Temple Grandin
Temple Grandin enlightens listeners about “visual thinking” and stresses the importance of leveraging diverse cognitive styles. She is an author, professor, animal behaviorist, and autism advocate.
Transcript
Ted Roosevelt V (00:20):
Welcome to Good Citizen, a podcast from the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. I'm Ted Roosevelt. My guest today is the author, professor, and scientist, Temple Grandin. Not only is Temple a leader in farm animal handling, but also in autism awareness and education. She sees her own neurodivergence as a gift helping her solve problems that other thinkers cannot. Today we talk about the different ways that humans think with a particular focus on visual thinkers like herself: people who see words almost like film clips, and the advantages that can bring. We also delve into the seven time Emmy-winning film about her life, titled "Simply Temple Grandin." She's the author of over two dozen books and the subject of a new documentary, "An Open Door." I'm thrilled for you to hear our conversation.
(01:08):
[music]
(01:17):
You are the first guest we've had that has a movie made about their life where there is a big time Hollywood actor playing them, and the movie title is your name, Temple Grandin. It's really an honor to have you on here.
Temple Grandin (01:31):
Well, it's great to be here and I get asked all the time about accuracy of the movie and the most accurate stuff is the visual thinking. It shows exactly how I think visually. Visual thinking is a different approach to problem solving than verbal thinking, and so it was obvious to me to look at what cattle were seeing when they went through a cattle handling facility and also the projects that I made in the movie are accurate and the main characters were shown really nicely.
Ted Roosevelt V (01:59):
I might have described myself as a visual thinker, but it's very different than when you describe yourself as a visual thinker. Can you explain it a bit more for our listeners?
Temple Grandin (02:10):
Okay. You have a bunch of pictures on your phone that move a little bit. My memory is like thousands of little phone pictures that I can access.
Ted Roosevelt V (02:20):
How did you discover that you saw things differently in your head, these sort of thousand little phone pictures that you can access? When did you discover that you thought differently?
Temple Grandin (02:32):
I thought everybody thought in pictures until I was in my late thirties and I developed a question that's very good at differentiating the visual thinkers from the non-visual thinkers. And this is before any of the research came out, which is then described in my newest book, "Visual Thinking," where I talk about the verbal thinkers, the math thinkers, and the picture thinkers. And if I ask you think about your dog or your car or your house, you're probably going to see it. You're so familiar with that. But when I asked you something that's out there in the landscape, but most people don't pay much attention to it, this is when I differentiated. So I had this question I've been asking for years: access your memory on church steeples. And what I learned is the visual thinker names them off. They're specific, they name off the churches. But I was shocked back when I was in my late thirties to ask a speech therapist and she just got the vaguest visual representation where I tend to see specific. Then I ran into some people that have aphantasia, where there's no visual thinking, and then I discovered a few of those people. And then I discovered research that the mathematical pattern thinker is different than the picture visual thinker. Boy, that made me so happy. That validated some of the things that I'd been observing. And we need our visual thinkers. It's a different approach to problem solving. You see something that could be a risk. You also see a way to fix things.
Ted Roosevelt V (04:03):
You've been a pioneer in a number of fields, but two in particular: around ag and autism. And I'm curious if you see them as totally separate, or how the connective tissue works between the two. Do they relate to each other in some way?
Temple Grandin (04:20):
Well, animals are very sensitive to things like high-pitched noise. See, an animal lives in a sensory-based world, not a word-based world. So it was easier for me to understand an animal because I didn't think in words. I was storing my memories as pictures.
Ted Roosevelt V (04:36):
I would say that I think in stories as much as words. For me, just like before this podcast for example, I spent time thinking about the questions I was going to ask. I was thinking if any might be taken the wrong way. I was worried about running out of questions. I was sort of playing a whole video of what might happen on this in advance of the podcast and I'm curious whether that plays any role in your head because it dominates a lot of people's heads. Are there narratives, are there stories, or does that not happen?
