Neurodiversity is Useful But Not Worth Nurturing

A colleague shared this display on autism from the Canadian Museum of Nature. In it they take a positive neuro-diverse view of autism and its differing strengths.  Most people would describe autism as a form of mental retardation, such is the prejudice and demand for people all thinking in lockstep like the majority does.

I showed it to my son and asked him what he saw.  He started to say, "Hi", but then stopped himself and said "Es and Ns."  I suspect his indecision and then incorrect answer (answers are always based on neurotypical expectations, not on what's actually there) would have gotten him a failing mark if this was a test question.  If it was on the literacy test, my hyperlexic son would have been considered illiterate even though he's the furthest thing from it.  When I saw it I saw Es and Ns but knew the expected answer was 'HI', so that's what I said - I've learned how to (mostly) tell people what they want to hear rather than what I see (and what's actually there).

Neurodiversity, as presented by the Canadian Museum of Nature, emphasizes the benefits that the human race enjoys as a result of it.  Having people who are able to comprehend data from a variety of different perspectives has obvious advantages, but in most cases neurotypical people will go out of their way to isolate and alienate those who they find mentally different, whether it ultimately benefits them or not.  Compliance and conformity will always trump complexity and difference.

Neurotypical prejudice especially hammers ASD influenced thinkers for their lack of social nuance, but then NTs are happy to benefit from Newton and Einstein's ASD driven detailed analysis of physics, or Alan Turing's ASD detailed focus on computing, or Nicola Tesla's ASD focused electrical engineering (there are many other examples).  In those cases where ASD produces exceptional results, NTs are happy to benefit from it even as they isolate and punish the people doing the work.  This approach often results in neurotypical people taking social and financial advantage of this genius for their own benefit.  NTs are happy to make use of ASD driven breakthroughs, but this often has more to do with how they can harness it and profit from it than it does having any kind of compassion for the people themselves.

When I was putting myself through university I worked as an automotive technician.  As people gained experience, many would move toward the sales desk, hoping to get out of the dirty technical work and into the cleaner sales end of things where management lived, but I was the opposite.  I went out of my way to take the technical roles and tried to avoid the sales side of things whenever I could.  I excelled at the technical work, quickly becoming the service manager, but had no interest in the slippery psychological side of the business.  Most business is of that slippery, psychological nature, as is a tragic amount of education.  For the people who work better at developing relationships and working their way up (which is to say most people), this is great, but for a guy with ASD it just feels dishonest.  We're not there to develop relationships that benefit our career, we're there to do the job at hand.  If I were better at the slippery psych I'd be up in management somewhere, but technical expertise isn't what gets you ahead even when that's the job at hand.

Education is a great example of human relationship building getting in the way of an important technical skill (learning).  Being willing to say what a teacher wants to hear rather than the truth as I see it is difficult for me.  I managed to earn degrees and diplomas in spite of my lack of tact and every grade I've ever been given was done so grudgingly rather than with encouragement.  What a teacher wants to hear usually isn't what's there and it's usually something designed to retain that status quo power structure built around relationship building.  If you can ingratiate yourself to the system/teacher/administrator you can count on it to help you socially climb it.  I have a great deal of trouble interacting with many managers for this reason.  They seem less interested in teaching and learning and more focused on personal advantage through networking.  It takes a special kind of manager to recognize my focus and support me in it rather than attacking me for it.

If we spent less time trying to align things socially for our own benefit and spent more time on tackling the issues themselves, I'd be over the moon, but it'll never happen, it isn't human nature.  I'm tempted to tell my son to see all the Es and Ns he possibly can and screw the rest of it, but that won't help him find a place in our Teflon coated social apparatus.  But spending lots of time and energy on something that doesn't come naturally to him (the nonsense of human relationship maintenance) means he's not developing his special understanding of the world to the best of his unique abilities.

Can you imagine if we had a school system that encouraged neurodiversity and enhanced it rather than trying to find ways to accommodate it by mitigating it into the same socially driven expectations box everyone else is content to be thinking in?  Can you then imagine a world where those enhanced, neurodiverse kids could go out into the world empowered by their differences instead of being socially embarrassed, belittled and beleaguered by them?

