Temple Grandin: "The Autistic Brain"

it's really great to be here today lots of things to talk about today in a pretty short period of time and I think I'll just start out talk about you know what exactly autism is is a developmental disorder it's a very very big continuum now the thing is one is something of just normal variation become an abnormality I know for example people with bipolar have more siblings in creative careers and people with autism have more relatives in technical careers you know if we got rid of all of the genetics that makes autism well you wouldn't even have any computers you wouldn't have any electricity I mean what do you think made the first stone spear now it wasn't the social yakety axe around the campfire that's for sure see that they have the thing is is a little bit of these traits can provide an advantage you get too much of the trait then you get a disadvantage you see that's the problem it isn't like having tuberculosis where you the have it or you don't I just got back from Australia and I had to check off on a customs form whether or not it had tuberculosis and I could definitely say no you see that is something that's absolutely definitive another thing is what would happen to little Albert today well dr. Einstein had known speech until age three he would have been diagnosed autistic in a lot of school systems what happened to him makes me really really worried fortunately somebody let him develop his abilities I think a job at the Patent Office was a good thing because he got exposed to lots and lots of new ideas what about Steve Jobs yep he was a loner he brought snakes to school on he didn't have any friends and one of the things that fixed him the really helped him was the local kids Computer Club when he was in high school he got in do computers with other students and this really helped him because the only place I had friends was where there was shared interests okay autism is a very very big spectrum it's not precise it's a behavioral profile you've seen it varies all the way with someone like Einstein Silicon Valley half a Silicon Valley's got a bit of the spectrum they tend to avoid the labels and then you've got on the other end of spectrum somebody very very severe you see it's a huge spectrum it's a much bigger spectrum than something like dyslexia now when I worked on my book the autistic brain we looked at the history of diagnosis it was kind of shocking how much things have changed you know nobody's changing the diagnosis of a demur closes it's still pretty much the same yes there's resistant strains now I got to worry about but it's still tuberculosis where in 1950 in 1970 they blamed mothers the psychoanalytic approach then in 52 they were mixing up on autism with schizophrenia this is the American Psychiatric Association you see the problem is these labels are half science and the other half is doctors squabbling around conference room tables and 1968 they just mentioned autism and just sort of barely mentioned and then in 1980 they finally came up with the definite diagnosis where you had to have speech delay and other obviously autistic behaviors in 1987 they added pdd-nos pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified well what is that 1994 they added Asperger's well now if you're just a geek and a nerd and you're socially awkward you now get an autism diagnosis because you no longer had to have speech delay well now in 2013 they decided to take out the Asperger's and now the whole thing is very muddy because what about the speech delay in the abnormal language well that's all kind of blurred now then they started to nuke new diagnoses called social communication disorder and they're trying to say that's not autism but what do you think the core problem is in autism is socially awkward it's sort of like you take out some social circuits and the brain end up with geek circuits do all the fun geek stuff now that genetics is complicated it's not a simple thing you know lots of little tiny code variations involved with the DNA that done that's involved with the brain development it's complicated you know what people don't realize there's only 2 2 percent or less of the DNA actually codes for proteins makes the animal what's the rest of the DNA do well when I was getting my PhD at the University of Illinois and they used to think non-coding DNA was rubbish or junk DNA no it's probably the operating system it tells the other DNA what to do so when you fold the genome all up coding DNA comes against non-coding DNA and some unknown and in my work with animals I knew addition now my book genetics and the behavior of domestic animals on its a textbook if it sells a thousand copies that's a best-seller for a textbook I and and one of the first things in the first edition we looked at was how traits are linked though the famous experiments by the Russian scientist Dulli F and he wanted to breed foxes that wouldn't bite your hand off so they selected foxes to be gentle and they ended up with a black and white border collie Fox dog you see coat color was linked to temperament yet traits are linked over select for single trait you're going to have a lot of problems and this article in science and nature though a bunch of articles on the encode project you know somehow maybe there's some kind of mathematical relationship on how the operating system works ok all you asked me hackers out there I challenge you the ultimate hack is the non-coding DNA I mean why do you want to mess around with people's visa cards and things like that when you can hack DNA a lot more interesting and a lot more valuable the problem is we don't really know how the operating system works ok I like to look at variation in personality traits sort of like a music mixing board or an audio mixing board you know you can make an anxiety a little less you can make anxiety a little more you can make depression a little less you can make visual thinking more or less mathematical thinking more or less these things are on a continuum see what the problem with top-down verbal thinking is once someone gets labeled autistic there's a tendency sometimes to overprotect you know like to Oh a little Jimmy you know he's got Asperger's or autism he doesn't have to order his food in the restaurants I go yes he does that's the kind of stuff that my mother always had me doing I had to do stuff she had me be a little hostess at her cocktail parties so I learn social skills really important stuff like that now being a visual thinker was a really big asset in my work designing equipment and this is actually a curved round crowding pan going up to the shoot to go in one of the beef packing plants that I've worked on and what I design something I can test run it in my mind now if you want to see how this works you can go on YouTube I have a video called beef plank video tour with Temple Grandin then you can see how it works now people always ask me did the cattle know they're going to get slaughtered well I had to answer that question and I found they behaved the same way the slaughter plant as they do in the veterinary shoot yes there's some stress but they knew they were going to die