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I think I'll start out and just talk a little bit about

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what exactly autism is.

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Autism is a very big continuum

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that goes from very severe -- the child remains non-verbal --

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all the way up to brilliant scientists and engineers.

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And I actually feel at home here,

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because there's a lot of autism genetics here.

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You wouldn't have any...

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(Applause)

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It's a continuum of traits.

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When does a nerd turn into

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Asperger, which is just mild autism?

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I mean, Einstein and Mozart

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and Tesla would all be probably diagnosed

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as autistic spectrum today.

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And one of the things that is really going to concern me is

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getting these kids to be the ones that are going to invent

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the next energy things,

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you know, that Bill Gates talked about this morning.

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OK. Now, if you want to understand

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autism, animals.

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And I want to talk to you now about different ways of thinking.

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You have to get away from verbal language.

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I think in pictures,

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I don't think in language.

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Now, the thing about the autistic mind

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is it attends to details.

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OK, this is a test where you either have to

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pick out the big letters, or pick out the little letters,

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and the autistic mind picks out the

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little letters more quickly.

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And the thing is, the normal brain ignores the details.

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Well, if you're building a bridge, details are pretty important

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because it will fall down if you ignore the details.

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And one of my big concerns with a lot of policy things today

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is things are getting too abstract.

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People are getting away from doing

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hands-on stuff.

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I'm really concerned that a lot of the schools have taken out

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the hands-on classes,

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because art, and classes like that,

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those are the classes where I excelled.

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In my work with cattle,

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I noticed a lot of little things that most people don't notice

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would make the cattle balk. Like, for example,

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this flag waving, right in front of the veterinary facility.

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This feed yard was going to tear down their whole veterinary facility;

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all they needed to do was move the flag.

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Rapid movement, contrast.

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In the early '70s when I started, I got right down

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in the chutes to see what cattle were seeing.

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People thought that was crazy. A coat on a fence would make them balk,

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shadows would make them balk, a hose on the floor ...

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people weren't noticing these things --

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a chain hanging down --

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and that's shown very, very nicely in the movie.

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In fact, I loved the movie, how they

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duplicated all my projects. That's the geek side.

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My drawings got to star in the movie too.

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And actually it's called "Temple Grandin,"

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not "Thinking In Pictures."

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So, what is thinking in pictures? It's literally movies

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in your head.

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My mind works like Google for images.

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Now, when I was a young kid I didn't know my thinking was different.

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I thought everybody thought in pictures.

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And then when I did my book, "Thinking In Pictures,"

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I start interviewing people about how they think.

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And I was shocked to find out that

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my thinking was quite different. Like if I say,

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"Think about a church steeple"

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most people get this sort of generalized generic one.

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Now, maybe that's not true in this room,

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but it's going to be true in a lot of different places.

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I see only specific pictures.

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They flash up into my memory, just like Google for pictures.

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And in the movie, they've got a great scene in there

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where the word "shoe" is said, and a whole bunch of '50s and '60s shoes

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pop into my imagination.

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OK, there is my childhood church,

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that's specific. There's some more, Fort Collins.

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OK, how about famous ones?

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And they just kind of come up, kind of like this.

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Just really quickly, like Google for pictures.

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And they come up one at a time,

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and then I think, "OK, well maybe we can have it snow,

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or we can have a thunderstorm,"

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and I can hold it there and turn them into videos.

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Now, visual thinking was a tremendous asset

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in my work designing cattle-handling facilities.

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And I've worked really hard on improving

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how cattle are treated at the slaughter plant.

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I'm not going to go into any gucky slaughter slides.

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I've got that stuff up on YouTube if you want to look at it.

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But, one of the things that I was able to do in my design work

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is I could actually test run

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a piece of equipment in my mind,

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just like a virtual reality computer system.

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And this is an aerial view

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of a recreation of one of my projects that was used in the movie.

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That was like just so super cool.

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And there were a lot of kind of Asperger types

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and autism types working out there on the movie set too.

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(Laughter)

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But one of the things that really worries me

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is: Where's the younger version of those kids going today?

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They're not ending up in Silicon Valley, where they belong.

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(Laughter)

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(Applause)

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Now, one of the things I learned very early on because I wasn't that social,

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is I had to sell my work, and not myself.

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And the way I sold livestock jobs

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is I showed off my drawings, I showed off pictures of things.

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Another thing that helped me as a little kid

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is, boy, in the '50s, you were taught manners.

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You were taught you can't pull the merchandise off the shelves

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in the store and throw it around.

