3 questions for autism advocate Temple Grandin on her new book and what it means to be a visual thinker

Are you neat and tidy and learn best by reading books and listening? Or are you creative, maybe a little messy, enjoy things like puzzles or chess and prefer to learn through charts and diagrams? If it’s the former, you're likely a verbal thinker. But if it's the latter, you might be a visual thinker.

Schools and workplaces often assume that kids and adults learn and think similarly, but with her new book, Different Kinds of Minds: A Guide to Your Brain, which goes on sale Nov. 28, scientist and autism advocate Temple Grandin is hoping to help change that.

Grandin, who herself has autism and had no speech until age four, has been in the public eye for some time. You might recognize her from the eponymous HBO movie Temple Grandin, in which she’s played by actress Claire Danes, or for her decades-long work as an animal behaviorist advocating for the humane treatment of livestock for slaughter.

But one of Grandin’s biggest missions is to educate more people, especially young people, on different types of thinkers — and to let them know that there are opportunities and careers out there geared toward what they’re good at. Her newest book is a young readers adaptation of her 2022 New York Times bestseller Visual Thinking, and helps kids and teens expand their understanding of visual and verbal thinking.

About 15% to 20% of the population is now believed to exhibit some form of neurodivergence, and unemployment for neurodivergent adults is eight times higher than for people without a disability. Yet many geniuses in the arts and sciences — from Thomas Edison to Michelangelo — are thought to have been neurodiverse, and perhaps also visual thinkers.

"The first step is realizing that these different kinds of thinkers exist," Grandin tells Yahoo Life. "I was doing a book signing last year in a school and was talking to the principal, and I was shocked to find out he did not know that object visual thinking — like how I think — even existed."

She adds: "We need different kinds of minds. We need these different approaches to problem solving."

Yahoo Life spoke with Grandin about her new book and how young visual thinkers can thrive. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

1. What are the different types of thinkers?

There’s verbal thinking; verbal thinkers think mainly in words.

Then there's visual thinking, and there's two types of visual thinking. The first type is the object visualizer. That's me. Everything I think about is a picture. People like me are good at art, mechanical devices, animals and photography, and horrible at abstract math, such as algebra.

The second type is the spatial visualizer. They think in patterns. Math is all patterns. Music and math tend to go together because of patterns.

Most people are mixtures of the different kinds of thinking but lean toward one of the types of thinking; one type of thinking will tend to dominate. But with a kid who is neurodiverse and has, say, autism, dyslexia or ADHD, they're less likely to be a mixture. They might be an extreme object visualizer, or maybe they’re an extreme spatial visualizer or mathematician.

2. In Different Kinds of Minds, you talk about how the U.S. school system — and society — is mostly geared toward verbal thinkers and not enough around visual thinkers. What do you think needs to change to enable more visual thinkers to flourish in school and in the workplace?

Let’s put all the hands-on classes like shop class and sewing classes back in schools, because that's where a lot of visual thinkers flourish. I once interviewed a doctor, and he told me he was having a horrible time teaching interns to sew up cuts because they'd never used scissors in their life. We've got kids growing up today who've never used a tool!

I also think one of the reasons why there's so much emphasis on algebra in schools is they think you need algebra to think logically — but that's not how object visual thinkers like me think. So, instead of algebra, object visual thinkers could maybe take geometry, or accounting, or statistics, or maybe business math. I'm not suggesting totally getting rid of math, but algebra is stopping a lot of individuals from becoming something like a veterinary nurse, which doesn't really need algebra.

And in the workplace, the first step I'd tell human resource people is you have to realize visual thinkers exist. Your very best mechanic is not going to be that guy that interviews well, because the person that interviews really well is probably not going to be the best mechanic. Companies have asked me, "What do we do with our interview process?" Well, maybe if I'm hiring a mechanic, I might be really interested in the car that he or she rebuilt — because that's something that's showing off their work.

3. If a kid or teen is reading this and thinks, 'Hey, that sounds like me. I think I might be a visual thinker,' what would be your advice to them?

This book is aimed at middle school because that's when kids are going to start thinking about careers. I gave a talk at a construction management conference recently, and they were asking, "How are we going to get kids interested?" And I said, "It's too late at the community college level to get kids interested in the trades and tools." It needs to start young — maybe by learning that making things is fun.

And then there's going to be another kid that'll go the math route, or maybe go a purely verbal route, or maybe they're going to be a mixture. The thing is, how can a kid figure out what they like if they're not exposed to tools or they're not exposed to musical instruments? I was exposed to a flute and couldn't figure out how to play it; another kid is going to pick that flute up and just play it. But if you're not exposed to different things, how can you find out what you'd be good at or what you're going to like?