Previous Posts on ASD:

https://temkblog.blogspot.com/2018/04/nosce-aspie-te-ipsum.html

https://temkblog.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-happy-ship.html

https://temkblog.blogspot.com/2016/10/think-different.html

https://temkblog.blogspot.com/2017/11/stranger-in-strange-land.html

Stranger in a Strange Land

We attended the POND family day a couple of weeks ago and the steady, plodding nature of drug based (forget gene therapy, it's miles away) research around ASD and the frustration expressed by some parents got me thinking about what I'd do if they suddenly could 'fix' it.

Watching my son growing up with an ASD diagnosis that I never had sheds a lot of light on how my own mind works.  When I watch him fly into a rage and begin looping I realize that he is a piece of me.  When I watch him hyper-focus and grok something completely, that's a piece of me too.  While I'm frequently frustrated by social interaction, I'm not sure I'd be as good at some of things I excel at if I weren't neuro-atypical, the same goes for Max.

My undiagnosed ASD has made for a strange educational history.  I dropped out of high school before finishing, an apprenticeship before finishing and college before finishing.  I was on my way to dropping out of university when I started battling my default approach of getting everything I wanted to out of a learning opportunity before walking away.  The social conventions around education, especially the graduating bit, has never held much sway over me.  I only started attending them at the behest of girlfriends who suggested that the ceremony mattered.  From my point of view once I'd learned what I needed to know I was done.

I played sports throughout my childhood but the getting of the trophies was always an anti-climax; something I tried to find ways out of.  I loved the competition but found no value in the social conventions around the awards ceremonies.  A lot of teammates couldn't understand my reticence, for them the glory was the point.

Social conventions have always been difficult for me to grasp.  The natural tribalism that neurotypical people seem to thrive on is foreign, abstract and often upsetting.  Obviously definable traits that other people cling to like religion, nationality and political affiliation seem like strange abstractions to me.  Even obvious associations like gender and orientation seem like affectations.  Would life be easier if I just fell into those assumptions and social conventions like most people do?  Probably.

I have few friends but that doesn't make me feel lonely.  That idea of loneliness and belonging is another one of those neurotypical assumptions that I find foreign.  When I started motorcycling a number of people immediately tried to get me into group rides; I don't get them.  The whole point of motorcycling is to feel free.  How does riding in tight formation all over the place accomplish that?  Others feel power in that social affiliation and get a real rush out of publicly expressing it.  Being out in public in a big group makes them feel noticed and important, but I just don't get it.

This has led to ongoing difficulties, especially with groups that thrive on hierarchy and social presentation (which is to say most of them).  Because I'm not bothered with the group dynamic I'm seen as an outsider and potentially disruptive to the organization.  People who get a charge out of the drama and politics of group dynamics find it easy to alienate me from a group, and tend to do so.

I generally undervalue my influence on other people because I assume they feel the same distance I do.  I'm almost pathologically unable to remember names.  This is often described in terms of introversion or shyness, but if this is what ASD feels like then it's more like being a stranger in a strange land all the time; I'm always a foreigner.  I used to think this was because of my emigration to Canada when I was a child, and that certainly set the tone, but I'd been odd like that even before we left.  My lack of belonging is endemic.  Every so often I meet an exceptional person who is able to see me as I am and not be frustrated by it, I never forget the names of those people.


As I've gotten older I've been able to better define my strangeness and I'm trying to manage it more effectively.  I find that exhausting, but not having giant lists of friends or feeling an important part of an organization?  Not so much.

This is made doubly tiring because of the career I've wandered into.  Teaching is a social process, and while I love the intellectual complexity of pedagogy, technology and curriculum I'm constantly frustrated by the political and social vagaries associated with it.  Whether it's union, administration or parental social expectation, I'm often oblivious to what people require of me and baffled by their approach.  I expect ethics and reason to dictate people's actions, but those things aren't guiding principles in many decisions.  Self interest hidden in socially normative ideas like class, religion or group politics are what drive most people.