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Now, when kids get to be in third or fourth grade,

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you might see that this kid's going to be a visual thinker,

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drawing in perspective. Now, I want to

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emphasize that not every autistic kid

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is going to be a visual thinker.

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Now, I had this brain scan done several years ago,

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and I used to joke around about having a

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gigantic Internet trunk line

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going deep into my visual cortex.

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This is tensor imaging.

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And my great big internet trunk line

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is twice as big as the control's.

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The red lines there are me,

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and the blue lines are the sex and age-matched control.

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And there I got a gigantic one,

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and the control over there, the blue one,

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has got a really small one.

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And some of the research now is showing

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is that people on the spectrum actually think with primary visual cortex.

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Now, the thing is, the visual thinker's just one kind of mind.

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You see, the autistic mind tends to be a specialist mind --

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good at one thing, bad at something else.

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And where I was bad was algebra. And I was never allowed

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to take geometry or trig.

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Gigantic mistake: I'm finding a lot of kids who need to skip algebra,

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go right to geometry and trig.

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Now, another kind of mind is the pattern thinker.

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More abstract. These are your engineers,

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your computer programmers.

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Now, this is pattern thinking. That praying mantis

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is made from a single sheet of paper --

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no scotch tape, no cuts.

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And there in the background is the pattern for folding it.

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Here are the types of thinking:

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photo-realistic visual thinkers, like me;

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pattern thinkers, music and math minds.

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Some of these oftentimes have problems with reading.

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You also will see these kind of problems

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with kids that are dyslexic.

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You'll see these different kinds of minds.

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And then there's a verbal mind, they know every fact about everything.

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Now, another thing is the sensory issues.

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I was really concerned about having to wear this gadget on my face.

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And I came in half an hour beforehand

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so I could have it put on and kind of get used to it,

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and they got it bent so it's not hitting my chin.

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But sensory is an issue. Some kids are bothered by fluorescent lights;

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others have problems with sound sensitivity.

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You know, it's going to be variable.

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Now, visual thinking gave me a whole lot of insight

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into the animal mind.

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Because think about it: An animal is a sensory-based thinker,

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not verbal -- thinks in pictures,

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thinks in sounds, thinks in smells.

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Think about how much information there is there on the local fire hydrant.

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He knows who's been there, when they were there.

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Are they friend or foe? Is there anybody he can go mate with?

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There's a ton of information on that fire hydrant.

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It's all very detailed information,

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and, looking at these kind of details

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gave me a lot of insight into animals.

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Now, the animal mind, and also my mind,

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puts sensory-based information

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into categories.

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Man on a horse

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and a man on the ground --

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that is viewed as two totally different things.

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You could have a horse that's been abused by a rider.

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They'll be absolutely fine with the veterinarian

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and with the horseshoer, but you can't ride him.

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You have another horse, where maybe the horseshoer beat him up

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and he'll be terrible for anything on the ground,

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with the veterinarian, but a person can ride him.

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Cattle are the same way.

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Man on a horse,

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a man on foot -- they're two different things.

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You see, it's a different picture.

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See, I want you to think about just how specific this is.

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Now, this ability to put information into categories,

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I find a lot of people are not very good at this.

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When I'm out troubleshooting equipment

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or problems with something in a plant,

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they don't seem to be able to figure out, "Do I have a training people issue?

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Or do I have something wrong with the equipment?"

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In other words, categorize equipment problem

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from a people problem.

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I find a lot of people have difficulty doing that.

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Now, let's say I figure out it's an equipment problem.

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Is it a minor problem, with something simple I can fix?

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Or is the whole design of the system wrong?

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People have a hard time figuring that out.

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Let's just look at something like, you know,

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solving problems with making airlines safer.

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Yeah, I'm a million-mile flyer.

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I do lots and lots of flying,

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and if I was at the FAA,

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what would I be doing a lot of direct observation of?

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It would be their airplane tails.

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You know, five fatal wrecks in the last 20 years,

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the tail either came off or steering stuff inside the tail broke

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in some way.

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It's tails, pure and simple.

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And when the pilots walk around the plane, guess what? They can't see

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that stuff inside the tail.

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You know, now as I think about that,

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I'm pulling up all of that specific information.

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It's specific. See, my thinking's bottom-up.

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I take all the little pieces and I put the pieces together like a puzzle.

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Now, here is a horse that was deathly afraid

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of black cowboy hats.

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He'd been abused by somebody with a black cowboy hat.

