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What Does It Mean to Have a ‘Weird’ Brain in the Age of Neurodiversity?

53 points by webmaven 5y ago

mescaline 5y ago
While I dislike the term "aphantasia" for being technically inaccurate, it is the closest label for the condition of my brain. My brain is completely free of any visual or auditory (or other sense) creations of any kind, other than what I'm perceiving in a given moment based on inputs from my eyes or ears (or nose, fingers, tongue, etc.) This is true whether I have ingested a "mind altering" substance, or not. I do apparently see and hear things in dreams, however. I cannot recall them later, other than by remembering facts and feelings about them. The Aphantasia definition quoted on Wikipedia states it is "the inability to voluntarily create mental images in one's mind". But, there also exists an idea of a state in which an individual's brain NEVER creates mental representations of any kind, willful or not, other than what is being observed by the senses in that moment. Thankfully, I still have an imagination. Thinking mind will always think, if allowed by the awareness. What makes it weird is whether or not things are seen in mind, or heard in mind when that thinking occurs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
- postalrat 5y ago
  If someone asked you if a tennis ball could fit into a keyhole you couldn't answer?
  - Jtsummers 5y ago
    That's unrelated to aphantasia, and is instead related to knowledge which doesn't require the ability to visualize to apply. Any common keyhole is going to be obviously smaller than a standard sized tennis ball to any person aware of both objects. An inability to answer your question would occur if someone lacked knowledge about one or both of the two objects, or had a fundamental inability to recall information about relative sizes and shapes of the two objects (perhaps generalized to more than just those two).
    - postalrat 5y ago
      What do you mean by "obviously smaller"? How do you make that judgement without ever being told one is smaller than the other and without being able to visualize both?
      - Jtsummers 5y ago
        By having experience or knowledge of both objects. If you've ever held a tennis ball and have ever seen a keyhole you know which one is bigger than the other, you have no need to visualize them in your mind in order to make a comparison. So long as you can recall these facts about them, you can make a comparison based on knowledge and not on visualization. Now if something prevents you from having this knowledge (somehow you have never seen a tennis ball or a keyhole, or something in your brain prevents you from having the ability to recall facts about the objects like their sizes) then that's something else, but it's not aphantasia. Besides, visualizations aren't perfectly accurate, they are subject to your own knowledge and memories. And they can be distorted by poor recall or just the imagination itself. I'm capable of visualizing a tennis ball that is small enough to fit inside a typical keyhole, or a keyhole big enough to permit a standard size tennis ball. That doesn't make either scenario realistic just because I can visualize them.
        postalrat 5y ago
        So do they remember the size of things in terms of numbers then do some sort of mathematical algorithm to compare their sizes? I'm trying to understand how things can be compared without some sort of internal visualization.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        Jtsummers 5y ago
        Possibly with numbers. Can you properly visualize a tennis ball next to a baseball and tell which is larger? I was never much of an athlete (in the sports ball sense, at least) and have insufficient experience with either to tell you definitively which is larger (I looked it up, my guess was baseball and that turned out to be correct). The fact is that a small but still standard sized baseball is only 5mm larger than a large but still standard sized tennis ball. That is near enough that my memory (I played baseball last as a kid) could not distinguish between the size of the two objects. But now I know the fact, a standard baseball is larger than a standard tennis ball (now, don't ask me in a few weeks what the actual sizes are, I will probably forget, though I will probably remember that the baseball is larger). Another way is just having knowledge of relative sizes and the ability to perform rudimentary logic. A tennis ball feels about the same in my hand as a door knob (in terms of size and ability to wrap my hand around it, bigger than most but not by too much). A keyhole fits into a doorknob. I'd have to be really drunk to not realize the logical implication of that: A tennis ball won't fit into a keyhole (assuming both are standard sized and we're not talking about a comedian's prop key and keyhole).
  - majormajor 5y ago
    If I asked you that question would you visualize a tennis ball next to a keyhole? I would not. I'd answer based on what (to the best of my understanding of my own thought process) is something more like a rough tagging and comparison of "tennis balls are roughly this big" "keyholes are roughly this big" -> "the one is too big to fit." Similarly with something like comparing an elephant to a train. I'm not picturing the two next to each other, I'm trying to remember roughly how big each is.
