Dr. Grandin: 00:00:00.950
I’m seeing students growing up today that have never used a ruler to measure anything. They’ve never used a tool. Well, how is the student going to find out they like tools if they’re not exposed to tools? See, most of the people that I worked with, they may have had a single welding class in high school or they grew up working on cars.

Gretchen Roe: 00:00:24.580
Hello, everyone. This is Gretchen Roe, and it is my very, very great pleasure to welcome Dr. Temple Grandin to The Demme Learning Show today. We’ve been looking forward to this conversation for months, and I am delighted to spend the next hour with her talking about her book entitled Visual Thinking and all the things that she has to share with us today. And Dr. Grandin, I’d like to ask you to introduce yourself, if you would be so kind.

Dr. Grandin: 00:00:53.868
Hi, I’m Temple Grandin. I am a Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University. I was also a very severely autistic child with no speech until age four. I was very lucky to get into very good early educational intervention by two-and-a-half. My mother always helped develop my art ability. I think it’s very important with autistic kids is take the thing they’re good at and build on it. I’ve been hearing some stories that I do not like about little and autistic kids in elementary school that are super good at math and they’re making them do the same baby math and they’re getting bored and becoming behavior problems. If you’ve got a 4th grader that’s good at math, let’s give him the more advanced math. Just let him do it in his 3rd-grade desk. They give you all kinds of reasons why they won’t do that.

Gretchen Roe: 00:01:47.471
Well, your journey has been such a remarkable one and I have followed it closely for a number of years. I have so many questions to ask, but let’s start with Visual Thinking. This is your latest work. This is a New York Times bestseller. Can you tell us what the genesis was for this? And I know what you’re going to say, but for our audience, if you would share how you came to feel that this message was really important.

Dr. Grandin: 00:02:14.380
Well, I’m noticing that there’s areas where we’re losing skills. Let’s take food processing equipment, for example, especially for poultry and for pork. Most of that equipment now comes out of Europe. And one of the reasons for that is the people that I worked with on equipment, they’ve retired out. I worked with people on beef equipment that were definitely autistic, that had their own shops. And these people are retired out. They can’t find anybody to fix anything. And it’s getting worse. As I travel around the country, I’m finding broken elevators everywhere where I go, and it’s getting worse and worse and worse. And visual thinkers like me, who are terrible at math, would love fixing elevators because they are mechanical devices. So in my book, I discuss the different kinds of thinkers. You have the object visualizer like me, who’s horrible at higher math but understands mechanical devices, animals, good at art and photography.

Dr. Grandin: 00:03:12.823
Then another kind of mind, and there’s research to support this, which I discuss in my visual thinking book, is the pattern mathematical thinker, the visual-spatial mathematical thinker who thinks in patterns, think music and math. These are your math kids, and that’s a different kind of thinking. And then you have an autistic word thinker. They love history, they love facts, and they think in words. And they can have complementary skills. Let’s go back to a food processing plant. My kind of mind invents all the mechanical equipment and builds it. They don’t just build the equipment, they invent it and patent it. And then your degree engineer, university engineers needed for refrigeration, boilers, keep the roof from falling in for the more things that require the mathematics. You see, you need to have both kinds of minds to build a good food processing plant. You see, that’s an example of complementary skills. And I do a lot of talks for businesses. And I said, “The first step is you have to realize that these different kinds of thinking exist.”

Dr. Grandin: 00:04:17.083
I didn’t know that word thinking existed until I was in my late 30s. I thought everybody thought “pictures” the way I do, but they don’t. And then, of course, a lot of people are mixtures of the different kinds of thinking. And in my visual thinking book, I have a bunch of research studies that show that the picture thinker like me and the mathematical thinker are different kinds of minds. And there’s some brand new research that was just published in Nature in 2024 – so it’s not in the book – that words are not required for thought, basically, that mathematical thought and visual thinking do not require words. There is thinking without words, and that is brand new information 2024.

Gretchen Roe: 00:05:01.764
Wonderful. That’s terrific. One of the things that compelled me so much with this book is it answered so many questions about myself. You have a survey in here that’s a very simple answer to the question: do I think visually? And I was remarkably surprised to find how thoroughly I think visually. And I think it helped me understand why sometimes people don’t understand. Those of us who think visually don’t always translate well what we’re–

Dr. Grandin: 00:05:33.547
That’s right.

Gretchen Roe: 00:05:34.103
–trying to explain. We can see it, but we don’t understand that you can’t see it.

