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Apr 13Liked by Joel Pearson

I love your positive outlook on cognitive/neural diversity and educating the workplace about it. I think there also needs to be a lot of work done around this in the educational system. In the US, there is support, but it usually is support to fit into the neurotypical box rather than support their strengths in out of the box thinking and processing. I had to pull my neurodiverse kids out of school as it was doing more harm than good trying to fit them in the box. Now they can focus on their strengths. Thanks for bringing up such important matters!

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thanks Ginger, glad you enjoyed it

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Multisensory aphantantasia, dyspraxia, familial hyper-fight/flee SNS response, red flagged auto-immune Gene profile. I bundle all these together as I strongly sense that they overlap. Neural functioning is so intensely intertwined it cannot fit into scientific boxes.

Cognitively divergent ‘sounds’ better than neural. But my brain/body is what it is. I am what I am, as well as who I am, both also entwined. No cause for pride or for dismay. But it is wonderfully enlightening to now be able to analyse and understand why I have always felt like a round peg in a square hole.

I find few people really interested in this stuff. Most have never stopped to think about how their mind functions and can struggle to go there. Thank you, 😊 Roseann

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Hi Roseann. What is "familial hyper-fight/flee SNS response"?

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Many in my family have an over-reactive Sympathetic Nervous System response to any ‘fright’ such as a sudden sound etc. if I laugh too long in one of those out of control laughing fits I can tip into crying instead, and actually feel sad for no reason. On a scary ride I once tipped from wild enjoyable laughter into hysterical screaming, even though I wasn’t actually scared. Most embarrassing. 😊

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Apr 14·edited Apr 14Liked by Joel Pearson

I don't doubt that divergens can make a big difference. But there is a big problem. "Everything" is designed for the norm. Take the 9:1 ratio of right, to left-handed people. Every one knows about it, and there are some adaptions like left-handed scissors. But most of the time, they have to adopt instead.

Now think of something like Aphantasia. Very few people know about it, and there are no adaptions. And I am not sure that there ever will be much (just like in the case for left-handed people). Especially knowing how set, people are in their ways.

I always se and hear the claim that we live in the age of life long learning. But there is almost no teacher that can explain things in a different (different enough to matter) way. They teach the way that they have always done. And sure, you might look at the statistics and think "well 90% can make it, the other ones must be lacy and not putting in enough effort".

To be fair, I have looked at the statistics of peoples questions on the Internet, regarding Aphantasia and usually about half say that they are not affected by whatever the question is about. But I have never seen a good explanation from those people, on how they do what they do. They simply just don't seem to know themselves... Somehow they have learned to adapt, without anyone teaching them how to do it. But the other 50% our left out hanging.

I believe there needs to be a school reform. Take health care. Almost all health care starts when you are already sick or wounded. How about teaching people how to take care of their bodies (including the mind), before it happens? There is to much focus on being prepared for work. But you won't be a productive worker, if you are not able to come to work because of sickness or injuries.

Ones upon a time, the explanation of why you should be drilled in learning to do math in your head, was that you won't walk around with a calculatior. Now everyone have a phone in their pocket and it have an calculator app...

There is also a huge amount of memorization of facts and figures. That's also not necessary anymore, because everyone have access to the biggest encyclopedia in their pocket (Internet).

In other words. School need to teach more of the meta aspects of life. How to think when you think (metacognition), how to solve problems. One of the latest advancements in mental health is "Metacognitive therapy". This is something that people could (and in my opinion) should learn, to help them along in life and to prevent problems before they arise (not saying that it is always preventable).

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indeed, education needs a major rewrite and restructuring - especially with the changes to society we will soon experience from AI. Your point is a good one re metacognition or learning or understanding, most of us don't have a good understanding of how our brains work or how we might come to a particular solution, and sometimes we get it completely wrong - that's why we need good science to unpack all this

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Apr 13·edited Apr 13Liked by Joel Pearson

1. Should companies be required to measure and balance neural or cognitive diversity in the same way they do for race or gender? Is this the next frontier for equality, or a step too far?