    - postalrat 5y ago
      Yes, I would visualize a tennis ball near a keyhole. Another question might be why does a key fit in keyhole and a penny doesn't? A key is bigger than a penny. Or how did this tree do that damage? https://miro.medium.com/max/738/0*V3lJsXAHSDxqXgxf.jpg https://miro.medium.com/max/738/0*V3lJsXAHSDxqXgxf.jpg
  - mescaline 5y ago
    I couldn't be aware of seeing such an image, but factually I can say a normal tennis ball does not fit into a normal keyhole. Then again, there's Alice.
- aidenn0 5y ago
  There seems to be great variation in vividness and occurrence of involuntary mental images as well. I have to put effort in if I want to picture something, so most of the time I'm reading books I don't have any mental image of what is happening. My wife, on the other hand, involuntarily forms rather vivid mental images of stories she is reading, to the point where she has to avoid violent literature in the same manner that she avoids gory movies. Our subjective experience of reading any given book is so different that it sometimes feels like we read different books when discussing them afterwards.
- renewiltord 5y ago
  So, for instance if you were supplied two weird shapes rotated strangely and then asked you if they would fit together like a jigsaw puzzle you can't rotate them and place them together? Man, I can't imagine how this works with assembling furniture.
  - majormajor 5y ago
    When I assemble furniture I do a lot of "pick up this piece and look at it from different angles to see if it matches the piece in the diagram for this step" because yeah, it's generally VERY difficult for me to visualize the result of "look at this from 45 degrees below it" in my head. It's similarly hard to hold onto a mental picture of a puzzle piece profile I'm missing or such.
  - mescaline 5y ago
    I am, strangely enough, highly spatial and tested off the charts for it when I was younger. I can do exactly what you describe, with a high degree of precision. I do this mainly by elimination, which is likely due to the fact I can't consciously perceive the imagery, but only get a feeling if it is "right" or not. One way I put it to a visualizer recently was that I am not conscious of seeing the map, but I am definitely operating on the mesh. The way he described it was that he was actively seeing the map, overlayed on the model, as if it were a screen in mind. He waved vaguely to "up here" where it "was".
    - daniel-cussen 5y ago
      Yeah sounds like you are subconciously doing the work 100%, it's just you operate with different subconcious/concious roles and limits. The mental visualization is off bounds for your concious mind.
    - sph 5y ago
      Same, I have aphantasia but I definitely am a visual thinker. The visualization in my mind is quite abstract and far removed from the act of seeing.
TOGoS 5y ago
> But something about the name of this award rubbed me the wrong way I totally get this. Sure, it may be a compliment in many ways, but the fact that other people decided to give you a "weirdest brain award" also gives the sense that "you ain't part of our normal people club". Maybe it comes down to there being something inherently insulting about being told who you are by someone who can never fully understand you. I suspect it's similar to how any minority feels when the majority culture tries to tell them how things are without having experienced it themselves.
- majormajor 5y ago
  I think you can't just erase cultural conditioning to value certain things by recognizing differences, especially if otherwise the culture or organization doesn't demonstrate that it values those differences. You have to actually value it, not just say crap or make empty gestures. People can tell. For instance, "most improved" or "participation" trophies: Boomers gave these to their kids, then later wrote articles about how entitled, etc, millennials had turned out to be as a result, but the truth is that we all knew those were the consolation prizes for those of us who sucked.
FeaturelessBug 5y ago
The concern presented by this author is a very valid one that I myself have been struggling with for over a decade now. I have been diagnosed with major depressive disorder since I was 13 years old. It however took me until last year to receive a diagnosis for autism and ADHD. My entire life I have fought and struggled against my brain in order to fit in, and actively harmed my own mental health by trying to change aspects of my personality that I categorized as maladaptive coping behaviors. I really thought that I could train myself out of being autistic, and one day when I was driving home having a breakdown I realized that I kept telling myself that I was going to "grow out" of my autistic behaviors. I think that it is valid to find pride in the way that I have overcome and learn to cope with my depression, but I'm not proud because I have depression and I certainly believe that it should be treated at all costs. However, I think that having pride in being autistic makes sense because it is a different way of being in the world. It still presents me with unique challenges that someone who is neurotypical may not face, but it isn't something that I can treat until it goes away and trying to do so has harmed me massively. It's also something that is difficult for me because the world itself is not designed to be accessible to me, as opposed to depression or struggling with an eating disorder or addiction. Those will always be harmful to you and don't make sense to be proud about as I feel that implies that you don't feel they should be treated.