Dr. Grandin: 00:05:39.774
Well, the verbal thinker tends to overgeneralize. This is one of the things that tends to happen. And I’ve been reading some kind of alarming research on things like ChatGPT, that if these AI programs keep reading their own stuff, they tend to over summarize, overgeneralize, and leave out information that may be important that’s not mentioned as many times.

Gretchen Roe: 00:06:03.017
Interesting. Interesting. Tell me a little bit about your process. You provide so much information. I have a variety of books here. I just finished reading Animals in Translation this morning over my breakfast coffee. You do so much research. How do you find the time to do all that research? Is it just what interests you or do you run yourself down a rabbit hole because you’re looking for an answer to a question?

Dr. Grandin: 00:06:33.345
Well, of course, I did visual thinking during COVID, so I had plenty of time to research because that– Betsy Lerner and I, that was our big COVID project. Now, just an example of different minds working together. My thinking is associational, so it’s not that well organized. And then I do the rough drafts and then Betsy would smooth them all out for me. But Betsy would have never found some of the scientific stuff that I found. No, I’m a very good internet surfer on things like Google Scholar. And I use different keywords to find things. I remind my students, one – because I have a class in livestock handling; I’m going to be doing the first class today – that cattle have six different words: bull, cow, heifer, steers, and calves. So let’s say I want to find an article about what was– how to feed cattle and I just talk about feeding corn to cattle, for example. If I don’t do another search feeding corn to steers, I won’t find the paper where they only use the word steers rather than cattle. And you don’t mix all the stuff together. Then I might do corn feeding for bulls. So that’s going to be three separate little searches to find all the papers–

Gretchen Roe: 00:07:47.537
Interesting.

Dr. Grandin: 00:07:48.165
–because in Europe they feed a lot of bulls. So you could have a paper where– you can have a situation where you might have an important paper where they just use bulls and the word cattle is not in it.

Gretchen Roe: 00:07:59.261
Interesting.

Dr. Grandin: 00:08:00.340
That’s stuff I figured out about surfing.

Gretchen Roe: 00:08:04.354
Which is valuable for all of us who are educating our children or teaching children. Tell me a little bit about the premise that you put forth that I thought was so compelling in this book about the fact that we are teaching to only one kind of learner.

Dr. Grandin: 00:08:20.531
Well, that’s the problem. The verbal thinkers are kind of taken over. There’s a tendency to think the visual thinkers who can’t do algebra are stupid. But I’ve worked with these people and they don’t just build equipment. They invent equipment. I’ve gone through their patents. They don’t do frivolous patents. They patent stuff that the industry still uses, 20-some years later. It’s a different kind of thought. And one of the reasons why the Europeans are supplying a lot of this specialized equipment is because in ninth grade, a child can decide “Do I go tech route or do I go university route?” And they don’t tend to stick their nose up at the tech route. And a lot of the people I worked with, some of them were autistic, had their own businesses, their own independent businesses. And they started out really small and they do a small project and then the customer would like them. Then they do a more complicated project. And then 15 years later, they’re in charge of the new cooler addition on a plant. I’ve seen people do that.

Gretchen Roe: 00:09:21.721
And in your field, you said one of the things that you said in the book was we’re outsourcing so much of this that we’re losing the ability to develop those kinds of thinkers here. What would you say to people in the Department of Education? What do we need to change to make that to make us more competitive that way?

Dr. Grandin: 00:09:45.310
Well, we need to put all the hands-on classes back in. And I couldn’t believe it. Somebody asked me the other day, “What are hands-on classes?” Shop. Welding, wood shop, cooking, sewing, all of the hands-on classes. And I put those all back in because I’m seeing students growing up today that have never used a ruler to measure anything. They’ve never used a tool. Well, how is the student going to find out they like tools if they’re not exposed to tools? See, most of the people that I worked with, they may have had a single welding class in high school or they grew up working on cards. And I’ll tell you how to get the video addicts off the video games. Automobile mechanics. There’s been five or six successes with young adults getting off of video games with car mechanics, and they find out that motors are a lot more interesting than video games. You see, those are your visual thinkers that can just see how a machine works. I had a chance to visit a newspaper that still had an old linotype machine, a really complicated machine that was used for setting type years ago. And they were telling me about years ago when someone bought this old lion-type machine. There it is right there. Old lion-type machine that usually you have to have a two-week course where someone comes in to show you how to use it. This guy was such a mechanical genius. He figured out how to use it himself.