they should be jumping out and I usually are not doing that okay I used to joke around that had a huge visual thinking circuit a big graphic serpent in my brain and it turns out but I do have a pretty big circuit in my brain for visual thinking this goes all the way back into the visual cortex it's probably in the top a 25% and when you're weird nerd and you're trying to get your business started I found nobody wanted to talk to me but when I showed them my drawings they went oh you did that well then I got respect you see I started out my business freelance one little project at a time and one of my big concerns where you've got kids labeled dyslexic you they're labeled ADHD they're labelled mildly autistic Asperger's is I'm seeing too many smart kits that a way less severe than me and they're not going anywhere they're getting addicted to video games they haven't learned job skills around age 12 boy I wish the paper routes were around well let's find a substitute for paper routes things like walking dogs for the neighbors how about done working on a neighborhood website something like that I'm they've got to learn how to do work and there's a scene in the HBO movie where I walk up to the head of the fireman ranchmen and I get his card I actually did that you know I started out one little freelance or at a time one little project at a time building up a freelance business that guy know a lot of people out in the meat industry that are mildly on the autism spectrum in good jobs like they run the maintenance engineering shop at a large plant sorry about entry-level and work up I know two people that are run metal fabrication companies and they run them they own the companies I'm people that do IT for major corporations you see as I go back and forth between the livestock world and the autism world on I'm just seeing too many kids kind of getting over protected you know you gotta get them out you got to get them out doing things and when I was fifteen I didn't want to go to my aunt's ranch my mother said well you could go for a week or two or you can go all summer but not going was not going to be an option they weren't going to let me become recluse in my room well and this is another brain scans done in 2010 and what the blue part shows is basically water cerebral spinal fluid my left parietal area is pretty well trashed out that kind of wrecked the math department I did just fine with elementary school math and I hit a wall of algebra so how did I get through college well back in 67 the fad at the time was finite math that was sort of the big fatter but he was doing probabilities matrices and statistics and with ten out thousand hour of tutoring I managed to get through that that absolutely saved me I'm getting worried today all this emphasis on stem then my kind of mine is going to get locked out you know but I'm going to show you where you need my kind of mind you know as I've said in my previous TED talk world needs all kinds of minds and they can work together and complement each other well back in 68 I had access to the same computer that Bill Gates had access Malcolm Gladwell uses this example in his book outliers you only basically said well if you have enough access to the education and enough time to practice everyone can become an X bird I wanted to learn how to program the computer I couldn't do it I just couldn't do it and one of the things I want to emphasize is build on the kids area of strength when you get kids with different labels they tend to have uneven skills build on the strengths my ability in art was always encouraged you know if I hadn't had art and sewing when I was in school or gone nowhere but I was encouraged to do lots of different kinds of art and I just got back and called back and in Quebec I just found out that art dance and theater all required classes up there you know French culture seems to value that and let's look at Steve Jobs Steve Jobs was an artist he wasn't an engineer he was an artist and you know what turned him on when he was in college even though he dropped out calligraphy he was fascinated with calligraphy and that's why computers have nice fonts you know it was the art mind that designed the user interface on every single smartphone that there is it was not an engineer engineers have to make it work see this is where you have to have the two kinds of minds working together and I'm going to give you some other examples of where my kind of mind that can't do algebra is needed this is one of my most important slides I am a photorealistic visual thinker what's called an object visualizer everything I think about is in a photorealistic picture now what I was young I didn't know that other people didn't think this way I thought everybody was the visual thinker you know then gradually I learned that other people think differently and I think kinds of jobs I'm good at is industrial design there's a whole College major industrial design people that have visual thinkers are very good at things like fixing cars and skilled the trades I think one of the worst things the schools have done taking out all the skilled trades classes absolutely the worst you know you've got people to young people today they don't cook they don't so I was selling up a ripping some clothing last night I was wondering if young person even knew how to use the needle and thread I they've never had to do those things on woodworking welding okay I talked about the guys that are only two metal fabrication shops that was welding but the other thing about doing those hands-on classes is they teach practical problem-solving you know real projects don't always work out just the way you want them to work out you know then you make a mistake or you don't have some of the materials can you figure out how to substitute another material that's resourcefulness and then you have the pattern thinker the spatial visualizer these are the kids are going to ace all the math stuff but the ones that are really brilliant math often have trouble with reading and I'm seeing some very bad situations where I see a kid is a little brilliant mathematician in the third grade and they're making them do that baby math over and over again well you'll just end up with the behavior problem he can do the high school math let them do the high school math also we got to get a lot more into what are they going to do when they grow up and in my autistic brain book I discuss all these different kinds of minds then you get the verbal facts thinker these guys they're very good with anything with words they understand words and obviously most so-called normal people are mixtures of these different kinds of thinking now we need to have evidence today that this is not just some nonsense that I've made up and the autistic brain book has got all the references for the evidence of the two types of visuals is thinking you know that that's the object visualizer and then the more where you are in space see in your brain you got circuits for what is something that's my kind of mind another kind of circuit is where is something where are you located in space that's the mathematician mind and there's also a some PET scan studies