Temple Grandin, PhD: The Power of Visual Thinkers
Dr. Temple Grandin is a New York Times bestselling author, celebrated animal welfare advocate, and one of the world’s most prominent speakers on autism. Temple first came into the public consciousness with her memoir, Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism, which provided her unique inside narrative and revolutionized how the world understood autistic individuals. Her latest book, Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions, works to expand our awareness of the different ways our brains are wired even further as she draws upon cutting edge research to demystify the brains of visual thinkers.
Our world is geared for verbal thinkers, she tells us in today’s conversation, with rigid academic and social expectations sidelining visual thinkers at school and in the workplace—to the detriment of productivity and innovation everywhere. In our conversation, Temple takes us through the three different types of thinkers, and argues that changing our approach to educating, parenting, and employing visual thinkers has great potential to encourage, rather than stifle, their singular gifts and unique contributions. As the number of children diagnosed with autism continues to rise nationally, her call to foster “differently-abled” brains is more important than ever—as she so eloquently says, we need all kinds of minds to solve today’s most difficult problems.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
Three kinds of thinkers…5:15
Neurodiversity is essential for our survival…29:20
Avoiding label lock…45:17
MORE FROM TEMPLE GRANDIN:
Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions
The Autistic Brain: Helping Different Kinds of Minds Succeed
Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism (Expanded Edition)
Visit Temple's Website
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN:
Hi Temple.
TEMPLE GRANDIN:
Hi. How are you?
ELISE:
I'm well, thanks. How are you?
TEMPLE:
I'm doing just fine.
ELISE:
Well, I want to start by saying that I am definitely a verbal thinker and I'm married to a visual thinker. So throughout the book I was reading to him and affirming him.
TEMPLE:
What kind of work does he do?
ELISE:
Well, he went to The Rhode Island School of Design for Architecture, and he does primarily interior planning and installing these shelving systems and he makes music and I've always found his mind fascinating. And you explained it perfectly. We see the world in almost diametrically opposite ways, where I miss everything visual and his ability to see things and describe them and find what's special about them blows my mind. I just, I miss everything.
TEMPLE:
Well, this is a really important thing that you just brought up because the first thing you have to do is realize people think differently. Okay? Now you found you married to somebody who thinks totally differently. And it was a shock to me when I first discovered that other people were not visual thinkers. So real shock. I thought everybody thought in pictures and then you can start exploring how the thinking is different and how they bring different approaches to problem solving.
ELISE:
Yeah, it's stunning. And it was, it was affirming to read your book because I love my husband's mind. He can fix anything. I mean, everything that you were articulating throughout the book was describing him. He can fix things. He understands how they work. He intuitively can just understand things where I have a lot of partially learned helplessness. I'm not as technically backwards as I might pretend to be at this stage of my marriage, but I don't think that way at all. I have no concept of a mechanical object, but I did very well in school, as you said, and I am excellent at algebra. I loved that algebra was the thing.
TEMPLE:
Hated it. Algebra doesn't even make any sense to me at all. The other thing I'm finding really interesting is that my kind of mind and your husband's kind of mind on the visual thinking, art and mechanics seem to go together. I mean, that sounds kind of weird, but in the mechanics, they can see how things worked. And in my work with the meat industry, I designed equipment and then people build it for me. And some of these people, they had their own welding shops. They were designers. And I'm gonna guess at about 20% of them were either autistic, dyslexic, or ADHD. And they owned their own businesses. They had multiple patents and one of the problems they got the day they're not getting replaced, the algebra requirements are screening them out.
ELISE:
Yeah. That was fascinating. And it's algebra specifically, because that my there's nothing to visualize, right? There's nothing to visualize.
TEMPLE:
And what should be done is let them go on to geometry and trig. I never even got a chance to take geometry because they kept pounding away on algebra. It makes no sense to me. Interesting. And well there's fields I would not be in, I tried programming a computer. Bill Gates and I had access to the exact same computer. He could program it. And I couldn't, I tried. So there's two things here. You have the access. We both had access to the same machine and he took off with it and I could log in. And that was about it.
ELISE:
And is that because, so within this, within the world you were describing, there's the verbal thinkers like me, visual thinkers like you and my husband, and then the object thinkers?
TEMPLE:
There's three kinds. And let's use the correct scientific names.
ELISE:
Okay. Please.
TEMPLE:
I’m what’s called an Object Visualizer. And I think in very specific pictures and the kinds of things that my mind is good at are art, mechanics, animals, and photography. Then you have the Visual Spatial Pattern Thinker, thinking in patterns. They're mathematicians, musicians, good at computer programming, chemistry, they think in patterns. And then of course you have the Verbal Thinker who thinks in words. And then there's some mixture of the different kinds of thinking. And in my book on visual thinking, I explain the different types and the scientific research behind them. And one of my big concerns today, is my kind of mind is getting screened out. I spent 25 years in heavy construction, supervising the building of facilities I designed, worked with all kinds of people that were visual thinkers, some on the autism spectrum. These kids are playing video games in the basement today, instead of fixing things in factories, we've got a huge loss of skills.
