Best-selling author, scientist, and trailblazer in autism research, Dr. Temple Grandin’s new book “Visual Thinking” draws on cutting-edge research and her own lived experience to reframe the conversation on neurodiversity and different types of thinkers.
Debbie Millman:
Dr. Temple Grandin is a scientist and animal behaviorist, and she has had a profound effect on how humanely livestock in this country are treated. She’s also had a huge effect on the way we understand people on the autism spectrum. Drawing on her own experience as an autistic person, she has written or co-written many groundbreaking books exploring autism and celebrating neurodiversity.
Her first book, Emergence, was published in 1986, and it changed the way the world views autism. Her most recent book, Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions is changing the way people think about thinking. She’s been recognized on the list of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the world. She’s the subject of an Emmy and Golden Globe-winning biographical film, and she owns numerous patents for her original designs. There is truly nobody quite like her.
Dr. Grandin, welcome to Design Matters.
Temple Grandin:
It’s really, really good to be here today.
Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Dr. Grandin, is it true that you believe if they were alive today, Albert Einstein, Mozart, and Nikola Tesla would probably be diagnosed as autistic?
Temple Grandin:
Yes, definitely. Because Einstein had delayed speech. Today, and especially with the way that the people get services, to get services, he’d have to be put in an autism class. You can argue over whether or not he’s autistic, but he’d end up in an autism class today because that’s where most speech delayed kids are going. Also in my work on designing equipment in the meat industry, I worked with brilliant people that owned metal working shops, people that had maybe 20 patents, and one guy that built very important equipment for me, oh, he was definitely autistic. But he had grown up working on cars. So, then he discovered that mechanical things were interesting. But the problem I’m seeing today is kids getting locked into the label, and they’re growing up, they’ve never used tools. They don’t get a chance to work on cars. We have all kinds of need today for people that can do mechanical things like fix elevators, build equipment for factories.
Debbie Millman:
I experience that firsthand. The elevator in the college that I work in is perpetually broken and there seems to be nobody in New York City that can fix it. And you’d think New York City, elevators? That would be a rough thing to believe.
Temple Grandin:
And we need those skills. We got water systems falling apart, wires falling off electrical towers. You need these people that can fix things and design things. Engineering’s not all mathematics. There’s the visual, thinking part of engineering, and then there is the mathematical part. You need to have both. And my kind of minds get screened out because we can’t do algebra.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, I know. I was so heartened when I read that because my nephew, my 14-year… Well, now he’s 15. When he was 14 and in 9th grade, he had just a terrible time with algebra, just an absolutely terrible time. Everybody’s sort of been pulling their hair out, how do we get him to be more interested in math? And I’m going to give them a copy of your new book.
Temple Grandin:
Well, what we need to be doing is when a kid ends up with a label, he might be an extreme object visualizer like me. Or there’s another kid is an extreme mathematician and does it in his head and the verbal people are forcing him to do step by step. It’s not how they think. Then a lot of people are mixtures of different kinds of thinking.
Debbie Millman:
Yes, I love the test in your book.
Temple Grandin:
You’re not going to find an extreme object visualizer like me and an extreme mathematician in the same person.
Debbie Millman:
Well, I want to go back in history just a little bit before we talk about your book. Your full name is Mary Temple Grandin. When did you begin to use Temple as your first name?
Temple Grandin:
Used Temple ever since I was a child. For years, nobody knew my first name was Mary. It was only on my passport. And then TSA forced me to put it on my plane tickets.
Debbie Millman:
By the time you were three months old, you’ve written about how you began to stiffen in your mother’s arms and she realized you didn’t want to be cuddled. You’ve written that as you got older, you began to chew up puzzles and spit the cardboard mush out on the floor. You developed a violent temper, screamed continually, and by the time you were three, you weren’t speaking at all. Your mom took you to the world’s leading special needs researchers at the Boston Children’s Hospital. What did the doctors think at the time?
Temple Grandin:
Well, you got to remember, this is 1949. I was born in 1947. She actually took me to a top neurologist who immediately checked me to make sure I didn’t have epilepsy and he made sure I wasn’t deaf. Referred me to a little speech therapy school that two teachers taught out of the basement of their house. There was some down syndrome kids in that and they just said, “Well, this teacher’s just really good at working with these kids.” And I can remember some of those speech therapy lessons and it’s very similar to the things that they were doing now: always encouraging me to use my words, slowing down, because when the people talked fast, it sounded like gibberish. There was also a lot of emphasis on turn taking, learning how to wait and take turns, really, really important. Then by four, I was verbal; and by five I was mainstreamed in a normal kindergarten in a small school.