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White cowboy hats, that was absolutely fine.

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Now, the thing is, the world is going to need

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all of the different kinds of minds

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to work together.

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We've got to work on developing all these different kinds of minds.

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And one of the things that is driving me really crazy,

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as I travel around and I do autism meetings,

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is I'm seeing a lot of smart, geeky, nerdy kids,

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and they just aren't very social,

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and nobody's working on developing their interest

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in something like science.

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And this brings up the whole thing of my science teacher.

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My science teacher is shown absolutely beautifully in the movie.

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I was a goofball student. When I was in high school

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I just didn't care at all about studying,

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until I had Mr. Carlock's science class.

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He was now Dr. Carlock in the movie.

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And he got me challenged

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to figure out an optical illusion room.

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This brings up the whole thing of you've got to show kids

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interesting stuff.

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You know, one of the things that I think maybe TED ought to do

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is tell all the schools about all the great lectures that are on TED,

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and there's all kinds of great stuff on the Internet

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to get these kids turned on.

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Because I'm seeing a lot of these geeky nerdy kids,

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and the teachers out in the Midwest, and the other parts of the country,

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when you get away from these tech areas,

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they don't know what to do with these kids.

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And they're not going down the right path.

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The thing is, you can make a mind

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to be more of a thinking and cognitive mind,

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or your mind can be wired to be more social.

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And what some of the research now has shown in autism

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is there may by extra wiring back here,

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in the really brilliant mind, and we lose a few social circuits here.

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It's kind of a trade-off between thinking and social.

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And then you can get into the point where it's so severe

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you're going to have a person that's going to be non-verbal.

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In the normal human mind

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language covers up the visual thinking we share with animals.

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This is the work of Dr. Bruce Miller.

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And he studied Alzheimer's patients

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that had frontal temporal lobe dementia.

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And the dementia ate out the language parts of the brain,

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and then this artwork came out of somebody who used to install stereos in cars.

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Now, Van Gogh doesn't know anything about physics,

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but I think it's very interesting

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that there was some work done to show that

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this eddy pattern in this painting

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followed a statistical model of turbulence,

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which brings up the whole interesting idea

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of maybe some of this mathematical patterns

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is in our own head.

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And the Wolfram stuff -- I was taking

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notes and I was writing down all the

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search words I could use,

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because I think that's going to go on in my autism lectures.

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We've got to show these kids interesting stuff.

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And they've taken out the autoshop class

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and the drafting class and the art class.

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I mean art was my best subject in school.

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We've got to think about all these different kinds of minds,

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and we've got to absolutely work with these kind of minds,

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because we absolutely are going to need

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these kind of people in the future.

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And let's talk about jobs.

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OK, my science teacher got me studying

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because I was a goofball that didn't want to study.

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But you know what? I was getting work experience.

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I'm seeing too many of these smart kids who haven't learned basic things,

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like how to be on time.

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I was taught that when I was eight years old.

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You know, how to have table manners at granny's Sunday party.

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I was taught that when I was very, very young.

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And when I was 13, I had a job at a dressmaker's shop

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sewing clothes.

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I did internships in college,

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I was building things,

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and I also had to learn how to do assignments.

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You know, all I wanted to do was draw pictures of horses when I was little.

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My mother said, "Well let's do a picture of something else."

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They've got to learn how to do something else.

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Let's say the kid is fixated on Legos.

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Let's get him working on building different things.

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The thing about the autistic mind

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is it tends to be fixated.

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Like if a kid loves racecars,

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let's use racecars for math.

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Let's figure out how long it takes a racecar to go a certain distance.

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In other words, use that fixation

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in order to motivate that kid, that's one of the things we need to do.

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I really get fed up when they, you know, the teachers,

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especially when you get away from this part of the country,

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they don't know what to do with these smart kids.

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It just drives me crazy.

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What can visual thinkers do when they grow up?

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They can do graphic design, all kinds of stuff with computers,

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photography, industrial design.

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The pattern thinkers, they're the ones that are going to be

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your mathematicians, your software engineers,

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your computer programmers, all of those kinds of jobs.

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And then you've got the word minds. They make great journalists,

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and they also make really, really good stage actors.

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Because the thing about being autistic is,

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I had to learn social skills like being in a play.

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It's just kind of -- you just have to learn it.

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And we need to be working with these students.

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And this brings up mentors.

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You know, my science teacher was not an accredited teacher.

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He was a NASA space scientist.