that show that this is this actually is real and I found these studies while surfing one night on the Internet two o'clock in the morning I found these studies they were kind of hidden away you know there's sort of this bias that everybody is exactly the same now there's a big amount of brain plasticity the big bunch of people in the middle range yeah you practice enough you can get really good at a lot of different things I wasn't very good at public speaking to start with and I walked out on my first graduate school talk you know I think I've come a little bit of a ways since then but then there's other things where it'd be better off just to work on on developing strengths you know there's two ways to do the math there's the verbal way and there's the more geometric way some of these kids that are really smart at this stuff they don't show their work well I think people need to understand they think differently when you take some precautions against cheating but once we've done that then accept the fact that they think differently now I want to give you a little glimpse into the mind of the mathematician this is not my mind that praying mantis is made out of a single sheet of folded paper no cuts no tape in the backgrounds the folding pattern that certainly is not my mind and there are some beautiful origami stars some kids gave me there's always like to show my drawings off because when you're weird nerd I learned that you got to sell your work rather than yourself during an interview we got to figure out ways to short-circuit that process and you never know where you might meet the person that open the door so your portfolio better be on your phone here's gorgeous artwork that Jesse Parke did she's more at the moderate level this is a good example of a developing talent and getting a person to do work other people want she was obsessed with electric blanket controls well nobody wants that for artwork we had dad get her off that and here's some beautiful artwork then another person on the autism spectrum at the moderate level is making I mean both of these artworks are being sold professionally all right what's this mess okay gear heads out there okay engineers this is a reason why you need us art lines that can't do algebra what's left there something you don't want to get very close to it's the remains of the Fukushima nuclear power plant and when I found out why this burned up why they had you know breach the containment radioactivity going into the ocean total mess how does happen so I read lots and lots and lots of articles I spent a lot of time on the plane reading I'd go by three newspapers and I would read everything about it and I pieced together what happened they made a mistake that to a visual thinker is so Elementary I couldn't believe that they had made this mistake well you know when you scram a reactor and you shove the control rods back in it almost turns it off but there's still it gets hot and you've got to have an emergency cooling pump to keep water going through it well they put all that equipment and the generators that run that equipment in a basement that was not waterproof all right so what do you think happened Diesel's do not run underwater that's what happened that's a mistake I would never ever make and you know like a women you could have submarine doors hear the crank shut you're going to need some sump pumps that the waters leaking you know in there well if they'd had those simple things things I understand things I think you understand wouldn't have had this problem we really do need all kinds of minds now in my first work with cattle I noticed that they were afraid of a lot of visual detail like for example this flag waving okay animals notice detail you see an animal's world is sensory based it's not word based and I noticed they notice all kinds of detail on the environment and refused to walk through a chute and if I got rid of all these little distractions then they would go right through the chute now how many people there noticed that that animal was locked onto that Sunbeam like okay you see that's being attentive to visual detail getting back to the slaughterhouse I found if I got rid of stuff like that walk right in the slaughterhouse is amazing I can go into meat plant do what I call lights and cardboard and I get a portable light on a long extension cord where I can light up a dark shoot entrance then I get cardboard to cover up something that might be making a shadow like that the works it's amazing lights and cardboard really does work well of course some of my earlier work was making an optical illusion room when I was in high school and my teachers didn't tell me how to make it they wanted me to figure it out for myself that's what I had to do it wasn't easy animals world sensory-based so when they remember something it's a picture let's say an animal gets afraid of something okay like it was a horse that was terrified a black cowboy hats white cowboy hats were fine but black cowboy hats we're really scary then want to be anywhere near black cowboy hats human beings language covers up sensory based thinking that type of Alzheimers whereas the language parts the brain are trashed artwork like this comes out or van Gogh was painting starry night and putting swirls in there and he didn't realize he was doing mathematics the mathematicians got a hold of this this is an important slide and it's true for both a lot of people on the autism spectrum is true for me it's also true for animals bottom-up thinking everything is learned by specific examples and I was just at a really nice bookstore last night and I noticed a book they had out there by a genius dog a border collie that learned all these words and when they trained that dog it was all specific examples everything specific examples they had to teach her categories for different types of toys ok balls versus sticks or something like that that's done by specific example you want to teach a kid with autism things like up and down you need to use 7 or 8 different specific examples otherwise they might think up just meant up the stairs no the kite went up in the air cup was put up on the shelf I picked up the paper clip you've got to use a bunch of different specific examples everything is learned by specific examples and specific examples are put into categories that's how my mind works it's also associative not linear it's associative thinking so if I see in my mind the picture of united concourse Bo is just in there the other day my mind can either go into a glass structure category or an airport category you see my mind works like Google search engine I'm going to show you a brain circuit that I've got that it's going to explain that and there's no generalized pictures of any of these things it's all specific it's what's called bottom-up thinking we need a lot more bottom-up thinking in government policy that's something we really need we've got people coming right out of college with reading something like political science or public administration and they're going right into politics or lobbying but they have no practical experience with any of the stuff that they're legislating or