Why The World Needs All Kinds of Minds

[Music]

[Applause]

what i want to get you thinking about

is the world definitely needs all the

different kinds of minds

because different ways of thinking um

give you a lot of variety and better

ways of solving problems

now i want you to think about these two

really super important innovators

steve jobs and albert einstein albert

einstein had no

speech until age three in a lot of

educational systems he’d be labeled

autistic

steve jobs was bullied i was bullied in

school too

and the only places where i was not

bullied

where i had friends through shared

interests

and for me in high school it was horses

and it was electronics

but both of these people if they were

young children today

and a lot of school systems would

probably be labeled autistic dyslexic or

some other label

now thomas edison another one of our

great inventors in the u.s

the inventor of the light bulb he was a

high school dropout

his mother homeschooled him he was

labeled hyperactive

and i probably had autism one of the

things that um

edison did is he memorized every street

in his town

that kind of sounds kind of autistic

now one thing that helped him is he

learned to work at a young age

he was selling newspapers at a very very

young age

and one of the big problems i see today

a lot of kids with the labels are not

learning working skills

and i’m seeing a lot of grandfathers

come up to me

grandfathers that maybe were nasa space

scientists and helped on our moon

program going to the moon one of the

greatest things our generation ever did

my generation and that grandfather is

finding out

that he was probably autistic when the

kids get diagnosed

and he was a nasa space scientist to

help this uh get to the moon

now jane goodall’s another interesting

person um

she only had a two-year secretarial

degree when she did her

famous study would that be possible

today

you know i get concerned about academic

barriers of entry

steven spielberg he was dyslexic

he actually got rejected from a top film

school because he had

poor crates but one of the things that

helped on

steven spielberg to be uh successful

is when he was a child he was given a

movie camera so he got exposed to movies

when he was really young people asked me

how i got involved in the cattle

industry

i got involved in it because when i was

a teenager i got exposed to it

students get interested in things they

get exposed to

and we got to get students out doing a

lot of things i see a lot of kids

growing up today

they’ve never used tools they’re totally

removed in the world with the practical

i think that’s a gigantic mistake my

next slide

on the different types of thinking it’s

one of my most important

slides i am a visual thinker or an

object visualizer everything i think

about

is a picture and i just discussed that

years ago on my book

thinking in pictures which is available

in the uk from bloomsbury

and being a visual thinker helped me in

my work with livestock because you want

to understand animals

you’ve got to get away from verbal

language

i absolutely could not do algebra

now another kind of thinker might also

be on the autism spectrum

is the visual spatial mathematical

thinker so you have a person who thinks

in photorealistic pictures

then you got a person who thinks more in

patterns the more mathematical

kind of thinking and these are the

people who be good at computer

programming

we need to be taking the thing that a

child’s good at and build on it

and then you’ve got another type of

thinker they think totally in words

they also tend to be very linear where

visual thinkers like me tend to be

associative

i’m learning more and more about how to

communicate with people

that are uh they don’t think the same

way i do

so the first step is understanding that

you think differently because when i was

real young i thought

everybody was a visual thinker i didn’t

know my my thinking was different

and then when i was in my late 30s i

started learning

that my thinking was different now i’m

going to show you some brain scans and

this first brain scan

shows um a big huge visual thinking

circuit this is a slice right through my

head right through here with a brain

scan

and the next slide shows a slice right

through here you see another big

visual thinking circuit and then

a third slide shows some abnormalities

in the left hemisphere

and this explains why i have no working

memory so here’s a hint that can help

people that are different

do not load working memory multitasking

on a busy

take out fast food window probably not a

very good job for me

um i when i was a little kid

it took me time time to respond on my

speech

i cannot remember long strings of verbal

information

so for tasks that involve sequence i’m

going to be a whole lot better if i have

a

pilot’s checklist now i get asked all

the time this next

slide shows how do you determine what

kind of thinker a kid is

well the visual thinkers when they’re in

primary school they’re going to be good

at

art they may also be really good at

building things

so take that ability and art and build

on it build on it

the mathematical thinkers might be good

at math well then you need to take in

the child and give a more difficult math

and then the verbal thinkers tend to

like writing

and so let’s take the thing the kids