- thr0wawayf00 5y ago
  > It's also something that is difficult for me because the world itself is not designed to be accessible to me, as opposed to depression or struggling with an eating disorder or addiction. I feel this so much when it comes to technology. I too was diagnosed with ADHD and I fight my technology addiction constantly. It's so easy for me to mindlessly descend into an internet or mobile app rabbit hole, and I'm acutely aware that this is intentional. I thank my higher powers every single day that I'm not into sports gambling or worse, because these companies make billions on people who are unable to say "no" and they know it. Everything is becoming so complex in our world, I believe more and more that we should have a right to basic affordances that allow us to do what we need to (like easily pay taxes in the US). I fear that complexity in functioning within society to be the next wave of suppression against people, if it's not happening already. Where I live, it now takes 2-3 months to get a driver's license because the state legislature won't fund the DMV. That should be illegal.
tonymet 5y ago
"neurodiversity" is another case of hyper-pathologization . Everyone has quirks. Moreover, its enabling antisocial behavior. If someone is impolite we call them "on the spectrum" and accept it. Not everything is a disease. Human behavior is very diverse and there's a broad spectrum of perfectly normal individuals.
- SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
  The "broad spectrum" idea is precisely what people are trying to communicate by using the term "neurodiversity". The alternative perspective, which used to be very common in my circles (and frankly is poking through a bit in your sentence about impoliteness), is that human behavior is not diverse and "normal" refers to a narrow, universal standard of behavior that everyone knows and is obligated to follow. A decade or two ago, I would constantly hear people complaining about others who don't listen to "normal" music or have "normal" hobbies.
- spacemanmatt 5y ago
  That is pretty much counter to whole realization of neurodiversity but ok
- throwaway684936 5y ago
  You're right. Autism isn't a disease and its traits should be normalized and treated as normal human social diversity. We should proooobably stop that whole dog-training-but-worse thing called ABA.
- chousuke 5y ago
  Have you ever considered that to an autistic person, a neurotypicsl person might be the impolite one? People who are actually antisocial will be impolite on purpose, and it's usually pretty obvious. Meanwhile, actually autistic people will get labelled as jerks or whatever because everyone assumes that the "rudeness" is intentional even if they just miss some cue or happen to be too distracted to respond in an "appropriate" manner.
jotm 5y ago
> When should I try to change or “treat” my mental differences, and when should I embrace them as naturally occurring diversity? Imo, it's simple: the more negatively it affects your life, the more you should try and fix it. It really depends on what you want in life, what you can be content with. It is really hard knowing you could do much more, and want to do much more, but your own brain is in the way. I mean, it's like having problems with any other part of your body. A limp is one thing, it can be managed. But would someone missing a leg or both not accept functional prostheses? The brain shouldn't be treated differently. The number of times I heard "you're so lazy"... while every day is a fucking massive struggle just to live a normal life. There isn't much point to such a life, to be honest, but dying is much harder than one would think. It's like shoving your hand into a fire - most people can't do it.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  Please, don't take the "dying" route. You have much to offer, and your life can very much have a point.
- barbs 5y ago
  > Imo, it's simple: the more negatively it affects your life, the more you should try and fix it. I think you need to be careful with this advice, as I can imagine people reading this and trying to fix things that they can't, and then getting frustrated and/or depressed when they can't. I imagine there are lots of younger people with ADHD/Autism who would feel that their neurological condition prevents them from fitting in, and so would feel that their brain needs to be fixed, when really what needs to change is acceptance of these sorts of conditions. That's my understanding of the whole "embracing neurodiversity" movement.
  - throwaway684936 5y ago
    > That's my understanding of the whole "embracing neurodiversity" movement. Your understanding is pretty much correct. An unmentioned danger here (in addition to self-fixing) is e.g. the autism industrial complex trying to convince the parents their child needs to be "fixed" early on through their absurdly expensive, completely ineffective and pseudoscientific, horribly mentally damaging "therapies." Certain kinds of "self-help" books targeted at neurodivergent people are the equivalent of that for teens/young adults who think they need to "fix" themselves.