lobbying about and I think it is a real problem that's why we've got so many bad problems today ok glass structure category go through those quick how about airport category yeah they're all specific and lanta big security lines ok all right and when I asked a physics professor one time to think about a church staple instead of getting specific ones the way I do he got pictures of motion of people praying singing and swaying oh well trippy that's not my mind now animals make categories let me show you one the found in the cattle industry ok we got a man on a horse the cattle thing you get will get real close to the man on the horse they feel comfortable with the man on the horse but when the guy gets off the horse and is on foot the cattle run away but think about it man on a horse is a different picture than man on the ground you've got to train them to both animal thinking is really specific and I talk about this in my book animals and translation how do we categorize a problem when we're troubleshooting is there something wrong with equipment or something wrong with training or are you working with a kid is it a biology problem like sensory oversensitivity or is it a behavior problem like frustration because they can't talk or I want to get out doing something or I want to get attention I find categorizing problems really easy but if you want to be good at troubleshooting you need to be able to categorize things here are the lucky geeks they got to land the Mars rover on Mars but I'm seeing the younger versions of too many of these kinds of guys getting addicted to video games and I'm hearing this story well I can't get him out of the basement he's 18 I can't get him out of the bedroom no they weren't going to let me become a recluse in my room this is what makes me crazy because I've been out to Silicon Valley I've been to Disney Imagineering I've been to Google I've been to Pixar I've been to a whole lot of different places oh it's all full of people mildly on the autism spectrum you know all kinds of people there some of them older people now we're at diagnosis later in life can be helpful is in understanding relationships but when we're dealing with these more milder people on the job front I'm seeing them get held back not learning any work skills kind of overprotecting some of these kids what you got to do is you got to stretch you got to push them just outside their comfort zone don't chuck them in the deep end of the pool don't give them sudden surprises but if you don't stretch them they don't develop I was more interested in looking at pictures of things than pictures of people but we need people interested in things after all Tesla who invented the power plant prolly was autistic yet God has stretch them mentors I had a fantastic science teacher you know you got to expose kids to interesting things to get him interested in interesting things if I hadn't been exposed to an optical illusion room I would not have gotten interested in it you know sort of imagine in our heads go like a empty Internet and you got to fill it up full of web pages you got to get out there and show them interesting stuff yesterday don't just play together and make up their own games you know you gotta learn how to negotiate when I was a little kid we did lots of stuff for turn-taking these kids have got to learn how to take turns wait and take your turn my ability in art was always encouraged we need to get a lot more emphasis on building up areas of strength and then you go what about the school requirements I'll tell you right now there's a lot of industries with no barrier of entry Oh royal industries screaming for certified welders right now you want to get to run five oil rigs you're a really nice 26 year old guy that likes to drink coke in his hotel room instead of getting blasted on beer and you do a job for like seven or eight years you'll run five oil rigs I mean there's a lot of industries out there where there's absolutely no barrier of entry oh the computer field is definitely one of those indices you show off a good portfolio of all your programming you're in you know industrial design all kinds of stuff like that okay great online resources Khan Academy Udacity free programming classes if that kid wants to spend eight hours a day learning programming he can do that well how I make video games code Academy I didn't put down code Academy another free programming Coursera free courses in every field lots of humanities classes but you've got to do that as a college course you know it's not at your own pace there's a lot of great free stuff on the web now there's one of my designs in Google Sketchup Sketchup is free software well let's get kids together that are kind of different and have been a Sketchup Club and then they can get to print their creations on a 3d printer which makes their their creation out of plastic resin well 3d printer is a mechanical device this is where electronic interfaces with the real physical and you don't do things right or print your pilot goo rather than printing your thing you know it is interacting with the real world you know what getting back to making things I was very disturbed today to look in the newspaper the Chicago Tribune today and they had st's model rockets already pre-made I was an estis model rockateur when I was a kid we had to build our own rockets we had a makeup you just got cardboard tubes and bolts of wooden you had to build them here's some other great online science projects when I was in high school not doing much studying I was learning lots of work skills you know I decorated our skeeto house up really nice by the time I got out of college I've done ton of work skills stuff where are we going to find mentors oh there's lots of retired people that could mentor some of these kids that are kind of different I'm really concerned or educational systems failing to stimulate some of the specialty the more art type of thinkers like me really worried about it that we're going to just get marginalized you know and what the thing is the mathematician minds need us let's look at another big gigantic engineering mistake airbags that killed babies and young children well there's no way it would have made that mistake that was an example of blindly following a specification that the airbag had to had to restrain an adult man with no seat belt well what you know you could better do up your seat belt guy because an airbag is strong enough of that it's going to kill little cats wouldn't have made that mistake either you know already discussed about the problems of taking out the hands-on classes this is a stuff that saved me horses model rockets an electronics lab those are the only places I was not teased the bullying stuff has really gotten out of hand what people are doing it on Facebook I mean twelve-year-old girls bullied another girl wrote horrible things on Facebook to the point where she jumped off an old abandoned cement plant and killed herself you know I that's like completely terrible last night on the TV and people thought it was funny to take other pictures other people's little kids pictures and put them up on a fake Facebook page and make fun