Autism, Academics, and Animals | Dr. Temple Grandin | EP 318

So the Hebrews created history as we know it. Don't get away with anything. And so you might think you can bend the fabric of reality and that you can treat people instrumentally and that you can bow to the Tyrant and violate your conscience without cost. You will pay the piper; it's going to call you out of that slavery into Freedom, even if that pulls you into the desert.

And we're going to see that there's something else going on here that is far more Cosmic and deeper than what you can imagine. The highest ethical Spirit to which we're beholden is presented precisely as that spirit that allies itself with the cause of Freedom against tyranny. I want villains to get punished, but do you want the villains to learn before they have to pay the ultimate price? That's such a Christian question.

One of the reasons why I started working on the equipment is like the way cattle were being handled was horrible; you know, electric prods on 100. I'm falling down, crashing into things, people screaming at them. Cattle handling in the 80s was terrible, absolutely terrible. And I saw that as something I could fix.

Now I talked to a lot of young people today that want to, you know, do activism about some specific thing, and it's way too broad. I want Justice in the world, for example, right? Yes, yes, it might be something they would say. Yes, yes. And I say, why don't you do something more targeted, like using DNA to show that this prisoner was falsely accused? You see, now that's something a lot more targeted that you can actually do.

Yes, absolutely. And I think that is a huge problem with the way that kids are trained morally in universities, is that that grandiose vague activism replaces the actual practicalities of problem solving that you're describing that actually make a difference.

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Thank you. Hello everyone! I'm usually excited to have whoever I'm talking to that day on my show because I pick people I'm excited about talking to, but I'm particularly excited about my guest today, Dr. Temple Grandin.

Temple Grandin revolutionized the animal handling industry over the last 40 years and has done more for animal welfare in a practical sense than anybody that I know of and perhaps anybody on the planet. I think you could make a case for that. She's a remarkable person.

I saw her first in Tucson, Arizona. I'll talk about that a little bit in our interview. She gave one of the most compelling presentations I'd ever seen in an academic setting at a conference on consciousness about 15 years ago. And ever since then, I really been wanting to meet her and I got to do that today, so that's so exciting.

So I'll just give you a brief bio and we'll pop into the interview. Dr. Temple Grandin is a professor of animal sciences at Colorado State University. Facilities she has designed for handling livestock are used by companies all around the world. Her work has been instrumental in implementing animal welfare auditing programs now used by McDonald's, Wendy's, Whole Foods, and many other major corporations.

It's appeared on numerous shows across platforms such as 2020, Larry King Live, and Prime Time. Dr. Grandin is also an accomplished author with books such as "Thinking in Pictures," "Livestock Handling and Transport," and "The Autistic Brain." A few of her other publications, "Animals in Translation" as well as "Visual Thinking," have even made it to the New York Times bestseller list. In 2017, Dr. Grandin was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame, and in 2022 she was honored once again as a Colorado State distinguished professor.

We're going to walk through her book today and we're gonna learn what she has to say now about thinking. Let's start with visual thinking and language. So do you want to tell people about your realization about different thought patterns?

When I was in my 20s, I thought everybody thought in pictures the way I thought. I didn't know that other people thought in words until I was in my late 30s. Now you've already mentioned how do I categorize? Well, I'll explain as a child how I learned to categorize. Categorizing with individual pictures.

So I was a very young child; I categorized cats, dogs, and horses by size because in our neighborhood at that time there were no cattle and there were no small dogs. Then a dachshund came into my neighborhood and she’s the same size as a cat, and I remember looking at the dachshund. She was a black dachshund and trying to figure out now what features does she share with the dog? She barks, her nose shape is the same as a dog, and she smells like a dog.

So I had to take other sensory-based things like smell and what the dog sounded like to put the dachshund in the dog category. So the way I form categories is I have to have a bunch of information. Let's take the cat category. You look at a leopard's face, a lion's face, and even a house cat's face; there are similarities, and they also smell all the same too.

If you go to the zoo, you can smell how they are different. So the first step for abstract thinking is putting making categories. So when I finally figured out that other people did not think in pictures, if I ask most people to visualize your own home, your dog, or your car, you will do it because you're so familiar with that.

But one time, in an autism conference when I was in my late 30s, I asked a speech therapist to think about a church steeple, and I was shocked that all they saw was a very vague two lines like this where I see specific churches. They come up like a series of, well, back then 35-millimeter slides, now if you PowerPoint slides, and then I can start.

As I see more and more of these churches, I can put them into New England type category, stone Cathedral type looks like a warehouse and it has a little plastic steeple type. I can make finer categories as I get more and more specific images. It's bottom-up thinking, and I learned that that’s exactly how an artificial intelligence program diagnoses melanoma cancer.

It's given a training set of two thousand melanomas and another training set of every kind of skin rash, and mosquito bite and infected whatever. And then it learns to categorize melanoma from non-melanoma, and that was very insightful to me when I learned that that's how a simple type of artificial intelligence programs work diagnosing something like melanoma.

So let me ask you, when I'm thinking something through, now I can think in pictures, and if I'm building something or trying to design something to build, then I tend to think in pictures. But I would say 90% of the time my proclivity is to think in words. And I would say in part that’s because my word thinking is so dominant it just suppresses the image thinking.

And so a lot of my thinking I would also say takes the form of something like internal argumentation. So I'll ask myself a question, I'll think up an answer in words, and then I'll think up a bunch of reasons why that answer isn't sufficient. And then I'll conduct an internal argument and that's occupying me continually, like 16 hours a day non-stop, and it's been like that ever since I was two years old, except for those times.

So yeah, so how do you conduct internal arguments or like what accounts for the so part of the creativity in my thinking is the outcome of these arguments. But you're thinking in pictures, so you're not having internal arguments. Now what's the stream of your thought like?

Well, when it comes to things like designing equipment, I often will kind of… a lot of equipment design someone gets an idea from something else, and one of my other books I wrote about the inventor of Velcro, and he saw how burdock stuck on his clothes, you know, cockleburs and those kinds of things stuck on his clothes and that's where he got the idea for making Velcro.

That would be visual thinking; the burdocks and Velcro, they've got similarities on how they stick together. In designing equipment, I can just see how it operates. I worked with welders that had 20 patents each that barely graduated from high school, but they could build any kind of a machine and invent industrial Machinery; they just see it in their head.

Right now, will you see? Okay, so I read Nikola Tesla’s biography a long while back, and it was extremely interesting, and he claimed, and I have no reason to disbelieve him, that entire inventions, machines would pop into the theater of his imagination, detailed out to the point where he knew the angles on the screws that held the metal together.

And he would try to write them down in something that approximated, something that would be, you know, that you could make a blueprint out of, let’s say, in that much detail. And sometimes a new invention would pop into his head so quickly that it would obliterate the previous one; he had to work very quickly to keep up.