belkinpower 5y ago
The article touches on this a bit, but I do think lumping straight up disorders like depression together with more “neurodiverse” ones like ASD is the wrong approach. Maybe other people feel differently, but for me personally I think there’s a pretty clear difference. If I could take a magic pill that permanently cured my depression/anxiety/ADHD, I would. But my feelings toward autism are a lot more complicated. Despite making my life more difficult in some ways, it feels much more a part of who I am than the other conditions. If it suddenly disappeared it would completely change my personality and way of thinking, to the degree that I basically wouldn’t be the same person anymore.
- nebulous_two 5y ago
  You're basically saying you think depression/anxiety/ADHD are disorders but autism is "part of who you are". Is a personality change indicative of whether something is a disorder or not? Is it only when the change is perceived to negative?
  - throwaway684936 5y ago
    Autism shapes personality and worldview, meaning it shapes the person and their sense of self. It doesn't cause suffering in a vacuum the same way other disorders do. The biggest "issues" attributed to autism come from lack of accomodations and the tendency to falsely attribute comorbidities as being part of autism. A huge difference between autism and the other listed things is that autism is not (and never will be) legitimately treatable, while depression, anxiety, and ADHD are treatable and have been for a long time. Amphetamine targets dopamine dysregulation and it's highly effective at improving quality of life. Autism has no equivalent. No drug has ever shown efficacy in improving the quality of life of autistic people, nor has any therapy. They've all been damaging, and the mainstream autism junk-science treatment today is ineffective according to meta-analyses[1], is based on gay conversion therapy, has been shown to cause PTSD[2]. Treating autism stops making sense (and thinking of it as important to identity starts making sense) when you realize that having an autistic brain means using a different but equally-effective social model[3], mode of thinking, and algorithms for processing information, that in many cases has tangible advantages. [1] https://therapistndc.org/aba-is-not-effective-so-says-the-latest-report-from-the-department-of-defense/ https://therapistndc.org/aba-is-not-effective-so-says-the-la... [2] https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/AIA-08-2017-0016/full/html https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/AIA-08-2... [3] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.586171/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.5861...
fdgsdfogijq 5y ago
I interviewed at a quant hedge fund. They hire some of the top programmers in the world at 1-2M+ comp. The head of recruiting told me that even if someone passes all of the coding interviews, if he is too slick and social in the behavioral they will reject him. They specifically wanted aspergers/slightly autistic personality types, and believed that a disheveled look with poor behavioral interviewing was a legitimate signal to hiring the best.
- throwaway684936 5y ago
  Why do they not advertise this? Autistic people are starving for employment despite being extremely skilled. Plus a great PR opportunity.
  - threads2 5y ago
    yeah I always figured the "we hire autistic people" PR thing I see some companies do was more cynical than altruistic
    - fdgsdfogijq 5y ago
      with the right engineering managers and technical problems it can work, I think big companies need more cog like employees
  - fdgsdfogijq 5y ago
    I think they give money to charities for autism/aspbergers. But they really dont hire many people and are pretty under the radar as it is.
- Animats 5y ago
  In a hedge fund, that probably reflects management fear that if someone is both a good quant and has social skills, they will take over, or start their own fund.
- kayamon 5y ago
  As an autistic person who has spent their whole life trying to overcome it and be slick and social, this really winds me up.
threads2 5y ago
here's betting that in a hundred years "autism" is as outdated/vague/meaningless as "hysteria" and "melancholia". schizophrenia isnt even in the newest DSM
8bitsrule 5y ago
This is one of the worst 5000-word essay attempts I've seen in a long time. It's trying to describe and prescribe for an important topic but meanders aimlessly through a forest of ill-defined abstractions, and falls into an conceptual swamp. Just one example, what does'The Age of Neurodiversity' mean? Definition please? In a world in which, for most of human history, shamans (about as weird as you can get) majorly figured in cultures around the world for thousands and thousands of years? A world which most of us find ourselves struggling to understand so we can build, then built structures which have mostly been abandoned? While we struggle to understand the meanings and/or purposes of our lives? Not to mention our personal emotions and limitations? Our attempts to clutch out some concept of normality are hilarious. Le Guin: " Imagination, working at full strength, can shake us out of our fatal, adoring self-absorption, and make us look up and see—with terror or with relief—that the world does not in fact belong to us at all."

