The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

each year Microsoft Research hosts hundreds of influential speakers from around the world including leading scientists renowned experts in technology book authors and leading academics and makes videos of these lectures freely available my name is Amy Draves and I'm here to honored to welcome dr. Temple Grandin to the Microsoft Research visiting speaker series temples here today to discuss her book the autistic brain thinking across the spectrum she is one of the world's most accomplished and well known adults with autism she has a PhD in animal science as a professor at Colorado State University and has authored several best-selling books including thinking in pictures and animals and translation in 2010 she was recognized as one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in the heroes category please join me in giving her a very warm welcome it's great to be here hope everybody can hear me just fine first of all I think I'll just start out and explain a little bit about autism you know if you didn't have a little bit of autism you wouldn't have any tech industry just that so there's a point where it's just normal variation you know they found that on people that have bipolar if you've got more creative relatives people with autism more techy relatives you know you take out a few social genes so if these social things you get deep genes you see a lot of these so-called disorders in very small amounts can give advantages and the thing is diagnosing something like autism is not precise now the thing is how about little Albert little Albert had no speech until age three you would probably be diagnosed two autistic today now why are so many kids getting diagnosed autistic or dyslexic are at ADHD or this or that well in order to get services in the school they got to have a label and the problem you got bought ISM is at one end of the spectrum you got thanks Steve Jobs was on the spectrum because I he was a weird loner who got Boyd it brought snakes to school and there's an awful lot internal loose to kids they getting up with an autism label because they've been bullied and they don't have any friends and they way too many kids being given way too many medications to then at the other end of the spectrum he had a person that remains nonverbal so this thing called autism is a really big spectrum but all the ones that are really smart I want to work in from Microsoft not done you know uh any out jobless the diagnosis is not precise it's the payroll profile they keep change again let's look at the history of the diagnosis they have constantly kept changing it used to think it was all psychology in 1980 they made it that you had to be a deaf speech delay and then in 99 1994 they added Asperger's syndrome where you didn't have to have speech delay you just deke and you can be Asperger's now then I take the Asperger's out and call it um we call it social communication disorder think a lot of this has to do with funding but it's still same thing still exactly the same thing so genetics is complicated you looking at little tiny code variations you know a little bit of this may be some advantage it's a complicated genetics the other thing is only 2% of the other of the genome codes for proteins the rest of the genome is the operating system the thing yes nobody actually knows how the genetic operating system works you know you fold up the genome the coding DNA folds up against the non-coding DNA and ways that's probably mathematical not well understood I love this quote from nature magazine my results start to place genes and regulatory elements in a three-dimensional context revealing their functional relationships you know that's sort of the mathematics kind of mind it's some kind of mathematical thing there's a program that tells the coding DNA what to do it's not a simple genetics and then yes personality traits the kind of like a music mixing board you know you can be more anxious and less anxious more mathematical or less mathematical this is probably the best way to look at it you can kind of turn the volume controls up or down and when you take tube techies and you put them together you know you kind of loaded the dice without finding around the text centers I get lots of hits on my website from the various towns where the tech centers are now I'm a total visual thinker I don't think I can't do programming I don't think in words I think totally and photorealistic pictures now that helped them my work in designing weinstock equipment what I do and what Steve Jobs did is industrial design he designed the user interface then the engineers had to make the insides of the computer work that's where you've got the two different kinds of minds working together gonna absolutely cannot remember sequence I get very frustrated with electronic devices I cannot remember sequence for doing different things unless it's something that tells you what the next step is I just get stuck and I find them incredibly frustrating to use where you guys are great at sequence so easy dealio I'm glad that's me but so I visualized stuff now he's a joke around that huge internet align deep inside my head turns out that this circuit my head is bigger than normal but you'll want to see the real mind blowing brain scan it's on the USA Today article you can use keywords USA Today Temple Grandin you'll see the real mind blowing a super visual circuit thing I and like this you know I've got a fairly big visual circuit there I'm probably the upper 25% for visual circuits this circuits normal the one that's shown on the USA TODAY's not but the thing is what tends to go across the spectrum on people with a little bit of the autism trait is the social awkwardness those circuits not being hooked up but things like whether you're a visual thinker or a programmer thinker that it that that you know you can have a personal expect from there's a mathematical thinker aren't thinker or maybe a word thinker and there are my saw my drawings the thing is when I was a weird geek the only way I saw myself was showing off my work let's see if this is a good projector yes we've got a good projected good good good sometimes the drawings look just terrible on the projector and I had to show myself by showing off my work we've got to get home another thing I'm getting really big on is teaching work skills I am seeing