“NeuroDiversity: The Birth of an Idea” My Quote Notes & Personal Reflections

Judy, thank you for honoring the pit of crippling emotional intelligence pent up in the hearts of everyone. I feel that many of us are ready to unleash collective cultural/sociological therapy as we hospice our civilization out of suspendedly animated suicidal altitude. The answers have been patiently waiting for us in the soil. Find your place in the new emerging plan for our children & the seventh generation we have to thank before & after us. See Ecosystem Restoration Camps Founder, John D. Lui provide you with a short briefing of your mission should you accept it.

Judy Singer coined the term neurodiversity in 1998. She states that this “addition to familiar political categories of class/gender/race will augment the insights of the social model of disability.” She states that previously, disability encompassed physical, intellectual, and psychiatric disability because it was administratively convenient. Those with autism typically were lumped in the psychiatric category or were occasionally labeled as mentally ill.

Mentioning Leonard Davis, author of “Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body”, she acknowledges how “the 19th century drive to classify, control and regulate the body, the means by which the “classifiers” gained power at the expense of the “classified” — those people who are unable to keep up with demand of the industrial revolution for a speedy, efficient and conformist workers.” “The notion of disability served to distinguish between the “worthy” and the “unworthy” poor, and how the distinction continues to function as a means of social control and punishment in our current welfare systems.”

Singer says that the Internet has been a tour of awakening for the Autism and Asperger spectrum. She prefers the term “aspie” to “person with Asperger syndrome”. I appreciate this playful self humility and I will speak more on how valuable this approach is. She argues that aspies should view themselves as a neurological minority and work for their rights and not medicalization. By medicalization, we mean being deemed fundamentally broken and in need of lifetime pharmaceutical coercion to bend to the rigid requirements of contemporary definitions of independence or success. To the dismay of some, the terms Asperger and Autism have been removed from the bible of psychiatry, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

Singer also finds herself being an introvert but an extrovert when she can. She references “imposter syndrome“ which is a sort of empathic vulnerability to going against the sensed norm. She seems to like to moderate dialogue by introducing alternative angles when she feels people are falling too far into the grips of its polar opposite. She would introduce a social constructionist angle when she felt people were deviating too much into an individualist, personal growth burden of failure on themselves, at the cognitive opportunity cost of holding its imagined enemy. She also had no interest in the intellectual hard labor of an academic career. She “found the trend towards cultural studies and its obscurantist language dis-tasteful and concentrated on finding work in social justice NGOs and public service.”

She sees the neurodiversity movement as one that embraces the gifts and challenges of the drawbacks ADHD, bipolar, autistic, and Asperger come with. She outlines the differences in opinion throughout the movement. Some parents are happy but some are having difficulty with their neuro-diverse child. Some individuals with autism claim that life is hard and the Neurodiversity movement tries to gloss over their difficulties, while others say they are fine or proud the way they are. Some claim that a lack of empathy is a real symptom of autism spectrum while others are outraged by the notion.

She rightly states that we don’t live in a perfect world where the disabled are given equal opportunities. She acknowledges that services are declining due to the political right’s successful onslaught against welfare. It’s very important under these imperfect circumstances for every family to be given respect for making choices based on a realistic assessment of their own resources and prospects. She encourages us to be patient with each other, however difficult it can be, as this is the ground ripe for pushing false boundaries and finding new pathways forward.

Singer describes the Internet as “…the prosthetic device that binds isolated, socially-unskilled autistics into a collective social organism capable of having a public voice, autistics have begun to elaborate a new kind of identity.” They use the word ‘Neuro-typical’ or NT, to sideline the word ‘normal’. They “see themselves as a kind of neurological “other” who have existed amongst and been oppressed by the dominant neurological type, the NT, whose hegemony has until now neither been noticed nor challenged.”

Reminds me of how a boss that I still highly respect and keep in touch with told one of my coworkers that he thought there was something wrong with me. A new employee fresh out of highschool, perhaps oblivious of this sort of basic tact, had informed me. We were both humorous about it regardless, because there really are aspects about me that are curious of which I don’t worry much about explaining to what we may now refer to, having established the definition, as a “neurotypical person”. I’ve stewarded a respectful relationship with this previous boss of mine and have also joked with him here and there confirming this observation.

She said that the neurodiverse seem to come from another planet to the neurotypical. It reminds me of when kids would ask me on the bus in fifth grade if I was high when I had never smoked before. Later I will talk more on the dysfunctional artificial social environment of middle and high schools. They definitely saw me as someone who was completely new or different to them. These were times when I had yet to become socially paralyzed by my parallel self-conscious assessment processor. Before this dammed my river of playful expression I was freely and playfully interacting with my peers.