Debbie Millman:
Didn’t doctors originally think that you should be institutionalized?
Temple Grandin:
Well, actually, yeah, that was kind of what was done with kids that had my problems in the ’50s. See, the thing is, now what’s known is kids with autism, you look very severe when they’re very young and you don’t know how they’re going to come out. You got to work with them and do your early intervention.
Debbie Millman:
In the glorious HBO movie about your life, your mother is portrayed as your fiercest advocate.
Temple Grandin:
That’s right.
Debbie Millman:
Someone who never stopped fighting for you. As you were growing up, did you feel her belief in you?
Temple Grandin:
Well, she always encouraged me. I was good at art. She always encouraged my ability at art and of course, art’s the basis of my design work. I would just draw the same horse head over and over again and she would say, “Let’s draw the whole horse. Let’s draw the stable.” She’d take my art ability and expand it. She suggested using other media like watercolors and pastel paints and pencils and draw different things. I actually got given a book on perspective drawing. I also, very early on, was learning to shop, learning table manners. This is where ’50s upbringing actually was helpful, much more structured.
Debbie Millman:
I read somewhere that you met an older student who had never used a pair of scissors.
Temple Grandin:
That’s right. In my book, Visual Thinking, I describe a conversation I had with a doctor who was pulling his hair out trying to teach interns how to sew up cuts and they had never used scissors. I had a girl in my class who had never used a ruler or tape measure to measure anything. We’ve got kids growing up totally removed from the practical world. Now, my kind of mind is an object visualizer. I grew up using tools. I would spend hours and hours and hours tinkering to make things like parachutes and bird kites. Did the adults make them for me? No, they just let me tinker.
Debbie Millman:
By the time you were in the fourth grade, you began to be bullied in school, and the kids called you chatter box because of what you’ve said was constant conversation on a particular topic.
Temple Grandin:
Well, yeah, I ask constant questions. My grandfather, when we visit with him, he was co-inventor of the autopilot for airplanes. We would just sit. We’d go in the other room, and while he’s smoking his pipe and eating some cheese and having a beer. He’d explain to me why the sky was blue. Why was grass green. So he liked telling me that stuff, and I’d ask him why tides go in and out. Why’s the moon have phases? And he would explain that stuff.
Debbie Millman:
How did you manage this dual world of family, your grandfather, your mother, your aunt being so supportive and loving, and yet the sort of bullying and really quite terrible behavior you experienced at school. How did you manage both of those at the same time?
Temple Grandin:
Fortunately, I didn’t have bullying in elementary school because Mrs. Deech, the third grade teacher, who was the head teacher for elementary school, explained to the other kids that I had a disability that was not visible, like leg braces. A lot of kids in the ’50s had polio and they had leg braces. It wasn’t something you could see. They explained to the other kids the need to help me.
High school was a disaster of bullying and teasing. I got kicked out of a regular high school for throwing a book at a girl who teased me. Then mother had worked as a reporter on doing public TV shows on mostly disturbed children. She’d actually researched all the special schools in New England. So, she picked out three of them and she let me pick a school. I picked the one that had horses and a farm. I didn’t care about studying.
You know what the school did? They put me to work running a horse barn. Now they said, let me get through my adolescence. Well, mother wasn’t too happy about backing off on academics. But what I’m saying now with a lot of these kids is they work really hard on the academics, no life skills. I’ve learned how to work. I was in charge of a horse barn, nine stalls every day to clean, put them in and out, feed them. I was responsible for it. Make sure the feed box is closed. I was responsible for that. I learned how to work. That was really important.
The other thing is the only place I was not bullied was friends through shared interests, like horseback riding, model rockets, and electronics. Really important. Today it might be robotics, 3D printing. It could be a sport. It could be a band, a choir, something where there’s friends who shared interests.
Debbie Millman:
The year after you were expelled for throwing a book at a girl who was teasing you, your parents got divorced, and several years later your mom remarried. You were able to spend a summer on the Arizona ranch of your stepdad’s sister.
Temple Grandin:
That’s right.
Debbie Millman:
It was there that you noticed that some of the animals appeared to relax after a cattle squeeze shoot was applied.
Temple Grandin:
That’s right. I was introduced to beef cattle for the first time, and I watched them get vaccinated in a device that squeezed them. It’s called a squeeze shoot. I noticed it kind of calmed them down. So then I built a device where I could squeeze myself, and I eventually got it to operate with air cylinders and that was some of my skilled trades work, built it all by myself.