And so there's that incredible fluency in visualization, but then in, as I said, in the verbal world, I’ll think of an argument and counterarguments. When you're thinking of industrial design, do you think of the object that you're attempting to design and then multiple variants of it and test them against each other, or does it just come to you as a solution for a given problem?

It almost sort of just pops into my head. I also see mechanical abnormalities. I remember walking in and someone made a cardboard old-fashioned locomotive; you know the wheels have those links between them, and I go, that they drew that wrong. Wheels are not going to turn. It was just a cartoon train for a party, but I immediately noticed that they didn't draw it right.

The other thing is, is my thinking associative. All right, give me a keyword; pretend I'm Google for images, not something not something I can see in here with books and papers all around and photography equipment and stuff all around me, but something kind of a creative keyword, and I’ll tell you how I access my memory for that keyword.

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So, and with regards, so my wife has a very powerful visual imagination. She's able to do all sorts of remarkable things with it, and one of the things that strikes me as highly probable is that her capacity for visual imagery is a lot more intense than mine.

Yes, and so like I was a fairly vivid dreamer for years, especially when I was reading Carl Jung's work in graduate school. Don't seem to dream much now or not well; I don't remember them much now. When I do think in pictures, it's not as vivid as seeing the real world. It's maybe five percent of that. It's sort of… it just doesn't have that intensity.

What, and you, I know it's very, very vivid. And while I was, um, while you were setting up all the camera equipment here, I found on here a whole bunch of papers, more papers I found online supporting a lot of the things that are in the book. I just got surfing around, and boy, you can sometimes find some great stuff when you look at the citations.

No, but it's very, very vivid. I don't know if it's completely vivid. Now, when you mention the word imagination, I remember going a long time ago to Disney World, a kind of a ride that had imagination with people and dirigibles and things like that. You know, then I visited a studio where they made a whole bunch of their stuff.

I'm now seeing that, yes, I'm now seeing a non-disclosure agreement, so I can't tell you what I did there. Right? But I now I'm seeing a very interesting discussion we had about designing things where, where you're designing things. There's the decoration part of it, and then there's the mechanical part of a machine. Of course, at an amusement park, you want to have decorations, but you also the rides have to mechanically work.

They're kind of two separate things. They're kind of done by two separate departments. You also spoke in your book about your ability to see things out of place. And so one of the things that characterizes autism is the fact that at least some autistic people are not very happy when they walk into a room, say that they're familiar with, and one thing is out of place.

So for example, an autistic child might walk into a dining room, and one of the chairs is, you know, tilted 45 degrees to the right or to the left instead of being put straight in. And what seems to happen, correct me if I’m wrong, is that the fact that that chair is now askew means that the entire room is different in some important and emotionally significant way.

So there's this response to anomaly. I don't have that issue; that's not an issue for me. But if there's one pixel off on an electronic sign, I will notice that. I remember one time walking into the airport with somebody else, and the United ticket counter sign was a whole row of television monitors, and there must have been 20 TV monitors making the word United over and over again.

And one of the screens was scrambled, the whole screen, and I immediately saw it and I said to the person beside me, did you see that that sign was messed up? No, they did not see it, and they were right beside me when we walked in. I immediately saw it. Now that it upset me? No, I just noticed that the sign was scrambled, right?

But it didn't upset you? No. So, yeah, so, so that's that interesting. So for me, I think I can detect anomalies visually. So for example, one of the things I learned to do when I was setting up my house and renovating places and setting up my offices like arranging my local environment was to sit in the room and become meditative in some sense and then to feel out what was bothering me about the room.

Like what ugly feature might pop out? What part of it needed to be attended to? Right? And I think I was tuning myself to detect what was abnormal in relationship to the underlying aesthetic or the pattern of the room. But that pops out for you almost instantaneously.

When I, for me, anomaly detection is mostly verbal; again, I think up an argument and then think up counterarguments, and if one argument and the other don’t jive, if they're contradictory, then that pops out for me.

Well, it's sort of like I fly all the time. I know when the pilots do the checklist, and like, we push back and we just take too long to turn. I'm going, uh oh, we’re gonna have it air traffic controls away, and I can often predict that before they announce it, and I also can.

I'm very conscious of on the biggest airplane when they start the little gentle push to push it back from the gate. I can feel it on the biggest aircraft there is, right? And I, and all right, so now I just want to get over here, and I'm going, oh please push back. But it's sort of like I don't get upset about it; it's just anything that's not routine I instantly notice it and I go, oh crap, I see a vest that says Tech Ops; we may have a delayed flight.

Now that brings up another thing I want to talk about. In the last month, I've had a mechanic come on a plane not twice, and both mechanics had gray hair. And this brings up a major issue that's in my book about skill loss, especially skill loss with mechanical things.

I've been on a lot of questionable elevators and escalators lately that definitely needed servicing, and what's happening, and this is in my screened-out chapter, is the kids are getting screened out of these trades because they've taken the shop classes out of the schools 20 years ago. And we have so many higher math requirements that you don't need for something like fixing elevators that the kids are playing video games in the basement on an Autism diagnosis instead of fixing elevators.

There's a relationship here between what goes on with industrial things and what's going on at school, which is a major, major thing that I'm interested in talking about. Yeah, so let's talk about that a little bit. It's one of the things that popped out for me from your book, so I was trying to think that through.

So you make the claim, as you just laid out, that our education system and maybe our entire culture, as it's hypothetically de-industrializing, is actually working against the best interests of those who think mechanically, those who think in pictures, and those who can do Hands-On work.

Here's a paper I just dug off of Google Scholar on visual objectability, a new dimension of nonverbal intelligence. And what a lot of educators don't understand is that object visualization, especially on solving mechanical problems, is a different way of thinking. I've worked with people that barely graduated from high school stutterers, they'd be labeled autistic today, they’d been special ed, but they had big metal working shops and 20 patents each for mechanically complicated equipment that they are selling around the world. And this is something that educators just don't get.

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The reason why I wrote this book? I'll tell you what was the reason. In 2019, just before COVID shut everything down, I went to four places and I realized the magnitude of the skill loss. The first one was a pork processing plant where most of the equipment came from Holland.

I went to another pork processing plant, equipment coming from Holland. Then I went to a poultry processing plant where all of the specialized equipment came from Holland, 100 shipping containers. And then I went to the Steve Jobs theater, and the structural glass walls are from Italy and Germany.

Then after reading more stuff, I found out that the state-of-the-art electronic chip making machine comes from Holland, and that goes back to their educational system. They don't stick their nose up at the high-end skilled trades and look at it sort of like a lesser form of intelligence.

When the kids get to about ninth grade, they can go University route or they can go tech route, and I want to emphasize high-end skilled trades where you're really using that visual thinking for mechanical devices. So I was trying to think through why this might be happening, so let me offer some hypotheses to you, and you tell me what you think about this.

So first of all, we have learned, and you draw on Simon Baron Cohen's work in your book. We have learned that there is a difference, and we can try to map this onto verbal thinking versus imagistic thinking. Simon Baron Cohen talked about systemizing versus empathizing, and he considers that something akin to the continuum between autistic thinking and normal thinking.