I recently backed out of headship and tried to refocus on the parts of teaching I'm good at rather than trying to herd the cats.  Even when refocusing on teaching I find that I'm having a lot of trouble with social expectations.  In 2017 a student's attendance is voluntary, their willingness to learn optional, and any failure hung on anyone but the learner.  Parents can pull their child out of classes for weeks at a time in the middle of a semester and I shouldn't wreck their holiday by assuming they will keep up with class work while they're gone.  At some point teaching has turned into daycare, which means the things I enjoy (curriculum, genuine student growth and pedagogy) don't matter so much any more.  For someone who doesn't intuitively understand socially motivated change, this lack of clarity around the evolving expectations of our education system is very challenging; it has been a bewildering and upsetting semester at work.

So here I am, feeling quite out of place, but that's nothing new.  My very human focused job is strange and confusing, but that's also no surprise.  Do these pressures tire me out, no doubt, but if I was suddenly told that they could cure ASD with a drug would I do it?  Would I be less stressed falling into the same political motivations and social conventions neurotypical people seem to thrive on?  Would I be better off thinking like most?  Probably, if conformity is the point of us being here.

I can only speak from my own experience, but if it meant losing my ability to focus on creative and technical expression, which happens because I'm not predisposed toward social or political gamesmanship, then no, I wouldn't seek to become less of what I am.

I'd let Max decide for himself after researching the science, but I'd hope he values his independence and uniqueness of thought as well, even if it generally annoys other people and isn't the easiest way forward.


Other Related Posts:
Conformity is Happiness.
Think Different.
WIRED thinking on neurodiversity.










The only reason neurotypical people want you to think like them is so that they can predict what you'll do and manipulate it to their advantage.

Why play to that?

Think Different

A grade 8 career fair last week had my senior computer
engineering students giving hundreds of grade 8s their
first glimpse of virtual reality.

Being one of the first to set up virtual reality in our area, I've had the pleasure of putting hundreds of students in it for the first time.

When they first find themselves in Google's Tiltbrush, students tend to either scribble in 3d, write in space or, on occasion, try and build something intentionally three dimensional because they're realize where they're working.  With a steady stream of students trying it for the first time on Thursday, this kept happening until something different occurred.

When you get a student who knows how to draw they tend to sketch quite effectively in the virtual space, though it tends to be based on 2d thinking (like they're drawing on paper).  We had a girl who had never tried VR before but obviously knew how to sketch enter the HTC Vive virtual space, but rather than working in 2d she immediately began sculpting 3d shapes.  

Grade 8 Tilt Brush No Watermark by gking53 on Sketchfab

This immediately caught the eye of the gifted grade 12 I had operating the system.  He got our attention and we watched her build out complex, identifiable 3d shapes.  What made it more amazing was that she was doing this without moving her head.  She was drawing in 3d but from a 2d perspective without even seeing what she was doing.  Everyone around the VR sets stopped what they were doing to watch something special.

Afterwards her teacher came up to me and said she was ASD and not very verbal.  I imagine the school system sees her as an expensive non-standard student but what we saw was a kind of genius.  Our gifted VR operator certainly thought she was exceptional, and not in a bad way.  Perhaps it requires an exceptional intelligence to recognize another exceptional intelligence.

***

POND Family day.  One of the largest sources of data
on neuro-atypical children in the world and based in
Ontario!  Our family is part of the DNA research and
our son volunteered to get fMRI'd as well.

On Saturday my family attended the POND Network's family day at UofT.  Having kids can often act as a kind of mirror, showing you more about yourself.  Having an autistic son has made me more aware of how neuro-atypical I am (I've learned coping mechanisms, but they aren't my natural state).

Where other people seem to require social interaction in order to be happy, I am very much an introvert.  There are few cases where I find people who engage rather than drain me.  I tend to go to ground after a week of teaching because I'm all peopled out.

The research presented by the Ontario Brain Institute was very interesting, and frustrating.  Google has been doing fantastic open source computing work doing the heavy lifting with sequencing genome data for neuro-atypical brains, but the process is still in its infancy.  We need much more data from more people and faster computers to narrow down the genomic complexities of neurological issues like ASD.  The current thinking is that ASD isn't caused by one or even a few genes, but by complex interactions between hundreds of them.  Understanding this process will require many people providing data to a massive computing effort.