Temple Grandin (05:09):
I've done interviews and I've talked to a lot of parents of autistic kids and they say, "oh, my kid has problems." I can't fix "problems." I find I have to question, question, question, like I know the age. Okay, so he had a temper tantrum. Well, when did they have it? What brought it on? I had a lot of questions I have to ask. The verbal thinker tends to overgeneralize. Like, just yesterday I was talking to a lady about executive function. I said, what do you mean by that? Let's discuss specifics: problems with being on time, problems with sequential information. I can tell you right now you use checklists because I have no working memory. I need an external working memory, so a task that involves sequence. I had a job at a dairy when I was in graduate school and they had a checklist on the wall on how to set up the milking equipment and how to clean it. That checklist saved me. Because if I had done something wrong, I could have run detergent into the bulk tank full of milk and then would've destroyed a bulk tank full of milk. I would've been fired if that happened. Like, let's say a chemistry experiment in school: put it down in a checklist format, and that's something over and over and over again. That simple accommodation of the checklist, it would save a ton of jobs.
Ted Roosevelt V (06:24):
I think there are going to be a lot of examples that I want to talk about in terms of the value of visual thinking and in fact, the early part of your career, you helped redesign animal handling facilities.
Temple Grandin (06:36):
That's right. And the first thing I did was to get down in the chutes and see what cattle were seeing, and I found they were scared of shadows. They were scared of reflections, coats on fences, seeing vehicles pass by, reflection off a parked vehicle, and nobody had thought to look at that. But you see at the time that I did this when I was in my twenties, I didn't know that other people thought in words. I didn't know that. It was something that was so obvious to me to look at what the cattle were seeing.
Ted Roosevelt V (07:06):
You grew up in Boston, correct?
Temple Grandin (07:08):
Yes, I did. Yeah.
Ted Roosevelt V (07:09):
What led you to cattle? Was there something that felt like was fated that you were going to end up working with cattle, that you're attracted to them, or was it just--?
Temple Grandin (07:16):
I came a non-ag background. It was exposure. My cattle exposure all started in high school. And especially when I went out to my aunt's ranch when I was 15 years old and that's where I got exposed--I got exposed to the Western United States. I'm a big believer in getting kids exposed to lots of different things that can be career options, because how can you know might like something or hate something if you don't try it? And then another thing that got me interested was a great animal behavior class I took in college.That got me interested in studying behavior. And then my first statistics class, I failed my first quiz. I got tutor, tutor, tutor, tutor, tutor, tutor to get through two statistics classes.
Ted Roosevelt V (08:00):
A mentor played a pretty important role in your life as well.
Temple Grandin (08:04):
I had a great science teacher as a high school student. I had no interest in studying. Mr. Carlock, my science teacher, he gave me interesting projects and now I started studying. English and history, I was just goofing off. Then I had a reason to study. That motivated me to study.
Ted Roosevelt V (08:21):
Do you have a sense of what he saw in you that other people weren't seeing in the time?
Temple Grandin (08:27):
Well, he was kind of a visual, real creative thinker and he started giving me challenging things to do. There's a scene in the movie where I had to figure out how to make the optical illusion room. They wanted me to figure it out.
Ted Roosevelt V (08:42):
That project that's depicted in the movie of solving that-- that happened.
Temple Grandin (08:46):
That happened. All the projects are accurate. They're all accurate: the dip fat, the squeeze machine, the gate. I actually did all of those projects and they were recreated from original drawings and pictures.
Ted Roosevelt V (09:01):
You just mentioned the squeeze machine. Can you talk about what that did for you in terms of calming you?