So the autistic types are more systematizing, and my suspicions are they're also the ones who are more likely to think in images in the manner that you describe. Wait a minute, thinking in images. And there's a nice paper that just came out relatively recently, “Seeing and Thinking in Pictures: A Review of Visual Information Processing” that came out in 2018.

I like to keep my stuff up to date. Now I think in photorealistic pictures where the more mathematical type of thinking thinks in patterns. You see in your brain, you've got circuits for what is something.

Okay, so I see a dog and I go, yeah, that's a dog, or I've got some China ceramic cattle on my coffee table here, okay, and I just look at the animals and name them. Then the visual spatial is where is something; where are you located in space? There are actually two different kinds of visualization.

And I have a whole chapter in the visual thinking book about this and research to back this up. Now the visual spatial type pattern thinking or sort of where is something in space? Those kids do well in math, so they're going to STEM, right? But let me tell you what's going on at the food processing plants.

The people I worked with in the big steel shops, now that a lot of us have closed down, we are paying the price now for taking out those shop classes on designed mechanically clever equipment. People I worked with in meat did never worked on boilers or refrigeration; we don't understand that stuff.

That requires a lot more mathematical thinking or the load on the roof so the factory doesn't fall down if we get two feet of snow. You see, that I have seen this division of engineering labor in every single meat company I have worked with. They're all the same.

So do you think that's a matter of like, let's say something approximating focal depth? So is it possible that the first kind of people that you talked about are dealing at the object level itself? So they're dealing, say, with a boiler or with a particular piece of equipment, whereas the other types are dealing with the relationship between equipment?

No, you don't think that's it. No, I think it's just real simple. You just see the objects, and then after you work, you see an object visualizer gets better and better at designing mechanical equipment the more things you go out and see.

Like when I started working on designing cattle handling facilities, I went to every feed yard in Arizona and I worked cattle and I go, this kind of a design doesn't work; this worked. So then I took all the good bits and recombined them. It's bottom-up thinking; the more stuff I get exposed to, okay, whether it's cattle handling facility or maybe I'll look at how water flows through something, and then you watch how cattle move.

I'd like to look at Drone footage, and a lot of that resembles water flow, and the visual spatial, they see patterns. It's actually very different, and what we're losing is the object visualizer.

That person that can just… you see, I'm very aware of things like I go in an elevator now that hasn't been serviced, and it's scraping in the shaft, you better believe it, right? I hear it, and I go, they haven't serviced that elevator. And I was at a fancy hotel recently, and the bellhop goes, oh, it skips that floor; we have to get that floor on the way down.

Yeah, real nice hotel, major city, right? Right. Okay, so let me… I don't quite understand that distinction yet, so I'm going to press a little bit more on that. So on the visual side, you have the visual spatial types; if I'm remembering this correctly, and that's the category that you fall into. And then you have people who are, what are they, higher up on the abstraction chain in some sense, the ones who can think more mathematically?

No, but basically object visualizers, I can tell you this from experience. We're good at Mechanical Devices, art, photography. I have talked to many, many photographers because I do a lot of interviews, find out they're dyslexic, they're about flunked out of school, and fortunately, somebody introduced them to photography.

And the other thing that my kind of mind is good at is animals. Then you're visual spatial mathematics; algebra I can't do, algebra, there's nothing there to visualize.

Mathematics, calculus, I took a computer programming course when I was in college; I couldn't do it; I had to drop it. I was exposed to the same exact computer that Bill Gates had, and he could do it, and I had to drop the class.

You know, these are the things that the more mathematical pattern thinking mind is good at, and some of these really smart kids could just look at algebra formulas and just see it. They don’t have to do it step by step; they just… and that's how they think.

And then the teachers try to make them do it step by step; that gets the kids frustrated. You know, they don't think the same way. Right, and right, and my thinking is also associative; I tend to jump around, but there's a logic to… well, the association, and I think the best way to illustrate that associative kind of thinking is give me a single keyword like on Google for images, and think up a creative keyword, and I will tell you exactly how my mind associates and how my mind can get off the subject, but there is a logic to the getting off of the subject.

So give me a keyword, a single keyword. Okay, how about "rose"? Okay, I'm seeing some rose bushes that we had in our backyard when I was a child, and we had a lot of thorns on them, and we also like to dig around in the grass that was back there.

So now I'm seeing the grass behind our house when we used to go play in it and catch some insects sometimes. Okay, now you can see how it's jumping around; I don't have that big a visual library of roses, so then how about "cows"? I tend to then go to something else. How about "cows"? What cows?

Alright, now I'm seeing like, um, 10 cow statues right here in front of me, and so obviously those are coming up in my mind. Just recently, I tend to bring up recent memories; I visited with a Black Angus bull; it was a pet, and he wasn't very happy with us because we didn't bring him any carrots.

So my friend gave him one of those disgusting soy protein bars, and he goes, I’m not gonna eat that; I wouldn’t eat it, no matter. Must have tried to feed it to him, and he was annoyed because we didn't bring him any carrots.

Okay, then I'm get, now I’m on the now I've got the carrot word in my head. And when I was in fourth grade, I used my Singer so handy to sew green crepe paper so students could be carrots, and I made the green carrot tops out of green crepe paper, so that's how I got interested.

So okay, carrot. So talking to you, talking to you that way reminds me very much of what used to happen in my therapy sessions when I was helping people interpret their dreams.

And so dreams have the same quality of thought that your thought had when you just put it on display there. So because the dream tends to be an intermingling, so imagine there's a center category, and the nature of the category is somewhat unclear, maybe that's partly what the dream is trying to puzzle out.

But what you get is a web of the associations, some of which are autobiographical, that are sort of circulating around a main theme. And partly what you do when you analyze the dream is you walk through all the associated images; you also ask the person to let their mind loose to generate more associations, and then you try to use the associational web to triangulate on the central theme.

And to haul out the gist and the gist of that array of images would be something like the interpretation of the dream. If you get it right, then it snaps into people; they think, oh yes, that's definitely what that was about.

But the dream is attempting to put something together, you know, that has a central character or sensory things because, you know, I have to have some balance issues, so I often get dreams where I'm like riding a bike down a hill that's super steep like that, and I wish I wasn't doing that. I know that has to do with the fact that I have balance issues.

I don't think it means anything, but I'm always up on some high place that I wish I wasn't up on, and I've got to try to walk down it. And then I have other dreams where I can see it might have some meaning and other times where it doesn't.

The other thing with my thinking when I'm working on design work, I can control the associations; I can control them. I've had before on, you know, there are now 3D simulations. Okay, let's say the company that's building us this plant wants to show off how the equipment works; they can do a 3D simulation showing how the equipment works.

And I can remember sitting in a conference room; we're trying to discuss how to do some conveyors, and the other guys there are coming up with ideas for the conveyors. I'm going, no, no, if you do that you're going to yank the rails out of the ceiling.

