After years of careful observation and listening, I am firmly and deeply convinced that neurodivergence is real.
I have serious doubts about the existence of neurotypicality, though. 🧵
15
Discussion
Loading...
@inthehands My understanding is that the word ‘neurotypical' was coined by Autists as part of a parody for the wonderful Institute for the Study of the Neurologically Typical. A copy of the original website can be found at https://erikengdahl.se/autism/isnt/
Also typical is different from both average and normal. Neurodivergence is also problematic in that what does it diverge from. Neurodiversity doesn't have these issues.
@inthehands I've been thinking this for years as well! Imo "neurotypicality" is a social construct and highly dependent on the society you're operating in!
@inthehands My long-standing definition of a "normal" person is someone you don't know very well yet.
@inthehands Not so long ago there was a declaration that normal was not a valid concept. Simply too many metrics that needed to be 'in range'.
Also, normal tends to be average - often it is better not to have a normal part of oneself.
I've been becoming more and more convinced of it as I get older and realize I don't really interact with a single person who fits "neurotypical"
that's... not my selection or confirmation bias. that's the term itself being a construct, like "reasonable person" is a legal construct.
@inthehands @HighlandLawyer Precisely. Everyone is on a spectrum. There is no 'normal'.
@inthehands THANK YOU. I have tried to explain this so many times, and this thread is wonderful.
@inthehands I quite like this model.
I do wonder what it means for communicating about this, though. I try to say “allistic” instead of “neurotypical”, because I don’t like the normative implications of the latter. But maybe it also is more precise about what’s different?
I’d hate to lose the ability to say “I’m different in this specific way”, just like someone who needs glasses has a different disability than someone who rides a wheelchair.
But I suppose that just speaks to moving beyond this rough binary or trinary (with adhd in there too), and into specific differences and what they mean.
1
@lkanies I understand “allistic” as meaning “not autistic,” which to my mind is at all not synonymous with “neurotypical.”
I think terms like “autistic” and ”ADHD” can be very useful inasmuch as they identify common patterns, just like your example of wheelchairs and glasses. I’m all in favor of that.
I’m just arguing against thinking that “not on the checklist of named diagnostic patterns” implies “person who fits some imagine archetype of typicality.”
1
@inthehands yeah, that makes great sense. I was trying to “yes and”, not disagree :)
1
@lkanies
Yes, I do think we agree!
@inthehands Yes, this whole thread. Basically how I've thought about this for years. There's no such thing as a neurotypical person. Statistically speaking, pretty much everyone is #neurodivergent.
I do think the next question to ask is, what characterizes the neurotype we think of as neurotypical? I do think there is a most-common neurotype that dominates modern society, even if it's not the average of human cognition or the baseline from which other neurotypes diverge. Something about being able to intuit emotional subtext from nonverbal affect, along with an obsession with social status and inability to focus without social support.
2
@joshsusser I would consider these to be three independent dimensions (clustered, maybe, but independent):
- being able to intuit emotional subtext from nonverbal affect
- obsession with social status
- inability to focus without social support
…and the sooner we recognize them as such, the sooner we actually start seeing people as they are.
1
@inthehands I can make a case for them being clustered, or even dependent. It starts with the knack for intuiting emotional subtext and trustworthiness, and that's the foundation for their large-scale social skills. But I don't have a lot of confidence this is true, or if we'll ever have good answers for this kind of question. I'd sure like to see research into this kind of thing rather than on how to eugenics autistic people out of the gene pool.
I also think the idea of a neurotype is about as useful as the idea of a body type (endomorph, mesomorph, ectomorph), meaning not very much, but sometimes it's slightly better than nothing. So I also want to see people as they are and not just a statistically implausible category. But if we don't use the language of neurotypes to talk about this stuff, what language do we use? I'm ready for something better.
@joshsusser @inthehands
I tend to think of NTs as more generalists, at least from where they start off in life. Like a stem cell, floating through the body mostly at random until it finds a place it is needed, then it differentiates.
Whereas NDs are more specialists from the start, like an already differentiated cell, randomly floating around looking for a place/role that it can function properly and thrive. (Yes there's some commentary on society built in there.)
How to parse this into traits or dimensions I don't know right now.