too many smart kids they get to college maybe had a degree in history or something like that and they've never had a job they haven't learned that even the very best job has some drudgery when I was 13 my mother got me a little sewing job and when I was 15 oh it's cleaning out all these horse stalls and managing the horse barn and one of the things that motivated me to do that is the one to prove I could do it you know they said that's learning work skills we need to be doing a whole lot more of that now what ended up happening here is my math department sort of got trashed out and it's full water so left parietal area no sequencing horrible working memory terrible at doing all the kind of programming so it's sort of like to take away one thing and I got visual thinking see people that tend to get a label tend to be on the more extreme ends of uneven skills good at one thing bad something else and one of the things I'm really concerned about with all the STEM education stuff science technology engineering and math is it's going to block my kind out of science but you need my kind you need me to look at the methods section of the paper and go yeah these two experiments came out with different results because you used a different breed of rat or pig or something like that you need banging I'm going to show you more exactly why you need me on the scientific team in 1968 Bill Gates and I had access to this computer terminal right here free all the time I wanted tons of instruction I wanted to learn to program us I couldn't do it free instruction I had all the access when Bill Gates did it yeah that's why yeah Microsoft and I agree with Malcolm Gladwell that you have to do lots of practice yes I agree with him that you have to have access to the facility well they both had that he did it I couldn't you know they I just don't have the you know full of cerebral spinal fluid it's just not going to work now you get people to get various labels ADHD dyslexia you know for all these different labels they put on them and it is just behavioral profiling it's sorta like profiling hijackers you know it's a very real proof lat now I am the photorealistic visual thinker can't do algebra absolutely can't do algebra it doesn't make any sense to me I'm saying a lot of kids who can't do algebra let's go right on to geometry and trig let's just skip the algebra never even got a chance to do one do geometry so how did I manage to get through college I got to thank the educational fads of the sick late 60s because in 66 everybody had to take finite math which is probabilities matrices and statistics with a ton of tutoring from mr. died on the wonderful math teacher I got through it then you have the the pattern thinker these are yet programs these are the programmer people he said guys are gonna be engineers computer programmers oftentimes these little kids have trouble with reading this little kid and he might need a math book you know three or four trades harder but may have trouble with really and don't make these little math kids do baby math you want tournament behavior problem I'll make him a gigantic behavior problem then you got the verbal facts thinker this is the kid that loves history lot Awards I should do a lot of word stuff very good at detail now the thing is the autistic mind tends to be into detail it's also what's called bottom-up thinking concepts are formed with specific examples not the other way around now here's scientific evidence that there really are two types of visualizers there's two really new things that are in the autistic brain book the history and the diagnosis which is pretty shocking when you see how they keep changing it nobody's sitting around changing the diagnosis the director Louis you know I would say the DSM diagnostic categories are half science and half doctors fighting in conference rooms locked up in the hotel somewhere and there are scientific studies that really are two different types of visualizers the photorealistic ones like me and the more mathematical where you are in space type of visualizer just to show you there's different ways you can do the math more further away and the more visual spatial way now I want to give you a mind I'll give you a little trip into the mind of the pattern thinker this is not my mind that praying mantis is made out of a single sheet of folded paper what you see in the background is the folding pattern and here's some great origami stars that kids gave to me for well I couldn't do this stuff they always like to show my drawings off because the only way again anybody take me seriously was I'm showing on my drawings they go oh you did that and here's some beautiful artwork but Jesse Park she does some she's somebody probably has moderate level autism here's some other fabulous aren't working on my grand marnier the Eco artist you know probably more at the moderate level mom's really worked hard to develop disability well this is where you need my kind of mind well there's a picture there the Fukushima nuclear power plant all blown up and burned up and radioactive total horribleness so I get interested in that sort of stuff so I want my bud like I'm nothing to do on the plane so I like buy for newspapers I've got a really bad cold sorry about the coughing grant get some water here and I couldn't when I finally figured out after reading all these papers reading paper after paper after paper for a week when I found out why is burned up they made a mistake I would never make I can't design a nuclear reactor that's the job for the mathematicians but it's not too smart when you live next to the sea to put those super important emergency generators that run the emergency cooling pumps in a non waterproof basement so what do you think happened when this when the tsunami came over the seawall flooded out the generators flooded out the electrical system nothing weren't you know I've been looking at the whole mess for the Boeing Dreamliner airplane well and then I thought it's very interesting they admit in Congress they never looked outside the airplane I I couldn't wait how they did that risk analysis to me I you just tested the airplane mathematically with a perfect battery well we know these batteries have prone to damage how about the laptop that caught on fire in an airplane well how about three cargo jets that burned up hauling with them I on computer batteries weren't