Debbie Millman:
Did you have a sense at the time about how or why it helped you?
Temple Grandin:
Well, deep pressure’s calming. You see, then in the early seventies, I met an occupational therapist named Lorna King. She was using deep pressure with things like cushions with autistic kids in Arizona to calm them down. Now again, deep pressure doesn’t work on everybody. It only works on some of them. The sensory issues are very variable. But that kind of validated me. I was great friends with Lorna and she and I did some early, early autism talks in the ’70s.
Debbie Millman:
The influence of your squeeze box or hug box can now be seen in things like gravity blankets…
Temple Grandin:
Yeah. That’s right.
Debbie Millman:
… and even special pressure shirts to help dogs who experience…
Temple Grandin:
That’s right.
Debbie Millman:
… severe stress during thunderstorms. It’s called the Thundershirt. So thank you for that. It’s helped my dogs quite a lot.
Temple Grandin:
It did. The Thunderstorm help your dogs, and where it really seems to help is on separation distress, too. It seems to help.
Debbie Millman:
At this point in your life, were you aware that you had autism? Because I understand that you didn’t actually get officially diagnosed until much later in life.
Temple Grandin:
The psychiatrist, by the time I was five and six, yeah, was basically saying I was autistic.
Debbie Millman:
The summer after you developed the squeeze box, you began to attend Hampshire Country School in New Hampshire.
Temple Grandin:
That’s right.
Debbie Millman:
The school was founded in 1948 by a Boston child psychologist for students of exceptional potential…
Temple Grandin:
That’s right.
Debbie Millman:
… that have not been successful in a typical setting. It was there that you met William Carlock, a science teacher who had worked for NASA.
Temple Grandin:
Yes. I’d been there for about three years before William Carlock became a science teacher. What he did is he gave me interesting projects. The HBO movie showed all the things I built. The gate you could open from a car, the squeeze machine, optical illusion room that I had made, the dipping vat project. Then he gave me interesting projects. He says, “Well, then you have to study in order to go to graduate school and become a scientist.” I still couldn’t do algebra, but the other classes I was just goofing off. Then when I finally went to college, thank goodness, the introductory math class at that college was not algebra. It was basically called finite math, probability matrices, and statistics. The nice math teacher tutored me in his office. I asked for help right away. I didn’t wait until I had flunked out of the course. I failed the first quiz. I asked for help. Big mistakes students make, not asking for help soon enough. That’s something I did.
Debbie Millman:
Talk about why algebra is so difficult for some students.
Temple Grandin:
Well, I’m what’s called an object visualizer. This is described in the visual thinking book. You have object visualizers who think in photo realistic pictures. Then you got visual spatial, your pattern thinkers, your mathematical students. Then of course you get your verbal thinkers who think in words. The problem I have is algebra has nothing there to visualize. Now, I can remember a specific formula like pi times the radius squared describes a hydraulic cylinder. When I say that, I’m seeing a hydraulic cylinder. You see, that is not abstract. But abstract math I can’t do. You’ve got to understand different thinkers exist, and a lot of people are middle of the road. But that extreme visual thinker works in the shop who can build anything, we need those skills.
Debbie Millman:
In your 1995 book, Thinking in Pictures, you reveal that you thought that all individuals with autism thought the way that you did, in photographic-specific images or as you put it, thinking in pictures. Can you talk about now how your thinking has evolved a bit?
Temple Grandin:
Well, that was wrong. Amazon had just come out and I’ve read reviews. Several people on the spectrum said, “Well, that’s not true.” So then I started now thinking back to all the people I’d met and I started to figure out, yes, there are some that think in words and these tend to be the history lovers that love lists and facts and sports statistics, things like that. Then I was reading a book by Clara Claven Park about her daughter Jesse, and it was called Exiting Nirvana. It’s out of print now, unfortunately. But that was where I got the idea of thinking in patterns rather than pictures.
Debbie Millman:
What does that mean, to think in patterns?
Temple Grandin:
Well, Jesse would paint beautiful pictures of houses where she put all kinds of geometric shapes on a picture of somebody’s house. I’m going, “This is patterns rather than pictures.” Then later on, when I did the Autistic Brain, I was surfing in the middle of the night and I went into the reference list. I didn’t do the citations. A reference list, and I found this paper on two types of visualizers, and I looked up the paper and I go, “Wow, this describes my mind, and then the mathematical mind.” I then got that term off the title of paper. Then I found some other papers.