We made two very bad mistakes, 20 to 25 years ago. And the first mistake was taking out all the hands on classes, because I worked with people that have multiple patents own their own business, and what saved them was a single welding class. You know, if they hadn't been exposed to the welding class, they wouldn't have opened up a metal working shop. Another big mistake made in the food industry, and I know the most about the meat industry, was shutting down in-house engineering departments and inhouse large shops. I've got clients right now. I wanted this one client just to build a very simple little hydraulic thing. They have no in-house capability anymore. Because in the short run, it was cheaper to farm all this work out. And that's why so much stuff's getting imported from Holland. Went to a poultry plant in 2019, before COVID shut everything down, I was shocked to find out that all the equipment in that plant came over here in a hundred shipping containers from Holland. And that's because they haven't taken out their skilled trades. There's two parts of engineering. There is the object visualizer. I call them the clever engineering department. Think, packaging equipment. If you've ever seen packaging equipment, how clever it is, then you have your degreed engineer, more mathematical. They'll design the refrigeration system for the plant to keep the food chilled, the boiler systems, power and water requirements. The parts that require the math, that we still know how to do. But what we don't know how to do anymore is the clever engineering department, because we don't have new small shops forming. Those kids are playing video games in the basement. I'll tell you how to get them off the video games, introduce them to mechanics. And they'll find out to fixing cars is a lot more interesting than video games.
ELISE:
Yeah. Well, and as you open the book, we have a culture that's highly attenuated to verbal thinking, right? Yeah. Like that's what's prized. That's what we test for. And, you know, throughout the book, you also talk about spectrums, which I want to talk about, and nerve diversity along the spectrum. But this idea that people like me, a writer, you know, it's built for people like me. And then you have sort of the programmers, right? Who mostly drop out of school and invent massive billion dollar companies in their garages. But all of these other people, there's no priority around those other skills and ways to think.
TEMPLE:
We need these skills. We've got water systems that are falling apart right now.
ELISE:
Yeah.
TEMPLE:
And people that are my kind of thinkers, are the ones that care about water equipment and keep it running.
ELISE:
Right.
TEMPLE:
Because you understand how it works. You see, now I also wanna talk about how visual thinkers and word thinkers can collaborate, because Betsy Lerner, my co-author, she organized all my stuff. I would write the initial graphs and Betsy would do magic reorganizing it. You see, that's visual thinker, like me, and a verbal thinker working together in a really beautiful way.
ELISE:
Right. Well, and you give lots of examples in the book of the essential nature of having all three types of thinkers, that diversity of thought leading to far better outcomes. And this might have been specifically when you were talking about neuro divergent traits and autistic people being incredibly good, far better, 30% better than a traditional thinker at certain skills, like attention to detail seeing patterns, right?
TEMPLE:
A visual thinker like me can see how something works. A more mathematically inclined engineer, calculates risk, a visual thinker like me can see it, like in the book, Visual Thinking, I talk about the Fukushima disaster. And I was shocked when I found out that they could have saved that plant if they'd simply put in watertight doors to protect electrically driven, emergency cooling pump, which will not work under water very well. And what I've learned is engineers calculate risk. I see, well, what's going to happen if water floods the site, all I need to know about that reactor is if that electric motor on that pump doesn't run, I'm in a lot of trouble. And, it's very simple. It's sort of shocking how simple that is.
ELISE:
Yeah. But when these kids are being screened out, when there are no good options for them, when we've determined, we've disparaged, vocational schools and trade training, right. Those things are significantly less available than they once were. We don't teach shop. And so also these kids are, I'm sure, feeling not seen or like they have no valuable skills to offer. Right?
TEMPLE:
The thing is, the type of thinking where you can figure out how mechanical things work, it's a different kind of intelligence. And, and I think it's hard for verbal thinkers to understand. And they will look at the shop kids as a dumb kids. Now, fortunately, some states are starting to put it back in. Now we're having more and more infrastructure things falling apart like this latest disaster with the water works breaking. You see a visual thinker can see how it works and how to fix it. And you keep deferring maintenance. I mean, we got wires falling off of electric towers in California and starting fires because they deferred maintenance, but we need all of the different kinds of thinkers. And the first step is realizing that they exist and they need to work together as teams.
ELISE:
Yeah. And I know there's limited data on this, but you had some that there was one study of 750 kids, fourth, fifth, sixth graders. And one third were strongly visual spatial. One quarter we're auditor sequential, which I guess would be verbal. And about 45% were a mix. So its significant,
TEMPLE:
A lot of people are mixtures, but what you will not find, and the research is explained in the book, a super good object, visualizer like me and a super good mathematician in the same person. They tend to be opposite skills. Because the object visualizer sees photographic images and the more mathematical thinker sees patterns. And I think it's interesting how the engineering get divided up in every single major meat company I've worked with. My kind of figure never worked on boilers refrigeration. We didn't understand that stuff. My kind of mind worked on mechanically clever specialized equipment.
ELISE:
Right. Well, it makes so much sense. I mean reading your book, it was like, of course, right? This is so obvious when stated, but it seems like it hasn't historically been obvious to us. You write a really fascinating chapter about savants and this idea that the way that our, and I recognize this probably isn't completely accurate, so please correct me, but the way that our brains work and within the spectrum of neurodiversity, you can have a preponderance, right? Like some people's brains, it's like all concentrated in one part, is that accurate? We have overdeveloped parts of our brains where some, like for me the mechanical part is under oxygenated probably.
TEMPLE:
Well hard to just say, but the savants have, you know, streamed memory in something very, very limited. Now most of the people I worked with there wouldn't have been savants, but there were people that could just see a way to make a mechanical device. And I know a guy he he's in his late sixties now, he sells specialized equipment all over the world. And I have to be vague about what he makes because he's not publicly disclosed. He's got a bad stutter, terrible student in school, dyslexic, a lot of autistic traits. And took a single welding class, started making a thing, selling it at little local county fair trade shows, now has a great, big, huge business, multiple paths. And the thing that worries me is what's happening to that kid today, getting shunned into special ed addicted to video games, and they're not getting wonderful jobs in the video game industry.