She points out, echoing Lennard Davis, and many others who have critiqued the inconsistencies of political correctness, that among the shrinking boundaries, neurodiverse people are among the few that are still fair game to be the safe butt of jokes. Personally, I think humor is transformative. I think it allows people to resolve cognitive dissonance or perceived paradoxes within worldviews that a particular identity otherwise wouldn’t have waded into. Mirth, or laughter, is the experience of grappling with the truth of two profound but unreconcilable ideas.

She imagines neurotypicals and autistics interacting “in mutual respect for each other’s differences, gifts and deficits, where communications protocols have been worked out between what are almost different ontological languages, different worlds of body language and expression.”

As a daughter of and mother of women on the autistic spectrum, she recognizes traits in herself both as an introverted neurotypical or an extroverted autistic.

She listed the traits of aspergers syndrome from Tony Atwoods 1998 book are as follows.

• Lack of empathy
• Naive, inappropriate, one-sided interaction
• Little or no ability to form friendships
• Pedantic, repetitive speech
• Poor nonverbal communications
• Intense absorption in specialized subjects
• Clumsy and ill-coordinated movements and odd postures
• Unusually prosody, accents, voice control
• Insistence on sameness — obsessive routines
• Absence of an innate “theory of mind” i.e. a theory of how other minds work.

Some resent the definition that they have no theory of mind and assert that they have no theory of NT minds, no different from the way NTs lack a theory of autistic minds. Temple Grandin says that it is characterized by hyper sensitivity to certain stimuli and under sensitivity to others.

The social constructionist view of disability counters the medical model of disability and states that disability is a political issue. It’s not a flaw in an individual but an outcome of disabling barriers in social practices. They distinguish between a physical impairment from disability as a social process. Disability is a result of a lack of consideration and the social and built environment physically impairs. Impaired is defined as lacking part or all of the limb, having a defective limb, organ or mechanism of the body.

She highlighted that the leading social model of disability theorists, Mike Oliver, Lennard Davis, and Rosemary Garland Thomson claim “that there have been a variety of cultural responses to bodily impairments in non-western cultures. Throughout time the disabled have been placed anywhere on a continuum from sacred to profane: perhaps possessed by a God or demon, perhaps marked by an exceptional destiny, or perhaps reaping just punishment for their sins. They may be anything from exalted, to tolerated, to abandoned at birth, to killed off in adulthood. There is no ‘natural’ relationship between impairment and the individuals place in society.” Michael Oliver points out that with the abandonment of this population during industrialization, institutionalization became a means of warehousing those who are no longer able to contribute to the productivity of the community, as well as a means of social control. It was a disciplinary spectacle exemplifying the fate of the “idle” meant for the edification of the lower classes.

Singer sees the social constructionist view as problematic because it refuses to acknowledge natural selection. Singer asks “What if a propensity for stigmatization has adaptive value, and is “hardwired” into the human organism, as much as a countervailing altruistic tendency to be “inclusive”. How then are we to proceed? It seems crucial to ask the question, if we are to come up with affective remedies to ableism.” Singer states that their anti-biological stance results in overstating the case against medicine, like a pendulum swing throwing it out with the bathwater. Singer encourages the dialogue to transcend the construction of binary oppositions where the medical model is understood as disproving the social model and vice versa. Singer concludes her thoughts on the matter insisting that we “still resolve to act with justice and compassion.” even though we, quoting Susan Wendell in The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability, “need to acknowledge that social justice and cultural change can eliminate a great deal of disability while recognizing that there may be much suffering and limitation that they cannot fix.”

Judy singer combines her research with the ideas of feminist philosopher Sandra Harding who have insisted that researchers should reveal their biases, their standpoint, and what can be called “a view from somewhere” rather than the imagined fetishized objectivity in the stance of positivist social research “view from nowhere” the feminist epistemologists have been critical of.

She advocates for a post modernist approach that allows who we are and where we come from to be reflected in our observations and standpoints. This way the reader can have a better chance of putting various views in proper context rather than letting them float in the air or attaching them inappropriately to something. Her view of a modernist approach would be to see the self “as a fixed, essential unity, with a de-centered, partial, and often contradictory intersection of historical discourses that are strategically deployed in the individual’s interests.”

In describing her biases she advocates for a “moving point on a sliding scale between free will and neurological determinism, between essentialism and social constructionism.” She thinks of the self as “a partial self, always an active inventing itself.” She is “somewhere Between a divine spark embedded in [a] universe full of meaning and purpose, and a biological machine, engineered by the purposeless but necessary operations of physical laws.”