53 points by webmaven 5y ago

While I dislike the term "aphantasia" for being technically inaccurate, it is the closest label for the condition of my brain. My brain is completely free of any visual or auditory (or other sense) creations of any kind, other than what I'm perceiving in a given moment based on inputs from my eyes or ears (or nose, fingers, tongue, etc.) This is true whether I have ingested a "mind altering" substance, or not. I do apparently see and hear things in dreams, however. I cannot recall them later, other than by remembering facts and feelings about them. The Aphantasia definition quoted on Wikipedia states it is "the inability to voluntarily create mental images in one's mind". But, there also exists an idea of a state in which an individual's brain NEVER creates mental representations of any kind, willful or not, other than what is being observed by the senses in that moment. Thankfully, I still have an imagination. Thinking mind will always think, if allowed by the awareness. What makes it weird is whether or not things are seen in mind, or heard in mind when that thinking occurs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia

postalrat 5y ago
If someone asked you if a tennis ball could fit into a keyhole you couldn't answer?
- Jtsummers 5y ago
  That's unrelated to aphantasia, and is instead related to knowledge which doesn't require the ability to visualize to apply. Any common keyhole is going to be obviously smaller than a standard sized tennis ball to any person aware of both objects. An inability to answer your question would occur if someone lacked knowledge about one or both of the two objects, or had a fundamental inability to recall information about relative sizes and shapes of the two objects (perhaps generalized to more than just those two).
  - postalrat 5y ago
    What do you mean by "obviously smaller"? How do you make that judgement without ever being told one is smaller than the other and without being able to visualize both?
    - Jtsummers 5y ago
      By having experience or knowledge of both objects. If you've ever held a tennis ball and have ever seen a keyhole you know which one is bigger than the other, you have no need to visualize them in your mind in order to make a comparison. So long as you can recall these facts about them, you can make a comparison based on knowledge and not on visualization. Now if something prevents you from having this knowledge (somehow you have never seen a tennis ball or a keyhole, or something in your brain prevents you from having the ability to recall facts about the objects like their sizes) then that's something else, but it's not aphantasia. Besides, visualizations aren't perfectly accurate, they are subject to your own knowledge and memories. And they can be distorted by poor recall or just the imagination itself. I'm capable of visualizing a tennis ball that is small enough to fit inside a typical keyhole, or a keyhole big enough to permit a standard size tennis ball. That doesn't make either scenario realistic just because I can visualize them.
      - postalrat 5y ago
        So do they remember the size of things in terms of numbers then do some sort of mathematical algorithm to compare their sizes? I'm trying to understand how things can be compared without some sort of internal visualization.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        Jtsummers 5y ago
        Possibly with numbers. Can you properly visualize a tennis ball next to a baseball and tell which is larger? I was never much of an athlete (in the sports ball sense, at least) and have insufficient experience with either to tell you definitively which is larger (I looked it up, my guess was baseball and that turned out to be correct). The fact is that a small but still standard sized baseball is only 5mm larger than a large but still standard sized tennis ball. That is near enough that my memory (I played baseball last as a kid) could not distinguish between the size of the two objects. But now I know the fact, a standard baseball is larger than a standard tennis ball (now, don't ask me in a few weeks what the actual sizes are, I will probably forget, though I will probably remember that the baseball is larger). Another way is just having knowledge of relative sizes and the ability to perform rudimentary logic. A tennis ball feels about the same in my hand as a door knob (in terms of size and ability to wrap my hand around it, bigger than most but not by too much). A keyhole fits into a doorknob. I'd have to be really drunk to not realize the logical implication of that: A tennis ball won't fit into a keyhole (assuming both are standard sized and we're not talking about a comedian's prop key and keyhole).
- majormajor 5y ago
  If I asked you that question would you visualize a tennis ball next to a keyhole? I would not. I'd answer based on what (to the best of my understanding of my own thought process) is something more like a rough tagging and comparison of "tennis balls are roughly this big" "keyholes are roughly this big" -> "the one is too big to fit." Similarly with something like comparing an elephant to a train. I'm not picturing the two next to each other, I'm trying to remember roughly how big each is.
  - postalrat 5y ago
    Yes, I would visualize a tennis ball near a keyhole. Another question might be why does a key fit in keyhole and a penny doesn't? A key is bigger than a penny. Or how did this tree do that damage? https://miro.medium.com/max/738/0*V3lJsXAHSDxqXgxf.jpg https://miro.medium.com/max/738/0*V3lJsXAHSDxqXgxf.jpg
- mescaline 5y ago
  I couldn't be aware of seeing such an image, but factually I can say a normal tennis ball does not fit into a normal keyhole. Then again, there's Alice.
aidenn0 5y ago
There seems to be great variation in vividness and occurrence of involuntary mental images as well. I have to put effort in if I want to picture something, so most of the time I'm reading books I don't have any mental image of what is happening. My wife, on the other hand, involuntarily forms rather vivid mental images of stories she is reading, to the point where she has to avoid violent literature in the same manner that she avoids gory movies. Our subjective experience of reading any given book is so different that it sometimes feels like we read different books when discussing them afterwards.
renewiltord 5y ago
So, for instance if you were supplied two weird shapes rotated strangely and then asked you if they would fit together like a jigsaw puzzle you can't rotate them and place them together? Man, I can't imagine how this works with assembling furniture.
- majormajor 5y ago
  When I assemble furniture I do a lot of "pick up this piece and look at it from different angles to see if it matches the piece in the diagram for this step" because yeah, it's generally VERY difficult for me to visualize the result of "look at this from 45 degrees below it" in my head. It's similarly hard to hold onto a mental picture of a puzzle piece profile I'm missing or such.
- mescaline 5y ago
  I am, strangely enough, highly spatial and tested off the charts for it when I was younger. I can do exactly what you describe, with a high degree of precision. I do this mainly by elimination, which is likely due to the fact I can't consciously perceive the imagery, but only get a feeling if it is "right" or not. One way I put it to a visualizer recently was that I am not conscious of seeing the map, but I am definitely operating on the mesh. The way he described it was that he was actively seeing the map, overlayed on the model, as if it were a screen in mind. He waved vaguely to "up here" where it "was".
  - daniel-cussen 5y ago
    Yeah sounds like you are subconciously doing the work 100%, it's just you operate with different subconcious/concious roles and limits. The mental visualization is off bounds for your concious mind.
  - sph 5y ago
    Same, I have aphantasia but I definitely am a visual thinker. The visualization in my mind is quite abstract and far removed from the act of seeing.