Temple Grandin (09:07):
Well, one thing that squeeze-- I had terrible anxiety. Terrible, terrible anxiety, and it helped to calm that down. People didn't understand sensory issues back then. They just didn't understand it. And now deep pressure is used a lot with autistic individuals and some respond really well to deep pressure. Sensory problems are real and you can sometimes get desensitized if the person controls it. I control a squeezing machine, so it actually desensitized me to having people touch me. Another thing that helped calm it down was lots of exercise. And one really important scene in the movie from a career standpoint is a scene where I go up to the editor of the Farmer Ranchman Magazine and I get his card because I recognized that if I wrote for that magazine it would help my career. And there were no women working in the yards with the cattle in the early seventies, but women were in ag journalism. And writing for that magazine really helped my career and I saw that door to opportunity. I walked up, I got the card, and I produced a decent article.
Ted Roosevelt V (10:10):
This was a big moment for you. A huge door was opened, and in fact, there's an upcoming documentary about you that's called "An Open Door." Can you tell me why that concept of a door opening resonates so much with you?
Temple Grandin (10:23):
I have to have a visual image. I have to have some kind of pictorial thing. I do not think abstractly, I just don't. But it's seeing that opportunity--I went up and I got the card. And a lot of people don't see those doors to opportunity.
Ted Roosevelt V (10:39):
I want to sort of keep digging into the major contributions you made in the ag space. One of the benefits of the designs that you came up with is that they're quite a bit more humane for the cattle going into slaughter. Was that a feature that was important for you versus efficiency?
Temple Grandin (10:59):
Yes, it was. It was very important to me. One of the things I wanted to answer when I first started was, were the cattle afraid of getting slaughtered? So I would go back and forth between the Swift plant in Tolleson, Arizona--this is back in the seventies--and the feed yards. And I found they behaved the same way in both places. And the things they were afraid of was stuff like shadows, reflections--they don't like going into the dark, and if you light up a dark place, they'd go in. That's the kind of stuff they were afraid of. People still are not seeing it. I got to find a picture here on my phone of a shadow I call the spider monster. This is two years ago. This is real recent. And see this shadow, it's on, I got on my phone right here.
Ted Roosevelt V (11:40):
Yeah, yeah.
Temple Grandin (11:40):
That's a shadow. That was at a big slaughter plant. That was not there in the morning. Everything was working fine. Two o'clock in the afternoon, they couldn't get the Angus to go in the paneling facility. And I walked out there and I saw that shadow and I go, "oh, I can tell you why they're not going in there. They're afraid of the spider monster." That's what I called that shadow.
Ted Roosevelt V (12:00):
It is a terrifying shadow for people that can't see it. It is really, it does look like a spider monster.
Temple Grandin (12:07):
It's a shadow from an overhead structure is what it is.
Ted Roosevelt V (12:10):
I think a question people might have is when you think about animals going off to slaughter, why is it important for us to be humane to them right before they're killed?
Temple Grandin (12:20):
We owe it to 'em. As I said in the movie, nature's cruel. We don't have to be. That's true.
Ted Roosevelt V (12:27):
So I want to transition a little bit because there's a phrase that comes up that I think your mother coined: "different, not less." Is that right? Is it something that came from her?
Temple Grandin (12:39):
I'll be perfectly truthful, it came from the script writer.
Ted Roosevelt V (12:43):
[laughter] No!
Temple Grandin (12:45):
I totally agree with that phrase and it's something that she would have said. It's in character.
Ted Roosevelt V (12:54):
I was struck by how far we have come in the last few decades in terms of how we think about neurodivergence and autism.
Temple Grandin (13:03):
Well, one thing I want to tell you about neurodivergence: when I was out working in heavy construction, 20% of the skilled tradespeople that were inventing and patenting equipment-- not just building it-- were either autistic, dyslexic or ADHD. And the problem is they are retiring out. The thing is, is that we need these skills. I was just talking to a guy who's brilliant, he's got 30 patents, he's selling mechanized equipment all over the world. He's in his sixties, and I said, well, where's the junior version of you? See, the problem is the junior version's not coming into the system. They're playing video games in the basement and they're getting screened out and we need these kind of thinkers. We need them. It's a different approach to problem solving, seeing how to fix something, how to build something, also seeing something that might be a risk.
