Why Only Some of Us Think in Pictures
Published May 29, 2023 · 19:33 · 152,680 views
About This Video
Van discovers Temple Grandin's work on object visualizers while listening to a podcast in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and is moved to tears. Object visualizers think in pictures, not words. They excel at mechanical devices, spatial reasoning, and Ikea instructions. They struggle with algebra, linear learning, and keeping things organized.
Van connects it to his own brain: why he's good at finding lost objects, why his studio is wrecked every Thursday, why filmmaking: a marriage of visual and verbal. Became his medium. The deeper argument: America's educational system is weeding out these minds by gating everything through verbal-sequential testing, and the shop classes that saved people like Van are gone.
Transcript
this week's video the one you're watching now will be on YouTube next week's video will be on patreon my name is van neistat I'm not like other people I think in pictures and I connect them this spirited man has discovered something about his brain and he is relieved he discovered it here by listening to this woman and this woman wrote a book because she discovered something about her brain and the brains of others like her I'm listening to a podcast with a woman named Temple Grandin and she's describing the way that object visualizers think and she is an objective visualizer and I am almost moved to tears because it is exactly how I think and growing up and learning thinking that way makes you feel like you're in the sense less advanced in the development than as usual for one's age dates from the late 19th century it has acquired offensive connotations in recent decades in terms such as developmentally disabled or having intellectual disabilities are now preferred this episode is about how our brains work and thank you better help for sponsoring this episode and helping me learn how my brain works therapy is an excellent entry point into understanding our minds and better help is an excellent entry point into therapy they have an online questionnaire that you fill out very simple basic questions and answering the questionnaire connects you to the most appropriate therapist for your needs if you don't like your therapist you can switch to a different therapist and better help we'll meet you at your comfort level be it text Audio Only or audio video a lot of these videos I make you hear this narrator's voice say the spirited man this and the spirited man that and that is me looking back at myself looking back from a um less emotional point of view at my behaviors and feelings and I I learned how to do that through working with therapists so if you're curious about therapy or you're in need of a therapist check out the link below and there's also it's the same Link in the description thank you better help one of the places where object visualizers excelled with shop classes and I remember in eighth grade 14 years old we fixed we welded the chairs that were broken for our Junior High little kids 14 year old kids mask with a with a rod and the shh and they're all gone she said 20 years ago they got rid of them from the schools and 20 years ago I graduated high school 30 years ago graduated high school 30 years ago this is San Miguel de Allende Mexico which is an extremely visual Place everywhere is beautiful even that black tarp is like beautifully draped across that mesh rebar and you just can't go anywhere without seeing Beauty so what is an object visualizer the world could be roughly divided into two kinds of thinkers people who think in pictures and patterns more on that difference later and people who think in words people who are primarily verbal thinkers tend to comprehend things in order which is why they often do well in school where learning is mostly structured sequentially it makes sense that they are drawn to and tend to succeed in the kind of high visibility careers that depend on facility with language teachers lawyers writers politicians administrators a lot of my enemies fall into those categories so that's what an object visualizer isn't and an object visualizer is a kind of visual thinker and there are two main types of visual thinkers first is the spatial pattern visualizer who sees in patterns and abstractions these people are good at algebra calculus computer programming Isabel is a spatial pattern visualizer and she took a like a Myers-Briggs type personality test intelligence test to determine kind of what careers she should choose and she scored in the like 99.99 percentile so like the one in ten thousandth percentile for the ability to take an object and understand whether it will fit in a space so you could give her like a bag of marbles and a little jar and you say well these all these marbles fit in this jar and better than 999 other people Isabel can say yes or no and it's insane seeing her do it and it's so handy for like moving and putting beds in rooms and so things like that Isabelle's career is she's an industrial designer and she can build spaces completely from scratch and beautiful spaces they're beautiful as well because she's a visual thinker but she's a visual pattern what is it it's a spatial pattern visualizer I think Temple Grandin the woman who wrote This Book and I to some extent though not as far on the Spectrum as Temple Grandin um we are object visualizers which basically means we think in pictures and so the interviewer in this podcast I was listening to in Mexico said okay when I say Rose tell me what comes to mind and she immediately went there was a rose bush in my backyard growing up I'm seeing that she said I don't have that much inventory of roses in my mind but I'm seeing that and then the object visualizer is associative with these with these images not linear associative so she said and so I'm now I'm thinking of the thorns and I'm thinking of the ants and the dirt now when I was listening to this podcast and I heard him say Rose what immediately popped into my mind was a painting that my aunt did of some roses that my grandparents farm and then my associative brain immediately went and found it and it went to this box I keep in the studio which has roses on it and in my mind the Box opens and I dig through and there's the painting and a couple days ago when I went to look for the painting so I could put it in this video it was exactly where my the pictures in my head said it would be and one of my like Jedi skills is that I can I'm very good at finding lost objects if someone loses an earring at a party and this has happened at Yaniv Schulman's wedding a woman lost like a Pearl Earring you know it was a hundred people there it's outside there's grass and stuff and I said this is my job this is my job and I found it so object visualizers are naturally good at animals art photography and Mechanical Devices we have a sort of inherent understanding of mechanical devices phone is ringing understanding Mechanical Devices which is a skill I've had my entire life I can just look at a machine or something and understand what's going on like Grandin said that if she sees an LCD screen at like an airport with one pixel missing she she notices it immediately and in my mind I'm like hang on that's the only thing I will notice that will be the first thing I notice if I look boom there's a picture there's like two or three pixels missing on my LCD screen of my of my phone and it's like the first thing I see when I look it's because my mind that's the kind of mind I have she said one of the a General Diagnostic for determining oh do I have an object visualizer brain is your relationship