Oh no, no, that won't work. They were almost using my mind like a 3D CAD program that was animated, and I could test-run in my head on these different conveyors.

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So, let's go back to the issue of, say, taking shop class out of school. So Baron Cohen talked about systematizers versus empathizers. Now what Baron Cohen's… yeah, who had the object visualizers? He was looking more at the mathematical visualization pattern thinkers.

I agree with them about systematizing and verbal, but he didn't differentiate… he didn't differentiate the systematizers properly. That should be more… yeah, he didn't systematize us. We would have two categories; the object visualizer and the visual spatial, and a big mistake in a lot of perceptual studies is that they're not differentiating them.

And some people… there's some verbal people in psychology that don't want to believe this stuff exists. Just while you were setting up the cameras, I downloaded six new abstracts that aren't even in my book on this that show that they are different. Right? We've got them right here on my lap.

So Cohen also talks about gender differences in relationship to this continuum. So we can break the continuum into two parts. On the one end, it is the case that autism tends to be preferentially a male disorder, right? Although there are females as well, but so that systematizing mode of thinking that you've differentiated into the two categories also tends to be gender stereotype to some degree.

I avoid that issue commercially because right now I’m interested in one thing at the age of 75, in helping the students who think differently get into really good careers where they can have satisfying lives, and I avoid the controversial stuff.

Yeah, well, I'm not so much interested in the controversy. I'm interested in trying to address the issue of why shop courses, for example, have been taken out of schools. Now, we do know that, like, schools are predominantly run by women.

Women are more likely to be empathizers. No, I think they're less like – I think the reason they took out the shop classes, they kind of just go, Well, everybody's going to go the university route. And cost is great; good shop classes cost a lot of money.

Now people are starting to put shop classes back in, and you know what they're finding? They can't find anybody to teach the shop classes. I just heard about a brand new beautiful welding shop built here in Colorado at a community college, and they can't find somebody to teach it, even after they drop the university requirement.

And I can tell you right now we need people that do these things before the power grid and the water systems fall apart. I'll tell you that stuff. I care.

Right, right, yeah. Well, it's a… okay, so you, well, you’ve visualized. Now, do you think visualization has also played a role in this? I mean the system types, some of the 3D drawings I see a draw, and that's not gonna fix some of the serious problems we got with infrastructure right now, and you need both kinds of thinkers.

Like one of the things I’ve got in my book is where a bridge fell down in Minneapolis, and the workers were complaining they were worried that when they were working on the spreads, it was going to collapse.

Well, I looked up that bridge collapse, and I saw all the twisted metal, and I had… I looked; took one look at that, and I went, it’s too light; it’s too cheap. That was just from looking at the pictures. Then I found the engineering report on why that bridge fell down, and they cheated on the gusset plates that hold the beams together, and they were way thinner than the spec.

But I had already looked at the pictures and said that bridge is too light; it’s cheap before I read any engineering report. So how was it in your life that you attained the practical knowledge necessary to facilitate your thinking?

So we're talking about how you gotta, you gotta get outside in the vision. I'll tell you how you do it. It's real simple; you got to get out and experience all kinds of stuff, because the more information you put in the database, the better you get.

And going back to teaching a computer how to diagnose melanoma, I had to give it like a couple of thousand melanoma examples and a couple of thousand mosquito bites, infected boils, and everything else examples.

In other words, the more, as I got older and I got more and more information in my database, I could think better and better and better, and I could make smaller categories of things.

Now, a lot of the people that I worked with in construction that build equipment for me that's used in every large beef plant now in the U.S., one of them started, and some of them would definitely be autistic. One of them started out working on cars; another one took a single welding class, and now he's selling mechanical equipment all over the world.

Started with a tiny shop that then grew into a big shop, and what's happening now is the little shops are not forming, and that's why we're importing all this equipment from Holland and Italy.

Because when you look at their educational system, and I looked it up again recently online in Italy actually has three routes: university route, tech route, mechanical, and art route, you know, like for their fashion industry.

And the Holland and Netherlands, you can go either university route or tech route, and that's why they're making the state-of-the-art chip-making machine that we don't make chips.

Right, I wonder if this is also a consequence of people increasingly moving away from farms, you know? Because when you're on a farm, you'd have to do a lot of hands-on stuff. You have to do a lot of fence repair; you got to take care of your own machinery.

And, you know, as you move into the urban environment, everything, in some sense even in the real world, is virtualized because you can always call on other people to do the day-to-day things that you need to keep the infrastructure.

I agree, a lot of kids are growing up today totally removed from the practical, and one of the things I talk about in the visual thinking book is, I talked to a doctor, and he told me he had trouble training interns to sew up cuts because the interns had never used scissors as a young child.

I had a student in my class that had never used a tape measure to measure anything, and they're totally removed from the world of the practical where those kids that came off the farms, yes, they had to figure out how to fix things!

Absolutely! But I think what's happening now in the schools is things are getting so verbal, and that's going absolutely crazy on math requirements because I know people with 20 patents and they could basically do sixth-grade arithmetic that I could do because I can relate that back to real things.

Do you know of any research pertaining to how the more the people who visualize objects might be assessed for their ability?

Yeah, there's a whole chapter in here that's… and I never pronounce their names right, blah, blah Hankova, and I can't say the names correctly. But I have a whole list of references in there where the difference between the object visualizer and the visual spatial is being assessed, and there's a whole bunch of references on that.

Now I have to look these names up because I can't… I can't pronounce them correctly. Let me find a reference list here for chapter two. Okay, it's Blaz Henokov. I've got one, two, three references in here from Blaise Hankova on types of creativity.

And then the other big reference I have lots of references would be Koznikov. If she's got trade-offs, object versus spatial visualization, reviewing the visual-verbal Dimension evidence for two types of visualizers. That's another paper, spatial versus object visualization, a new characterization of visual cognitive style.

That's three papers right there, Koznikov that are in my reference list, and okay, and I've got a lot of references where they are actual, you know, tests were done. You know, when I go through the citation lists, I just went in, and we're working on the children's edition of the book right now, and the one of the copy editors had a query about a reference, and I had to look that up.

And then I decided to just type in object visualizer and visual spatial into Google Scholar again and find the same old papers. And then I found some citations; it's kind of a cool paper here in the journal Cognition.

It’s an old paper, actually, visual object ability a new dimension of non-verbal intelligence. I know from working in factories, I spent 25 years in heavy construction, and that is something that I don't think many teachers have done that and seen how these guys think big complicated Cargill plants, IBP plants, which are now Tyson Monfort plants, and that company is now JBS.

Figuring out complicated things with equipment, it's a different type of intelligence. And I think it's…I know for sure, when I worked on the book with Betsy Lerner, my super verbal co-writer who helped me organize things.