If they were getting fantastic video game industry jobs, I wouldn't be criticizing, but that's not what's happening. They're ending up on a disability check when they ought to be inventing, you know, mechanically clever equipment for different industries. Another thing we don't make is the state of the art electronic chip making machine for semi-conductor chips. It's from Holland, and when you look at pictures of the machine with all the covers taken off, there's plenty of mechanical stuff in there for my kind of mind to work off. And I've gotten on inside videos of chip factories. I got to watch the confidential video. It shows the whole inside of the factory. I'll tell you right now there's plenty of equipment in there. Lots of conveyors and things from my kind of mind to work on. We need my kind of mind to make these factories work.
ELISE:
Yeah, well, and this is, you know, ancillary to what your book is about, but just thinking about this culture of fixing things, which we no longer have, right. We live in a highly disposable culture of just toss it and buy a new one. We no longer repair, very few things. I mean, you would repair obviously your dishwasher or your washing machine, but it's this whole idea of building things that are durable and good and that we can then fix
TEMPLE:
One example I had is I had a computer monitor go bad with the Samsung computer monitor and it started to flicker. The power supply was failing. I looked it up online. I knew exactly how to fix it. And then a big house cleaning frenzy had got thrown out. But I wouldn't know how to fix that monitor. If I had to have fixed that monitor, I could have put a new power supply in it, even if I had to put in an external power supply for it, with a little plastic box so it would be electrically safe, but right. There was nothing wrong with the screen, power supply is an expensive part and they put a cheap one in. And it was failing.
ELISE:
Yeah, but it feels environmentally essential that we start to shift our thinking back also into this idea. And as you mentioned, all the failing infrastructure, bridges, et cetera, we need those. We need people who understand how to mechanically fix those parts of society.
TEMPLE:
Well, the water supply issues, the electric supply grid issues. Th thing that's interesting in the engineering, I talked to a manager of an electric company in this region and they told me that their person who was expert at wiring up substations had barely graduated from high school. And can wire up a whole substation for you.
ELISE:
Yeah.
TEMPLE:
You see there's the mechanical side. And then there's the, you know, then the mathematics of balancing the power grid. But what drives me crazy, when they had those power failures from Texas, they talked about such vague nonsense. You see, my approach would be okay, you had eight or nine power plants on that grid, whatever number that was. Well, I want to know what froze in each one of them. And then I can list them in order of expense and difficulty of fixing.
ELISE:
Right.
TEMPLE:
I think a frozen turbine hall is going to be easier to fix than the gas well head that froze. Those are going to be a mess to fix. Because I actually had a chance to talk to a person who built gas wells, the guy in the pickup who keeps the things running. But let's talk about what froze each plant and how to fix it. Not a bunch of vague nonsense.
ELISE:
Yeah. I feel like you mentioned the Flint water crisis. You obviously talked about the Boeing Max, but even in Flint, I think it was a, maybe a passing moment, but you mentioned the right mechanical engineer would've understood exactly what’s happening in the interior of the pipes.
TEMPLE:
The Jackson mess right now. And the water system falling apart, a hundred year old stuff that's not being maintained. You see verbal thinkers tend to over generalize. Verbal thinking's very top down, a big policy about something, but how do you actually implement it? Visual thinkers are bottom up. I formed concepts by taking specific examples and putting them into categories. Let's go back to the power plants in Texas. Well, I'm gonna rank them maybe 1, 2, 3 different categories on expensiveness and difficulty to make them freezer proof. That would be my approach to it. And I don't care who owns them. I would just put it out there. This one's easy to fix this. One's going to be darn near impossible effects, and this is why. And let me loosen that place for three hours. And I get down in the shop and they'll tell me everything long as there's no suits around. So they know to worry about getting fired and they show me exactly what broke and that would be the logical way. And let's start fixing the ones that would be easy to fix, making it freeze proof. Right? I can't believe some of the stuff that froze. You froze a coal fired power plant. We have a coal fired power plant here. It's never frozen. And they'd go over and look at how the coal feet mechanism works, why it does it freeze. To say my first inclination is, would be to go out in the field and look, and I don't want to talk to the suits. I want to talk to the guys from the shop. They'll tell me everything, as long as I protect them from getting fired.
ELISE:
Right. Well, I know that this book is not about interpersonal relationships within governments and corporations, but you talk about also just being with the people in the shop and the general mistrust among sort of different types of workers. It's lack of respect, I guess, for people's thinking processes.
TEMPLE:
You see every tech startup needs eventually to hire a suit, which is kind of a derogatory term for a verbal thinker because they need a verbal thinker to organize types. You see the thing about my kind of mind, we're not that well organized. And so the company gets bigger. They’ve got to hire people to organize stuff, you know, make sure the payroll gets paid, the taxes get paid and just run the business. But what's happening now is, you see verbal thinkers, overly abstract things. We're going to have some big policy, but how do you actually implement it? How do you actually do it? See my mind's bottom up. I use specific examples of, okay stuff that works, stuff that doesn't work. Now the problem with bottom up thinking, it takes a ton of data to make it work. But there was a kind of a tendency say, well, everybody has to go to college. Well, what I have found I working on jobs is that the degreed engineer, oh yeah calculates all the mathematical stuff, but how do you actually build it? You see, you need both kinds of minds, the degreed engineer and the visual thinker. Because I need the mathematics to make sure the plant roof doesn't fall in.
ELISE:
Yeah, it feels like a Baton toss like this, or, you know, having worked in corporate America probably with primarily verbal thinkers, but even then it can sometimes feel like a bunch of kids playing soccer. You know, everyone wants to be in this position, scoring goals, even if they might be better in a different part of the field. I think in general, and this is again a generalization, we pride people on becoming generalists, right? Like getting a wide liberal arts education, which has its ups upside and qualities as a verbal thinker, but we're not particularly attenuated to this idea of understanding how a child's brain works and then teaching to that. Right. Well, we don't necessarily have the capacity, but it doesn't seem to be part of our philosophy either.