A moment occurred in the presentations when a parent asked how close they are to being able to give a biological rather than psychological diagnosis for ASD.  He asked because students with a physical disability will have the earth moved to be accommodated, but students with psychological disabilities are generally warehoused and ignored, especially if they aren't problematic.  The example he gave was in education, where a school will spend tens of thousands of dollars on ramps and elevators for a student in a wheelchair to be able to access the building and integrate with their peers, but won't offer a fraction of that to a student with a neurological issue.  This got a round of applause from the audience.

The speaker had an even better answer.  She said this is awkward because she's a psychiatrist and the issue isn't whether or not this is a physical or mental diagnosis but instead an indictment of the government and society in general's stigmatization of mental illness.  It doesn't end at mental illness though.  If you aren't neurotypical, you aren't accorded the same rights and access to care.  The goal should be to enable all people to reach their potential, the type of diagnosis is irrelevant.  This got a big round of applause too.

It also raised some hard questions around how we treat difference of thought.  My son has a great deal of trouble organizing and completing linear tasks, but he can make diabolically difficult lateral connections.  Having a conversation with him will force you to think laterally in ways you never had before (unless you're too stupid or lazy to make the effort, in which case he sounds nonsensical).  I'm a pretty good lateral thinker, but the connections he makes are astonishing, yet he's considered substandard because he's not at the level of his peers in a loud, socially driven classroom.  He almost failed French because he wouldn't speak it in front of the class - the kid with social anxiety and ASD wouldn't perform like the other kids would.  He's sat in a desk in a row in a crowded, loud classroom with neurotypicals who thrive in this environment, and then he's told he doesn't stack up to them.  Their accommodation is to give him access to a support room twice a week.
I often think that if the school system doesn't destroy him, my son is going to grow up to do something exceptional precisely because he doesn't think like everyone else.

If you look at a movie from the '80s you'll find that we've come a long way in how we treat gender and sexuality differences.  If you watch a film from the 1950s you'll see that we've come a long way in how we treat racial differences, but differences in how we think are still a place of stubborn prejudice.

Last year at a Head's meeting I suggested that neuro-atypical people should be in teaching.  They will cause it to change by offering different approaches that might improve the system as a whole.  Our head of guidance thought this was ridiculous.  Outliers shouldn't be teaching or even in education.  Education should be about moulding students to society's expectations.  I've never felt more disenfranchised by the education system than I did at that moment, and I've frequently felt disenfranchised by it both as a student and a teacher.  I guess people will always find a systemic reason to identify and diminish another group of people for their own benefit.

When my son was first diagnosed with ASD I was hoping for a cure, now I believe that he isn't thinking incorrectly, just not the same as most people, and that can offer us all a social advantage.  It would be very shortsighted of us to try and stamp out that difference.  His ability to make lateral connections of thought might one day allow him to solve a problem in a way that no one else could even conceive.  This is assuming the education system doesn't beat it out of him.  Instead of exploring his differences of thought he's repeatedly forced to perform neurotypical tasks in a substandard way and then rebuked for it.  There is no point in his day where he's allowed to explore his intelligence in the way that a gifted student is because his mode of thought is deemed foreign.

A good place to start would be to take away the distinction between physical and psychological diagnosis and treat all students to the same support.  That might mean breaking down the systemic, grade based process of education by introducing purely individually driven learning goals and achievements.  My son may not graduate on time because the system he is in seems designed specifically to not work with how he thinks, but he'll get there eventually, and it would be nice if he wasn't constantly being told he was a failure when he does.  The chances of him going on to develop his unique talents in spite rather than because of his education would be much greater if he doesn't feel like the rest of society thinks him a loss.

Education, like socio-economic status, is an invented sense of superiority.  If you do well at something designed specifically for you, have you really done anything of value?  If you struggle to do well in a system specifically designed to work against you, are you a failure? Neurotypicals might not be able to use their customized education to grant themselves social advantage any more, but can you imagine an education system in which every student was able to minimize their weaknesses while maximizing their strengths without some shortsighted idiot judging them?  The human race would flourish in the diversity of ideas that would bloom from those graduates.  We only have to get past our prejudices to get there.

***
Austim & History - where would we be without these people?
8 Inspiring People with ASD

Putting Students into VR for the first time shows many ommonalities, and exceptionalities...