08:50 lot of people have difficulty doing that 08:53 now let's say I figure out is an 08:55 equipment problem is it a minor problem 08:57 with something simple I can fix or is a 08:59 whole design of the system wrong people 09:01 have a hard time figuring 09:03 that out let's just look at something 09:05 like you know solving problems with 09:06 y'all making airlines safer yeah I'm a 09:09 million-mile flyer I do lots and lots of 09:10 flying and then you know like if I was 09:14 at the FFA what would I be doing a lot 09:17 of direct observation of it would be 09:19 their airplane tails you know five fatal 09:22 wrecks in the last 20 years tail either 09:24 came off or coasteering stuff inside the 09:27 tail broke in some way its tails 09:30 pure and simple and when the pilots walk 09:32 around the plane guess what they can't 09:33 see that stuff inside the tail you know 09:36 now as I think about that I'm pulling up 09:38 all of that you know specific 09:40 information it's specific see my 09:42 thinking's bottom up I take all the 09:44 little pieces and I put the pieces 09:46 together like a puzzle now here's a 09:48 horse that was deathly afraid of black 09:50 cowboy hats you've been abused by 09:52 somebody with a black cowboy hat white 09:54 cowboy hats that was absolutely fine now 09:57 the thing is the world is going to need 09:59 all of the different kinds of minds to 10:03 work together we've got to work on 10:05 developing all these different kinds of 10:06 minds and one of the things that's 10:08 driving me really crazy so I travel 10:10 around than I do 10:11 autism meetings is I'm seeing a lot of 10:13 smart geeky nerdy kids and they just 10:16 aren't very social and nobody's working 10:19 on developing their interest in 10:21 something like science this brings up 10:23 the whole thing on my science teacher my 10:25 science teacher has shown absolutely 10:26 beautifully in the movie as a goof ball 10:28 student when I was in high school I just 10:30 didn't care at all about studying until 10:33 I had on mr. carlock's science class 10:36 he was now dr. Carlock in the movie and 10:39 he he got me challenged to figure out an 10:43 optical illusion room this brings up the 10:45 whole thing he got to show kids 10:47 interesting stuff you know one of the 10:50 things that I think maybe Ted ought to 10:51 do is done tell all the schools about 10:53 all the great lectures that are on Ted 10:55 there's all kinds of great stuff on the 10:56 Internet to get these kids turned on 10:58 because I'm seeing a lot of these geeky 11:01 nerdy kids and the teachers out in the 11:03 Midwest and other parts of the country 11:05 when you get away from these tech areas 11:06 they don't know they do with these kids 11:08 and they're not going down the right 11:10 path the thing is you can make a mind to 11:13 be more of a thinking and cognitive mind 11:16 or a mind can be wired to be more social 11:18 and what some of the research now is 11:20 showing autism is there may be extra 11:22 wiring back here and then really 11:24 brilliant mine and we lose a few social 11:25 circuits here it's kind of a trade-off 11:27 between thinking and social and then you 11:30 can get into the point where it's so 11:31 severe you're going to have a person 11:33 that's going to be nonverbal in the 11:35 normal human mind language covers up the 11:38 visual thinking we share with animals 11:40 this is the work of dr. Bruce Miller and 11:43 he studied alzheimerís patients they had 11:46 frontal temporal lobe dementia and the 11:48 dementia ate out the language parts of 11:50 the brain and then this artwork came out 11:53 of somebody that used to install stereos 11:54 and cars now van Gogh doesn't know 11:58 anything about physics but I think it's 12:01 very interesting that there was some 12:03 work done to show that this Eddy pattern 12:05 and his painting followed a statistical 12:07 model of turbulence this brings up a 12:10 whole interesting idea of maybe some of 12:11 this mathematical patterns is in our own 12:14 head and the Wolfram stuff I was taking 12:17 notes I was write down all the all the 12:19 search words I could use because I think 12:22 that's going to go on in my autism 12:23 lectures we've got a show these kids to 12:26 interesting stuff and they've taken out 12:28 the auto shop class and the drafting 12:30 class in the art class I mean art was my 12:32 best subject in school we've got to 12:34 think about all these different kinds of 12:36 minds and we've got to absolutely work 12:38 with these kind of minds because we 12:40 absolutely are going to need these kind 12:42 of people in the future and let's talk 12:45 about jobs okay my science teacher got 12:49 me studying because I was a goofball it 12:50 didn't want to study but you know what I 12:52 was getting work experience I'm seeing 12:54 too many these smart kids that haven't 12:55 learned basic things like how to be on 12:57 time I was taught that when I was eight 12:59 years old you know how to have table 13:01 manners at Granny's at Sunday party I 13:03 was taught that when I was very very 13:05 young and when I was 13 I had a job at a 13:08 dressmakers shop by selling clothes I 13:11 did internships in college I did I was 13:16 building things 13:17 and I also had to learn how to do 13:19 assignments you know all I want to do is 13:22 draw pictures the horses when I was 13:23 little mother said well let's do a 13:24 picture of something else they got to 13:26 learn how to do something else let's say 13:28 the kids fixated on leg 13:29 let's get them working on building 13:32 different things 13:33 think about the autistic mind as it 13:35 tends to be fixated like if the kid 13:38 loves race cars let's use race cars for 13:40 math let's figure out how long it takes 13:42 a racecar to go a certain distance in 13:44 other words use that fixation in order 13:48 to motivate that kid that's one of the 13:50 things we need to do and really get fed 13:53 up when the you know the teachers when 13:54 especially when you get away from this 13:56 part of the country they don't know what 13:57 to do with these smart kids it just 13:59 drives me crazy 14:00 what can visual thinkers do when they 14:02 grow up they can do graphic design all 14:04 kinds