TEMPLE:
I think part of a liberal arts education would be having some skilled trades. I mean, when I was in elementary school, I loved wood shop, I also loved sewing. And what I found that, you know, the only difference between sewing and making things outta steel is one material's rigid and the other is soft, but it's still making things and putting things together. And I think part of an education is also, you know, learning about some of these things. And I think the first step, as I said before, is we've gotta realize that different kinds of thinking are different, you know, different kinds of intelligences to approaching problem solving. And just to keep things running like infrastructure, you're gonna need my kind of mind to keep a water system operating. To prevent a mess like Fukushima, you know, I really do need all the different kinds of minds.
ELISE:
And you mentioned, throughout the book, a variety of neurodivergent traits, ADHD, hyperactivity, autism, do these things typically go together? Why are they, or just, it’s across the board, these are the way different ways that people's minds are impacted, or is there a correlation?
TEMPLE:
Well, autism's a spectrum. I mean, Elon Musk come out and said, he's on the spectrum. Einstein had no speech until age three. Steven Spielberg was dyslexic. Michaelangelo dropped out of school at age 12. Where would these innovators be today? What would happen to Michaelangelo today? Grubby little 12 year old dropped out of school. Now, fortunately he had exposure to great art. Every church was commissioning it. He also grew up using stone cutting tools. So this brings up a very important thing about careers. Students get interested in careers they get exposed to, I got exposed to cattle when I was a teenager. I wouldn't have been in the go in the cattle industry if hadn't been exposed to it, you know, it starts out with exposure and then mentoring. But I'm concerned that a lot of smart kids just kind of going nowhere, because nobody's working on developing their skills. As I said before, the first step is realizing that different kinds of thinking exist.
ELISE:
Yeah.
TEMPLE:
And I'm worried about the algebra draconian algebra requirements screening a kid out of automechanics class. You don't need algebra that do auto mechanics.
ELISE:
Right.
TEMPLE:
And then for a veterinarian, you have to study calculus and algebra and they'll say, well, you need algebra for drug dosing. Yeah. That's maybe 10 formulas you just memorize. Like I know how to size hydraulic and pneumatic cylinders. Yeah. I just memorized how to do that.
ELISE:
Right. That's what calculators are for.
TEMPLE:
What veterinarian uses calculus in a veterinary practice?
ELISE:
Right. It's pretty interesting. And you think about these kids and I thought this was a service in the book too, talking about consider the socioeconomics of this, but that there are, in a lot of these trades, apprenticeship.gov, like where you can actually not only get a job, but be paid as an intern to be developed and trained, but people don't really know that that exists.
TEMPLE:
I think we need to be doing more of these things. Like when they were building our buildings on campus, our new animal science building remodel, our new chemistry, building our new biology building. I visited with the construction managers on those projects. And there was a huge shortage of electricians in Colorado, on plumbers. You know, these are jobs that are not gonna go away. They're not gonna replaced by computers. You know, people will say, and I think some verbal thinkers make this mistake, “Everything's going to be run by computers.” But what they forget it is mechanical devices controlled by computers. Let's take something like 3D printing. That's a mechanical device controlled by a computer. And I had an interesting conversation with Betsy about this. And she kind of didn't understand that until she got looking all at YouTube videos of 3D printers in operation, different types of, then she understood a mechanical device by a computer and the best mechanical devices are going to be made by my kind of mind. So have my kind of mind to make the mechanics of the 3D printer and the mathematicians do the programming. See we're going need both kinds of minds. You're going to need my kind of mind just to keep them 3D printers operating, you know, the little toy ones. They're very fiddly little devices, one of the companies that makes them said patience required, caution, you need to have patience because it is kind of a tricky little device.
ELISE:
Yeah.
TEMPLE:
But that's an example of needing the different kinds of minds.
ELISE:
Yeah. I can't remember who this quote was, but you had a beautiful quote about we're starting to understand the importance of biodiversity, right? Maybe a little too late, but that neurodiversity might be as essential to our survival.
TEMPLE:
You've got was autism and it says milder forms. You've got Elon Musk, you've got Einstein. And then you get people that are very severe, nonverbal, no speech though some of them can learn to type also maybe can't dress themselves. You put the same verbal name on Elon Musk or Einstein that is put on someone who can't dress themselves. To me, that doesn't make very much sense. So there's a tendency to over generalize. And I see a lot of parents get locked into the label and they don't think their kid can do anything. I'm seeing too many kids where, oh, they're doing well in school, but they've never gone shopping by themselves. They don't have a bank account. They're not learning just basic skills on what I call business social, how to greet people, just basic things like that. And, and not going anywhere. Because then they don't have a shop class to take. But I know three people I work with, one that's definitely autistic, and I one that's definitely not autistic. A single welding class was the start of their business. Now welding isn't for everybody, but if you don't get exposed to things, you don't know what you might like or what you might be good at.
ELISE:
Yeah.
TEMPLE:
See, this is why we need to be exposing kids with all the skill to trades things because then if they have a talent for that, we need this person that can fix anything.
ELISE:
Right. And so much of it is, I'm from Montana and I was writing horses and I was with this Wrangler, this young kid, it was just the two of us. And he was telling me, you know, how much he struggled in school and hated school. This is before I read your book, but he was articulating his dismay and, and yeah, this kid is an incredibly hard worker. He is going to farrier school so he can shoe horses, which is in dire need. But he also is so intelligent about animals, which won't surprise you. Like he has a completely different mind. He's an exquisite horse person and yet he felt left behind and rejected. You know, he feels less than, you know, that was a big part of our conversation.