of them you know that's got worse on some of those teasing stuff not better you know we need people in this country that can get out there and do real stuff now that means involving making things businesses can't find enough mechanics they can't find enough high-level programmers there's a lot of places out there where there's shortages of jobs I'm just saying too many talented quirky kids I'd rather call the mild Asperger's that just kind of going nowhere you know they're playing video games and collecting a Social Security check and they shouldn't be and then I go out to the meat industry world and here's the guy that came out of the trailer park and he's not doing that he is running a maintenance shop now people in the trailer park are going to have a terrible time of the more severe cases of autism they're going to end up just going absolutely nowhere see this is the problem you have with autism it's such a big spectrum but you know those ones real mild ones they had to work okay yes celeea work and not yourself also I learned that I had to UM ask my boss for specific goals when I work to the fireman ranchman magazine I knew I had to do a certain amount of articles there were certain things I had to cover there was certain meetings I always had to cover certain livestock shows I had to cover then I was free to do one I to do some features it was clear like what I was supposed to produce and when there's a mistake the boss cannot be vague like for example let's say we're training somebody to be a museum tour guide you got to demonstrate the correct distance you can't just say oh were you too aggressive with the patrons you've got to say well watch Suzy how she does it you've got to demonstrate the correct greeting it's just like coaching an actor in a play that's how you've got to do it now I want to discuss problems with sensory you know sound sensitivity visual sensitivity problems these are things that happen in conjunction with a lot of different labels sensory processing problems and they can range from being a nuisance to being something that really is very very debilitating when I was a child in the end the school bell went off it hurt my ears we used to go on this ferryboat and when the horn boy I just flung myself down the deck started screaming because it hurt my ears another problem I had is I had problems hearing hard consonant sounds like you said rat cat or bat a very hard time differentiating those so my speech teacher when she worked with me when I was very young she'd slow down and she'd enunciate her hard consonant sounds she'd say Cup and then she'd say Cup but she'd go back and forth and I was a kind of kid that in the 50s you should just get put in an institution because last three years old I had absolutely no language at all okay done some brain scanning with Walter Schneider University of Pittsburgh and this is a circuit for speak what you hear speak what you hear circuit this type of scanning can track fiber bundles in the brain they're sort of like a cable bundles that connect up all the different parts of the brain now that is a cable bundle that goes from the language motor area down to the visual cortex for speak what you see this is mine and I all those different bushes you can see there that they've actually cut off the ends of the bushes because they go all over the brain and basically the way my mind works is I have a language based visual search engine in other words you put keywords in and it pulls up all kinds of other run on all kinds of pictures now the thing is there's still a continuum here you can see that the normal circuit is got a few bushes on it at what point two extra bushes become an abnormality okay there's no black and white dividing line now the reason why this scanner was developed was they it's all funded by the Defense Department to look for head injuries in veterans now if you have a head injury these bundles will be ripped and they look like spaghetti bundles when you twist it and break half of them and it's like oh man and go this guy's in trouble but one is a developmental abnormality you know what point more bushes abnormal it's not clearly black and white now the price I paid for all those bushes which I think have a lot to do with visual thinking I have less bandwidth for speak what I I will speak what I see I had trouble getting my speech out getting speech out that was really really really hard and and but I had bandwidth okay getting back the Malcolm Gladwell thing well I got a few fibers there so they were able to you know maybe expand the whole zone and I could do one if I learned how to talk another problem that happens lots of times in autism is a tension shifting slowness it takes longer to shift back and forth this is why I didn't want the photographer's down there and find me because okay I see them move down their shifts my attention and then I just done lose my train of thought some kids were they going to read the print will jiggle on the page and this doesn't explain all reading problems maybe only explains 10% of reading problems but I'm finding it about one out of 50 the so-called normal population has this problem see in the back of your head you get circuits for shape color and motion they're going to work together something's wrong with how those circuits work together sometimes very simple treatments will work for this things like pale pastel paper get away from fluorescent lights these are the kids that can't tolerate 60 cycle old-fashioned type fluorescent lights they things like a checkerboard pattern on the floor will drive them crazy because they can kind of see it doing this I'm things colored lenses sometimes help some of these kits well there's my head all right that is the connectome hopefully there's some gray matter in the space there I hope and I'm but what this shows is the light matter circuits that connect up different brain departments and this new scanning technology they can actually dissect out cable bundles that do the different things because with this technology you can tell due to myelinated fibers cross or the intersection that's connected you know bridges versus intersections it can tell the difference well there's the connectome without rest of the head and some other scan findings show that my fierson my amygdala was I much bigger than normal well and that's been helped now with antidepressants there's a lot of visual thinkers I know visual thinking designers they're not autistic but a little bit of prozac in the morning really helps I'm I've been taking on antidepressants for over 30 years they stopped my constant panic attacks you know in the movie that showed me in my 20s now is eating all that yogurt and jell-o no reason why I was eating the yogurt and jello is is I had colitis and when I went on the antidepressants the colitis kind of got cured it made the colitis stopped but you've got to use really low doses of antidepressants otherwise you're going to have problems okay here are some accommodations for the workplace getting rid of 60 cycle fluorescent lights I need a quiet place to work there's some individuals may need frequent breaks also no sudden surprises in work