Debbie Millman:
By the time the expanded edition was published in 2006, you realized it had been wrong to presume that every person with autism processed information in the same way. In the 2006 version, you described three types of specialized thinking.
Temple Grandin:
Yeah. There’s three types of thinking, which now the correct names for, which back then I didn’t use the correct names for them because I didn’t know them at that time, was object visualizer. I was calling it photo-realistic visual thinking, is what I was calling it. Then there’s the pattern thinker. I was calling it a pattern thinker, mathematics, and that’s what the scientists called visual spatial. Then, of course, your think verbal thinker who thinks in words.
Then on the visual thinking book, the big thing that’s new in that is the huge skill loss problem we’ve got. I didn’t realize what a big skill loss we had until I went to four places in 2019, right before COVID hit. I went to two state-of-the-art pork plants where all the equipment was imported, mostly from Holland. I went to a state-of-the-art poultry plant, all of the machinery inside, it came from Holland in 100 shipping containers. And I went to the Steve Jobs Theater and the mothership building of Apple, and the structural glass walls are from Italy and Germany, and the carbon fiber roof is from Dubai. I have a picture of me standing in the middle of that, screaming, “We don’t make it anymore.”
Then I’m going, we’ve got a serious problem. 20 years ago, we made two mistakes in education. We took out all the hands on classes at some schools: art, sewing, woodworking, carpentry, auto mechanics, drafting. All those hands on things. So kids are growing up not using tools. The other big mistake that was made in industry, and I know the most about my industry, is shutting down in-house engineering departments. Back in the ’80s and the early ’90s, these companies had big shops where they could invent and patent equipment. Those were phased out, and they found it was cheaper and more economical to contract to work out. Now that’s coming back to bite them, and it’s now turning into a perfect storm on maintaining factories, on maintaining things like electrical towers, water supplies.
Debbie Millman:
You sound pessimistic. Do you think that this is something that could be reversed? How do you…
Temple Grandin:
Oh, absolutely. It could be reversed. What we need to be doing… Well, you got to have kids exposed to tools to get them interested in tools. You got to have them exposed to industrial design. So let’s look at college. You have industrial design. That’s the art side. You have engineering, which is the math side. You need both kinds of thinking. They used to say, “Well, the stupid kids would go to shop class.” I can tell you, the people I work with are not stupid.
Debbie Millman:
Well, I love shop.
Temple Grandin:
Mechanically complicated stuff.
Debbie Millman:
You call your most recent book Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions. So my very first question is, for my listeners, can you define what it means to do visual thinking?
Temple Grandin:
All right. There’s actually two types. There’s the object visualizer, like me, who are very good at things like photography, art, animal behavior, and mechanics. Because you just see pictures, and they’ll tell you to take the machine apart and then you just see how it works. That is my kind of mind. I call my kind of mind the clever engineering department. I mean, think packaging machine, think paper feed mechanism in your printer. Those are examples of what I call clever engineering. Those aren’t made by the mathematicians.
Then you have the visual spatial mathematical part of engineering. You’ve got to make sure the roof of the building doesn’t fall down; you have enough electrical power.
Then you have verbal thinkers who think in words. Now, I was shocked when I found out in my late 30s that other people think in words. Let’s say we’re designing something. An engineer, what it looks like and its function just go together. You look at the inside of the Space Station. There’s no aesthetics. Where you look at the stuff that Elon Musk has designed, I mean, the space suits are really cool. He got a costume designer to design them.
Debbie Millman:
So he’s working with a continuum of people.
Temple Grandin:
Yeah. That’s right. That’s what he’s doing. Well, first of all, they had a costume designer from a major movie design the space suits. Then they had to have engineers make those space suits work as space suits. So you’ve got both kinds of thinkers here. The object visualizer, the art person made them look cool. Then you had to go to the mathematical engineer to make sure those space suits would actually work. Or, you look at something like we’re using Zoom right now. Visual thinker like me designs the interface and then the mathematician programs it.
Debbie Millman:
Dr. Grandin, you begin the book with a 1957 quote from the linguist Noam Chomsky. Uou talk about his book Syntactic Structures, wherein he claims that language, specifically grammar, is innate and his ideas have influenced thinkers for over 50 years. Do you agree that grammar is innate for humans?