TEMPLE:
The visual thinkers are good at animals, art, mechanics, and photography. I've talked to lots of photographers that I've worked with that have dyslexic. I've talked to one right now. He's done major, major nature documentaries. And he's a little bit concerned right now about his drone pilots test, you know, there's a little bit of math in that. I think I could handle that. It's pretty much memorization. But, these are people that are needed and being a visual thinker helped me with my work with animals because let's look at animals. Animals are not verbal thinkers. Animals are sensory based. They're sensory based world of smell, sight, sound. I just read our interesting brand new paper that a dog's olafactory system is directly connected to the visual cortex and this dog must get three dimensional smell images of things. I was trying to think about what that would be like. And I presented that research at a veterinary conference, a sensory based world.
So when I started my work with cattle, the first thing I did is I look at what the cattle was seeing and the cattle did not wanna walk through the shoot to get vaccinated because there was a coat on the fence, a paper cup on the ground, a shiny reflection on a vehicle, a string hanging down, little things we tend not to notice. And people thought I was kind of crazy looking at this stuff. But at the time that I started doing this, I didn't know that other people were verbal thinkers. I didn't know that, I didn't learn that verbal thinkers existed until I was in my thirties. And you get back to the old thing, like the artists hate the accountants kind of stuff. I think some of that's different kinds of thinking. To resolve that problem, they need to realize different kinds of thinking exist and we really do need all the different kinds of minds.
ELISE:
Yeah. I mean it's interesting time to be alive, always, but particularly right now. But we think about the gender binary and we think about a lot of these systems, moving beyond a lot of this, these black and white systems and you think brains, you know, in a way too, like the way that we think or process the world sits on the spectrum. Right? Elon Musk.
TEMPLE:
Well, Elon Musk really likes his things to look good. You look at his launch entry tower, the jet bridge thing that you walk through to get in space capsule looks like it's out of 2001 Space Odyssey. We're the one that NASA uses looks like construction, scaffolding. He likes stuff to look cool.
ELISE:
Yeah.
TEMPLE:
I can relate to that.
ELISE:
And, and that's because, and he's in the more of the visual, like the, the design part of it, right? More in your world.
TEMPLE:
The visual and you see, but then of course you're going to need the mathematical people that to do all the orbital mechanics, like for example, Katherine Johnson, a mathematical mind. And one thing that was done right with Katherine Johnson when she was a little girl, is her ability in math was moved ahead. You know, these kinds of thinking will often show up in kids around seven or eight years old. So you have a pattern thinker like Katherine, where they moved her ahead in math, you see goes, here's pure math. Okay. Orbital reentry. If you come in too steep, you burn up. If you come in too shallow, you go out to outer space and you die when your air runs out, you've got to come in at just the right angle, that's math.
ELISE:
She figured it out.
TEMPLE:
She calculated that by hand, originally, it's all done by hand originally for the first flights.
ELISE:
So what's your advice to parents? You know, I think about my son for example, and we were having this conversation based on your book because he can't spell.
TEMPLE:
Old is your son?
ELISE:
So I have a nine year old and a six year old and my nine year old has a fascinating mind. He loves facts. He's a little bit confusing to me. He loves facts. He can't spell, probably has ADHD or some version of it, but just like his mind, he blows my mind all the time, but he mechanically struggles with his hands and I don't know, but how do I help? What's your best advice for kids?
TEMPLE:
Thing's really important is exposing kids to lots of different things. My art ability showed up when I was about seven or eight years old and mother always encouraged it and I would just draw the same horse head over and over and over again. And she encouraged me to draw more things. Now there's one of my drawings right there.
ELISE:
That's beautiful.
TEMPLE:
When you're weird, what I learned to do is I learned to sell my work. So my art authority was always encouraged. Okay, let's say the child's really good at playing with Legos. I'm seeing too many kids growing up and they never get a chance to try tools. I was using pliers, screwdriver, and a hammer in second grade and I was taught that these were growing up things and had to be used in a responsible manner. And there's kids growing up today where the 16 years old and they're making fabulous things out of Legos and nobody thought to introduce tools, right? That's a gigantic mistake. You've got exposed kids to a lot of different things. Katherine Johnson, fortunately, got moved ahead in math because if she'd just been made to do baby math, she would've gotten maybe a behavior problem. Little word fingers, maybe reading, you know, more advanced books.
I don't believe in this age appropriate book. So if they high reading level, you know, they can read the Harry Potter book in second grade, if they can read it. In fact, books like that have been really good for reading because now you've got a child going to a bookstore that's having the midnight opening and the children are dressed up in costumes and they wanna read this giant, big fat book, that motivates reading. And I did not read until third grade, mother taught me with phonics. She homeschooled me in that. And let's start with the book that's worth reading that the kid might be interested in. And some kids learn whole word, and other kids learn with phonics. And I was a phonics learner. She did it very simple. I can't believe some of the complicated nonsense I've gotten out of teaching phonics. I already knew my ABC song, that's already got half the sounds. And then she just had me memorize the sounds and she'd read a page of an interesting book and then stop in a really, really juicy place and have me sound out a few words and gradually I read more and more and she read less and less, all done out loud reading.
ELISE:
Did she obviously, you know, she was a teacher, right? But did she intuitively understand your mind and how to help you or was it just trial and error?
TEMPLE:
Mother’s a visual thinker herself, and it wasn't until she got into late adulthood that she realized that different kinds of minds existed when she started reading, some of my stuff. You know that I do a lot of talks with big corporations and I tell managers that the first thing you've got to do is realize that different kinds of thinking exist and they bring different kinds of skills into projects.
ELISE:
Yeah. And do you feel, you know, one of the parts of corporate culture, suits, right? Or this idea of management, which can be incredible fuel, right? If you have someone who's just clearing obstacles for you and helping you get what you need, so you can do your best work, or it can be a major impediment. Have you seen examples of disparate teams, different types of thinking done well, where there are lessons for all of us in terms of respecting and supporting each other?