TOGoS 5y ago

> But something about the name of this award rubbed me the wrong way I totally get this. Sure, it may be a compliment in many ways, but the fact that other people decided to give you a "weirdest brain award" also gives the sense that "you ain't part of our normal people club". Maybe it comes down to there being something inherently insulting about being told who you are by someone who can never fully understand you. I suspect it's similar to how any minority feels when the majority culture tries to tell them how things are without having experienced it themselves.

majormajor 5y ago
I think you can't just erase cultural conditioning to value certain things by recognizing differences, especially if otherwise the culture or organization doesn't demonstrate that it values those differences. You have to actually value it, not just say crap or make empty gestures. People can tell. For instance, "most improved" or "participation" trophies: Boomers gave these to their kids, then later wrote articles about how entitled, etc, millennials had turned out to be as a result, but the truth is that we all knew those were the consolation prizes for those of us who sucked.

FeaturelessBug 5y ago

The concern presented by this author is a very valid one that I myself have been struggling with for over a decade now. I have been diagnosed with major depressive disorder since I was 13 years old. It however took me until last year to receive a diagnosis for autism and ADHD. My entire life I have fought and struggled against my brain in order to fit in, and actively harmed my own mental health by trying to change aspects of my personality that I categorized as maladaptive coping behaviors. I really thought that I could train myself out of being autistic, and one day when I was driving home having a breakdown I realized that I kept telling myself that I was going to "grow out" of my autistic behaviors. I think that it is valid to find pride in the way that I have overcome and learn to cope with my depression, but I'm not proud because I have depression and I certainly believe that it should be treated at all costs. However, I think that having pride in being autistic makes sense because it is a different way of being in the world. It still presents me with unique challenges that someone who is neurotypical may not face, but it isn't something that I can treat until it goes away and trying to do so has harmed me massively. It's also something that is difficult for me because the world itself is not designed to be accessible to me, as opposed to depression or struggling with an eating disorder or addiction. Those will always be harmful to you and don't make sense to be proud about as I feel that implies that you don't feel they should be treated.