This is my position as well. I think we exercise our free will anytime we use our experiences stored up in our feelings that can consciously and subconsciously weigh on our decision making scale about events we calculate or simulate into the future. I think when we react to something with more aspects of the lower or earlier evolved lizard components of the brain, we are, by definition, not using as much of the prefrontal cortex considering our brains have limitations or finite processing ability. Not to knock the lizard brain, where emotions are swimming around beneath the surface of full (objective?) awareness. Our emotions, tied in with wisdom, are not without their own application in what makes intelligence. They serve their own niche, especially in a messy lofe saving “that’s a tiger!” assessment where the time required for deliberation with the prefrontal cortex is would promptly remove our genes from the future. It’s not a perfect analogy because it’s taken out of the planet, body and mind as machine book, but I analogize the prefrontal cortex as functioning like Random Access Memory (RAM) on computers. RAM provides extra room for calculations or thoughts to happen. These thoughts in RAM can be about other concepts or thoughts passing simultaneously through our noodles. These parallel processes or calculations can then reference information that the brain is holding up to be further scrutinized by the prefrontal cortex. This gets into why I’m an advocate of “Mbraining”. Mbraining, to me, is the idea that our intelligence isn’t a linear race to space solely predicated on information processing capacity. This smells of American fetishizing over size. Bigger can only be better? What about the concept of extrapolation? We lose clarity and reliability as we pull a metric further from its happy habitat atop the height of a normal distribution bell curve. Any concept we demand an operational definition of, for convenience of quantification, loses important qualitative components.

Geoff Lukes speaking on individualism “…every way of seeing is also a way of not seeing;… and a view of man as essentially… self interested or ‘rational’ or concerned to maximize his utility amounts to the ideological legitimation of a particular view of society and social relations — and the implicit delegitimization of others.”

Thomson describes a research thesis as a highly individualist enterprise that relies on the researcher to bring “an autonomous producer — self governing and self made… [who]… develops within an expanding market economy as a self controlled individual responsible for shaping his destiny and the social order by competently manipulating his acquiescence standard body with personal skills and technological tools.”

“The social sciences have been more influenced by metaphors drawn from the physical sciences than is often consciously acknowledged. And not being reflective about this, they have been dragged along for a surprisingly long time in the after wash of a long superseded Newtonian science, with its discrete particulate forces, its dichotomies of individual/society, natural science/social science, essentialism/social constructionism, the observer/the ‘observed’. Fast until actual energies have been expended in delineating the precise boundaries between the separate entities. But gradually the metaphorical realm of quantum science is beginning to trickle through with its language of paradox, of indeterminacy, of the indivisibility of particle/wave (read individual/society), of fields, of forces, and of spectra. And life on a “spectrum” requires words that don’t even exist yet.”

She also feels the way I do that we don’t yet have words, or may never, that describe our thoughts and feelings, especially remote digital exchanges with people we have no community or dialectical context with that we haven’t met. I find much futility in written word to truly connect with other living breathing reading speaking beings.

She used similar language I have when describing our culture stating that parenthood is a battleground of belief systems and struggles to make sense or come to terms with the extent of human variability.

In being raised by someone on the spectrum she had the visceral experience that compelled her to liberate herself from the binary dichotomy between social constructionist and the biologically deterministic medical model of disability. She saw others’ muses label parents as evil if they didn’t want or were unable to handle the extra demand that disabled children might need. Conversely, if their parents were disabled, we’ve lacked the language to honestly consider the psychological effects on their children. It was binaurally, either the kids rights or the parents, who ever had the disability. She read “On Loving and Hating My Mentally Retarded Mother” by Carol Rambo Ronai. I would recommend this to anyone ripe for diving into the moralistic slippery slopes regarding disability and mental health nuances. I added it to my ever growing book list that grows much faster than my ability to read them.

The autism movement, pushed by their own, is going to revolutionize the industry. It won’t be the patronizing NT prescribing neurodiverse their cure to become normal, rather, they will grow into their own proud ethnic group.

Starting in 1940 until 1980 autism was thought to be a result of cold negligent mothering. The social disconnectivity of computers freed up the sensitive communicative abilities of autistics.

Singer ties the feminism movement to the rise of not autism or aspergers but the wider awareness of the phenomenon due to a higher respect given to the concern of mothers. Previously, many cases of autism or aspergers went undiagnosed because women were written off as simply being hysterical mothers. Susan Wendell called this “epistemic invalidation, women were not seen as knowers and truth tellers by the cognitive and social authority of medicine.”