TEMPLE:
I think some of it got done well. And a lot of the meat processing plants that I work in, is the mathematicians did the boilers in the refrigeration. And my kind of mind did all the mechanically complicated, clever equipment that you had in the plant, that worked well. Now here's a big mess, a verbal thinker in sales, boy, he could talk in charge of remodeling the plant and he wouldn't listen to anybody. And he built this remodeled plant without enough waste water treatment and the city shutting down, it was like a million, million, million dollar mess. He didn't listen to the people in the shop that told him it wasn't going to work. That was a complete fiasco. And that was like 20 some years ago, more than 20 years ago. He should have listened to them, to the people in the shop were told why it wouldn't work.
You know, I used to sit in the job trailer and we’d talk about stupid suits. Now I'm doing less of that now, because I didn't know at that time, 20 years ago, I'm sitting in the job trailer talking about how stupid the suits are, is that they think differently. See it's sort of like this, a verbal thinker like wants the technology to work. Okay. You want the phone to work, take pictures, text, whatever you want to do with it. Where a lot of techy people get really into what beautiful code they wrote or the technology is just so cool. Well, you need to have some of, yes, I want the phone to work.
ELISE:
Right.
TEMPLE:
The first step, as I said before, is we have to realize different kinds of thinking exist and the managers better listen to some of the guys in the shop when they tell them about stuff. That's going to break, let's say for example, on a water system,
ELISE:
Right. Do you think that verbal thinkers, that we can be grandiose or arrogant just because the world has been built for us in, you know, prioritizing our type of mind? And so we think that we know more than we do about stuff that's beyond our capacity. Do you think what's happened just that level of stereotyping?
TEMPLE:
Well, the thing that's happened now is the skill loss thing, electricians and plumbers and people to fix industrial equipment. Now what I've been seeing right now, since COVID, I'm getting back out in the plants, if you go into the middle of Nebraska, you still have a lot of kids coming off the farms and one particular plant fought to keep their engineering shop and not have it shut down. But then I get out away from that area where you have the farm kids coming in, get out, maybe California, I got a plant out there. They can't build anything. They have no in-house capability to build anything. They've lost it all. Their shop doesn't have enough equipment in it. Because I looked at their shop and they were probably wondering why I wanted to look at their shop. I wanted to see if they even had the equipment for doing my little project, they were farming all the equipment out. And then there's a point where you really get in trouble doing that when we have to import a poultry processing plant equipment from Holland that's because in Holland they don't stick their nose up at skilled trades. And the state of the art electronic chip making machine is from Holland. And when you take covers off that thing, it's got lots of complicated mechanical equipment that my kind of mind needs to work on.
ELISE:
Yeah. So for families in California, right? Or a less rural environment with kids who are maybe mechanically gifted, but they don't know it. What do you think, is it just like take them to a wood woodworking class, take them to a pottery studio?
TEMPLE:
Let's get all these classes back in the schools, we need to be hooking kids in middle school. That cars are interesting. I took a photography class in college and there was things I learned about depth of field and lighting that apply to iPhones. You know, those old stuff that, you know, how that works, it it's still the same, but you have to expose kids different things, then they can see what they tend to gravitate towards.
ELISE:
Yeah.
TEMPLE:
And I I'm glad that some of the schools are putting some of this stuff back in because we need these people just to keep things running.
ELISE:
Yeah. No, absolutely. And clearly opportunities are moments to help kids identify their gifts and support them in those gifts rather than the suggestion.
TEMPLE:
And a lot of kids have middle of the road kind of thinking and you know, are mixtures and then the kids that tend to get a label tend to be more likely an extreme computer program or mathematician or an extreme object visualizer can understand anything mechanical, but if they don't get a chance to use tools or do mechanical things, you're not gonna see that ability.
ELISE:
Yeah.
TEMPLE:
You see that that's the problem. You've got to have an opportunity to do it.
ELISE:
Yeah. And in terms of labeling and spectrums and the conversation in the book about autism and because we are living in a world where we're trying to move away from language and we recognize our language is inadequate, we're trying to put as many labels on people as possible. Do you think labels are just generally always dangerous?
TEMPLE:
You see one of the problems, if you've got to get any kind of special ed service, you have to have a label, an insurance company won't pay for it. So you have that reason for labels, but I'm seeing too many parents, the kids labeled autistic or labeled something else and they got locked into the label and they can't imagine that their kid can even do anything. And I've visited programs where they get autistic kids, like even non-verbal ones out on boats, get them on surfboards, get them out into nature. And it might be a three day trip for the family. And one of the most important things that that kind of program can do is prove to the parents a kid can do something, like he actually got on a surfboard and liked it or got in a boat and liked it. You know, there's too much of what Deborah Moore calls, “label locking.” They get so locked into the label. But I worked with people that own metal working shops, now they're all retiring. Now that definitely would be labeled autistic today.
ELISE:
Right.
TEMPLE:
Or ADHD. And they had successful businesses, multiple patents. This is what makes me very frustrated is to go back and forth when autism world and the world of industry. And this gets into the whole thing about identity. For me, identity, being a university professor, a scientist, a person who designs things, might call that career first. Yeah. There's some social stuff. I know. I see people having these social chit-chat conversations. They're having such a great time. They go by so fast. I can't even follow them, but having interesting things to do that, that gives my life a meaning and getting into interesting careers. I've been out to Silicon valley. I've been out the major tech companies. Oh, half those programmers are on some degree on the spectrum,
ELISE:
Right.
