There is a growing convergence between neuroscience, as a general catch-all for the burgeoning field of neurological study, understanding and practice, and where other, wider scientific fields, particularly physics, appear to be pointing our schemas conceiving of the universe, and our place in it, toward. To quote the late, great satirist Terry Pratchett, as I have in the immediately previous post (stop yawning at the back!) it's because of quantum.
(nb, If you’ve dismissed the immense body of literature, which is Pratchett’s legacy, as just fantasy writing, you’ve spectacularly missed aw the points!
Certainly, much of it is rooted in, reaches out from tropes deployed in the loose genre of literary fantasy, often inverting and/or lampooning them. But the vast worlds, universes created and characters whose tales, lives, legends and mythologies are interwoven through them, are deep, witty reflections on the human condition
In many ways satire, humorism or absurdity are the inescapably only ways to capture and ruminate upon what it means to be human in a vast, chaotic and seemingly largely uncaring universe. Pratchett does it with aplomb.
Any, ultimately futile, human attempts to impose any kind of order upon it, whether individually, or through organisational structures like religion, superstition or any other kind of magical thinking, ‘the sciences’, ‘the arts’, ‘the humanities’, politics or systems of governance and their ugly twin economics, or any other means we have derived of ‘understanding’, inherently requires of us first to acknowledge the deep existential absurdity of engaging in any such undertaking. Without it, there lie paths toward even deeper absurdities of self-importance and bloviation.
Pratchett managed it with a warmth and levity too, rarely seen in other works of existential philosophy or satirical literature. Almost every study, and they are studies, reaches beyond Swiftian satire to meet Camus and Douglas Adams behind the bike shed of the universe for a cigarette. Only to find, after sparking up, it is a novelty ‘exploding’ joke. Or a woolly jumper.
Even to the last, through every word of every tale and in every action beyond them, the gentle, reflective human responsible reached out to help us better understand ourselves. Is there any better way to reflect on neurological decline, as an almost inevitable consequence of life lived, reflecting upon itself, to sum up the disturbing intrusion of any pathologised manifestation of it and loss of agency over life it signals, is removed by it, as Alzheimer’s disease was for Pratchett, as ‘the embuggerance’? It should be a medical diagnosis.
More than that, Pratchett went on to chronicle his lived experience of it for us all, in an often deeply moving documentary, going on to also become patron of Alzheimer’s Research UK. When DEATH came, capitalised for him, there was no other way for Pratchett to go than riding sidesaddle, looking both forward and backward, Janus like, riding away from a profoundly human life into the vastness of unknowing, with no howl of existential rage, but with the warmth of a knowing chuckle.
He left the world both more empty, without the person or the prodigious output which sustained so many readers, and more full, because they moved through and, in metaphorical and literal senses, remain in it, an elixir to be imbibed, if no longer twice a year, then, whenever you bloody well please!)
I’ve wandered into some of that convergence, shuffled in sideways, via post-graduate studies in the fields of ethnology, literature, cultural anthropology, (whisper it) social work and alighting, eventually, at long last, wearing the one ring to encompass them all, forged in their connective tissues, at neuroanthropology.
It seems, from a certain vantage point, from the perspective of life’s early autumn, diagnosed later in life with two neurological conditions, understanding of which, especially considering they have been underlying since, even pre, birth or early developmental stages, my academic and applied, practical lived experience, have in fact been high-functioning, high-masked, ‘special interest’, irregular electrical discharges across my brain. How fortunate.
They were only ever a matter of doubt or question due to external then internalised deep trauma, a neuropsychological feedback loop of well and ill-intentioned actions and motives. How droll.
So, through a deeply personal, yet still, in as much as any can be, academically objective ethnographic lens, I’ve observed, been, gotten involved, in this convergence. I’ve tried, oh so very hard, to ‘take nothing, leave nothing’. I’m sorry, I just can’t, couldn’t, shan’t. These are those, this is that. At least some of it.
Where neuroscience and quantum (physics, engineering, mechanics, aw the quantums) meet, in how our brains not only understand but create the universe around us, appears to be where I live now. I don’t remember the flit but can clearly visualise the removal trucks.
Too fanciful? A conceit? Delusion? Of course, it is all and none of the above. A superposition.
I’ll try to explain, without the bells and whistles, poetic indulgences and coorie-fistit flourishes. They may not be the words your looking for with a cloudy and overcast chance of being the ones you need.
I’ve never been comfortable with the inevitability of first person perspective. It is almost undeniably an aspect of my neurodivergence. My inner monologues have always been, at least I’ve always been conscious of them as, unreliable narrators. Aren’t they all?
See them there, here, the ‘I’s’, ‘my’s’, ‘mine’s’? I’m deploying them by uncomfortable force of will, consciously, self-consciously. This is an exorcism.
It may be useful to treat what follows, in this and interrelated upcoming posts (written, just typing, where’s a hundred monkeys when you need them!) as a thought or cognitive exercise, directed toward genuine empathy and understanding. If your immersed in neurotypicality, or are cognitively bound by it, it’s highly likely you just wont get there, get it all. It’s not your fault.