And she had someone come in to fix a bunch of stuff in her house, and after we had discussed this, Betsy was telling me, well I watched how he figured out how to fix the stones on the chimney. I had never really thought about it before, but she’d watched how he did things, and then she started to understand there’s a form of intelligence there that’s absolutely not verbal when she watched a person she hired to fix stuff in her house.

Right, right, yeah. Well, you can imagine something, and this did pop into my mind visually, can you imagine somebody who's trying to put together a stone chimney? They have to rotate that way to make sure that they're going like a Tetris game, that's a good way of thinking about it.

I was thinking then again because I'm thinking in images now that we're talking I was thinking about my young grandson. He was… he’s only two years old. He had his Legos played laid out in front of him, and when I was a kid, I played a lot with Legos, and I played a fair bit with this Meccano set that was like a junior engineering set. And it was certainly the case that working with Legos was non-verbal because you're rotating shapes in space and having them fit into one another towards some design end.

And that's a nice kind of hands-on learning and exposure to different mechanical principles. And so do you have recommendations for people who want to help their children train their visual spatial and object visualization abilities?

Let’s get them out building things! The big mistake I see with a lot of kids is they're super good with Legos. They don't think to introduce tools. I was using tools myself, right? I was not using a saw but I was using hammers, screwdrivers, and pliers. I was taught how to use it safely.

I’ve got another book of children's projects called Calling All Minds where I describe bird kites that I spent hours tinkering to get them to work and to agree with parachutes to get them to open up more easily. Kids aren't doing enough of that kind of stuff today, right?

Okay, so there's a return to the immersive; there’s a need for a return to the practical on both sides of the gender spectrum of everybody. And I would now… when I was doing a book signing for visual thinking, I went to a physics lab in Harvard. This room's labeled physics lab, and they had all kinds of 3D printers on there, but they also had a sewing machine, and they also had a station for crocheting.

This is the building labeled the engineering department at Harvard. Maybe they're realizing they've got to get them doing some hands-on things. This is when I did the book signing for this; it was part of the book tour.

The other thing I've noticed – I stayed; I got into some interesting places. I stayed at this hotel where they had textbooks in the rooms from the 1930s. I wish I'd had more time to look at it, and I pulled out an electrical engineering book, and it had a lot of math on it, but it was much more applied.

They’d say, well, this is how the generator works; this is the math that goes with it, but it would describe how the generator actually worked. It was much more applied. And now the physiology book that I had in the 70s well explained how the kidney works, how the heart works, and then explained the chemistry.

Now I look at a physiology book, and it's much more verbal, a lot more math and chemistry, but how does the kidney actually work? I still have my old Duke's physiology of domestic animals from 1970, and I want to go back and compare that to the Duke's physiology now, and it’s like we're taking the practical out.

I just got an email yesterday from the UK that they wanted to take a technology and design course out of a high school. You see, I think what's happening now is mathematics is totally taking over. Yes, we need mathematics because my kind of mind is not gonna touch boilers and refrigeration in that food processing plant; that's a job for the mathematicians.

But what we're losing is the object visualizer. Right, right, right. Yeah, well, I wonder too if part of this is the fact that, you know, for a long time in our society, a lot of this practical Machinery just worked. And so we could afford to ignore it in some abstract sense.

Right! Because our cars worked, and our power grids worked, and we could take all of this low-level infrastructure for granted. Now that meant there were a lot of people on the shop floors who were busily working, making sure it worked, but it did mean that we had the luxury to engage in abstract specialization.

And maybe we could fall prey to the psychological tendency to just dismiss all that. Well, you see, when they first started, about 20 years ago, is when they started taking shop classes out of the schools. Well, you can get away with that for a while, and then the people I worked with, I'm gray now, are retiring; they're retiring out, and they're not getting replaced.

That's happening with elevator and escalator mechanics; that's happening with airplane mechanics, and I'm seeing that more and more and more and more as I travel. These are three things that I see all the time, and they are getting gray.

Right, right. So, yeah, the retirement problem is going to be the retirement problem when it comes to industry. There are two gigantic mistakes that were made: shutting down in-house engineering shops 20 years ago. We had a huge metal working shop called the Monfort Fab shop, and it was part of the engineering of a company called Monfort, so it no longer exists now.

Well, that’s been shut down, and then at the same time, we took out shop classes. Now, in the short run, it was cheaper for these companies to just farm out engineering work they needed to do in their plants.

Yeah, that works fine until the shops retire out, and now what's happened, like I can't go in the net give you the name of the company, but I have a client right now where the one shop that's left is ripping people off at five times the price. And that's happening, right?

Do you see any positive consequences of computer technology for object visualizers and for the people who are working more in the visual-spatial end of things? Well, it’s definitely useful to, you know, the visualization of stuff you can do on computers, but that doesn't replace real things; let me tell you. Power grid, I lay awake at night about that, and it’s so fragile that I'm not… I'm not going to go into any detail because it’s too fragile, and I’m not going to discuss the things that I visualize and lay awake at night about the power grid because it's just…

Okay, fragile. Okay, I'm curious about that. Why not discuss them? Because I don't want to give them, I don't want to give people that have bad intentions any information on how to hurt the power grid.

Okay, okay, I see. Yeah, that's the reason, right? Because it's very easy, and I don't want to give out any information that would help somebody damage the power bridge, so I don't discuss the details here, but I'm seeing them right now.

Right, right, yeah. Well, that's part of that ability to think about critical points of failure, engineering mind. I know where the critical points of failure are, and I'm not going to discuss them.

Right, right. So we can all be thankful that you're not a terrorist. Yeah, I’ll be thankful I’m not a criminal. Yes, exactly, exactly.

Well, I’ve always often been afraid when thinking along the same lines that you're describing of just exactly how fragile things are in that regard and how much someone with a good imagination… how much damage they could do if they targeted things properly; it is really quite frightening to apprehend. Well, that's why there are certain things about the power grid I am not going to discuss, and I'm seeing three big fat critical control points right now; I'm seeing them in my mind, and they make me crunch.

Right, so can we talk a little bit about the specifics of your work? I remember one of the stories you told at this Tucson conference was about you. You talked about cows; that they would do such things as go into a field, and look at a… if you look left, a briefcase on the field, for example, the cows would eventually come and look at it.

That's right. A cow in a line might be stopped by something like a Coke bottle in their path, and so you used your ability to think like animals to design systems for animal handling that were much more humane.

So can you walk us through that a little bit? Well, the first work I did with cattle was in the 70s in Arizona when I didn't even know that I had autism, was a visual thinker, and other people were not visual thinkers.

And I noticed that if there was a coat hung on the fence, the cattle would stop. If there was a shadow or reflection off a vehicle, so I got down in the shoots to see what they were seeing. And I would take pictures down inside the chute, and people thought that was kind of crazy.

But now I'm like right; just recently did a startup in a really big plant, and at 10 o'clock in the morning everything’s working fine, and then at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, a big shadow appeared. I called it the spider monster, and it was just a shadow, and these cattle decided they weren't going to walk over that.