those in the risk analysis three of them not one cargo jet three cargo jets how about the pallet of lithium-ion batteries that was dropped at an airport and started to catch on fire I just googled fires and lithium-ion batteries lithium ion batteries cargo planes it's not pretty that was not in the risk analysis you see one of the things I'm going to show you later on in the brain scan is I have a gigantic visual Association circuit show you how that works the best picture of it there's on the USA Today website time so cool which that picture was in the book but Walter had had they made that scam yet they had to do a whole bunch of computer stuff to get that but USA Today has er done we need that associating and getting outside the box on my brains designed to go outside the box okay am i work with cattle I noticed that cattle notice little tiny things that people don't notice like the cattle and don't want to go into this facility because the flags don't waving it's scaring the hell that I want to go in there most people don't notice the flag okay how many people notice that that animal locked on to that light many people noticed it okay see I have to teach my students to be visually observant my finding me only about 10% of people notice that I want to point it out you see it cattle or fade out I get asked to cattle freighter getting slaughtered they're more afraid of this too dark there's a shiny reflection there's a hose on the ground things like that if you want to see how my meat plant stuff works I got a great video beef plant video tour with Temple Grandin you can go look it up an animals world is sensory based it's sensory based it's not word based I think pictures smells touch sensations there's evidence in normal human beings language covers up visual thinking is Alzheimer's patients will start sometimes doing pictures and when van Gogh painted starry night I don't think he realized he was putting mathematics in it my thinking's bottom up everything's learned by specific examples so if you got a kid with autism get him out doing things I'm seeing too many kids on the high end of the spectrum not learning basic stuff how to shake hands how to shock you know nineteen-year-old honor student who drives she's never grocery shocked by herself you know let's learn how to use a debit card I mean it's a lot of things need to learn how to do my thinking is associative and not linear okay I got a picture on mine United Airlines terminal in Chicago now my associated mind could now either go into two different categories glass structure category or an airport category there's no generalized pictures here's my glass structure and they come up like a series of slides they come up sequentially biosphere and Arizona Crystal Palace the greenhouse at Colorado State and then the Crystal Palace they got down Dallas Texas airports Denver can go through the airports you know that's a blue Guardia but when I asked an astrophysicist what he sees when he sees church people I see specific ones I was I and a lot of people to see a vague generalized one he saw a motion of people praying and singing and things like that kind of a motion thing I don't know well Carol make visual categories man on a horse men on the ground two different things it's very important to train them to both cuz you see man on the horse man on the ground two totally different things it's off the cattle are used to the man on the horse unless you suddenly there's a man on the ground will be scared of that it's very specific in categorizing problems with equipment do we have a people training issue or do we have something wrong with the equipment I find a lot of people have a hard time differentiating between an equipment problem and a problem with the people sorry about all the coughing I'm getting over a really super bad cold and it's gonna be another two days coughing before I totally get over that okay you got an autistic kid a real severe one kind of a heavy good problem is it biology or is it behavior is he pitching a fit because you want him to stop playing a video game or is he pitching a fit because there's so much noise in this restaurant he can't stand it once biology the others not it's okay to be geeky it's okay to be weird and the lofty geeks get to do fun things like what the Mars rover on the moon we got the Moloch guy and the Elvis guy in any one ancient old hippie the old people with a mild autism I see them all the time they just get jobs but now you see the schools in order to get services any kind of services you've got to have a label and I'm seeing too many smart kids you know not going anywhere this drives me crazy they're not learning work skills I think putting them on a paper route be a great thing also in the autistic brain there's jobs for visual thinkers like me and for the mathematic minds and for the verbal minds now but they're gonna go in a functional MRI machine I was more interested in looking at pictures of things than pictures of people but we need people interested in things there wouldn't be any computers if you didn't have people interested in things it wouldn't even be any electric lights Tesla the inventor of the power plant definitely be labeled autistic today now what you got to do to help these kids that are different to succeed you gotta stretch them you can't just throw them into something new that causes panic no sudden surprises but you gotta stretch them when I was eight years old my mother would have me put on my party dress and serve hors d'oeuvres to her guests shake hands with each guest and I liked doing it as a grownup privilege a real grown-up thing to do that but it taught super important social skills then I had my great science teacher I loved the way he was shown in the movie there's a scene in the movie where I say is he really a NASA space scientist and then it shows him with the space helmet I just started crying when I see that he was a NASA space scientist and that space I was real those are real space helmet it's made it even more cool that's the kind of stuff I get kind of choked up about we got to find people and you know you a lot of you guys could mentor some of these kids but you see because the problem you got with autism the labels so broad and one end we've got lots of people are working tacking at the other end we've got very severe people and not gonna be working here but it all has the