thr0wawayf00 5y ago
> It's also something that is difficult for me because the world itself is not designed to be accessible to me, as opposed to depression or struggling with an eating disorder or addiction. I feel this so much when it comes to technology. I too was diagnosed with ADHD and I fight my technology addiction constantly. It's so easy for me to mindlessly descend into an internet or mobile app rabbit hole, and I'm acutely aware that this is intentional. I thank my higher powers every single day that I'm not into sports gambling or worse, because these companies make billions on people who are unable to say "no" and they know it. Everything is becoming so complex in our world, I believe more and more that we should have a right to basic affordances that allow us to do what we need to (like easily pay taxes in the US). I fear that complexity in functioning within society to be the next wave of suppression against people, if it's not happening already. Where I live, it now takes 2-3 months to get a driver's license because the state legislature won't fund the DMV. That should be illegal.

tonymet 5y ago

"neurodiversity" is another case of hyper-pathologization . Everyone has quirks. Moreover, its enabling antisocial behavior. If someone is impolite we call them "on the spectrum" and accept it. Not everything is a disease. Human behavior is very diverse and there's a broad spectrum of perfectly normal individuals.

SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
The "broad spectrum" idea is precisely what people are trying to communicate by using the term "neurodiversity". The alternative perspective, which used to be very common in my circles (and frankly is poking through a bit in your sentence about impoliteness), is that human behavior is not diverse and "normal" refers to a narrow, universal standard of behavior that everyone knows and is obligated to follow. A decade or two ago, I would constantly hear people complaining about others who don't listen to "normal" music or have "normal" hobbies.
spacemanmatt 5y ago
That is pretty much counter to whole realization of neurodiversity but ok
throwaway684936 5y ago
You're right. Autism isn't a disease and its traits should be normalized and treated as normal human social diversity. We should proooobably stop that whole dog-training-but-worse thing called ABA.
chousuke 5y ago
Have you ever considered that to an autistic person, a neurotypicsl person might be the impolite one? People who are actually antisocial will be impolite on purpose, and it's usually pretty obvious. Meanwhile, actually autistic people will get labelled as jerks or whatever because everyone assumes that the "rudeness" is intentional even if they just miss some cue or happen to be too distracted to respond in an "appropriate" manner.

jotm 5y ago

> When should I try to change or “treat” my mental differences, and when should I embrace them as naturally occurring diversity? Imo, it's simple: the more negatively it affects your life, the more you should try and fix it. It really depends on what you want in life, what you can be content with. It is really hard knowing you could do much more, and want to do much more, but your own brain is in the way. I mean, it's like having problems with any other part of your body. A limp is one thing, it can be managed. But would someone missing a leg or both not accept functional prostheses? The brain shouldn't be treated differently. The number of times I heard "you're so lazy"... while every day is a fucking massive struggle just to live a normal life. There isn't much point to such a life, to be honest, but dying is much harder than one would think. It's like shoving your hand into a fire - most people can't do it.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
Please, don't take the "dying" route. You have much to offer, and your life can very much have a point.
barbs 5y ago
> Imo, it's simple: the more negatively it affects your life, the more you should try and fix it. I think you need to be careful with this advice, as I can imagine people reading this and trying to fix things that they can't, and then getting frustrated and/or depressed when they can't. I imagine there are lots of younger people with ADHD/Autism who would feel that their neurological condition prevents them from fitting in, and so would feel that their brain needs to be fixed, when really what needs to change is acceptance of these sorts of conditions. That's my understanding of the whole "embracing neurodiversity" movement.
- throwaway684936 5y ago
  > That's my understanding of the whole "embracing neurodiversity" movement. Your understanding is pretty much correct. An unmentioned danger here (in addition to self-fixing) is e.g. the autism industrial complex trying to convince the parents their child needs to be "fixed" early on through their absurdly expensive, completely ineffective and pseudoscientific, horribly mentally damaging "therapies." Certain kinds of "self-help" books targeted at neurodivergent people are the equivalent of that for teens/young adults who think they need to "fix" themselves.