So they'll have to build a roof over the facility so that the cattle can't see the spider monster. The other thing I show people how to do is: what's your lead animal? Your lead animal will come up and stop and look at the thing they don't like.

The same plant on the night shift: okay, the shadow monster wouldn't be there; either the guy calls me and he goes, they go halfway up the shoot and stop. Alright, what do I do? I said, now bring up a nice calm bunch of cattle. Watch your leader really carefully; he'll look right at the thing he doesn't like.

And the LED light on the corner of a building, and they took that down, and then everything worked fine. How do you identify the leader? Well, there's always a leader.

When, all right, let's say I take 20 head of cattle out of a pen; there's a lead animal that walks out first, usually one of the more bold animals, not the dominant animal. The dominant animal that pushes the others away from the feed trough, he's in the middle of the herd or she's in the middle of the herd, but the leader will come out of the pen first, and the other cattle will follow.

And it's just the first animal in the group's the leader; it’s that simple. You see, as we were talking about that, I’m seeing it.

Okay, so is that leader stable across instances of leadership, and is that associated with this ability to find what's anomalous and to deal with…? Well, the cattle that have lived together for a while tend to stay in the same order. You know, years ago when your tags came out that were sequentially numbered, in other words, you could just buy a package of ear tags labeled one through two hundred, and they put them on their cattle anecdotally.

And one of the things that surprised ranchers when maybe 200 cattle came back the following year to go through the shoots to get vaccinated, and they were coming through in almost the same order.

Now that's a group of people that live together. Okay, is there something… okay, so you made the observation that the lead animal will stop and look at the thing that he doesn't like, and so are the other animals, but also that lead animal wasn't the physically dominant animal.

He's got some other characteristics; the animal is dominant at pushing others away from the water trough or from the feed trough, but the leader is exploratory, and that's right, but also absolutely, also that the lead animal will spot anomaly, right?

Like the spider monster that you're describing, and so it's not like they're so bold that they're completely without fear; they're still acting cautiously in some sense. All right, so you can walk the lead animal down a chute, and you can see what it’s going to see, and you can actually do that because you go down there and do it, but you also think that way.

You gotta bring your cattle up really calmly to see because if you bring them up at a run, then the leader just turns back, and you don't know what it's reacting to.

Oh yeah, I said to him. Now bring them up nice and calm; watch the leader come up the chute, and when he stops, he'll look right at the thing he doesn't like.

And he looked at the LED light on the corner of the building, then they texted me a picture of it, and they got rid of that, and that fixed the problem.

Now, have you developed some sort of picture of the class of things that stop cattle? Yes, okay!

So tell me what sort of thing I want to stop cattle; I have pictures, I have checklists of things to look for. Reflections on water, at this particular plant, there was a gate handle; a gate handle that jiggled, and it was right by the chute entrance. I said, that needs to be fixed so this gate handle doesn't vibrate.

So what's common? Do you do what's common about the things that stop cattle in their tracks? Or can you extract out…? Well, let's look at cattle's a prey species animal, so you're looking for things that might be a danger.

Some little bits of rapid movement set them off, and something that sort of like shouldn't be there, like you can put a white plastic bottle in the entrance of the chute. Now, about shut a meat plant down, they'll just keep turning back away from it, turning back away from it.

Right? So they're looking for something that doesn't fit the environment. That's right pattern and that's probably doing something like activating predator detection.

Well, that's right; it's like that, you know, they’re looking for stuff that, you know, a movement in the bushes maybe that's a mountain lion or a wolf. Some little movement in the bushes.

The other thing about new experiences, if you take something like camera equipment, cattle love camera equipment. You put an expensive camera in the middle of the pasture, and they will come up and knock it over and lick it to that. That's what they will do.

See, things that are novel are attractive when the animal can voluntarily approach and scary if you suddenly shove it in their face. You suddenly shove it in their face, then it's scary.

Right, and so that's right. That’s a good point. Introducing new things to cattle is to let them voluntarily approach it.

I don't know how many times people say to me, my horse was fine at home; he went crazy at the show. Well, you've got a lot of novel stuff there, like flags, for example.

So you better get your horse used to flags before you go there; and the best way to get them used to flags would be to decorate the pasture with flags and let your animal walk up and voluntarily approach them.

Right? Well, you know, that's exactly what you do in psychotherapy when you're trying to help people overcome a phobia. Right?

So if someone's afraid of an elevator and won't get in it, that often happens with agrophobia. What you do is you say to them, okay, let's start by imagining elevators.

So, that's going to make you a bit nervous, but imagine an elevator at some distance; that doesn’t make you uncomfortable; okay, okay. And then you say, okay, well now you've done that, see if you can move yourself in your mind closer to the elevator door.

And then you keep doing that, but it has to be voluntary. It’s 100% absolutely necessary for it to be okay.

So maybe you run them through this imaginal exposure therapy, and then you say, okay, for our next session, what we're gonna do is we're going to go out in the hallway. You know that elevator you wouldn't take? We're going to go out in the hallway; we're going to stand 200 feet away from the elevator, and you're just going to look at it if you can.

And so they'll do that, has to be voluntary; and then you can get them 150 feet away and 100 feet away, and soon they'll be right up to the elevator door.

I was very anxious, as you know, in my 20s, and I got terrified of airplanes because I was an extremely scary emergency landing when I was a senior in high school. They put the slides down, and the whole thing, very, very scary; and one of the ways I got over that is I had to make aviation interesting.

And when I got the ride in the cockpit of a plane flying hosting heifers to Puerto Rico, that made it interesting. You make something scary interesting because I know another thing they do on the elevator phobias is they show them how the safety mechanisms work.

That the elevator is not going to fall down the shaft. Yeah, well you even compel that interest to some degree. So for example, once you get a phobic person inside an elevator, what they'll tend to do is look at their feet. And so you say to them, look, quit looking at your feet; look at each corner of the elevator; look at all the numbers; look at the display panel.

You have to facilitate their voluntary visual exploration, okay? And to some degree, what you're doing is you're calling out their interest to say, attend to all of these things as if they're interesting, and then that's how they familiarize themselves with the elevator.

And they also note that, well, they're in there because you have to look at the elevator to know you're in an elevator, right? Literally, you have to move your eyes and point at all the different parts of the elevator, and the more that you can help people do that at a high level of detailed resolution voluntarily, the more likely they are.

Not, not only to become less afraid of the elevator; is that, that actually isn't what happens? Is you train them in a form of exploratory bravery because what you teach them is that if they use their eyes voluntarily to scan what they're afraid of, they'll become braver, and then that generalizes to all sorts of other instances too.

So if you train someone to be less afraid of an elevator, they're much less afraid of other things as well. That's right, and the thing that we're seeing, I'm saying right now in dogs, you know we have very strict leash laws here, and there's more problems with dogs being afraid of the veterinarian because they haven't been out experiencing enough stuff like strange people touching them, for example.

Just going to lots of different places. You know, this is the reason why when they train service dog puppies, you take them everywhere so that there's almost nothing that will frighten them. Yes, yeah.