Ted Roosevelt V (13:55):
Can you spend more time talking about the value proposition, how useful it is to have a wide range of different types of thinkers working on a singular problem?
Temple Grandin (14:04):
Well, let's just look at food processing plants, for example, and I've worked on a lot of that. The people that work in the shop invent mechanical devices like packaging machines, mechanically clever devices. They lay out the entire factory--maybe a person with a one semester class in computer drafting lays out the entire factory. And they don't just build equipment, they invent equipment and patent it. And then you have mathematical degreed engineer does boilers and refrigeration. I've worked for every major meat company. This division of the labor is the same everywhere. I spent 25 years of heavy construction supervising installation of equipment I had designed. And what I'm very concerned right now that our visual thinkers are retiring out, they're not getting replaced. And I'd even talk to an airline and we've talked to mechanics--okay, we've had a wheel fall off a plane? That's maintenance.
(14:56):
This engine cover just ripped off the Southwest Airlines--I watched the thing tear off on a video this morning. They probably didn't latch the cover correctly. You see, now I'm visualizing and I've looked at the latches on those engine covers and did they push them down correctly? Did they make sure they latched? See, I'm seeing it, and this gets back to visual thinking. I remember talking to one of the former deans at one of the universities. They used to have Boeing engineers come in and talk to engineering students. This is 20 years ago, and it shows a different approach to problem solving. And what the problem was is a heavy toolbox--real heavy, big toolbox--was dropped on the wing of a partially built airplane. The mathematicians tested it and it was close to the critical limit. You are the factory manager, what do you do? And the correct answer is to throw away a good portion of that wing. That's the correct answer, and the more mathematically inclined students don't get that. See, what I've learned about the mathematical mind, they don't see a risk, because in my book "Visual Thinking, I talk about the Fukushima disaster. I can't design a nuclear reactor, but they made a visual thinking mistake so basic, I can't believe that they did it.
(16:21):
You know what would've saved Fukushima? Waterproof doors. And they did not have them. All I need to know about that reactor, and it's an old fashioned reactor design, is an electric pump in the basement called the emergency cooling pump. And if that doesn't run even after the reactor's crammed, it's going to burn up. That pump's got to run. Well, an electric pump in a water-filled basement is not going to run. You see how basic that is?
Ted Roosevelt V (16:49):
Yeah.
Temple Grandin (16:49):
The mathematician doesn't see it. In fact, the other day I sat on a plane next to a mathematical engineer and we discussed this. Now, they did a great job of making it earthquake-proof. They did all the calculations that it shook and it shook and it shook and it was fine. And I said to this mathematical engineer, would you have seen the water coming over the seawall, where the historical data showed very clearly the seawall would be breached, and flooding the basement and wrecking the electric pump? She says, no, I would not have seen it. You see the mathematician calculates. Yeah, they design a nuclear reactor, but you need someone like me to say, "Hey, you need to put waterproof doors on that thing."
Ted Roosevelt V (17:31):
So how do we promote more visual thinkers in the work--if you feel like they're sort of falling out of the workforce? What can we do with our educational system or I don't know where the bottleneck is to make sure that--
Temple Grandin (17:45):
I have a lot of things we can do. We need to put all the hands-on classes back in, and when it comes to these math requirements: how about replace algebra--which is too abstract for me, I can't make a little telephone picture with algebra--and replace it with some statistics on how you analyze data or some business math. I'm not suggesting getting out of all math. And in Europe and Europe's building a lot of industrial equipment now that we're not building, especially for food processing. Well, in ninth grade, the kid can go university or they can go tech. We stick our nose up at tech and it's not a lesser form of thinking. It is a different kind of thinking and I tell business people, we need these skills.