routine and I still can't stand scratchy clothes and I have found that some cotton itches and other cotton does not pitch and I really don't know why now I had a terrible time in a regular large high school and I was kicked out fighting in ninth grade throwing a book at a girl who's bullying me to call me a retard and then I want to wait a special boarding school for gifted kids with emotional problems you got to remember this is 60s this is 60s you got to remember that and and I got in some big serious fistfights and they took horseback riding away for a while I still could clean the horse barn but I just couldn't ride him and I switched from anger to cry it's okay for geeks to crime they'll pay for I NASA space scientist cried when they shut down the space shuttle and they did it on 60 minutes you know you can go and look that up you know looking at some of these things we've got to get a lot more resourceful on how we deal with these kids you know let's think about these girls that wrote the awful things on that Facebook page like drink bleach and die what's one of the things they wrote on this other girl that commits suicide that's the printable stuff the other stuff they wrote is not repeatable I'm and okay so they're putting a felony charge on these girls a better thing do it after 12 and 13 years old a better thing to have done would be to pull them into a big meeting near you with them with the judge the prosecutor the police school parents you know religion oh the priest or rabbi or whatever all together and and the prosecutors there saying I can sign this form you know getting wrapping you with a felony or you are banned from social media until you're 18 and you're going to be doing a lot of community service especially with with people that have been bullied and they have that would be a more constructive way that would be the take community way using a community to work with them and I've read some interesting stuff on on getting you know gangs cleaned up and stuff by taking this kind of approach I'm where I'm okay you know now you have a family member with severe autism you see this is the problem if you have very severe autism even with good treatment you may not be able to do normal activities you can't go to a football game you can't go to the supermarket without that being a tantrum from sensory overload that's really stressed and stressful for the family you know and we've got to get supports for those families one of the things we got to do we need to do this and everything is getting people out of their silos you know one of the problems with the government agencies they don't communicate with each other people have got to get to where they start communicating with each other and then I got to show some pictures of this because we're building a new therapeutic Writing Center at CSU show that there's a website up there every definitely need we got to raise the money to build this and because the states have cut back all the budgets now for every state college everywhere I and and since I'm an AG this state right here cut all the budget for Future Farmers of America program which is an AG program for high school kids was just terrible because for some of these kids that are kind of quirky and different that's the greatest program learn how to fix tractors learn how to weld and you know everyone needs to eat okay now what were you going to we've got enough time here to do questions I'm supposed to save 15 minutes for questions and I can go until four minutes after twelve because I'm allowed exactly one hour okay they've got done that's the microwave I didn't realize that Mike was the one you're going to use well I've got a roving mic now I can't see out here very well but I'm hopefully only going to turn the house lights up good good I think somebody's over here because I would definitely like to do a few questions okay hopefully we can get it to somebody you know as I can't see okay good hello as an animal lover I'd like to thank you for all your work with the humane treatment of animals I really appreciate that well thank you thank you very much and on a rather simplistic level I as an animal lover I do things like buying cage-free eggs and then I was devastated to hear someone on TV the other day say well if you buy those eggs that sounds really good on the curtain but it really isn't so depends upon how the cage free eggs are done well you know it depends how they are done exactly this is you see this this is the problem on a lot of things I'm you know what's really going on in the world's is somewhere in the middle what I think is going to happen an egg is you're going to have things like you know cage free eggs cage free eggs to really do them right they are going to be more expensive now what are we going to do about our people that are working at minimum wage they have to buy cheapest eggs for their kids all right let's go to a large-scale commercial I'm not gonna use that buzzword factory farms that on who's going to provide some amenities for the chickens like for example they can walk it full height then walk in the normal posture what a chickens want they want a private place to lay their eggs you know they don't like to do that out in the open perching scratching place it's called a colony house or a colony cage that'd probably be a sensible alternative for you know large-scale commercial eggs and then for the cage free eggs that work one where they don't work is where you try to get the stocking densities too high and then you end up with a big dust yes they do work fine at lower stocking densities but then you have to have maybe five times more buildings then you have four four on you know large-scale commercial you see things aren't quite so simple sometimes you get people pro and con on an issue and try to oversimplify it my book animals make us human actually discusses these issues and it is for sale in the bookstore okay right here just you say it real loud and quickly and I'll repeat it okay it's a calico mixed cat tortoiseshell and calico we got some weird genetics there you might be interested in my genetics in the behavior of domestic animals book the cat gets panic attacks is very very easily overstimulated I can't tell what is over stimulating her and what isn't you have to be so careful okay finished now this also ties into some autism so if you got a cat that gets overstimulated and what does it do when it gets overstimulated she can for no apparent reason to me I can be holding her and she'll suddenly scream and literally I think you've got a I think you've got a psychomotor epilepsy there really yes and you can also get this in some very very very severe cases of autism where where you'll get a sudden you'll jump up knock the wall out is not that severe but she will cry and she will jump straight up in the air and God help you if her claws are near yeah but that's prolly you see when it comes on like a switch right and and this can happen in some people especially nonverbal individuals with autism you get its where that you do not in a noisy store there in a quiet place you know now if they're having a meltdown the middle of Walmart that is just