Well, that’s the same argument you were making earlier about the fact that to train people practically we have to put them in a lot of different practical hands-on situations so that they can generalize across all those instances. And so experience that's too narrow is too restrictive.

Well, I get worried that we're going to have people making policy on all kinds of important stuff, um, when they're so far removed from the world of the practical. You see, we need to have both because all the problem with us practical people is we're not organized enough.

That's where just about every tech company has to hire a suit eventually just to keep the company organized; somebody's got to pay the payroll, somebody's got to pay the taxes, somebody has to make sure the rent is paid.

You know, if they need more office space, then they've got to go out and go shopping for Office Space. You know, there’s… well, and we really do need all the different kinds of minds.

Well, when I look at the ideological solutions that are being put forward to the world's problems continually, I do wonder the same thing you're wondering about, which is is this empty ideological representation a consequence of the fact that the people who are doing this have no practical experience at all?

It's like they're not thinking at the level of detail well. I think that what it's a problem because when I worked originally; this is over 20 years ago, with McDonald's, Burger King, and Wendy's, and they took the top managers out into the field; and implemented the auditing program, it was interesting to see how the animal welfare issue went from an abstraction, give it to Legal, give it to public relations, to Something Real that they really needed to address.

You know, half dead animals going into your products, not okay, right? Right. Um, right? A broken stunning equipment is totally terrible and not okay, and that's mainly a management problem and failure to do maintenance.

I’m and, and when I worked on that in 1999, I got five journal articles published on this; I saw more change than I'd seen in my whole career when these big companies were inspecting these plants.

But I figured out a very simple scoring system; if you couldn't shoot 95% of those cattle dead on the first shot, you failed a McDonald's audit. It was that simple; some very simple critical control points.

If you had more than three percent of your cattle bellerin, running their heads off when you're handling them, you failed the McDonald's audit.

Okay, so why did that turn out to be the critical issue? Well, they, um, broken stunners were a big issue. Now, on the handling, I figured out a way to score that. That's very simple vocalization—if you're poking cattle with too many electric prods or you're slamming doors on them or whatever they're going to be bellerin' their heads off, and I better not hear any bellerin' coming out of the place where they kill them.

Well, I hear bellerin' coming out of there; somebody needs to get kicked off the approved supplier list. It's that simple. That's one of the critical controls, right?

So you used animal distress as an indication of efficiency of process. Okay, can you walk us through some of your designs? I mean, you designed these circular cattle enclosures as well to calm them down.

The circular designs are really nice, but I'm also very proud of the fact there were 75 plants on the McDonald's approved supplier list; only three had to buy fancy, spent expensive equipment. Everybody else we fixed with management; yeah, three managers had to be removed.

I call that managerectomy on a lot of non-slip flooring had to go in because one of the things we measure is slipping and falling and lighting; cattle are scared of the dark.

Training people to move smaller groups of animals and put a solid side up so they don’t see the vehicles passing by. And these very simple changes, we were able to fix some of the older places. I'm very… I used all my design ability to figure out how to make some of the older facilities work, even though they did not have the fancy new equipment.

And then we had three; only three plants had to do a front-end remodel that was very, very expensive. That's three out of 75. I'm really proud of that.

Oh, yeah, that's all big pork plants in the U.S., right? So, so tell me, tell me what your goals were, okay?

So let's walk this through at the level of detail. So why don't you tell people about how these cattle handling plants work broadly speaking from the time the cattle arrived till the time they’re processed? Let’s say and then how are you brought in to fix them?

Well, unloading a truck, make sure you have a non-slip unloading ramp, open the gates up, let them out. You do not need to scream at them, pound on the vehicle, or stick electric prods into the holes in the side of the truck.

So let the cattle just get off and they will. And then they should walk quietly out of the truck. If they go to scale, weigh them on the scale and then quietly walk them into a holding pen and get a drink of water maybe lay down.

Then when it's time to go up to the plant, somebody should come down, bring a group of 20 out, not a group of 50. And you quietly walk them up the alley to where they get to where the round crowd pen is.

And the whole thing should be in a calm walk without slipping and falling and without moving and bellerin', and almost no electric prods. It should all be very calm; walking is what it should be.

Right? And how many plants did you go analyze? We had 75 plants on the approved supplier list and only three of them had to have extensive renovations, but we did have three plants where the plant manager had to be removed, right?

And so in those cases—why did you remove the managers? Well, the ones we were able to get rid of the plant managers were the corporate ones. The plant then— we had one plant that we used to call the problem child, and management was family, and we couldn’t get rid of it.

And that plant would like, you know, fail an audit and then pass an audit, and ah, but management has to decide that they're going to do things right.

You can have the best equipment, and it's not going to work if it's not managed. In fact, before we started these audits, I had a lot of equipment out in the field, lots of equipment; half my clients tore it up and wrecked it.

And one of the… what the customer inspections and audits did is force the plant to manage the stuff they had, either brand new fancy stuff or older stuff.

And so how broadly did your innovation spread and how rapidly and what were the consequences of that for the meat handling industry in general?

Well, the auditing program was within six months as the year of 1999 was adopted by McDonald's, Wendy's, in Burger King, and that covers just about all the big beef plants, and I saw more improvement than I had seen in my 25-year career prior to that.

People were no longer using broken equipment; they were moving smaller groups of animals; things were kept repaired and employees were better supervised, and boy, it made a big difference.

So why do you think you were able to do this? I mean, you obviously can solve the problem practically, but how are you able to make your way in the corporate world in a manner that actually resulted in people listening to you, and B, changes actually being made?

Because that's quite a remarkable combination of unlikely achievements. Alright, let’s start off. I started out with equipment. This was in my 20s, and I found that selling equipment was much easier than getting people to manage equipment correctly.

And early in my career, I made the mistake that a lot of young engineers make; I thought I could make a self-managing cattle handling facility.

That is nonsense; I know that now; that’s nonsense. Good equipment makes good handling better, but it doesn't replace management. And what the auditing program did is it forced people to manage the facilities.

And why? Why were you so concerned with animal welfare? And how would you define animal welfare? Why did that become paramount in your hierarchy of goals?

One of the reasons why I started working on the equipment is like the way cattle were being handled was horrible. You know, electric prods on 100. I'm falling down, crashing into things, people screaming at them.

Cattle handling in the 80s was terrible, absolutely terrible, and I saw that as something that I could fix. Now, I talked to a lot of young people today that want to do activism about some specific thing, and it's way too broad.

I want justice in the world, for example, right? Yes, yes. It might be something they would say, yes, yes. And I say, why don't you do something more targeted, like using DNA to show that this prisoner was falsely accused? You see, now that's something a lot more targeted that you can actually do.

Yes, absolutely. And I think that's a huge problem with the way that kids are trained morally in universities, is that that grandiose vague activism replaces the actual practicalities of problem-solving that you're describing that actually make a difference.