Ted Roosevelt V (18:30):
Looking forward, what are some of the changes that you'd like to see around how we think about neurodivergence in our society now?
Temple Grandin (18:39):
I'm going to just say we need the skills. We need the skills. Would you like the power plant to work? Would you like the water system to work? And the verbal thinkers will care about this stuff when it breaks.
Ted Roosevelt V (18:53):
I mean, I love that answer because one, it's true, but two, it's a powerful self-interested motivator for people. Functionally, we need this for our society to work well.
Temple Grandin (19:05):
The other thing is like this Zoom program we're on right now. You wouldn't have this if you didn't have the mathematical minds. And then the visual thinker makes the simple interface that makes it easy to use. Like you take the iPhone, for example--Steve Jobs, he was on the spectrum. He was an artist and he made an interface where you didn't need a PhD in engineering to figure out how to use the phone. That's why it was so successful.
Ted Roosevelt V (19:32):
Do you think about your legacy at this point?
Temple Grandin (19:35):
Well, I want to see the kids that are different be successful. I do a lot of talks now where I want to encourage students to get out and do things where they can really make a difference. And one of the things that helped me to be successful in cattle handling--I worked on cattle handling. I didn't work on some vague, oh, cattle treated badly. That's way vague. The other thing I did, and this goes back to getting the card and working for that magazine, is that I wrote about it and I wrote a lot of just practical, how-to articles on cattle handling. It wasn't some big vague thing. It was something very targeted.
Ted Roosevelt V (20:14):
When you're out on the road and you're giving these speeches-- I think I saw somewhere that you're like a million mile flyer that you're, you're on the road quite a bit.
Temple Grandin (20:21):
3 million plus on United.
Ted Roosevelt V (20:23):
3 million plus. That's it. What are the sort of common themes? What are you hearing from parents now?
Temple Grandin (20:30):
Well, I'm hearing "my kid's got a great job because they read something in one of my books." One of the big problems I'm seeing right now with fully verbal autistic individuals, teenagers that have never gone shopping, they're not learning basic life skills: bank account, shopping, ordering food in restaurants. They're doing everything for 'em, and I'm seeing smart individuals that are teenagers still using Legos because nobody's thought to introduce tools. And that's somebody we need to keep things going in all industries.
Ted Roosevelt V (21:02):
Yeah, I'm not sure that's limited to autism either. I mean, I think there are a lot of kids that aren't learning some of the basic skills
Temple Grandin (21:09):
Well, but it hurts the autistic kids more than it hurts the other kids. The other kids will muddle through it.
Ted Roosevelt V (21:15):
I think I've heard you say in the past that you like having autism. You feel that that's really something that you would opt in for.
Temple Grandin (21:21):
Well, I like the logical way I think. I'm appalled at how illogical so much the world is. Totally illogical.
Ted Roosevelt V (21:31):
Well, and you can opt, not to answer this question, but maybe in broad strokes at least: how do you think about the political system or things like that in our country right now?
Temple Grandin (21:42):
We need to get some people involved that could actually get things done. The Republicans built the interstate highway system, and the Democrats went to the moon. They actually did things, and I'm going to leave it at that.
Ted Roosevelt V (21:59):
I mean, I think that might be one of the best answers I've heard about the state of affair of US politics. Yeah,
Temple Grandin (22:04):
Well, we need things to be done and the kind of stuff I'm interested in-- well, I'm interested in maintaining basic infrastructure. See, as a visual thinker, nothing is abstract. I don't think in abstractions.
Ted Roosevelt V (22:21):
Over your shoulder is a poster for the Hubble Space Telescope, and I'm wondering if you are as intrigued or fascinated by space as you are by things here.