same name don't get locked into the labels and we've got to learn work skills the other thing things that kids don't do today let's get together and you know do play outside where they have to make up their own game just talking to Julie here who lives here in Seattle and a good friend of mine she works on my Grantham comm webpage and which is kind of an old-fashioned web page but you know what it downloads on the crappiest computers in the reasons why it's kept the way it is the worst computers dial-up scan actually access that you know what's a big problem out in our rural areas internet access there's all kinds of fabulous stuff online can't play a videos in Crete Nebraska it doesn't work in Deering Nebraska it doesn't work okay and she was telling me about how she gets her kids off the video games who can't play from video games but not fate hours a day she said her kids had the greatest time busting up rocks to see what was inside them and then they decided that well she had him wearing safety glasses but then they didn't like the rock star on their arms so they put coats on then they made up a gain with the rock pieces but you see that's teaching important social skills my ability in art was encouraged usually when you start to see the kids got a special skill it's around third or fourth grade little math kids you need to move my head alright kids I was one of those encourage them to draw lots of different things they can learn how to do it sign say oh we're gonna do stuff that other people want here's great online resources I'm sure you guys know about all this stuff there's one of my designs to Sketch up on that's no longer your competitors product anymore but you see I'm I do these talks all over the place and I want to show parents teachers out there cool stuff that's available like oh yeah and you can do a 3d printer out that and the little gates will actually work isn't that cool there's all kinds of online science projects when I was in high school not doing very much studying boy I saw I learn work skills this is our ski tell house before and after I fixed it all up my science teacher it's a really important mentor you know let's tap into some the retirees it doesn't matter if he's teaching a kid ancient old computer language it doesn't matter what you're doing is turning the spark on the god I get the spark turned on and I'm very concerned that our educational system might be kind of failing to stimulate some of the different kinds of minds I think with the stem the stuff they're doing is really good stuff with the elementary school kids and then they hit the wall at algebra and if you screen alcohol or it's us guys you're gonna have some problems all right hacking the power grid is this something I'm very concerned about well some people got to think I'm a total Luddite there's three things on any heavy equipment that need to have a non computerized automatic off switch gets too hot spins too fast too much pressure shut her down you know you all heard about Stuxnet well Stuxnet was the thing that messed up the Iranian centrifuges and it instructed a Siemens industrial controller to spin the centrifuges till they broke well you know I'm not gonna go into the politics of that but Siemens industrial controllers are pretty common let's say that was a major power plant then it's too fast breaks it well you put a real simple governor on it it shuts it down and it should be a non computerized thing spins to fast shutter now the problem is I visualize how we can break it okay how about a totally electronic car there's three things I want in that absolute kill switch to the battery it's not computerized so let me disconnect the power brake and steer it off the road I don't have to have anything else but those are three things the better work even if the computer is completely gone haywire I gotta be able to get it off the road and stop it period okay I think it's bad at schools have taken out the hands-on classes cooking sewing woodworking woodshop all the different trades they teach practical problem-solving some states are beginning to realize this is wrong and that putting them back in again thank goodness Melissa's the stuff that saved me when I was a kid because the only places I was not bullied was the specialized interests get kids involved and things like I'm they electronics are computer programming or you know doing things with 3d printers Boy Scouts Girl Scouts things with a specialized interests we need people in this country they can get back to doing real stuff and I'm seeing too many smart kids that ought to be working here that are getting addicted to video games I know you're opening again your new Xbox now an hour a day is fine but I'm seeing too many smart kids especially a little math geniuses where some of them are collecting Social Security checks playing video games all day that's not okay haven't learned any work skills know if they can get a job in the video game industry fall for you could actually get paid to play video games I'm in a legitimate business I'd be alright with that that's not what's happening I'm seeing too many quirky kids not getting challenged and getting into good careers you've also gotta show kids interesting stuff the kind of interested in interesting stuff you know oil rigs have joysticks - we got lots of those the Colorado not a thingy that's a key to successful employment is you sell your work and not yourself we've got to work on sorry about the coughing probably gonna have to get a cough drop really really coughing bad you know waiting on a question/answer period but you've got to UM sell your work rather than yourself because and then the other thing is how do you house boss work with these guys you've got to give them very specific goals and when they make social mistakes may give you an example that was done with me my very first design and construction project I criticize some welding and I said I'd look like a pigeon doodoo da nits and Harley the plant engineer pulled me into his office and he quietly he didn't scream at me he quietly said to me we have to nip these little cancers before they metastasize you're going up in the catheter right now and apologizing for that kind of talk that's the way the boss handles him in private giving the instruction on what to do don't be vague let's say it teaching a kid to be a science museum tour guide that's a great