Why do you think it was that animal suffering stood out for you? Is it partly because you can think like animals? Like, what, why do you think?

Well, you wouldn't… how would you like to get shocked with electric prods and be slipping and falling and crashing into fences and things like that? You'd be terrified. And my goal was to improve how the cattle were treated.

When I talked to students about, you know, activism, I said, what I worked on wasn't everything bad happening to animals. I worked on something targeted.

The thing that I’m seeing now with young people that want to make a difference, they say, I want to have justice in the world, or I want to like, animals are treated terrible,, we got to do something about it. And I’m saying, you’re going to be more effective if you pick out something relatively targeted.

I’ve worked on cattle handling to start with; that’s not everything to do with animals!

Yes, exactly. Or the example of using DNA to show that this criminal was innocent; that's something much more doable and targeted that you can actually do.

Right, so how was it that the suffering of animals in meat trucking and meat packing plants came to your attention to begin with?

So you said the suffering; you found that unbearable? First of all, it started out when I went out to the feed yards handling cattle back in the 70s; there was a lot of really horrible cattle handling.

And I made a mistake in the beginning that a lot of young engineers make; they think technology can solve all their problems.

And I mistakenly believed that I could build a self-managing cattle handling facility. That's nonsense; I know that now; that's nonsense! Good equipment makes good handling better, but it doesn't replace management.

And what the auditing program did is it forced people to manage the facilities. And why? Why were you at the cattle handling facilities to begin with? I mean was this part of your academic training, or was this part of the fact that you had grown up on a farm?

Well, I got interested in after going out to my aunt's ranch, and this brings up the other thing students get interested in; stuff they get exposed to, it's that simple.

In one of the people I profiled in visual thinking, Michelangelo, the grubby little 12-year-old dropped out of school, but he was running around all the churches, seeing great art. And he grew up with stone cutting tools; okay, that’s the exposure. Then he started making some stuff, and then an artist took him in as an apprentice.

That’s mentoring; good careers start first with exposure! And the other reason why I'm so concerned about taking all the hands-on stuff out of schools is those things like, let’s say theater, for example, expose students.

I didn't care about being in the play, but I loved making scenery and costumes that I loved doing. Now that’s something that can become a career.

So let me… we’re running out of time on this segment. Let me ask you one more question, and then maybe I'll sum up our discussion for everybody or try to extract out the gist.

You've been talking with Dr. Temple Grandin today, who's developed a spectacular career in modifying animal handling and also managed a lot on the more purely intellectual front as well in terms of conceptualization of information processing.

She’s… we talked a lot today about the difference in the ways that people think, concentrating mostly on the distinction between visual thinkers who tend to be more practical and detail-oriented.

And who can be broadly differentiated into two categories and those would be object visualizers and people who think more visual-spatially and mathematically, contrasting them with people who think more verbally.

We talked a fair bit about the prioritization of more verbal and abstract thinking at the cost of this practical thinking and training in that practical thinking.

We discussed how that's affected the school system and broader culture; we discussed the dangers that poses to the integrity of our society as we lose the people who have the hands-on knowledge.

We talked about the psychological danger that poses to people who think more practically, concretely, and visually who are in school systems that are optimized for the verbal thinkers.

We talked about Temple’s career at the detail level, ameliorating the suffering of animals across the, like, nationally and internationally as it turned out, partly because she decided not to chase mere generalities but to focus on an actual problem, which was the suffering of actual animals in actual plants.

Was willing to focus her emotional concerns on something that was practical and to marry that with a strategy that involved particularization and visualization and verbal communication and practical interactions with corporations.

And also, we closed that with a discussion of the fact that what she's doing now is trying to bring to people's attention in podcasts like this the fact that we seem to be working contrary to our own best interests by not building educational facilities that help optimize the ability of visual thinkers to function.

But also, for society more broadly to take advantage of the talents and skills of those people in innovation and in the maintenance of the infrastructure that we already have around us.

And so I think that about summarizes what we talked about today, is there anything you want to add to that? That definitely, you know, kind of summarizes that we need all the different kinds of minds and they can, when we understand that different people think differently, they can work in teams where they can collaborate and have complementary skills; I think that's something that's really important also.

Right, right. The thing I want to… one thing I would do with the schools is I’d put a lot of the hands-on classes back in, like art, sewing, woodworking, shop, welding, auto mechanics, theater, because these are all things that expose kids to things that can become possible careers too, right?

And those are all things that have to be done; they're in an embodied sense; you actually have to… it’s not purely abstract.

Any, any, oh, it’s not abstract! And none of those things are abstract. Yeah, well, that's… I suppose a danger of moving so much education online as well is that it's going to increase the degree of abstraction.

Well, that’s right. When I went to this book signing for visual thinking, I told you about the electrical engineering book in the 30s I found in this unique hotel room, but I also got put in the office of a professor in political science, and I looked at some of those books, and it was so abstract.

Theories about politics, I didn’t even understand it. It had nothing to do with right or left; it had to do with just abstractions that were so abstract; it made no sense to me. And I'm going, oh, I wouldn’t want this person in charge of figuring out what happened with the power grid.

You know, I remember at this Tucson conference where I first saw you speak after you spoke, very practical talk, very much like the one that you delivered today, when we were talking, a philosophy student got up because there were a lot of abstract thinkers at this Consciousness conference and asked you something extremely abstract and philosophical, and you did exactly what I would expect a good engineer to do, which was to say, you know, I really don't understand anything that you just said.

I don't know how to associate it with anything practical, and I'm completely unable to answer your question, which I thought was just… it was ridiculously comical. And I also thought, um, what would you say?

Well targeted because it was the case that, you know, you had been talking about real practical realities, your ability to think like an animal, the fact that you had taken these practical steps to ameliorate animal suffering and that that had been so consequential and so obvious worth, and then you were faced with this flight into abstraction.

And did what engineers always did do, which is something like, well, yeah, but I don't understand that; what does it mean practically? Which is a really good question that, you know, it's a question that should be asked of abstract thinkers all the time.

What are the devils in the details here that you're overlooking? How much do you know about the systems that you're abstractly representing? And the answer to that is usually almost nothing.

Well, it's sort of like, you know, we need all the three different… you know, different kinds of minds. You need the object visualizers; you'll go to get the arts, mechanical and photography and animals.

You need the visual spatial mathematicians, computer programmers, chemists, things that require mathematics, and we need the verbal thinkers because they're going to help organize things. You see, you need all three different kinds of minds, and they should work together in a complementary fashion.

Alright, well, that's a good place to end this segment, I would say. I'm going to go thank everyone on YouTube and the associated podcast for your time and attention. I hope you found this discussion interesting and engaging and practically useful as well.

I'm going to switch over to the Daily Wire Plus platform, and I'm going to talk to Dr. Temple Grandin a little bit more on the biographical. And I want to lay out how her interest in the issues that she did pursue professionally made themselves manifest in her life.

Hello, everyone! I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.