plain sensory overload in fact that's a really good way to tell if someone on the spectrum is really a sensitive I just but but it's something out of the blue like this the cats in a quiet place and then just does that that's probably a psychomotor epilepsy that is treatable with standard epilepsy drugs used for humans you need to find a veterinarian that's skilled in using those drugs in your area also there's a book by Karen overall it's a little outdated now but it's available on Amazon on medications for animals Karen overall spelled like overalls I don't know if she's updated it or not but that sounds like a typical psychomotor epilepsy if you get something like that similar in a nonverbal person it's treatable with epilepsy drugs thank you so much tempo Oh dr. Grandin hi I'm over here okay I can't tell which way sounds coming anyway I'd like to talk more about the parent over over hovering over an autistic child good trying to find a reasonable balance for my 17 year old daughter I wanted to know do I go get her a job does she get her oh you need to grease this job you need to grease the skin some my mother when I was 13 I saw a house where a lady young did freelance sewing out of her home just in the neighborhood and she went in talked to the lady explained the situation I now had a little volunteer job two afternoons a week taking apart dresses and hemming them and she liked me so much she started paying me you know the mother set up the ranch stuff no you need to set up some things for you 17 year old daughter okay first of all what is she good at this is a subject to really like to talk about what are you good actually um struggling with that but she loves she goes to regular high school what is her best class she loves the anime club anime club well first of all we need to get the art ability more broadened she's taking graphic design and he's taking practice on the second level so she's already passed the first he's really good at art stuff well how about working on a neighborhood newsletter how about we're generally interested in doing yearbook okay good let's encourage all that kind of stuff but if she hasn't had any job at all you need to set up some job to be something like that like you know helping at the farmers market every weekend you help set the tents up doing something in the park but some children's program or you know just find stuff in the in the neighborhood then it can be volunteer stuff that's fine but she needs a discipline of a job okay every Saturday afternoon - you're going to help old mrs. Jones get our groceries you just set up stuff like that okay okay thank you hello I was wondering how you feel about mainstreaming of all different kinds of minds in the same room do you think that it all depends upon the particular situation right but do you don't do but don't get to top down thinking on that right that's something that gets a lot more specific situation now I generally with little kids want to see the mainstreamed into a normal classroom but let's say let's go back to a little math genius well right should begin their college math in third grade right get a laptop loaded with college math software you bring it down to the third grade classroom because I want the social of the third grade but you don't make them do the baby math right so different so different minds should be able to be trained in different ways and sometimes in the same room oh definitely they can be trained and sometimes in the same room that is just frankly too much and sometimes it doesn't work right awk to a very nice teacher who's in Colorado talk to her about half an hour about a student she had was nonverbal student who made a lot of very disruptive noises he was not able to participate in the class at all that was not working but then there's other situations where that nonverbal student may be working just fine I also get asked all the time about public versus private schools and all that stuff like I don't even want to hear that I have found I travel around there's so many things depend on the particular people and the particular situation and and how the parents and the teachers get along parents and teachers have got to be on the same wavelength I cannot emphasize that enough when I had a tantrum at school the penalty was no television that night that was the penalty that was the rule whether it happened at home weren't happened to school I know I was not punished for flinging myself on the deck of the ferry when the horn went off because that was strictly sensory overload but I'm we've got to um we've got to get them on the same page I wanted to I what I don't want to see I'll tell you some things I don't want to see I don't want to see a smart fourth grader that's fully verbal put in autism class mostly with nonverbal clients that I don't want to see because then that Asperger end up going nowhere when maybe he ought to go to Silicon Valley see this is the problem we've got with autism when the kids are very little and you have speech delay they all look the same you work hard on early intervention really really hard and I'm on everybody any kid is not talking at age three needs to be an early early intervention the worst thing you can do with those kids is do nothing with them and when I get down south where there's no services at all I say you got to go to your church group you got to go get students you've got to get someone to work with these kids okay then when you work on it kind of diverged into kind of three groups real high end group and they really you know math geniuses art you know stuff like that but they have some skill deficiencies could go into a high level career there's kind of a moderate group and then there's a group that does not become verbal and it's definitely going to have to live in a supported living situation see this is the problem how did all that how does such a broad thing get all called autism because when they were three they all look the same you know little kids and then the Asperger's thing that had no speech to light but now they've merged that and now it's gotten even broader and more murky hi okay I'm right here okay and you're right you see I can't tell what's right in between the opening okay my name is Mandy I'm a behavior therapist and a graduate student in psychology first I just want to say thank you for all that you've done for the autism community and so my question is you've talked a lot about how being a visual and pattern thinker and developing that strength has been really helpful for you so I'm wondering how and when you figure that out and how you were able to communicate that to other people in your life that's a really good really really good question my ability in visual thinking showed up around third and fourth grade eight nine years old you know the drawings and pictures I made in kindergarten and first graders I'm just normal little kids stuff you know sometimes these things show up earlier but lots of times it doesn't show up that early now first of all the kids that are the visual thinkers like me usually a really good at art that's your first tick off also going to be really good with Legos okay then your math