(But hey, yet another ND analogy for my ever-growing collection!)
@inthehands What? The typical brain is as rare as the average body size‽
@inthehands I've been saying that, rather less coherently, for a while so thanks for the thread!
What I mean by that is I doubt there is even one single truly “neurotypical” person on this Earth whose brain is actually average in every important dimension of brain variation.
2/
7
@inthehands This is my gripe, too. We're all a multi-dimensional bunch of bell curves. If you somehow find someone who's near the middle of ALL of them - what a freak!
@inthehands I generally consider "neurotypical" to be a hegemonic ideal, that some people manage to imitate sufficiently well
1
@recursive Assuming you mean “neutotypical” but autocorrect? If so, strong agree
1
@inthehands darn autocarrot
Quoting both psychologists and doctors I have known:
"There is a wide range of normal."
Making the same point with different words.
@inthehands it's like any other statistical myth .. nobody has 2.5 kids either ... but society has become to statistic-brained that people are often willing to attribute material truth to what is actually just a reduction based on data ....
In the 1950s, the Air Force realized that planes were crashing because cockpits didn’t actually fit the pilots’ bodies. Wrong size = danger!! They commissioned a researcher to develop a new, more correct set of standard dimensions for the seat, yoke, etc.
That researcher, Gilbert S. Daniels, came up with 10 body measurements that matter to cockpit size. He gathered measurements of several thousand pilots. And the number of people who were at the average for all ten measurements? Zero. Not a single one.
“Average” proved to be a statistical construct, not a thing that actually exists as a person.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/on-average/
3/
8
@inthehands IMHO, it's iterations (I'm convinced time is the first dimension) that are primarily problematic, or maybe rather complexifying. Normativity really doesn't account for historical adaptation.
If I'm reading my world right, what gives "(neuro-)divergents" the most blisters is they way "(neuro-)typicals" seem to be blind not only to the adaptations they've made, but in turn what it is they've adapted to. Like, lactose INtolerance was not a thing until, hmmm, circa the white 1950's.
Something that seems to have gotten lost is the original intention of the idea of Neurodiversity, which is that it was supposed to be a challenge to the idea that some people are normal, and some people are broken versions of normal.
Instead, the idea of Neurodiversity states that people are different from one another, there are many ways of being normal, including being disabled. And it focuses on people who are in the ND minority, surrounded by the negative space of the NT majority.
Neurodiversity as a concept is useful when talking and thinking about neurodivergent people, framed by our difference from neurotypical society, but less useful when talking and thinking about neurotypical people because once you start looking at that negative space, it doesn't really exist at the scale of an individual person.
ND and NT are not clinical terms, they're sociological terms. You can't be diagnosed as ND or NT. But the words help us think and talk about these concepts.
@inthehands One of the unexpected parts of my newish job as a driving instructor was the differences in people's body proportions. Setting up the driver's seat right is a big deal. I had a young woman who looked down on me in the car and the next time I saw her I didn't recognize her bc she was standing up, and shorter than me!
@inthehands beautifully communicated and thought out
'average isn't real'
this is in so ways why we as a species are 'failing'. we have built a society on an average (determined by the most privileged among us).
racial average. gendered average. abled average. prosperity average. medical average.
none of this averaging works because on an individual basis it is never accurate. we are all a bunch of overlapping blobs and spending all of this time trying to precicely categorize each and every one of us into specific boxes is both a gigantic waste of time and an oppressive tool that guarantees our needs won't be met.
this is of course extremely relevant in the conversation (and widespread adoption by those in power) around AI, as one big gigantic averaging tool.
1
Yes. And note the “average” here isn’t always even truly the midpoint of the population, but rather the locus of power: much of society is built around men, for example, when being male is not even typical.
@inthehands One slightly more blunt stat I tend to mention is that the average person has about one testicle. Which is more about bimodal distributions than your point about high dimensionality. But it still tends to rattle the cage whenever I hear people trying to optimize for the "average case" without much introspection about it.
@inthehands what else could an average be, if not a statistical construct?
Families with 2.6 children knew instinctively that statistical averages are constructs that do not affect lived experience.