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Now, some states now are getting it to where

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if you have a degree in biology, or a degree in chemistry,

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you can come into the school and teach biology or chemistry.

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We need to be doing that.

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Because what I'm observing is

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the good teachers, for a lot of these kids,

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are out in the community colleges,

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but we need to be getting some of these good teachers into the high schools.

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Another thing that can be very, very, very successful is

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there is a lot of people that may have retired

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from working in the software industry, and they can teach your kid.

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And it doesn't matter if what they teach them is old,

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because what you're doing is you're lighting the spark.

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You're getting that kid turned on.

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And you get him turned on, then he'll learn all the new stuff.

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Mentors are just essential.

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I cannot emphasize enough

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what my science teacher did for me.

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And we've got to mentor them, hire them.

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And if you bring them in for internships in your companies,

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the thing about the autism, Asperger-y kind of mind,

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you've got to give them a specific task. Don't just say, "Design new software."

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You've got to tell them something a lot more specific:

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"Well, we're designing a software for a phone

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and it has to do some specific thing.

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And it can only use so much memory."

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That's the kind of specificity you need.

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Well, that's the end of my talk.

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And I just want to thank everybody for coming.

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It was great to be here.

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(Applause)

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Oh, you've got a question for me? OK.

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(Applause)

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Chris Anderson: Thank you so much for that.

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You know, you once wrote, I like this quote,

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"If by some magic, autism had been

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eradicated from the face of the Earth,

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then men would still be socializing in front of a wood fire

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at the entrance to a cave."

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Temple Grandin: Because who do you think made the first stone spears?

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The Asperger guy. And if you were to get rid of all the autism genetics

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there would be no more Silicon Valley,

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and the energy crisis would not be solved.

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(Applause)

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CA: So, I want to ask you a couple other questions,

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and if any of these feel inappropriate,

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it's okay just to say, "Next question."

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But if there is someone here

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who has an autistic child,

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or knows an autistic child

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and feels kind of cut off from them,

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what advice would you give them?

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TG: Well, first of all, you've got to look at age.

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If you have a two, three or four year old

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you know, no speech, no social interaction,

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I can't emphasize enough:

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Don't wait, you need at least 20 hours a week of one-to-one teaching.

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You know, the thing is, autism comes in different degrees.

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There's going to be about half the people on the spectrum

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that are not going to learn to talk, and they're not going to be working

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Silicon Valley, that would not be a reasonable thing for them to do.

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But then you get the smart, geeky kids

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that have a touch of autism,

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and that's where you've got to get them turned on

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with doing interesting things.

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I got social interaction through shared interest.

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I rode horses with other kids, I made model rockets with other kids,

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did electronics lab with other kids,

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and in the '60s, it was gluing mirrors

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onto a rubber membrane on a speaker to make a light show.

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That was like, we considered that super cool.

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CA: Is it unrealistic for them

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to hope or think that that child

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loves them, as some might, as most, wish?

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TG: Well let me tell you, that child will be loyal,

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and if your house is burning down, they're going to get you out of it.

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CA: Wow. So, most people, if you ask them

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what are they most passionate about, they'd say things like,

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"My kids" or "My lover."

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What are you most passionate about?

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TG: I'm passionate about that the things I do

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are going to make the world a better place.

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When I have a mother of an autistic child say,

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"My kid went to college because of your book,

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or one of your lectures," that makes me happy.

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You know, the slaughter plants, I've worked with them

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in the '80s; they were absolutely awful.

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I developed a really simple scoring system for slaughter plants

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where you just measure outcomes: How many cattle fell down?

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How many cattle got poked with the prodder?

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How many cattle are mooing their heads off?

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And it's very, very simple.

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You directly observe a few simple things.

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It's worked really well. I get satisfaction out of

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seeing stuff that makes real change

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in the real world. We need a lot more of that,

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and a lot less abstract stuff.

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(Applause)

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CA: When we were talking on the phone, one of the things you said that

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really astonished me was you said one thing

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you were passionate about was server farms. Tell me about that.

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TG: Well the reason why I got really excited when I read about that,

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it contains knowledge.

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It's libraries.

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And to me, knowledge is something

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that is extremely valuable. So, maybe, over 10 years ago

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now our library got flooded.

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And this is before the Internet got really big.

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And I was really upset about all the books being wrecked,

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because it was knowledge being destroyed.

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And server farms, or data centers

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are great libraries of knowledge.

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CA: Temple, can I just say it's an absolute delight to have you at TED.

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TG: Well thank you so much. Thank you.

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(Applause)