Temple Grandin (22:34):
Well, I'm very--always been a NASA fan. When I was a little kid, I worshiped the astronauts. And one of the reasons I put that up there is people ask me about some of the great questions. Well, there's a picture on there of what's called the Hubble Deep Space Field, and the thing that's interesting about that is the scientist that discovered that had a proposal that everybody thought was stupid and everybody else thought, said it should be canceled because it was a waste of 10 days of observing time. He was going to point the Hubble at what they call dark space and basically pointed at nothing right next to the Big Dipper. Pointed at nothing, and he saw thousands of galaxies. Most important picture it took, pointed it at nothing. Everybody said he was crazy. Hit the jackpot.
Ted Roosevelt V (23:19):
I'm so glad I asked because I knew there'd be a good story. Now, we ask everyone on this podcast two questions and I'd love to get your answer to both of them. The first is, is there an action that you would encourage our listeners to do?
Temple Grandin (23:33):
Let's start working on real things. You want to make change. Work on something that's targeted. Let's take food waste for example. Let's pick out something like what supermarkets throw away, for example, and then work on it in your local community and write about how you did it. Instead of getting into a bunch of politics, let's write on how you did it. How'd you make sure that no one was going to get sick from the stuff you salvaged? Because that's one of the reasons they'll give for not salvaging it. Explain how you did that. That's how you get stuff out there.
Ted Roosevelt V (24:10):
It is a complaint that my wife hears from me fairly often is the amount of time and energy that people spend, for lack of a better term, sort of clutching their pearls or being upset about things and not doing anything about the thing that they're upset about.
Temple Grandin (24:24):
Well, let's do something about it and then if you write about it--and I did this with cattle handling. My very first article I'd done on cattle handling for Beef Magazine. Oh, I was jumping for joy. I got picked up by Arkansas Cattle Business and another magazine. Of course, this is back in the seventies. The writing was a real important part of what I did. That's why getting that card from the editor was just so important and that seems absolutely real.
Ted Roosevelt V (24:47):
Temple, what's an organization you'd like our listeners to support?
Temple Grandin (24:51):
Find something in your local community where you get things done. I think we need a lot more local stuff. Then you start something very successful locally--write about how you did it. A how-to paper--keep the politics out of it--a how-to article. Post them on--you need to get in academic literature, you need to put it up on a website. What I did with my grandin.com, my livestock website, I got lots of information on it that people can just use.
Ted Roosevelt V (25:19):
Temple, when does your documentary come out?
Temple Grandin (25:22):
Well, they're doing a lot of festivals. They've been winning a lot of festivals, so you see the problem is if they put it on the streaming service now, then they can't put it in festivals once it goes on a streaming service. So that's why they're doing lots and lots of showings, but that's why it's not on a streaming service.
Ted Roosevelt V (25:38):
How many books have you written-- 20 books at this point?
Temple Grandin (25:40):
I've got about 15 books and I have used co-authors on a lot of my books, but a lot of the stuff I've done, technical stuff I've done on cattle handling, I wrote that stuff. And my book, "Thinking in Pictures," I wrote, but I need co-authors for organization. Now this is an example of different minds working together, like on the "Visual Thinking" book: this was the big Covid project right here, and I wrote the rough drafts, and then Betsy, my verbal co-author, she smoothed them all out. You see, you need to have the different kinds of minds.
Ted Roosevelt V (26:15):
Temple, this has been a really enjoyable conversation for me. It's an honor to meet you and have a chance to talk to you and hear a little bit more about your story. This has really been a joy.
(26:29):
Thank you so much for speaking with me today, Temple. It was a pleasure and truly an eye-opening experience. Your work is so meaningful and I'm grateful you took the time to share some insights with me. Listeners, keep an eye out for a new documentary, "An Open Door," about her life and influence, and be sure to pick up her latest book, "Different Kinds of Minds: a Guide to Your Brain," out now. If you enjoyed hearing this interview, please leave us a review. It really helps us reach new listeners. Good Citizen is produced by the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in collaboration with the Future of StoryTelling and Charts & Leisure. You can learn more about TRs upcoming presidential library at trlibrary.com.