TEMPLE:
Been there, seen them. And sometimes people who think differently, they do really good with their own businesses. Okay. Now what can employers do who work with people that are different? Let's say they're a programmer for a tech company, vague instructions don't work. You need to say, now I want you to design some software that uses this specific platform to do some specific thing and then let the programmer figure out how to do it. Or if you just said, we're not a team player. Now, one of the things I learned working on teams is I work better if I have some particular part of the project this month. Okay. I will design up till this point with a factory in the process or on writing assignments, I'll say, well, okay, I will write all the guidelines on the animal handling. Other people can write some of the other guidelines, where there's like a specific thing that I do. And here's the deadline. We want the references in this format. And then I go and do it. I've learned to sit in a committee meetings and say now, okay, what are the parameters for this job? You want me to take some labor out, we’ve got to work to reduce workman's comp claims. What are the goals for this project?
ELISE:
You seem to have so much self knowledge, which is, I think really interesting. I mean, obviously understanding the way your mind works has been critical to your success, but how does one cultivate that just deep and profound awareness of self, it's pretty amazing to witness?
TEMPLE:
Well, the things where I got the most insight were first person accounts of people with autism, writing a lived in experience, and brain research, high up brain research. Those were some of the things that gave me the most insight. And I could always keep learning because I didn’t even realize that verbal thinking existed until I was in my thirties. And the way that I found out that it existed, I'll never forget when I went to a autism meeting and we got to talking about how people think, and if I ask somebody think about your own home or your own car, most people can see that. But this was the question where I was able to see the difference, when I ask you about something you don't own to out there in the environment. That's when I discovered my magic question, get my first inkling in a different kinds of thinking. So if you say to me, think about a church steeple, I start naming them off. They are specific. And I see them ask a visual thinker. I'll start saying, well, it's a church here and blah, blah, blah. And I'll just name them off like PowerPoint slides. I was shocked when I asked a speech therapist to think about a church steeple and all she done was pointy thing to lines like this with absolutely no detail. And that was my first inkling when I was in my thirties that maybe she didn't think the same way I did. That was a shock. And then I started using this question over and over again, I’d say, think about a church. How does it come into your mind? I'd always ask it the same way. And the more visual thinkers name them off, then the verbal thinkers who see the pointy thing. And then there's people in the middle where they might see a fairly detailed new England steeple, but they don't tell me where the church is.
ELISE:
Right.
TEMPLE:
You know, that's kind of the mixture. And if I ask them, think about their dog. Yeah. They're gonna see their own dog, because they're so familiar with that. Ask you something you don't own. I mean, even those pastors don't think about the, the steeple on church,
ELISE:
Whereas you have a filing cabinet of reference points in your mind?
TEMPLE:
Well, now what's happening is now I'm seeing my PowerPoint slides that I dug up online. You see, then as you see more and more steeples, I can put them into New England type, cathedral type, warehouse churches that have no steeple. You see, I start putting them into categories.
ELISE:
Yeah.
TEMPLE:
See that's how I learned concepts by putting specific examples into categories.
ELISE:
Do you have a spiritual framework through which you see the world, or do you feel like this, the designation of people's gifts is sort of random or do you feel like there's some other guiding principle that determines what's needed at a certain time?
TEMPLE:
Well I love the whole space telescope vintage poster there in my curated background and the picture I love the best is the deep space field that shows hundreds of galaxies. And now the web telescope is bringing in more beautiful pictures and this is when I got emotional. I cried when I read about how the deep space field was discovered, the Hubble was pointed at a dark part of space that contained nothing. And all the other scientists thought this was the stupidest waste of observing time. Ten days of valuable observing time to look at nothing right near the big dipper. And they found a hundred galaxies. When I think about life's great questions. I'll look at the deep space field and I'll look at some of the new web telescope pictures and kind of leave it at that.
ELISE:
It's pretty stunning,
TEMPLE:
But I get emotional about this guy going against everybody else and looking at nothing and finding hundreds of galaxies.
ELISE:
I know it's pretty amazing. Right?
TEMPLE:
I get really emotional about, you know, learning knowledge. I remember reading about a scientist that studied whale fossils, and he was over in Ukraine and he got all of his work onto a single portable hard drive, wanted to save his work. You know, the little hard drive boxes, there the size of CD player. And he was trying to upload it to his colleagues. His life's work on a portable hard drive. I can't even look at a portable hard drive or look them up on Amazon now without crying, thinking about his whole life's work, his little fragile, portable hard drive, but he was trying to take a train out of the country, to save his life's work.
ELISE:
Yeah, did he save it?
TEMPLE:
I don’t know. It was an article in The Wall Street Journal and the article ended.
ELISE:
Oh, Temple.
TEMPLE:
That's the kind of stuff I get emotional about. The most important thing to him was saving his knowledge.
ELISE:
Yeah. I understand.
TEMPLE:
There was specialized knowledge on, I think it was whale fossils, but that's the kind of stuff that I get emotional about, you know, preserving knowledge, not losing knowledge. If I look up portable hard drives on Amazon right now I can make myself cry and I'm starting to get upset right now talking about it. And I had to buy some of those for my students. But that's going to be associated with saving knowledge.
ELISE:
Yeah. Well, and you right about your emotions, which I thought was so beautiful, where you talk about as a person on the autism spectrum, that you're limited to the prime or primitive emotions, that you feel that's why you really understand animals. You understand the sense of feeling like prey.
TEMPLE:
Animals live in a sensory based world. And I find, I still have to keep talking to people about cattle handling about the same old things that it scare cattle. You know, it's things like shadows. Now I know that this won't show up on a podcast, but I want to find this, this shadow. I do a lot of work with the slaughter plants and people ask me a cattle afraid of getting slaughtered. I'll tell you what they're afraid of the spider monster.
ELISE:
That's a scary shadow.
TEMPLE:
And this particular place worked just fine in the morning. And then in the late afternoon, this weird shadow from the overhead structure went on the floor and Angus cattle decided they were not gonna walk over the spider monster.