job for 12 year olds well I museums will take them that young so let's go demonstrate correct distance how you greet people you know assess their performance now they interact with the visitors you can also get sensory problems in conjunction with a lot of different labels loud sounds hurt my ears some people may have problems with hearing hard consonant sounds you know my speech teacher had to slow down talk to me more slowly okay let's look at some more cool scans this is a fiber bundle in the brain for speak what you hear got a little tiny tiny shrimp this is a fiber bundle for speak what you see and this fire bundle goes from the visual cortex goes from about here to about here the language area that's mine and you can see it branches out way further but another thing that happens is if you look in the circles there I got less bandwidth for language output now you can see looking at this that these are truncated here the scan is truncated they've been cut off but this is actually to go in the USA today this all a part of all those fibers go all over everywhere so the circuit that's for speak what I see isn't just doing speak what I see it's kind of a word based search engine or visual thinking and I I wish I had to scan USA Today in the book I've got this scan here in the book attention shifting can be slower people at on the spectrum they need quiet place to work maybe they gotta get away from fluorescent lights there's some individuals when they go to read they can see the print chico on the page sometimes colored lenses will help them sometimes colored paper help I got a lot of tips in the autistic brain how to deal with sensory problems this is something where they need to be doing research on this that very variable one autistic kid has visual problems another one has sound sensitivity it's extremely variable okay there's my head what you see right there is the connectome this is the white matter fibers that connect up different parts of the brain see around the perimeter is the gray matter hopefully there's some gray matter in that space there it's always shows the white matter inner connector circus and this new imaging method I can actually dissect out the circuit so you can actually dissect out just speak what you see circuit see older imaging okay about two white fibers crossing is that a bridge or an intersection okay if it's a bridge it doesn't connect if it's an intersection they connect this scanner can tell the difference Walter ties to explain it to me but I don't understand that and the boy I can sure understand what you could do with it and there's the connectome - the rest of the head they also found out that my fear center is three times larger it's the trouble a lot of visual thinkers that's why I take antidepressants they are lots of designer friends math friends take antidepressants stop the constant panic attacks and but not everybody on the spectrum has this problem it's real variable cerebellum is small but again that's not Universal across the spectrum here are some accommodations we may need to do some individuals have got to get away from 60 cycle fluorescent lights they'll need a quiet place to work they'll need breaks where they can calm down and no sudden surprises in work routine and I got to have no scratchy clothes and I find some 100% cotton issues and other stuff does not now it's okay for geeks to crime I got kicked out a ninth-grade for throwing a book I had to switch from anger to crying that bad horseback riding taken away for two weeks and when they shut down the Space Shuttle they were crying on 60 minutes and walking that's why they had those jobs I tell parents your teenage boy Christ uncle good you know geeks that cry can have cool jobs like NASA I've talked to a number of a retired NASA space scientists that have grandkids that are on the autism spectrum they said oh man oh my colleagues they were all on the spectrum well but these kids in a kind of different he's in the town figure out just in the town the thing is we can do it at teach them social skills teaching work skills get them to work in a little store that a friend has walked dogs for the neighbors most lawns work in the farmers market you know they've got to learn that responsibility and discipline award there's a paper route around they still exist that would be excellent you know everybody and the families got to work together especially when you have severe autism see this is the problem then the other end of the spectrum you've got a kid that you can't go to a movie with them you can't go to a restaurant she's screaming and pitching a fit because of sensory overload that's very very rough on the families we have to need we got to get people out of their silos gotta get people thinking outside the box no that's a really hard thing to people to do well and then they're gonna be building to Therapeutic Riding Center CSU of course we're looking for money for that and now we're gonna do some questions and I'm gonna pick somebody I'm sorry about all the coughing and stuff but I can't help it and I'll repeat the question how old is your son he's 11 years old fully verbal he's not sober okay Mike thanks he's going into 6th grade and the school district the public school system is trying to switch his academic curriculum from an academic curriculum to a functional skills / curriculum and and we we are trying to understand what's the best you got a question here Laura Pete k-chill here is it okay you got an 11 year old partially verbal not completely fully verbal you know should you be going more in a functional he's got to learn functional but I am seeing smart kids my older than me at 11 years old they can't go into a store buy a candy bar and behave properly I could do that when I was 7 and so I think it's essential that he's got to learn those sort of things you know I was one time I would be I picked up at the airport by a dad he's 12 year old partially verbal son we stopped at a gas station this kid goes in there Yanks all the candy off the shelf is destroyed on the floor in this gas station well this kid was high-functioning enough if he was caught he wouldn't have done that so you've got to have you can't be doing that kind of stuff going to store in just trash it throw things on the floor one quick follow-up so I knew we're trying to do that at home obviously teaching in functional skills but he needs to do