If you can get there, everything else written in these blog posts will become much more accessible to you. If you can’t, its written in such a way as ensure your not excluded from it. We do that, mask to engender neurotypical understanding. It’s not our fault.
As with anything occurring in the human brain and, by extension, it’s emergent property of mind, or even as a facet of consciousness (which is most definitely not ‘mind’, is, if anything the property of human, or sentient being, awareness which ‘watches’, sometimes wilfully ‘pilots’ a mind or minds), neurodivergence, or any other neurological condition not rendering it divergent from neurotypicality, is particularly person specific. Both neurodivergence and neurotypicality are emergent properties of human, of sentient, brain development.
The evolving concepts of neurodiversity(n), neurodiverse(adj), neurdivergent(n), neurodiverse(adj) and neurotypical(adj), as well as any other developed, developing, or to be developed, correlatives or cognates, like any idea or concept released into the wild, accumulating social, cultural and linguistic context, grow appendages of their own, sometimes far removed from their conception. No matter how tight we still want to hold them, they fly the nest.
The terms ‘neurodivergent’ and ‘neurodiverse’ currently refer to people whose neurology, emergent thought patterns, behaviours or learning styles fall outside of what may be considered ‘normal’ or ‘neurotypical’. For the benefit of the tape, normal is a lowest common denominator, social construct. It barely exists, certainly not in any objective or quantifiable sense, and is not an aspirational state.
Neurodivergence embraces and does not delimit the idea that differences in the human brain are natural and, in many, even most, cases can lead to meaningful, positive insights and abilities, as aspects of full, meaningful lives and lived experiences.
As a concept, neurodiversity is gaining wider socio-cultural traction and understanding. Both neurodiverse and neurotypical people are increasingly finding that differences rooted in human brain development are not necessarily ‘disabling’ or ‘disabilities’. Some differences are real strengths.
To acknowledge that, though, is also to acknowledge that conceiving of those differences, between neurodivergence and neurotypicality, is also deeply rooted in, in fact could even be described as an emergent (or even meta-emergent) property of, the social model of disability.
Underpinning most disability focussed legislation worldwide, the social model acknowledges that disability and disabling circumstance are not properties of medical diagnoses (or, the medical model of disability) but of the social context through which a person must navigate the world around them and in which they occur.
The social model contextualises and identifies socially or culturally systemic barriers, delimiting or derogatory attitudes and social exclusion which make it difficult or compound difficulties, sometimes making it impossible, for disabled people to attain value (in terms of societal, collective and wider perception, all too often as an aspect of compounding systemic delimitations, reflecting back on personal self-worth) and function.
Most importantly, as a concept, it has been developed, in the main, by disabled people.
The social model of disability diverges from the previously (and unfortunately still currently in many regards) dominant medical model. The medical model is a functional analysis of a body as machine-like. The social model differs in not conceiving of a typically, or not, functioning body which ‘needs’ to be ‘fixed’ in order to conform to typically normative values.
While physical, sensory, intellectual, neurological or psychological variations may result in functional difference, it does not necessarily lead to disability. That is, unless society fails to, omits or neglects to, take account of and include people who differ in these ways, intentionally and with respect to their individual needs. When exclusion, alongside a lack of intentionality and respect to or for individual needs persist, disabling circumstance persists.
The origins of this approach and its development can be traced back generally to the 1960s, with specific terminology emerging from and in the UK in the 1980s. If you haven’t developed understanding of them yet, please catch up.
An essential primer is to begin by understanding the distinction between the terms ‘impairment’ and ‘disability’. Modelling ‘disability’ socially, ‘impairment’ is used to refer to the physically, seen or unseen, presence (or lack thereof) of an attribute which affects or impacts a person and their bodily functionality. This is most often easily understood regarding attributes such as an inability to walk or to breathe independently.
The modelling seeks to redefine any medical basis of disability, to refer to societal restrictions placed upon an ‘impairment’ or difference. These restrictions are ‘caused’ by society when it does not give full, genuine and equitable social and systemic support according to a person’s structural needs, thus creating disabling circumstance.
These same principles apply in considering neurodiversity. As a term it was intended to be comparable to biodiversity, which refers to the diversity of all living things, and refers to the many differing ways in which human brains function. Consequently, it also refers to the differing ways people think and behave as a result.
For disability and neurodivergence, the lens through which the world around a person is seen, how it is perceived, as well as how it acts upon and is also ‘created’ by variance, develops, evolves in divergence. Theres oh so much more to say about divergent thinking as a concept in and of itself, pausing first to consider how it also becomes an emergent property of neurodivergence.
All of these interrelated ideas and concepts were aspects of a single, much longer piece of writing and reflection. Given a pregnant pause to consider a general and often specifically neurotypical, albeit by way of a long-term ‘hack’ of attention and cognition, begun by advertising and marketing, extending by way of television and reaching a perfect storm via digital technology, smart phones and social media, largely by capital and its controlling interests, sharp intake of breath…
…resulting, among oh so many other things, in a dismaying and dismissive tendency toward TLDR, I’ve broken it up into shorter posts. Am I not good to you, even if its not good for you, or me.
Up next, in our related series ‘Decolonising A Scots Mind’ and ‘Aye,I’, things get personal…
…but first, a word from and for our sponsors, you!