Temple Grandin:
Well, in one of my earlier books, Animals in Translation, I looked at the research that was done by Sloganov, I’ve probably said that wrong, on prairie dogs and that in their calls they have a noun-like function. Well, is it a coyote? A hawk? That’d be a noun. An urgency function, sort of like an adjective, and the way they hunt: lurker versus going from hole to hole. So that’s kind of a grammar function right there. You’ve got a noun function, urgency function, and does this coyote go from hole to hole or does he lurk? But the other thing on some of this language-based stuff, I remember reading something about uniframes of something. All I could think of is special pallets they put cars on in the car factory, which I know is wrong.
Debbie Millman:
What gave you that visual picture?
Temple Grandin:
Yeah. That’s wrong. I know it’s wrong. But I think some of the issues about animal thinking, they’re still arguing about consciousness. Now, I get to thinking about, I think it’s difficult for somebody who thinks in words to imagine the dog actually thinks or conscious. The dog is a sensory-based thinker. Smell is very important to dogs. There’s new research that shows that the nose has a direct trunk line to the visual cortex. Ooh, trippy. New Cornell research. It’s not in the book. It just came out on the dog’s smelling in three dimension. Wow. But it is a sensory-based world, not a word-based world. I think some of this, it’s hard. I think it’s hard for some verbal thinkers to imagine thought without words.
Debbie Millman:
Well, there are scientists or neurologists that think that thought creates consciousness.
Temple Grandin:
Well, yeah, I think what creates consciousness is a certain amount of association hubs in the nervous system. All networks form hubs, whether they’re Facebook, whether they are airlines, because I can remember airlines when there were no hubs. But those hubs organically form. Networks form hubs. So in the brain you’ve got hubs where you get memory information, incoming sensory information, signals coming up from the emulsion centers, the frontal cortex trying to sort through it, and all this stuff is all intersecting together in big hub. You have to have a certain amount of centralized hubs, I think, to have consciousness.
Debbie Millman:
You write how language is presumed to transform thought into consciousness, while visual thinking gets erased somewhere along the way.
Temple Grandin:
This has been very tricky for me because in the visual thinking book, this is a really good example of collaboration. Betsy Lerner, my co-author, is a total verbal thinker. What we would do is I’d write the initial drafts and, boy, she would smooth them out and straighten them out and organize them. So, that’s a perfect example of collaboration between a visual thinker and a word thinker. There’s things that she thinks completely differently than I do.
I can remember when she got a dog and I suggested for her to watch everything the dog does and what he smells. Then she started to get some insight into sensory-based thinking in a dog’s world. I see people yanking dogs away from things they want to smell. Well, that’s their life.
Debbie Millman:
There are dogs that have been proven to be able to smell cancer.
Temple Grandin:
Well, there’s a lot of things they can smell and they can be trained to smell and working for all kinds of detection purposes. Their nose is just super powerful. I kind of use what’s the most example maybe a human did? Well, I’ve read about some wine steward that could identify 2,000 wines. Okay. That’s maybe as close as a person ever got to a dog.
Debbie Millman:
You state that visual thinking is not about how we see, but how the brain processes information.
Temple Grandin:
Yes. Because it’s in my imagination. Like, right now, I’ve got to go over and I’m doing a lecture in the introductory animal science class and I’m going, “Ooh, I’m going to have to go to a parking garage and walk over there because I won’t be able to find space in our lot.” Okay. Right now, I’m seeing both places. Then I can start the feel carrying my briefcase and wishing I could have gotten a space by our building. You see that? Just thinking about something that simple. I’m now seeing the parking garage. Now, it’s associative. Now I’m seeing the broken sign where one of our students drove our meat refrigerated truck in there, and it was too high. Okay. You see it’s associative.
Debbie Millman:
Right. It sounds like you have a visual power of association.
Temple Grandin:
Yeah. It’s a visual power of association. Give me a keyword and I’ll tell you about how it associated. Give me something kind of creative. Don’t give me car or house or something like that. Think of a kind of a creative keyword and I’ll Google it in my mind for you.
Debbie Millman:
Egg beater.
Temple Grandin:
Egg beater?
Debbie Millman:
Mm-hmm. Egg beater.
Temple Grandin:
Well, as a child, I can remember beating things with the egg beater. Now I’m seeing the power mixer we had. Now I’m seeing eating cookie dough before we baked the cookies. That was really a yummy thing to do. Okay. Now, I’m seeing a cement mixer. Okay. The association there is egg beaters mix up things, cement mixers mix. Als,o cement mixers are something I’ve had a lot of experience with. So I have lots of images and memory. Now, I’m thinking about my first job and I can see that cement mixer really high in Phoenix. We had to get the steps made on this cattle ramp before that truck got too hot. I remember the engineer going, “We’ve got to get this concrete laid by 10 o’clock.”