to Ikea instructions do you love Ikea instructions or do you hate Ikea instructions I love Ikea instructions like I get that it's like a comfort to me I open it I know exactly what's going on and I know why they're zooming in on things and why they're saying like not this screw because it looks a lot like this other screw and why it's going in order and some people verbal thinkers they want a list of words that tells them how to put the thing together insert screw into blah blah blah and I can do that and when I do that and a lot of my videos are that it's very difficult because there's so much visual information that I the tendency is like to make it 8 000 words and two specific part of the reason why I chose filmmaking is because it's a marriage of these two things it's a marriage of the verbal and the visual of course so the the bulk of my energy is spent structuring the the words like this like I've spent three days writing this down but all this camera work and stuff I will do in less than two days and and the editing because the verbal structure and the linear is very difficult for me it's something I've muscled through another quality or another difficulty that object visualizers have is object visualizers tend to be very messy part of my identity on this channel is about organization because that is a war I fight every single day is I am on a Thursday when I upload these videos the all of my spaces are total wreck there's papers everywhere there's tools and supplies and everything everywhere because I'm in my object visualization brain I'm not in my forced discipline brain of putting things away and in high school one of my superlatives was most disorganized and they didn't I think they didn't publish it because they thought it was too mean but we did a big survey everybody did a survey and filled it out and I was voted by my class of whatever 200 people the most disorganized person in my class it's just something I worked on in New York City was a big training ground for that because you have to be organized in New York City you lose your Metro card you lose your keys you lose that's like a day's work that's like that's going to cost you I wanted to make this video because I sort of captured the moment when I was in Mexico where I had this revelation and it was it was a very big had a very big effect on me I'm so I'm looking through the Mexico footage to put this video together and I find this shot of a hardware store that I loved and in the windows of the hardware store are planks with numbers on them and I look at them and in five seconds I know I know what's going on I know why there's numbers on there I know why they're in such and such order and it occurs to me that's because you have an object visualizer brain this is a perfect example to illustrate what how this brain works so there's a series of boards they're numbered they're they're in a steel frame there's a padlock at the bottom of the of the window these boards cover the glass at night so no one breaks in and steals all the tools inside the hardware store there's a one is has the Roman numeral one across the top that's one that's the first window that's the window on the left one set of boards has the Roman numeral two across the top and that's two that's the second set of boards and then underneath that are the not Roman numerals but Arabic Arabic the Arabic numerals one two three four five six or zero one two three four five six seven eight nine ten or whatever zero one two three four five six seven eight nine maybe on the other one three or four set maybe three seconds in my mind I know exactly what that is they unlock that padlock they swing out that frame in the daytime they take all those Boards out one by one they put them somewhere and now they have Windows and they do it with the left and the right number one and number two the boards have to go in in a certain order or else they don't fit so they put them in in the order that's in the Arabic numerals zero one two three four five six seven eight nine now two of them are out of sequence there's a zero and a one I believe are out of sequence and the reason for that I think is because it doesn't matter and they just grab those two you know they have to put this thing away every single night and they just doesn't matter and they go ding ding ding ding ding ding and they put it together and they lock it this stray is growing out of the road and they're just leaving it so your car's gotta fit under and I don't think my car does and having this Revelation in Mexico was particularly was particularly it like got into my soul because one of the reasons why Mexico functions so well and the reason why I love Mexico so much is because there is so much Hands-On visceral mechanical aptitude of the Mexican citizens I don't know why I don't know any enough about their educational system to understand why this is this is such a thing but in me for me it translates into this beauty you know I think the reason I was moved to tears listening to her book on tape is because you notice I noticed growing up the difficulty of having this brain because most of the world and most of your educational system or our educational system is verbally based so most people you're talking to are verbal so it makes you feel very it made me feel very stupid to have this kind of a brain for me like I if I hear something I don't I don't remember it I just will not remember it that's why I have all the to-do lists is because I can see the thing I write it down and I see the thing that I have to do and then it's more likely to go in my mind because it's in my file of images but you know I didn't develop these skills and coping mechanisms and embrace this kind of brain that I have you know that wasn't until I was an adult I you know I wanted to be an engineer when I was a kid object visualizers get knee capped by algebra we can't do it we're very bad at it calculus it's too abstract and the argument that Temple Grandin makes is that we are losing all of these object visualizers to the rigors of these stem programs in our public schools and they're weeding out these very valuable people and she goes on to say that she knows welders who barely graduated high school and have the sixth grade understanding of mathematics but have 20 patents each for sophisticated Mechanical Devices like each one of these guys that she knows has 20 patents these are multi-millionaire guys with sixth grade math educations who today's educational system would likely have weeded them out in her Mission I think unconsciously my mission too is to somehow save this this kind of brain from our education system I I think I'm doing it unconsciously because I'm trying to save the me when I was little and somehow it just things work differently that we had shop we had shop back then and I I don't know somehow I was able to survive and get through it and get through it I was 47 years old when I got this information and um you know the relief it reduced me to tears my whole life I've always needed to be and thought and sacrificed to be here beautiful things in beautiful environments and I thought that that was a flaw I thought that that reflected superficiality about me but it turns out that's just how my brain is because I'm officially a thinker is that what it's called objects thinker object well I'm listening to the Temple Grandin my name is Temple Grandin I'm not like other people I'm taking pictures then I connect on this week's patreon only video I try to be a man of integrity and as such I won't drive around in a car with birds on it but for months I've been conceiving this gadget as I fall asleep at night