Gretchen Roe: 00:11:16.168
Wow, that’s amazing.

Dr. Grandin: 00:11:16.756
He just saw how it worked. You see, it’s totally mechanical device. It melts lead to make the type. And the keyboard is not the query keyboard. It’s a really awful keyboard. I couldn’t possibly type on. But you see the person who’s the mechanical mind just sees how something works. In other words, you see a solution to a problem. The mathematician calculates. Let’s go back to the Fukushima nuclear power plant. This is why we need to have visual thinkers. And I couldn’t believe it when I found out why Fukushima burned up. And they had failed to put waterproof doors on to protect the electric emergency cooling pump that was in the basement from being flooded.

Dr. Grandin: 00:12:04.658
Now the engineers, the mathematicians, they did a wonderful time making it earthquake-proof. It shook and it shook and it shook. Everything was fine. 20 minutes later, the tsunami breached the seawall. It only took me 20 minutes on Google to very quickly find easy-to-find data that will show that the seawall is going to get breached. It’s like they didn’t see it. They just didn’t see it. You see, this is why you need both kinds of problem-solving because that was a gigantic visual thinking mistake that I just couldn’t believe that they made it. Watertight doors would have saved it. It would not have happened if they’d had waterproof doors.

Gretchen Roe: 00:12:44.078
Interesting. I found that argument that you made so compelling in the book because sometimes when we create teams of people, it’s easy to find people who all think the same way. And you said we should have each kind of thinker on any team to make it successful.

Dr. Grandin: 00:13:05.615
Well, we have to recognize the different things that they’re good at and that the skills can be complementary. And I’m very, very concerned that my kind of thinker, the visual thinker, is getting screened out because we can’t do higher math. And some people think that you need to have algebra in order to think. No, you don’t. No, I just see solutions. Let me just think of a– give you a real simple example. Okay, there’s the big Microsoft computer crash and of course, strollers and everything were getting lost at the airport. One lady was really upset because the airline’s lost her stroller and she had kids that were old enough to sit up and I immediately saw them in a blue Denver airport wheelchair, okay, to replace the stroller. Infants? No, they’d fall out. But yeah, I just saw it. It just came up in my mind as a picture. That’s just a very simple example of a visual solution to a problem.

Gretchen Roe: 00:14:02.304
Absolutely. That makes sense. That makes sense. You had also said that and one of the courses that we’re missing in school is drafting. And you had said that that would be something that would be a course of study that a lot of students who maybe don’t have the algebraic thinking would be able to be very successful with. Can you talk a little bit about why?

Dr. Grandin: 00:14:31.214
Well, you have to visualize the building. The first step in learning drafting is you have to recognize what the lines on the drawing mean in relation to the structure. Like, for example, if there’s squares on the drawing, those may be columns that hold up the roof. And one of the things that helped me read drawings was what I kind of made my own internship at the Swift plant in Tolleson, Arizona. They lent me a beautiful set of hand-done drawings to the plant. And I walked around in there for two days until every line on that drawing related to a structure in the plant. And it was a very, very accurate drawing. A lot of the drawings we’re getting today are terrible. These computer-aided drawings, they’re not very good drawings. They’re leaving rebar placement out, reinforcement rod placement out, things like that. They’re leaving out important detail that you need for building something correctly. And in my livestock handling class, the students have to make a scale drawing, and they’re having more and more problems with doing the scale drawing because I have students that have never used a ruler,–

Gretchen Roe: 00:15:41.423
Wow.

Dr. Grandin: 00:15:42.412
–never have measured anything. And then he might ask, “Well, why would I ever need to make a scale drawing?” Okay, can understand maybe they don’t ever need to make a cattle handling facility. Let’s say they’re remodeling their house, or they want to make sure their furniture is going to fit in the living room before they buy it. That would be a good use of a scale drawing

Gretchen Roe: 00:16:01.975
Absolutely. Absolutely. Can you give us some examples of occupations where a pattern or mathematical thinker would excel?

Dr. Grandin: 00:16:11.603
Oh, they’re going to excel in chemistry, computer programming. That’s a big area where mathematical thinkers excel, figuring out power requirements, balancing the power grid. You need people like me to make sure that the wires don’t fall off the towers, like they do in California, but they never maintain them. And the mathematicians balance the power grid. Let’s look at when Texas had that big freeze. They talked about that in a very abstract way. You have power plants where stuff froze in them and it didn’t work. And my first step in how to deal with this would be to figure out what froze? What piece of equipment actually froze in each station? And then figure out how difficult it would be to winterize and then rank them in order. And I’d have to go visit the maintenance department. They’d show me. You let me loosen there for three hours. I’m going to go right down to the shop and I’ll find out what froze.