it at school too okay and and he's 11 I'm well first of all I don't like to go by the autism label I kind of like to go more like what can he do can he read the sports page and tell you who won okay so I'm just trying to get some idea here of with a reading level on candy do I dress himself beat himself can he cook something in the microwave yeah okay so you do those kind of simple skills I'm and they can do simple cooking one of the things that we're probably a good thing you needs to learn how to know you know start learning some work skills that you know one thing that I'm seeing with these kids they aren't learning how to do tasks that other people want see when I was back in third grade and my ability and art showed up I would have just done endless Horseheads my loss encouraged to draw something else I want to paint a really nice picture of beach that was pretty close to professional quality my mother put it in a glass frame on the wall and yes I knew the difference between a glass frame and a refrigerator door definitely I need a different sex and this is something where you're gonna have to use your judgment I can't write but the thing is you and the school have got to work together as a team and what I find is that depends so much upon the particular people and a particular situation doesn't have anything to do about whether it's public or private it's all back to who the particular people are but you and a school gotta get on the same wavelength okay it's so nice to meet you temple my son is 8 he just turned 8 second grade nonverbal I want to encourage social skills well I definitely want to social skills yeah I want him at in Boy Scouts I want him to be on the softball team I want him to engage in these things but they're not a lot of organizations or things that he can go to there they're able to work with him so I don't want to throw him into an environment well no you've got that one okay it's 8 years old what does he like to do guardzilla social Skellig I teach these kids how to take turns yeah how do you wait your turn ok you want to go to the Star Trek movie well then you gotta wait in line I got in the Star Trek movie in the 520 matinee a two seconds for starting had to sit closer to the front than what I wanted to do no I didn't pitch a fit and try to dislodge somebody from a seat in the back of the theater that he's totally socially inappropriate his best friend is his sister so my daughter definitely is a huge help in terms of developing a social and her friends yeah they just teach social skills like demonstrating write up all the number of kids they come up to me they have never been taught to shake hands correctly you know you like stick the wrong hit let's stick it out like this or something you know someone's just gonna take the hand and demonstrate things use this much pressure three shakes look at the person then just demonstrate how to do it almost like demonstrating for somebody in a foreign country how to behave yeah I think the hard thing for me is I want to make sure that I want to give him the opportunity to do the things that other children do but I want to second thing well the thing is honey play softball he can throw a ball yes with instruction yeah so it's it's like it's so if I put them in on a team of some sort then if the team is unable to work with him they're not used to well you see my child if you want to problems you have I'm okay you see I don't know it's a difficult thing I need to find but we but one thing a super super important is I'm can you go to a restaurant eat and get through the meal yeah food being far away yeah things like that okay good yeah it's doing something right and he doesn't he's not to noise sensitive no that's good and what else does he like to do besides Godzilla he he does like to play on the computer he definitely likes to ride his bike that's an that's his thing no I didn't fight you some might be a more appropriate thing to do with other adults because he can do it at the adult level right he pop and things like that so maybe getting an a biking group or something might be more appropriate than the balking mm-hmm yeah he can find a bike at a the same level as the others he likes putting things together too he's really like he could see we have this train table you know like with all the it could be a mess he could look at a picture of what it looked like when we purchased it or something he can recreate the train table and so he likes that type of thing but if you're doing any is he doing any and he I'm asking a lot of questions you might wonder why am I asking all these questions I'm trying to find out exactly what where this where this I go more by okay what levels was kid at yeah was he a grade level on any subject no I mean I would say math he's getting there's a lot of things that does not even real could you read a little thing about Godzilla and tell you about it not really okay not where I can understand it see we got to look at what is real thankfully there are some people are non-verbal there's two of them profiled in the autistic brain that type independently there are some people that appear extremely low functioning that I had a locked-in syndrome they can't control their bodies they got a normal brain in there and that's like a totally different kind of thing then you have totally virgle autism where that kind of geeks and nerds and the social circuits aren't too good okay thank you so much for coming my son just turned seven and he is in a mainstream first grade class and what we're finding is he's actually the top student in his class academically good he's getting a little bored you need to advance the work and so one of the things we found about word no I don't I don't want to develop behavioral issues you'll develop babies do they get bored I'll tell you that much and so I'm wondering in your travels and the discussions that you've had what have you seen work well in terms of I think they're called twice gifted programs where you can have some of the though they call twice exceptional yes where are these gifted but also may be autistic I'm see the other thing you gotta look at it's like what's that what the real typical profile is the kid that's really socially awkward little geniuses in math but they have trouble with reading this tends to be the profile so what you need to do is just give them the next grade math look I'm not