kids they're going to be good at math they also tend to be really good at Legos but they have the little math heads have trouble with reading that tends to be the pattern and the word thinkers all they'll memorize every fact about whatever their favorite thing is and that will show you know that will show up sometimes they learn more than one language there's some word kind of word math combinations that actually end up being good at programming now in my book the autistic brain I fully discuss on all the different kinds of minds work and provide scientific evidence for that I work with both children and adults with autism and especially a lot of the adults were really upset by the changes in the dsm-5 and these are adults that were Asperger's had previous Asperger diagnoses so I was just wondering your opinion on the changes if you think that they're legit or if you think that there should be a separate Asperger's diagnosis well you see the problem is is that you know the science is kind of showing a continuum on you know I think I think as more work stone brain scans and things like that start breaking autism up in the component parts see the problems with the eye with a face recognition eye contact by that social stuff that the core deficit then you get into things like what kind of thinker they are that's something different I'm I think one of the reasons for doing it was politics they were trying to narrow the spectrum but I think all it's happened is it's muddied the waters as far as I can tell because now I'm what I'm it varies a lot by state by state kind of what's happening some states are going to say going to be reevaluated others they're just calling everything a Sdn it's sort of more of a big muddle I'm it's still kind of hard to tell exactly how it's going to work out see what the problem you've got here is that these characteristic categories are half based on science and the other half is doctors fighting around the conference room table in a secret meeting and they got bashed for having secret meetings in hotel conference rooms you know that's not how you're supposed to do science you know as a scientist kind of rubs me the wrong way I it's said the other thing I want to talk about I'm getting concerned too many kids autism is becoming their whole sense of being especially kids on the higher end of the spectrum now people say to me if I could snap my fingers and make myself not be a stick-on would I do that no because I like the logical way I think but being working in animal science and doing my animal work that comes first I think it's important to have a profession and have a sense of identity where autism just is not the first thing I don't particularly like it when nine year olds walk up to me all they want to talk about is their autism so all I want to talk about no I'd rather talk about their they raised the trained dogs or something like that or there was a girl that raised chickens for a 4-h project or they liked astronomy or they like you know history or something you know like it's I get concerned where that becomes their total sense of being dr. bender I think we have time for one or two more quick ones because it'll be an hour we got one minute before it's an hour's up ducked right right there right quick right there that's okay okay quite uh basically what he say is an unconventional path yes that's right I got in a lot of back doors okay what mother what happened with me I'm mother got me my mother got remarried that brought the ranch into the family and I get to go out to my aunt's ranch but then by the time I graduated from Franklin Pierce College on with a bachelor's in psychology mother it's worked on setting up a lot of job stuff the sewing job the ranch an internship at a hospital that had autistic and emotionally disturbed children remember this is 60s and a internship at a research lab where I had to share a house with another lady that stuff where she greased the skids and set it up then when I went out but I also had been doing all these carpentry projects and I'd sold a few signs so when I went out to Arizona I was in graduate school well I went over to the Arizona State Fair and started painting signs for the carnival I sort of had you know that entrepreneur I really did walk up to the Arizona Fire arrangement guy and I got his card and I said told him about my master's thesis you see and that started out one little article at a time this stuff I did on my own you know started out just one little thing on it's time and you see then you start writing and you write about a subject then you start building up a reputation in that subject also I figured out by the time I graduated that certain people could open the door something that I figured out you never know where those people are going to be we're going to that's what I did I will say sorry and this is gonna be our last question okay all right I don't know where you're at I can't see you okay one right here there's some of the alright are you can talk really loud I'll try to repeat it um I just oh there was one of I didn't see it I can't I can't I can't see what's sorry okay I just wanted to say first look I have ADHD and I really admire you because you've come so far in your and here's and you don't you've studied animal cognition that you've come up all these great theories it's exactly what I want to do but my main question was that I that there's artifice allows with artificial selection and dogs and things like that there's those genetic traits that I know you've talked about there's really problems with dogs the Bulldog is like I've deformed freakazoid watch it a Bulldog supposed to look like go to Google Images and type in Bulldogs dilemma and you'll see the 1938 version I question what do you feel it's unethical to breed them or do you think we can actually like I know they're studying we can learn from the art of the problems that come with them well I don't think we should be breeding animals either for pets or for food where the animal has physical problems like lameness it's not able to have its babies naturally it's got neurological problems bulldogs can't hardly walk they have to have the puppies vices ovarian they can't breathe because I kept breeding for the smashed in face I have problems with that you know we shouldn't be breeding animals that are physically defective either for food or for for pets and you over select for single trait you wreck your animal they on done you'd probably be a fan of my behavior you know second edition of genetics the behavior domestic animals and I well they can be ordered from any bookstore

Channel: Chicago Humanities Festival

Views: 647,965

Rating: 4.8933005 out of 5

Keywords: Temple Grandin (Author), Autism (Disease Or Medical Condition), Genetics (Field Of Study), animals, the autistic brain, Photo Realistic Visual Thinking, Pattern Thinker, Auditory Thinker, Neuroscience (School/tradition), animal welfare, The Autistic Brain (book), temple grandin the autistic brain, temple grandin autistic, temple grandin autistic brain, templ grandin

Id: MWePrOuSeSY

Length: 63min 37sec (3817 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 19 2013