Dr. Grandin: 00:17:10.383
And some are going to be very difficult to fix and others could maybe fixed easily. But how can you even discuss it rationally without listing what froze in each plant? Okay, let’s say I can get half the stations back on. All right, then I’m going to go to the mathematicians. Okay, can I at least do decent rolling blackouts on a schedule? That’s better than no power. That has to be figured out by the mathematicians. I’m the one who’s going to say, “Okay, now what froze? Why did the coal-fired plant not work? We have a coal-fired plant. It’s never frozen.”

Gretchen Roe: 00:17:45.926
You also had said that when when we talked in preparation for this, that you wanted to talk about how it would be important for parents and teachers to look for those visual thinkers. So what are the things I should be looking for in my students or my children to know that they have that visual talent?

Dr. Grandin: 00:18:10.657
Well, it tends to show up around six or seven in building things. These are the kids that might be super, super good at Legos. And then the mistake that’s made is they’re not graduating the tools. I was using tools in second grade, using them really carefully, but I was using them. They’re simply not not using tools. And then how can you know you’re good at tools if you’re not exposed to them? Your math kids, the way you’ll tell is getting frustrated doing the baby math. You need to move ahead in math. You just start seeing what do they tend to be good at? And a lot of math kids are also good at music. I was exposed to musical instruments. I had a little flute. I couldn’t figure out how to play that little flute. But I was exposed to it. You see, if you don’t expose kids to a lot of stuff, how do you know what they’re going to be good at? You’re just not going to know.

Gretchen Roe: 00:19:03.057
Well, your mom was remarkable in the fact that she was such an advocate for you in a time where advocacy for children was not something that was innate to the culture. One of the things that I found so remarkable is that your mom insisted that you learn things like social modicums and social graces. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because I think that makes a huge difference. And I think a lot of us are missing that in this day and age, even for kids who don’t have autism.

Dr. Grandin: 00:19:37.354
Well, it was standard 50s parenting. I remember so much out of the 50s to teach kids to say thank you, teach kids to shake hands, say please. Well, they would cue me. You’ve got to say please. And then if I didn’t do it at the neighbor’s house, grownups corrected kids. This was old-fashioned 50s parenting. And I think this is one of the reasons why I’ve talked to a number of grandparents who discover they’re autistic later later on in life, where that helps them with their relationships. But they were taught social skills. These very, very basic social skills are not being taught. And she also had a very good sense of how much to stretch me. You don’t take an autistic kid and force them into rapid multitasking at the McDonald’s takeout window. That’s just too much rapid multitasking. That’s not going to work.

Dr. Grandin: 00:20:27.796
The other big place we’re really falling down is making the transition to work. We’re doing really badly on that because working skills are not the same as academic skills. I’m seeing students graduate magnitude from college, but they don’t handle work very well because they never learned working skills and they need to start learning young how to work for somebody that’s outside the family that’s the boss. So they need to learn.

Gretchen Roe: 00:20:55.090
Now, why would you say someone outside the family?

Dr. Grandin: 00:21:00.074
Well, I’m seeing a lot of parents that overprotect too much. They’ve got to learn how to do things outside the family. And those grandparents that had great jobs, they had paper routes when they were young. So we need to replace that with things like volunteer jobs at a farmer’s market, maybe at a church, doing volunteer work where somebody else is the boss. They need to start getting jobs before they graduate from high school. And I see a lot of parents overprotect. I think they get too locked into the autism. Well, they can’t do anything. And there was a certain people about me that thought I was stupid and wouldn’t be able to do anything.

Gretchen Roe: 00:21:35.605
I have a question for you from Connie. She says,”Ny son has intellectual disabilities in a low IQ in addition to his APD and being on the spectrum. He has a vivid imagination but struggles with all other areas. How do I discover what he’s good at?” And I think that question can be generalized. There’s a lot of parents who are saying, “How do I discover what my child is good at?”