good at

and build on it that’s really really

important

now unfortunately there’s still quite a

lot of problems with discrimination out

there

when i started out in the 70s uh being a

woman

in the man’s cattle industry that was a

bigger barrier than autism ever was and

i was just um

reading material from sienna she’s a

student in the uk very very good at math

you know went to top math things went to

top math school

and was treated very badly there no that

is absolutely not right

and today in the cattle industry the

cattle industry is welcoming women

but maybe in math we need a little more

welcoming let’s talk about some famous

women in math catherine johnson

and she calculated all the trajectories

for our first spacecraft

help us get to the moon and grace murray

hopper

who invented the very very first

computer programming

now these people often get forgotten

they’re just getting recognized

today now the next slide shows my

grandfather’s on

autopilot my grandfather and another

person person who was probably autistic

was the co-inventor for the autopilot

for airplanes

and three little coils you could sense

which way the plane was going

people in aviation thought it was crazy

but autopilot airplanes

was basically invented on

by a traditional mit trained engineer

that’s my grandfather

and another person who had this crazy

idea

and and i’ve it was in every play in

world war ii

but the thing that is sad is the stolen

version

was in most of the planes world war ii

stolen by the bendix corporation

but my grandfather did get compensation

at the end of the war and it went into

tons of commercial planes now you look

at this auto pile and it looks pretty

simple but sometimes simple things

really work

now the next slide just shows the

classes we need to be keeping in the

schools we’ve taken

all the hands-on classes out of the

schools we need to be putting those

classes back in

the other thing is there’s a study that

shows arts foster success

a scientist that had a creative hobby

was more likely to win a nobel prize

than a scientist was just a regular

scientist

now the problem i had is since i was

weird

how did i sell my work well what i

learned to do is i sell my work

not myself so i would simply

show off pictures of my jobs and this

next slide

shows the dipping that project that i

designed

and i put the drawings out there and

people go wow you did that

and then i’ve got another slide of

another project

and i used this slide to sell the um

one of our very large meat companies to

have me design

on the front end of all of their big

meat factories

and i sent them that drawing next slide

shows a curved cattle handling facility

that was one of the pictures i put in my

portfolio so basically what i did is i

showed off the drawings

showed off the pictures the next slide

shows the dipping that

system i designed for on

that were shown in the hbo movie project

i did back in the 70s

next slide shows my brochure it’s not in

color because in the 70s uh

colored printing was extremely expensive

so i had a real professional brochure

i just showed people what i could do i

want to show some more

pictures of jobs and uh here’s another

slide labeled half the cattle in north

america

handled in systems i designed and then i

got

two black and white slides of the

dipping vat

system um a lot of stuff was black and

white in the 70s because it was so much

cheaper now what worries me

is that our educational system i think

screening out a lot of smart kids us

visual thinkers we absolutely can’t do

algebra

but the thing is engineering needs

visual thinkers

because engineers calculate risk but i

can see risk

and when i found out why fukushima

burned up i was just

shocked simple watertight doors could

have saved it

you see i see the water coming in there

the mathematician doesn’t see it he

doesn’t see the water flooding the

basement

drowning the electrically operated

emergency cooling pump

i can’t design a nuclear reactor but i

do know electric motors don’t run

underwater you know it’s that simple

next slide talks about the boeing on

max airliner disasters engineers

calculate risk

i see risk and engineers like their

jargon

impact with terrain that’s jargon for

crashing

okay the next picture shows a picture of

an airliner

and that arrow is pointing its little

tiny fragile thing

that’s no bigger than this pencil

sticking out of the plane it’s called an

angle of attack sensor it measures

whether or not a plane is going to stall

normally that just acts as a as an

instrument to inform the pilot that he’s

in danger of stalling

but boeing went hooked this very fragile

thing

that a burdens rip off a plane directly

into the planes of flight controls and

they forgot to tell the pilots

this is really basic here and

i look at that and i go you wired that

thing to the flight controls and didn’t

tell the pilots

yes the bird rips it off what do you

think happened

the pilots are back on the the plane

thinks it’s stalling so the computer’s

shoving the nose down like this and the

pilots are going

like this back on the yoke and the real

the plane crashed

it was a disaster um and

i wouldn’t have made that mistake i

would have seen that the next slide just

shows a big food processing plant

i’m concerned in that which in a lot of

places we’re taking the skilled trades