Debbie Millman:
It’s like a flip book in your brain.
Temple Grandin:
But you see what I’m getting is a series of associations. But these associations have some logic to them, and that’s how I solve problems because it’s bottom-up thinking. I’ll associate back to things I experienced in the past. “Oh, we’ve tried that in the past. That didn’t work.”
Debbie Millman:
I want to read a paragraph from your book.
Temple Grandin:
Okay.
Debbie Millman:
I’m very verbal. In fact, I’ve been told that everything happens up here in my head to a point where the rest of my body doesn’t even exist and it’s so much about language for me.
Temple Grandin:
Okay.
Debbie Millman:
I want to read a paragraph about word-based thinking.
Temple Grandin:
Okay.
Debbie Millman:
And then talk about it.
Temple Grandin:
Okay.
Debbie Millman:
“Word-based thinking is sequential and linear. People who are primarily verbal thinkers tend to comprehend things in order, which is why they often do well in school, where learning is mostly structured sequentially. They’re good at understanding general concepts and have good sense of time, though not necessarily a good sense of direction.
“Verbal thinkers are the kids with perfectly organized binders and the adults whose computer desktops have neat rows of folders for every project. Verbal thinkers are good at explaining the stops they take to arrive at an answer or to make a decision. Verbal thinkers talk to themselves silently, also known as self-talk, to organize their world. Verbal thinkers easily dash off emails and make presentations. They talk early and often.”
Temple Grandin:
Well, I’ve noticed with verbal thinking, like on things like policy, they overgeneralize. They say, “Well, we have to have an inclusive classroom,” or something like that. But how do you do it? They have no specific examples. It’s very overgeneralized, top-down thinking.
Debbie Millman:
What is the difference between bottom-up thinking and top-down thinking?
Temple Grandin:
Okay. The main difference between top-down and bottom-up is bottom-up, concepts are formed with specific examples. Okay. Let’s start a very simple example when I was a child. I had to separate cats, dogs, and horses. So how did I do that? Well, originally I used size, but then our neighbors got a dachshund, so I could no longer sort dogs from cats by size. So then I had to find other features that a dachshund shares with dogs, such as barking, the smell and the shape of their nose. The bottom-up thinker works better. It’s just like an artificial intelligence program.
Let’s say you have an artificial intelligence program that diagnoses melanoma skin cancer. Well, you show it 2,000 melanomas and then 2,000 mosquito bites or whatever, other kinds of rashes, it learns to sort. It takes a lot of information to be a good bottom-up thinker because what you’re doing is taking specific examples and putting them in categories.
Debbie Millman:
So, visual thinkers are bottom-up and verbal thinkers are top-down?
Temple Grandin:
Visual thinkers are bottom-up. Even the mathematicians are much more bottom-up.
Debbie Millman:
You talk about how visual thinkers are really needed now in all kinds of potentially dangerous situations, and outline how some theorists describe the three main components of risk assessment. I want to share that with you, what you’ve shared in the book. The three main components of risk assessment as identifying the potential risk, assessing the potential damage, and figuring out how to reduce it.
Temple Grandin:
All right. Now, that’s very sequential. They’re doing what I do sequentially with words. See, there’s three parts of that. All right. Let’s go to the disaster chapter in visual thinking. The Fukushima accident. Now there’s just one step. They designed the plant, the nuclear plant, perfect to be earthquake proof. It’s shook and it’s shook and it’s shook and it’s shook and everything’s fine. 20 minutes later, the tsunami floods the site. I just see the water coming. As soon as I… Water coming over the sea wall, flooding the site, I said, “Watertight doors would have saved it,” because the electrically-driven emergency cooling pump drowned.
Now, I just see it almost like a movie. It’s just one step. Well, it’s been a shock to me as I’ve learned the mathematical engineer has to go through, or the verbal thinker kind of goes through this more complicated way, engineers calculate risk. Okay. You look at the historical data. There were tsunamis that would’ve breached that in the past, that 10-meter sea wall. I can’t design a nuclear reactor, but maybe I need to be working on the safety systems because that electric pump has to run when I need it, and it’s not going to run underwater. You see, I just see. It’s so obvious the water coming in there, and you see it busting the doors out, and five seconds later the basement’s flooded.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve observed that when engineers discuss risk, they tend to use language that is almost robotic and void of human detail. This was incredible when I read this. A crash is called impact with terrain. Major problems are called anomalies. During a rocket launch, when everything is working smoothly, it is nominal. When it isn’t, there are four levels of failure, which I’ve learned from your book: negligible, marginal, critical, and catastrophic. The Boeing 737 Max tragedy was labeled a common mode failure.