Dr. Grandin: 00:22:00.923
Well, they have to be exposed to lots of different things. How would you know kids good at music if they’re not exposed to musical instruments? Drawing and art was one of my things. I loved art class when I was in elementary school. Well, it was a good art class. Is a kid good at mathematics, you know, try different mathematics. We also need to get kids interested in things like some of these mathematics kids when they get bored, get into piles of trouble. Well, let’s talk to them about interesting things they could do with that math when they grow up. How about making a solar panel that will last 50 years instead of 25 years? How about better batteries so that electric car can go twice as far on a charge and not have any risk of having a fire? That’s stuff that I can show to third and fourth graders of really constructive stuff they could do when they grow up. And that’s kind of the heavy-duty physics stuff that’s going to be for the math kids.

Gretchen Roe: 00:22:54.087
Right, right. Absolutely. And as as a parent, what you’re saying is, then, we need to think in possibilities of the things we should expose our children to. Your life was quite a remarkable one in the fact that you were exposed to so many things as a young child that a lot of people culturally would have thought you weren’t able to do.

Dr. Grandin: 00:23:16.956
Well, that’s right. And we go out with the other kids. We’re building treehouses. We’re just doing, you know, all kinds of things and kids don’t tinker anymore. I can remember as a young kid we we set up an old army tent to have a sleepout in and we set it up wrong. Did the grownups get involved in that? No. As long as we didn’t do anything dangerous, the grownups just let us set it up wrong. Tinker, figure out how to do things.

Gretchen Roe: 00:23:46.894
So I love what you’re saying about figure out how to do things, but it seems like as a society we have lost the ability to persevere. How as a parent can we cultivate that perseverance in our kids?

Dr. Grandin: 00:24:02.291
Encourage them to try, try different things. I think part of this comes from not doing hands-on things, because if you don’t do some tinkering with hands-on things, you’re just not going to do it. When I was seven, I would tinker for hours to get a little bird kite to work. In fact, I have a book called Calling All Mines. That is my little project book for kids. So I’ve got all kinds of kites and that parachutes, things that I made as a kid. And I tinkered for hours with this thing. Also, I have another book, The Outdoor Scientist. Again, that’s kids projects. We’ve got to get kids off of devices. I’m not suggesting banning it. Let’s limit it to an hour a day. And get them out doing more real things. Then they’re going to get interested in it. And so I have a math kid. I’m going to move my head in math. Maybe he can do college math in the 4th grade classroom. Let him do it on computer. All right, what can you do with that math? That’s where I take them out and I show them a big field of solar panels and say, I have to tear these all out 25 years from now. That’s going to be a real mess.

Dr. Grandin: 00:25:12.845
Okay. Your chemistry. That’s math. Make a panel that’s going to last longer. That’s the kind of stuff I can just present to a young– I’m not a kindergarten kid, but a elementary school kid. And that’s something that they could do when they grew up because these kids tend to get obsessed, and I’d like to have them get obsessed with something constructive, like making a better battery, for example, or figuring out how to make smaller computer memory. So I always like to tell kids where the movies live online. Giant data centers show them pictures of that big warehouses full of computers that eat horrible amounts of electricity. Figure out how to make that smaller and have less energy. I give them those kind of challenges. I’d rather have them grow up and– I want to have them grow up and do those kinds of things and not go down rabbit holes. I really don’t want them to go down.

Gretchen Roe: 00:26:14.821
What are your closing thoughts for us today?

Dr. Grandin: 00:26:17.270
Well, I want to see the kids that think differently. They really do great things. Steve Jobs was probably on the spectrum. Bill Gates is probably on the spectrum. Einstein was on the spectrum. There are a lot of really talented people that are on the spectrum and we need their minds to solve problems in the future. And we got to show kids lots of interesting stuff to get them interested.

Gretchen Roe: 00:26:39.358
Absolutely.

Dr. Grandin: 00:26:40.382
That’s one of the things we got to do.

Gretchen Roe: 00:26:42.257
Absolutely.

Dr. Grandin: 00:26:43.136
And then take something that’s fixated and broaden it so it’s not so fixated.

Gretchen Roe: 00:26:50.093
Absolutely. I think you have inspired us all today. I want to thank you so much for spending this time with us. I appreciate it more than you will ever know. This is Gretchen Roe for The Demme Learning Show. Thanks so much for joining us. You can access the show notes or watch a recording at demmelearning.com/show or on our YouTube channel. Be sure to review, rate, or subscribe wherever you may be hearing this, especially if you really enjoyed it. Doctor Grandin, thank you so much for your time. It has been my great pleasure to host you today. [music]

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