Judy Singer carries Leonard Davis’ observation on technological infrastructure’s influence on culture in 18th century to the 21st century. Davis suggested that Europe became deaf during the 18th century from a “performance culture” to a text based culture where reading required both muteness and attention to nonverbal signs. The deaf as readers and writers became the “totemic citizens“ of the new age of textuality. She applies the same inquiry into how computers may have similarly influenced autistic traits out of NT. She states that computers replace the complexities of intuitive decision making with simplified role-based machine logic. She says “…even NTs can be reduced to the frustrated headbanging rage which is the old hallmark of autism “[w]hen these simplistic systems cannot respond fluidly enough to complex realities.

This resonates with me as a seemingly neuro-typical video game player growing up. I recall that the most disorienting rage I’ve ever experienced is when an electronic device malfunctions. I’ve seen friends display the same. It’s enraging when we’re dependent on a device for our pleasures. They’re so complex and delicate that when they malfunction it’s nearly impossible to address the situation without a deep knowledge of their inner intricate anatomy.

In the article
“Autism & The Internet” or “It’s The Wiring, Stupid”
by Harvey Blum

He explains how the internet has become a sensory haven for autistics to communicate with each other and NTs. He interviewed Temple Grandin who gives testimony to the vast informational nature of the internet as a validation of her brain’s abilities and convinced her that she wasn’t cursed to only what NTs could define as normal or healthy.

I had a similar experience before I went manic, was admitted to a psych ward, and was held down and given a shot to fall asleep after staying up for around 36 hours. At the time I was very resistant to the establishment’s interventions. I refused medications before the the shot was given because I was certain they didn’t know what was going on in my mind any more than I lacked the ability to explain it to them. I don’t know why I felt like I was midwifing in a new age of understanding with what was happening to me. It fed my retrospectively embarrassing beliefs that I was the second coming of Jesus. Being interviewed by professionals was satisfying and I felt like their inquiry would help everyone once we figure out what was really happening with me. I had a mentor at the time who was a strong believer of Christianity. I had spent the previous year talking with him about a lot of philosophical matters that had been bouncing around my mind unarticulated in my young teenage mind since high school. I had always been dumbfounded at who or what I was. I had friends but always carried a heart heavy with loneliness since I failed to explain to or be around anyone in a way that I felt truly reflected who I was. My heighten self awareness had paralyzed my own expression, like I was an autistic person under the gaze of someone else. When I was alone I didn’t feel as nauseatingly superficial as I did when I was stumbling around the interactions of other people. I felt like I was very inauthentic because of this. I really looked up to my brother Jeremy since, from my view, he seemed very comfortable, confident, and had an extroverted fun sense of humor that allowed him to enliven other kids his age or mine. He’s also three years older than me so he essentially registered as an astronaut, Buzz Aldron or Tim Allen Buzz lightyear caliber.

I admired his quirky group of friends and their humor, often directed at themselves, as another example of his and their authenticity and healthy relationship with themselves. I remember one day on the bus when I was waiting at the front for the bus to stop at my house. One the oddest of his friends, with a mohawk, and known for his admirable ability to bring popular kids off their vanity trance with his indiscriminate sense of humor in interacting with people, made me anxious about stepping into the double whammy paralyzing tractor beam of his and my parallel perception of myself. I tried my best not to look as if his presence bothered me but it was obvious somehow and I confirmed as much because he later told my brother he couldn’t stand me. He could sense the superficiality that I tried my best to hide behind. As I grew older I found ways to be more comfortable with expressing myself in social groups that were more likely to be conducive authentic self expression and exploration.

Institute for the Study of the Neurologically Typical

“Autistic emotions are another advantage: we’re much better at separating our feeling from our thinking, and can stay calm and rational in situations where neurotypical persons are paralyzed by fear or panic. The down side is that our capacities for social interaction and communication, and the ways we process sensory input, are impaired to varying degrees.”

This is from a parody website poking humor at the neurotypical medical establishment approaches to diagnosing autistic traits as pathological. One of the symptoms neurotypicals suffer from is a “preoccupation with social conformity”. The first quote resonates with my experiences in that social interactions can have paralyzing effects on the ability to interact with others. The ability to have a hold on emotions from influencing thinking also resonates. I’ve always been dangerously introspective about my own motivations and would think about the implications of the thoughts I have and what they mean about who I am. I’ve always been open to the idea I was fooling myself or rationalizing my actions or thoughts to fit a preferred identity.

Observing so many of my peers in school participate in petty identity contests pushed me to stay safely introverted because I couldn’t manage my own parallel self criticism in the presence of their assessing eye balls.

In the future I may expound on how the artificial social environment of large schools are a reflection of our culture’s implicit emphasis on the prioritization of power over sophistication in the world, another sad manifestation of quantity over quality. Vulnerability and sensitivity is feared and fed upon by those who find comfort in exploiting it.

Be whole humans!! Love Benjamin Lee the Janssen branch.

To keep up on Judy Singer’s work here is her blog.