Temple Grandin:
To me, I just see an angle of attack sensor. When I found out what that was, and I looked them up online and my next flight, I’m at the airport checking out angle of attack sensor [inaudible 00:32:13] the different planes and I go, “You wired a computer that controls how this plane flies,” and not the regular autopilot. You wired this computer that the pilots didn’t know about to a single, extremely delicate, fragile sensor that a bird can just bust off the airplane. How did you do that? No one asks the simple question: If a bird snaps off the angle of attack sensor, what will the plane do?
Debbie Millman:
How do we begin to improve how language is used to describe scenarios? How?
Temple Grandin:
Well, I think what we need to be doing is have teams with different kinds of thinkers on the team. The first step is you have to recognize it. Now, I’m saying, well, they didn’t have there at Boeing is a gnarly old shop guy who would’ve walked into the CEO’s office with an angle of attack sensor and slid it down the conference room table and saying, “You can’t wire that computer up to one of these.” Period. You see, I’m kind of visualizing that as kind of a fun scene.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I am too. I am too. It’s like a little movie in my head.
Temple Grandin:
If that had happened, this wouldn’t have happened. The planes would still be up there. Then there were other mistakes made. They wanted to not do simulator training for the pilots, but if they’d wired the computer to two angle of attack sensors and it had the angle of attack disagree function functional on these planes, that tells you one of them was broken. What if the default setting should have been fly normally if it breaks off and return to the airport. When you think about it [inaudible 00:33:50] see how basic that is?
Debbie Millman:
It’s logic. But you’ve stated in the book, and this is something, as somebody who is very verbal, this book really impacted sort of the way I behave. You state that by default, verbal people tend to be the ones who dominate conversations. They’re hyper organized and social. How can verbal thinkers best communicate with visual thinkers and give them the space to even slide that connector down the conference room table?
Temple Grandin:
Well, we need all the different kinds of minds.
Debbie Millman:
So what do we do? How do we create scenarios where visual thinkers, verbal thinkers, any type of neurodiverse thinker can be more collaborative?
Temple Grandin:
I think the first step is we got to realize the different kinds of thinking exist. Combined teams is what we should be doing, recognizing the skills that they bring to the table. They have different specific skills. Let’s take architecture versus engineering. I was just reading an article about a famous architect today, and he wants to make a building that looks like a Jenga tower. Then the engineers have got to make sure that Jenga tower doesn’t fall down, and the engineers are going to, okay, the elevator’s going to work, water systems, power. The architect wants it to look pretty and look nice and not just be a box, but you need both kinds of minds.
Debbie Millman:
I want to ask you about the term neurodiversity. It’s a term that originated in the autism community. It really became a rallying cry for people who had been marginalized because of their difference. Proponents of neurodiversity strive to change the medical model that reduces people to their diagnosis or to their label. And you write that the central idea behind neurodiversity is to find a new paradigm for thinking about neurological disorders.
Temple Grandin:
Well, I tell business people that you meet these different kinds of minds. Now, I’m thinking of the Millennial Tower in San Francisco that’s tilting, that tilts another few inches and the elevators won’t work. I wouldn’t give you 5 cents for an apartment in that building. They were cheap, and they didn’t put the pilings down to bedrock. Well, if you listen to some old concrete foundation worker on the site to put the pilings down to bedrock, it would’ve been my kind of mind that would’ve gone, “Oh, man, those suits are crazy. Why are they doing this?” You need those different kinds of minds.
The other thing is, I worked with a lot of people that probably were autistic. I’m going to estimate that drafting people, designing entire factories, designing equipment, people inventing mechanical things and building it, 20% of them were either autistic, dyslexic, or ADHD. You know, undiagnosed. Now, the way I got ahead in the ’70s, I can tell you being a woman was a bigger barrier than autism. I made sure I was very good at what I did. What I did was I learned to sell my work. I’d show off my drawings, and there’s no way I can show off a drawing on an audio podcast, but I would show people my drawings. I sold Cargill. I designed the front end of every Cargill beef plant because I sent a drawing to the head of Cargill and pictures.
Debbie Millman:
Dr. Grandin, I want you to tell my listeners how you learned to draw.