I think this is a slippery slope. While it definitely could and would benefit both the companies and their diverse employees, testing and identifying individuals as (neural/cognitive) diverse has the potential to segregate them... and not in a good way. Think of the book and movie series Divergent, where they test their young population to determine what vocation and, by extension, what community they are best suited to. They are then segregated to that community to perform said vocation till the end of time. Those identified as divergent are weeded out and killed. Now - this is fiction, but you can see where identifying people's neural and cognitive type could be dangerous.

2. Do you think of yourself as neural or cognitively divergent? If so do you like this and wear it as a badge of honour?

As someone with aphantasia, I identify as neural and cognitively divergent, although I didn't realize this my whole life. It's only recently (2021) that I began to understand how my aphantasia has impacted my life, positively and negatively. As for badge-of-honour or as I've heard it referred to as... superpowers, it's cool to think of myself among a small percentage of people around the world who think in a unique way. I'm not so thrilled with my superpower when I can't picture my children's and grandchildren's faces. Not great.

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thanks for sharing

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○ I was interested in seeing your observation about the relative size of the visual area of the brain as it could be related to some mental activities being different in different people. I have aphantasia and because I cannot recall image my forebrain cannot ask the visual area of the brain to remind it what something looks like - which means my forebrain has to convert images into words and remember the words in order to recall (in verbal terms) a general idea of what something looks like. This could mean that someone with aphantasia and a smaller visual section of the brain would benefit from a larger forebrain.

Has any work been done (references please) to see if, when some areas of the brain are smaller due to neurodiversity other areas become larger because they have more work to do because the neurodiversity means that other areas of the brain are not performing normally?

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Hi Chris, yes there is at least one study that shows data that the two areas, visual cortex and a part of the frontal cortex are inversely related in terms of their anatomical size here is the link: https://www.jneurosci.org/content/31/26/9472

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However, the frontal cortex does more executive organisational functions rather than word processing or language - but its an interesting hypothesis!

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Hi Joe;,

Thanks for the reference which looks very interesting although unfortunately they don't seem to have tested for aphantasia. My comment "my forebrain has to convert images into words and remember the words in order to recall (in verbal terms) a general idea of what something looks like." is how it seems to me - but whatever is happening in my forebrain (I haven't had a brain scan!) I need to convert it into words to express it.

The situation is that in the 1960s I was involved with a complex commercial information computers system. I decided that the sales staff staff did not understand this "black box" software and suggested that it should be possible to design a computer system which "thinks" like a human (when perhaps I should have said thinks like me). As a neurodivergent individual who had only been working with computers for about a year I had no reason to think designing that a transparent human-friendly computer was difficult - only that my employer was not doing it. Of course I realised that the stored program model was initially designed for mathematicians to processes numbers held in arrays (a very powerful tool) - but I am sure that everyone knows that the average human being is not a mathematician and there is no reason to think the human brain thinks in terms of numbers in a numerically addressed array. For these reasons the stored program model is quite naturally not a natural starting point if you want a transparent genetic electronic clerk which is easy for humans to understand and use. Seen in retrospect my CODIL proposals start from first principles by assuming that what was needed was an electronic clerk based on the idea that humans were non-mathematicians processing sets stored in a setnamed-addressed network.

I am currently reassessing the CODIL project and drafting a paper which suggests that I may have produced a reverse engineered model of how human short term memory works and stores information. The original CODIL idea introduced a firm line between decision making and sensory processing - in effect I produced a mind model which duplicates my own aphantasia. However once the model is formalised one can consider the boundary and the "communication barrier" can simply be interpreted, in computer terms, as a missing recursive call between the decision making "forebrain" module and the sensory modules. While I am sure my aphantasia cannot easily be corrected, the "bug" in the computer model can be remedied by allowing the CODIL software to be extended to include both the forebrain and the sensory areas of the brain.

It is important to remember that much of what we know about the brain has come from studying people with some kind of abnormality. Perhaps my neurodiversity has made it possible for me to think about how the forebrain works - uncluttered with the task of having to worry about how the sensory parts of the brain work.

OK - I see this as an interesting idea - but perhaps because I am neurodiverse I am not the best person to assess the potential of the CODIL model and because of my age it is nor practical for me to restart the research by producing a more powerful CODIL interpreter.

Chris

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