ELISE:
I don't blame them.
TEMPLE:
And it's just a shadow. And I find, I still have to, you know, point out to people how to find these things. They said, watch the cows, they come up to shoot. They'll look right at the stuff they don't like. Another thing was some little L E D light that was on the side of a building, the cattle didn't like that. And they got rid of that. And then they noticed little visual things. I notice if an electronic sign has one pixel that's wrong, I'll notice it. Like one time I went into the airport and as you walked in, there was big TVs in a row that had the name of the airline on it. And one of them was scrambled and I immediately noticed it. And then I talked to the person beside me. I said, did you see that that sign was scrambled? No, they didn't. I saw at the instant I walked in, that one of the monitors had a scrambled image on it.
ELISE:
I would not have noticed either temple.
TEMPLE:
No, I definitely noticed it. Have one or two pixels off on a electronic joint, I’ll notice it.
ELISE:
It's amazing. Well thank you for your time. I loved your book and it has given me so much to think about, and it's one of those light switch books where suddenly you're like, oh, of course I didn't know this, but now it seems unknowable. I mean, it seems so obvious, you know?
TEMPLE:
I might have to do a little book. I've got books. This is calling to get your kids out on building things. Just right for your kids, Outdoor Scientists. These are my children's books. They'll be just perfect for your kids.
ELISE:
I'm gonna get those. Yeah.
TEMPLE:
Yeah. Outdoor Scientists, because I would spend hours experimenting with a little bird kite when I was like seven years old to figure out how to get a kite kit to work.
ELISE:
Yeah, yeah. This is the sounding familiar. My oldest, I mean, I think he should be a Marine biologist. He is just fascinated with any water and any aquatic life. And, it's funny because you, as a parent, there's cultural programming to sort of generalize your kids and not let them go too deep into something. But maybe that's exactly what we need to do is let them follow their bliss.
TEMPLE:
What you need to do is broaden it. Alright. Let's read books about Marine biology. Maybe do some math involved with Marine biology. Because when I start out with drawing, I would just draw the same horse head over and over again. My mother encouraged me to draw the whole horse, draw the stable, you know, take that interest and broaden. So it isn't quite so fixated. Okay. What is some of the equipment that a Marine biologist use? All really fancy audio equipment that they used to listen to whales and listen to a lot of Marine animals. You could learn about some of the scientific instruments you see, I'm just giving you an idea of how to broaden. You can read about Jacques Cousteau, I put him in one of my books. He wanted to be a pilot, but he got injured and old fashioned airplanes you had to have strength to pull back on the open. Well, until he went underwater, couldn't be a pilot. So he flew underwater.
ELISE:
I love that. That's great advice, which I'm gonna take. And thank you for everything and good luck with this book. And I hope it changes our whole education system.
TEMPLE:
Well, I hope we just got to realize we really do need all the different kinds of minds. Beause I want to emphasize that, boy, Betsy, she's total verbal thinker. Oh, she did wonders with my organization. Just wonders. I do the rough draft. I'd get a draft back around and I go Betsy, you're just magic, what you do to do with it.
ELISE:
Yeah.
TEMPLE:
But the original ideas that came from me.
ELISE:
Yeah, no, it takes all kinds.
TEMPLE:
You definitely need all kinds. And right now I am not going to be quite so mean about the stupid suits, the way I was 20 years ago, sitting around the job trailer. But on the other hand, the suits better listen to the guys down in the shop and don't get them fired when they just tell you how to fix things.
ELISE:
No.
TEMPLE:
They’re the ones that fix some of these broken water systems, messed up electrical grids, and stuff we really need.
ELISE:
Yeah, definitely. Alright, well, thank you.
TEMPLE:
This was a joy talk to you and I've got to go over and teach my class and meet with my student.
ELISE:
Well, I very much agree with Temple, that we need to make sure that technical schools have a place in our culture and that they are no longer considered “dumping grounds” for low achieving kids. And, as she writes: “This fallacy is born of our prejudice, that college is for everyone, that it is the only path to a high paying job, and that working with your hands in a skilled trade is somehow less prestigious or valuable than careers that require academic degrees.” So, we need these people desperately to help us keep society in tact and safe. We’re having a crisis throughout our infrastructure, which I think we can all recognize. And as she comments, throughout her book, we just don’t make things anymore, things that we should absolutely make. She also elaborates more on the word-based thinking, which is the verbal thinkers, who typically are better at algebra. And she writes that, “People who are primarily verbal thinkers tend to comprehend things in order, which is often why they do so well in school, where learning is mostly structured sequentially. They are good at understanding general concepts and have a good sense of time, though not necessarily a good sense of direction. Verbal thinkers are the kids with perfectly organized binders and the adults whose computer desktops have neat rows of folders for every project. Verbal thinkers are good at explaining the steps they take to arrive at an answer, or make a decision. Verbal thinker talk to themselves silently, also know as self-talk, to organize their world. Verbal thinker easily dash off emails, make presentations, they talk early and often. By default verbal thinkers tend to be the ones who dominate conversations, are hyper-organized, and social. Now visual thinkers tend to be late talkers and struggle with school and traditional teaching methods. Algebra is often their undoing because the concepts are too abstract, with little or nothing concrete to visualize. Visual thinkers tend to be good at arithmetic that is directly related to practical tasks, such as building and putting things together. Visual thinkers, like me, easily grasp how mechanical devices work or enjoy figuring them out. We tend to be problem solvers and sometimes appear to be socially awkward.” The point that she makes throughout, is that in our culture, which is very much engineered towards verbal thinkers like me, we are missing huge troves of talent. People who haven’t been historically recognized, but who we desperately need. Thanks for listening.