Temple Grandin:
Well, my mother teaching me to draw, and then there was a draftsman named Davey who worked at a construction company. I watched how he drew, But before I could learn how to draw from Davey, I had to learn how to read a blueprint. You look at a flat drawing and there might be a little square on the floor plan. Those squares are concrete columns that hold up the roof. I had to learn to read a drawing.
At the Swift plant, they gave me a copy of a beautiful set of hand-done drawings, very detailed. I walked around in that plant for two days until I could relate every single line on that drawing to a door, a window, a piece of equipment, a column, of course the water tower was easy. That was just a great big circle on the drawing. Then after I learned how to read the drawings, then I just copied the way Davey did it. It kind of appeared almost like magic.
I can remember in 1978, I have a drawing of a dipthat system. I remember drawing that and I’m going… I couldn’t believe I had done it because a lot of people thought I was stupid and they didn’t think I’d amount to anything. I remember looking at that drawing and I’m going, “Stupid people wouldn’t draw a drawing like this.”
Debbie Millman:
Absolutely.
Temple Grandin:
That really helped my self-esteem.
Debbie Millman:
Some of your drawings are included in your book, which I love. One of the things that I wanted to ask you about the term neurodiversity was the idea that people talk about neurological disorders, and do you think that we’ll ever dispense with this word disorder and just think about these conditions as different?
Temple Grandin:
There’s a certain amount of variation in brains and behavior. I think it’s just personality variant. When does geeky become autistic? You see, it’s a too continuous trait. So, a certain amount of this is normal variation. Now, obviously, if you’ve never learned to speak, yeah, that’s a disorder. The problem we’ve got with autism is you’re going from Elon Musk and Einstein to somebody who as an adult can’t dress themselves, and we call it the same thing? That’s horrible overgeneralization by the verbal thinkers. All I can say, the business people, we need these different kinds of minds. We need to be putting all the hands-on classes back into schools because we got infrastructure falling apart right now. Bridges falling down, all kinds of stuff.
Debbie Millman:
Dr. Grandin, my last question is this. You write about how while autistic people may have problems in some areas, they also may have extraordinary and socially valuable powers provided that they are allowed to be themselves. Autistic.
Temple Grandin:
Well, they also have to be able to have access to… Okay. If you have a third grader who’s super good at math and you make him do baby math, he needs that old-fashioned algebra book out of the attic. I don’t need it. I need to have art and be growing up with tools. I got that, because if you’re not exposed to enough different things… Or, I was exposed to musical instruments and I had lessons. I couldn’t play this little flute, but I was exposed to it.
Debbie Millman:
Now, I understand that melodies are the only things you could memorize without a visual image.
Temple Grandin:
Well, you see, I see the flute when I talk about it, and I’m seeing the piano that I had some piano lessons on. See, there’s nothing abstract there.
Debbie Millman:
Interesting. It’s so fascinating.
Temple Grandin:
Seeing myself playing chopsticks on the piano. I got not much further than that. But at least I was exposed. Another kid, you expose them to that flute or a guitar, they’ll just pick it up and play it. How are you going to know you’re good at musical instruments if you’re not exposed? Music and math tend to go together.
Debbie Millman:
Well, music is really based on math in so many ways.
Temple Grandin:
It is.
Debbie Millman:
Dr. Grandin, I’d like to close the show today with a quote of yours from your 2010 TED Talk. You stated this: “If by some magic, autism had been eradicated from the face of the Earth, then men would still be socializing in front of a wood fire at the entrance to a cave.”
Temple Grandin:
Well, who do you think designed some of the first technology? Not the chit-chatters around the campfire. It would’ve been someone sitting in the back of the cave trying to make a stone spear or something like that, that you see the brain can be more social or the brain can be more interested in what they do. You see, I am what I do. The happiest times in my life is doing really interesting things in my career. Something that works, that improves treatment of animals, real things. How do we make real change and improve something on the ground?
Debbie Millman:
Well, I’m hoping that your book will really show people the important changes that we need to make and ways to think about the world and new ways to make it better.
Temple Grandin:
Okay. Well, it’s been great talking to you.
Debbie Millman:
Thank you, Dr. Grandin. Thank you so much for making the world a better place with your work, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.
Temple Grandin:
And thank you so much for having me.
Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. It’s been an absolute honor. Temple Grandin’s latest book is Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions. Her website is templegrandin.com. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. Remember, we can talk about making a difference; we can make a difference; or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.