saying put them in the next grade you know just do him the math books you know keep giving him harder and harder math books and he can sit in the back of the room and do those bath works or maybe take an online program in class if he can take it don't hold him back and then you're gonna have to do special ed for reading but you know like what classes is getting bored well you seen that stuff he's gonna have to learn to participate in some of that stuff and those things you can't see math you can just advance ahead and test out but you can't do that in some of these other classes okay we read you know gets a little older and you've got to read one of the classic literature and discuss it you know but well it gets down to they recognize that the you know kids have got uneven skills good at one thing bad at something else movie do I don't I don't know what's available locally you know there's some kids that do great with certain Montessori schools sometime but they but so much depends upon the particular school a particular situation I mean I would hopefully are in a parent group so you can find out it's actually called twice exceptional if you want to look it up on the internet and I see what groups you might have around and look it up on the gifted groups and go to the other meeting says I go over to a gifted conference and you got a kid labeled gifted and he's the same little you know autistic geeks that we'll see over at the autism meeting you see the problem is to get different labels and they go down different pathways depending upon their labels and then I'm seeing the worst thing I see because I see a really smart awkward kid put in with a much more severe kids and then that's not going anywhere you know don't get locked into the label and the thing that appalls me is how people get so locked into the label a because they can't see the kid you know the reason why I have to ask all these questions is is I got to know more now there's one place where their advice is the same you got a three-year-old that's not talking you got to get into early educational intervention tons of it once the ones a be a type of stuff and that's the same for everybody but once they get a little older I've got to ask a lot more questions okay oh okay right over here all right you mentioned the movie and I have three things I'm learning about your experience of the movie I sensed they were trying to be relatively true to the material but there's obviously some fiction I'm wondering whether seeing the movie changed any of your own memories or feelings about events or whether any of it perks you because it didn't get it right well the things they got right in the movie Claire Danes became me in the 60s and 70s the visual thinking was shown accurately all my projects are actor and all the things I built those were all accurate sensory problems accurate there are some events they had to compress and fictionalize but stuff that's really important they is right and a lot of kids have written to me and told me that that movie helped them to you know that want to be motivated and succeed because I'm getting like really worries me as I'm seeing too many kids like me they walk up to me and all we want to do is tell me about their autism I don't want to hear about their autism I want to hear that they like to train dogs or there's a science project or they like medieval knights or whatever you know their favorite thing is autism is an important part of who I am but I consider myself a college professor first and when we were arranging this book tour I wasn't gonna cancel my my animal auditor of animal welfare auditor training and I've got animal welfare all our training we're doing but McDonald's in Thailand the bookstore had to go around that stuff I think it's important that I have my real job and I've been peel ask me what are you gonna do next and I hope I'm gonna get back more doing some the livestock stuff because I don't like it when kids talk to me all I want to talk about is their autism and why they can't do stuff yes there's some things I can't do programming a computer that's like impossible like other things that just gets into well I can't do this work in the parents store because I can't do the cash register wised and I said well maybe dad needs to buy a scanner then you know what let's figure out how to make that work you know I'm all for accommodations that enable there's some individuals are gonna have to get away from fluorescent lights gonna have our quiet place to work we got it you know it's like wheelchair ramps that enables but I'm seeing too many kids getting sort of a handicap mentality where the aid is not weaned away when it should have been weaned away the purred like a really smart kid that doesn't to shop doesn't know how to shake hands I've got real problems with that okay well let's go wherever the mic it's right here okay so my question is striking a balance between independence and safety so I hear what you're saying about work scale and getting those independents go so I have an 11 year old high-functioning Asperger's and we've had to do to Amber Alerts already in his life so what are you doing to take off some where once was taking off and we lost him yes and then the other was he begged and begged to go for a bike ride so we were very specific this was two years ago about what's your plan what are you gonna do this was a two-block bike ride and I'm gonna take a right and then I'm going to take another right and then another right and another right we sat there and he said I can see it I've got it man he didn't you see this is where we're on got to give him independence I mean I was doing mile long but I know count but I was very reliable on you know the rule was if we were gonna slip gonna go downtown so I could buy a kite or buy a toy airplane or an ice-cream things I like to do downtown I had to leave a note on the piano store you know and then an approximate time when I'd get back but you see you have to look at as a kid was a kid actually capable of remembering that route I thought he was but from an impulsive perspective when he got two blocks away he thought well what if I maybe I'll just do two more blocks and and then I'll be fine I can still make it in the same amount of time and he got really disoriented and couldn't figure out how to get back so instead of coming back home he actually went further and