of stuff with computers 14:06 photography Industrial Design on the 14:11 pattern thinkers they're the ones that 14:13 are going to be your mathematicians your 14:15 software engineers your computer 14:17 programmers all of those kinds of jobs 14:19 and then you've got the word minds they 14:21 make great journalists and they're also 14:24 make really really good stage actors 14:25 because the thing about being autistic 14:27 is I had to learn social skills like 14:30 being in a play it just kind of just 14:32 have to learn it and we need to be 14:35 working with these students and this 14:37 brings up mentors you know my science 14:40 teacher was not an accredited teacher he 14:42 was a NASA space scientist now some 14:44 states now are getting it to where if 14:45 you have a degree in biology or degree 14:47 in chemistry you can come into the 14:49 school and teach you know biology or 14:50 chemistry we need to be doing that 14:53 because what I'm observing is the good 14:55 teachers for a lot of these kids are out 14:57 in the community colleges but we need to 14:59 be getting some of these good teachers 15:01 into the high schools another thing that 15:03 can be very very very successful is 15:05 there's a lot of people that may have 15:07 retired from you know working in the 15:09 software industry and they can teach a 15:11 kid and it doesn't matter if what they 15:13 teach them is old because what you're 15:15 doing is you're lighting the spark you 15:17 get nected turned on and you get them 15:20 turned on then you'll learn all the new 15:22 stuff mentors are just essential I can't 15:26 emphasize enough what my science teacher 15:28 did for me and we've got to mentor them 15:32 hire them and if you bring them in for 15:34 internships and your company's the thing 15:36 about the autism Asperger II kind of 15:37 mine you got to give a specific task 15:39 don't just say design new software 15:40 you're going to tell them something a 15:42 lot more 15:43 specific well we're designing a software 15:45 for phone and it has to do some specific 15:47 thing and it can only use so much memory 15:49 that's the kind of specificity you need 15:51 well that's the end of my talk and I 15:54 just want to thank everybody for coming 15:56 it was great to be here 16:11 oh yeah question for me okay thank you 16:15 thank you so much for that you know you 16:18 once wrote I like this quote if by some 16:21 magic autism had been eradicated from 16:23 the face of the earth then men would 16:25 still be socializing in front of a wood 16:27 fire at the entrance to a cave hey guys 16:30 who do you think made the first stone 16:32 spear Jose Asperger guy and if you were 16:34 to get rid of all the autism genetic 16:35 said they know more Silicon Valley and 16:37 the energy crisis would not be solved 16:42 someone shot you a couple of the 16:43 questions and you know if any of these 16:45 feel inappropriate it's okay to say next 16:47 question but if if there's someone here 16:50 who has an autistic child or knows an 16:53 autistic child and feels kind of cut off 16:56 from them what advice would you give 16:58 them well first of all I got a look at 17:00 age if you have a two three or four year 17:02 old you know no speech no social 17:05 interaction I can't emphasize enough 17:06 don't wait you need to at least 20 hours 17:09 a week of one-to-one teaching you know 17:11 thing as autism comes in different 17:13 degrees there's going about half the 17:15 people on the spectrum that are not 17:16 going to learn the talk and they're not 17:17 gonna be working in Silicon Valley that 17:18 would that would not be a reasonable 17:20 thing for them to do but then you got 17:22 these smart geeky kids you know the 17:24 touch of autism and that's where you've 17:25 got to get them turned on with doing 17:28 interesting things I got social 17:29 interaction through shared interests I 17:32 rode horses with other kids I made model 17:34 rockets with other kids did electronics 17:37 lab you know without the kids and then 17:38 60s it was gluing mirrors on the under 17:41 rubber membrane on speaker to make a 17:42 light shell that was like we can serve 17:45 that super cool look is it unrealistic 17:47 for them to hope or think that that 17:49 child loves them as some might most well 17:53 let me tell you that child will be loyal 17:54 if the house is burning down they're 17:56 gonna get you out of it Wow 17:58 so most people if you ask them what are 18:00 they most passionate about that say 18:01 things like my kids or or my lover or 18:05 what are you most passionate about I'm 18:08 passionate about that the things I do 18:10 are going to make the world a better 18:11 place when I have a mother of an 18:13 autistic child say my kid went to 18:14 college because of your book or 18:16 something or wanting our lectures that 18:17 makes me happy you know like the 18:19 slaughter plants I've worked with them 18:21 in the 80s they were absolutely awful 18:23 I developed a really simple 18:24 scoring system for slaughter plants 18:27 where you just measure outcomes how many 18:28 cattle fell down how many cattle got 18:30 poked with the Prada how many cattle are 18:31 moving their heads off and it's very 18:34 very simple you met you directly observe 18:36 a few simple things it's worked really 18:37 well I get satisfaction out of seeing 18:39 stuff that makes real change in the real 18:43 world we need a lot more of that and a 18:45 lot less abstract stone what are you 18:53 talking on the phone one of the things 18:54 you said that really astonished me was 18:56 he said one thing you were passionate 18:58 about was server farms talk about the 19:01 reason why I got really excited I read 19:04 about that 19:04 it's contains knowledge its libraries 19:08 and to me knowledge is something that is 19:11 extremely valuable so maybe over 10 19:13 years ago now our library got flooded 19:15 this is before the internet got really 19:16 big and I was really upset of all the 19:17 books being wrecked because it was 19:19 knowledge being destroyed and server 19:21 farms or data centers are great 19:24 libraries of knowledge temple can I just 19:27 say it's an absolute delight to have you 19:29 at Ted well thank you so much thank you