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