for the way to his known practitioners his ABA his psychology so I tried to go they'd be a practice he tried to get help but it was here far away well maybe he needs to solve all who gets in a problem he could have called you and you could have called him right he eventually flag someone down well he actually started throwing a fit so someone was worried got a cell phone they call the feed had a cell phone it wouldn't happen okay constantly and you couldn't constantly you know playing games and stuff on the phone you know maybe get him a stupid phone that justice hope okay I just wanted to say first off thank you so much for coming it's so good to see you and I also wanted to reiterate everything you said about getting these smart kids the job skills and what they need to make it is true and it does happen I want to see the smart kids working here that's what I want to see there is one crazy the thing that makes me really really crazy as the gray hair as I travel around that's on the spectrum probably undiagnosed is working as a good really great job and then I'm seeing ten-year-old jr. walking up to me all hung up on autism nobody's taught him how to shake hands by grabbing me in really inappropriate ways because he wasn't taught the most basic social skills and then worse yet I hate to say it getting so addicted to video games they're not learning how to program and going nowhere I might end up on Social Security and and it's the same deep this is what makes me just crazy I agree with you but I did want to tell some of the parents that everything you said about teaching them social skills about working with them about getting them the kind of education they need it really does work our daughter was diagnosed with mild to moderate autism at the age of three and she had trouble speaking in full sentences in kindergarten this year she graduated high school a year and a half early she got the Bellarmine scholarship for Seattle University good and what she studies in the fall well let you tell her I'll let her tell you Oh diagnostic ultrasound okay well good great you've been getting some work experience to that cause I think it's really important you know even if you have a job you'll love there's a certain amount of drudgery you know I loved cleaning out the horse stalls but I had to pick up these big bushel baskets of sawdust and carry him up the stairs I hated that I and there's a there's a discipline of work and yeah I know if I want to make sure that when you know you get a good job when you get out and you keep that job there's gonna be times they're really tired and going oh man you got three more patients to do I don't really want to do them you got to them you got me a really nice storm and everything you know it is called work but congratulations go ahead and get a really good career in that I also want to congratulate you but you look really nice and there's a scene in the movie where my boss slammed down the deodorant said you stink use it that actually happened I say it don't tell you be eccentric but you can't be a slob you just can't be and I had boss that on the Secretary's took me out shopping just like movie showed that happened you know I think I'm still a bit eccentric but don't think of us we have time for one more question I'll let you choose the last question questioner ok I'll let you give the mic to someone then ok ok on the other side of the spectrum I have a cousin who's in his late 50s and I think he was just never diagnosed what's he doing now he lives by himself he doesn't work how do you how do you support himself with 5000 views well he tried some simple jobs but I assume he's on some kind of government as well as he is he you see that she has to look at you know was he capable of doing you know we got to be reasonable well I programming job would not be a reasonable alternative for me but you know what would be a good thing for me to do user interface I'm the kind of person needs to test user interface my question is um he's really highly intelligent and goes far beyond things that I'm able to grasp he's he can't be can't being a conversation with people for very long gets nervous easily gets nervous well I used to have terrible nerve attacks and as I went through my 20th my Norfolk tactical worse and worse and worse worse and if I had gone on antidepressants I would have been dead from stress related health problems you see there's a place for proper careful use of medication and and there's way too many meds given out to little kids like candy but there's other people with this huge anxiety a little tiny dab of Prozac I have designed our friends they'd be on fronts and alcohol what's the little tiny dab of prozac it's gotta be a real small dose otherwise you get agitation and insomnia well my question is how do how would I or should I suggest to him or do I not well I years old I mean it's son and he seems to be okay yeah you seem to be happy yeah we love him he's a wonderful person and I'm and he hasn't worked his whole life yeah digit do you think it's worth it for him to consider that you know there's a reason well why don't you give a meal the autistic brain and maybe thinking of pictures to read and because they're one of the best ways you don't these diagnoses are not very precise you can read books and things like that you can look up icd-10 that has that did you know that's free on the internet the DSM is not free on the internet by ICD is type in ICD autism you can read and and he may very well be on the spectrum I'm what he do all day oh he watches Star Trek and he reads books about the stars and he makes his own telescope and he makes his own telescope well maybe get into a into an astronomy club you know where you'd be doing stuff with telescope you know what he maybe he ought to be teaching kids how to make telescopes that might be a good second career for him because let's get some of these kids interested in things like making telescopes I want to get him out of the house and and you know doing some hands-on things that'd be a great thing for him to do okay that's a great idea okay may will end on that thank you so much loading signing books and you can find will set her up right outside the store

Channel: Microsoft Research

Views: 18,480

Keywords: microsoft research

Id: DKzCYaAHpVs

Length: 55min 51sec (3351 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 09 2016