belkinpower 5y ago

The article touches on this a bit, but I do think lumping straight up disorders like depression together with more “neurodiverse” ones like ASD is the wrong approach. Maybe other people feel differently, but for me personally I think there’s a pretty clear difference. If I could take a magic pill that permanently cured my depression/anxiety/ADHD, I would. But my feelings toward autism are a lot more complicated. Despite making my life more difficult in some ways, it feels much more a part of who I am than the other conditions. If it suddenly disappeared it would completely change my personality and way of thinking, to the degree that I basically wouldn’t be the same person anymore.

nebulous_two 5y ago
You're basically saying you think depression/anxiety/ADHD are disorders but autism is "part of who you are". Is a personality change indicative of whether something is a disorder or not? Is it only when the change is perceived to negative?
- throwaway684936 5y ago
  Autism shapes personality and worldview, meaning it shapes the person and their sense of self. It doesn't cause suffering in a vacuum the same way other disorders do. The biggest "issues" attributed to autism come from lack of accomodations and the tendency to falsely attribute comorbidities as being part of autism. A huge difference between autism and the other listed things is that autism is not (and never will be) legitimately treatable, while depression, anxiety, and ADHD are treatable and have been for a long time. Amphetamine targets dopamine dysregulation and it's highly effective at improving quality of life. Autism has no equivalent. No drug has ever shown efficacy in improving the quality of life of autistic people, nor has any therapy. They've all been damaging, and the mainstream autism junk-science treatment today is ineffective according to meta-analyses[1], is based on gay conversion therapy, has been shown to cause PTSD[2]. Treating autism stops making sense (and thinking of it as important to identity starts making sense) when you realize that having an autistic brain means using a different but equally-effective social model[3], mode of thinking, and algorithms for processing information, that in many cases has tangible advantages. [1] https://therapistndc.org/aba-is-not-effective-so-says-the-latest-report-from-the-department-of-defense/ https://therapistndc.org/aba-is-not-effective-so-says-the-la... [2] https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/AIA-08-2017-0016/full/html https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/AIA-08-2... [3] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.586171/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.5861...

fdgsdfogijq 5y ago

I interviewed at a quant hedge fund. They hire some of the top programmers in the world at 1-2M+ comp. The head of recruiting told me that even if someone passes all of the coding interviews, if he is too slick and social in the behavioral they will reject him. They specifically wanted aspergers/slightly autistic personality types, and believed that a disheveled look with poor behavioral interviewing was a legitimate signal to hiring the best.

throwaway684936 5y ago
Why do they not advertise this? Autistic people are starving for employment despite being extremely skilled. Plus a great PR opportunity.
- threads2 5y ago
  yeah I always figured the "we hire autistic people" PR thing I see some companies do was more cynical than altruistic
  - fdgsdfogijq 5y ago
    with the right engineering managers and technical problems it can work, I think big companies need more cog like employees
- fdgsdfogijq 5y ago
  I think they give money to charities for autism/aspbergers. But they really dont hire many people and are pretty under the radar as it is.
Animats 5y ago
In a hedge fund, that probably reflects management fear that if someone is both a good quant and has social skills, they will take over, or start their own fund.
kayamon 5y ago
As an autistic person who has spent their whole life trying to overcome it and be slick and social, this really winds me up.

threads2 5y ago

here's betting that in a hundred years "autism" is as outdated/vague/meaningless as "hysteria" and "melancholia". schizophrenia isnt even in the newest DSM

8bitsrule 5y ago

This is one of the worst 5000-word essay attempts I've seen in a long time. It's trying to describe and prescribe for an important topic but meanders aimlessly through a forest of ill-defined abstractions, and falls into an conceptual swamp. Just one example, what does'The Age of Neurodiversity' mean? Definition please? In a world in which, for most of human history, shamans (about as weird as you can get) majorly figured in cultures around the world for thousands and thousands of years? A world which most of us find ourselves struggling to understand so we can build, then built structures which have mostly been abandoned? While we struggle to understand the meanings and/or purposes of our lives? Not to mention our personal emotions and limitations? Our attempts to clutch out some concept of normality are hilarious. Le Guin: " Imagination, working at full strength, can shake us out of our fatal, adoring self-absorption, and make us look up and see—with terror or with relief—that the world does not in fact belong to us at all."