out and we need skilled trades in

engineering

i was watching some very interesting

videos just the other day

on making big turbine blades they had

the coolest scaffold for building the

tower for the turbine well probably

someone’s a visual thinker

made that scaffold also they’re layering

on all the fiberglass and

the graphite fiber fabric really

intricate process

it’s done wrong the blade’s probably

going to break

i’m real real interesting we need

our visual thinkers so the thing i

learned on building large food

processing plants

who does it the degreed engineers would

do things like boilers refrigeration

make sure the roof isn’t going to fall

down but the visual thinkers like me

we did things with what i call the

clever engineering department think

packaging

equipment all of the really clever kinds

of things

and these people are not getting

replaced

that’s the problem and i factor holland

and germany they’ve been shipping a lot

of very expensive

food processing equipment over to the us

because we’re not making it anymore

and what’s caused this is uh

taking on welding and shop class out of

the schools 25 years ago

paying for that big mistake don’t do

you’re probably doing that in the uk

too now the next slide i’m just going to

talk a little bit about thinking before

wrapping it up

on computers artificial intelligence

autistics adhd and dyslexics were

bottom-up thinkers

in other words you take a lot of

specific examples and you put it into

categories top-down thinkers tend to

over-generalize okay we’ve got

kids with this label then we just assume

they can’t do anything

and for me i understand

specific examples of different things

so how do i learn something like good

and bad well if i put gum on the

teacher’s chair

that’s not robbing a bank you can have

different degrees of something being

good or bad i hold the door open for

somebody that’s really really nice

but it’s probably not mother teresa so

you can have with specific examples

different degrees of something being

good or bad

that’s i had to be taught that here are

just some tips

on kids that think differently do not

overload

working memory multitasking is not going

to work

when i was learning to talk i had to be

given time to respond

i often have problems in interviews with

interrupting

and that’s because i don’t get the

timing right i have a slow

processor speed but if i was a computer

i’d be an intel 286 you can look that up

online and see what that is

but i got the cloud from memory i got

some great big warehouse

full of servers to be my memory

and give the kids checklists for things

that involve

sequence like taking apart a machine and

then you got to put it back together

again give them a checklist or just a

checklist for setting up the cash drawer

in a store

real simple we also have to take these

kids and stretch them

just outside their comfort zone and get

them doing new things

but give them choices give them choices

and if you’ve got a problem with noise

sensitivity one of the ways to help kids

get over that

is give them control of the noise so if

it’s something like a hair dryer

let them turn it on and off where they

control it

really important and we’ve got to limit

the screen time now that’s really hard

with covid

but we need to be having some time every

day where there’s gonna be no screens

how about a meal

with no screens because i’m seeing too

many kids getting addicted to video

games

and they’re not getting out there and

designing them and we need to have

you know chances choices to do a lot of

hands-on things

this is my book of hands-on activities

calling all mines

i’m it’s available electronically so

that should make it easy to get if you

have to order it from the us

but kids aren’t doing simple things like

making paper snowflakes

you know and hands-on things also teach

practical

problem solving you know we’re getting

kids uh

getting upset if they’re not perfect

now i think what we need to be looking

at education

is what is the goal of education i think

we need to be looking at

where is a child 10 years

after high school i was a lousy student

in high school

i had a great science teacher who got me

motivated to study

because now studying became a pathway to

a goal not just something to please the

family

a pathway to a goal another thing with

kids that are different

we need to be teaching working skills

that needs to start around 11.

maybe little volunteer jobs church or

community center

i know that’s difficult now with covid

but they’ve got to learn how to do a

task

outside the family

uh and when i was uh 10 years after high

school i was doing those dipping vat

projects that was shown in the hbo movie

and one of the things that really

motivated me

is i wanted to prove to people that i

was not stupid

that was a really big motivator for me

and i want to see on these kids get out

and be successful

also there is scientific research that

shows that the different kinds of

thinking

really do exist and i talk about that

research in my book the autistic brain

that is available in the uk

the autistic brain that the object

visualizer

and the visual spatial more mathematical

visualizer there’s

research that shows that they really do

exist

these two different kinds of visualizers

and thank you for listening to my tedx

talk

thank you very much