High-dimensional data has this property: it is extremely unlikely that there will be a data point situated at the exact center.
It’s the high dimensionality that’s important here. One person might be at some sort of average on •one• dimension, but for them to be at the average on •all• dimensions grows exponentially less likely as the number of dimensions increases.
It’s like trying to roll all threes with a set of dice. Odds of that with one die? 1 in 6. Odds with two dice? 1 in 36. Odds with 10 dice? 1 in ~60 million.
4/
5
@inthehands Coincidentally, CoolWorlds recently did a video about this concept as relates to the origin of our universe and the Fine Tuning Argument. Nice explanation of the math and some visualizations too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hj7a4mPkbsY
Why We Might Live in a "Barely Habitable" Universe
YouTube
@inthehands
I've heard it phrased as "everyone has some neurodivergent traits, but not everyone is Autistic/ADHD/AuDHD".
When someone says "everyone is a little bit autistic", wherever they are coming from, it comes off as minimizing, dismissive, invalidating, or all three.
1
@cratermoon @inthehands yeah this one gets my hackles up immediately. Might as well say you don’t see race.
1
I don't think that's what Paul was saying, though. We have identified these categories because those of us who fall in them (like me) often struggle more than others to conform to societal expectations. But that doesn't mean that anybody is "normal". You can say nobody is normal, or nobody is typical, without denying that outliers exist and face greater challenges in society.
@inthehands Well, but we typically talk about human things being typical more with standard deviations than with exact numbers anyway. If "neurotypical" is anything in the first standard deviation, you're WAY more likely to get multiple dimensions in the same target. Given a normal distribution, about 2/3 of the population will be "typical" on any given trait.
Daniels was looking at just 10 easily quantifiable body measurements. How many important dimensions of variations are there in a human mind? How hard are they to measure? How likely is it that even one single “average” mind exists on Earth?? The odds are vanishingly small.
[Napkin sketch: assume there are a paltry 20 dimensions of brain variation. (Surely that’s low.) Assume there’s a 1 in 5 change of being completely “normal” in each. (Surely that’s high.) Even that absurd hypothetical gives a 1 in 11,490 chance that a •single• completely average mind exists in a population of 8.3 billion.]
5/
3
@inthehands iirc, Daniels was only looking at airforce personel — and only at men!
so you would expect some commonality. but, no.
1
@inthehands even if you expand “normal” out to within 1σ of average less than 1 in 2000 people would fit 20 independent dimensions!
My general framework for thinking about this stuff:
- Brains vary a lot, in a lot of different ways.
- We have names for a few variations, or common patterns of variation. That can be useful, but it’s hardly complete.
- There’s a wealth of as-yet-unnamed neurodivergences out there.
- It’s all but certain that •everyone’s• mind is atypical in one way or another.
- Comparison with, aspiration to, or forced conformance to the nonexistent “average” mind is unhelpful, frequently harmful.
- Embracing variation is the only reasonable (or humane) approach.
6/
1
In that story of the Air Force measurements, the research team came up with a completely radical suggestion:
Make the seats adjustable.
WHOA 🤯
“Adjustable seats.” seems to me like a great starting point for thinking about variations in human minds.
7/
1
1+ more replies (not shown)
@inthehands I wonder what this means for something like neurology, where we don't even know how many dimensions there are, or if that number is even fixed and not its own dimension!!!
1
@alter_kaker
Yeah, just vast terra icognita; most of our understanding of the mind is still “here be dragons.”
The things is, my “average is highly unlikely to exist” argument doesn’t depend on knowing any of that. If we assume the space of possibly variations is highly multidimensional, then it’s basically QED without any further knowledge needed!
1
I kept thinking of hypervectors as I read all this. The way cosine similarity drops off exponentially faster with increasing dimensionality.
@inthehands If you find such a person, their lack of variety would actually make them exceptional.
@inthehands I think of it in terms of the degree to which you have to fake it.
So a “neurotypical” person doesn’t have to fake neurotypicality that much, and a “neurodiverse” person has to fake it a lot (e.g. to the point that it’s a noticeable drain on their energy).
the bell curve is still round at the top
bonfire.mavnn.eu
News and community around mavnn.eu projects.
Automatic federation enabled