What Does It Mean to Have a ‘Weird’ Brain in the Age of Neurodiversity?
vice.com
vice.com
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-la...
[2] https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/AIA-08-2...
[3] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.5861...
* Antidepressants are barely better than placebo.
* Benzos are a short-term bandaid, best reserved for panic attacks.
* Antipsychotics have truly horrifying permanent side effects.
Amphetamines are a borderline miracle. Again, comparatively. Nothing else available today comes close in effectiveness at treating any psychiatric disorder. They definitely have their shortcomings, but for people with ADHD they're such a huge boost to quality of life and lead to better overall life outcomes.
There's a chance pharmacological depression treatment will catch up to where ADHD is at if/when ketamine become commonly available. Same with PTSD and MDMA. The future of anxiety treatment looks a bit more bleak... but there's experimental stuff out there with HDAC inhibitors and I think some other stuff causing fear extinction.
On average, the acceptable "separated from placebo" margin doesn't have to be that high, but the range of effect is absolutely enormous, even within close relatives.
Antidepressants that did nothing positive or negative for me or some family members were either extremely helpful or extremely harmful to other family members of mine. (Almost never vice-versa; my biochemistry appears to be quite stubborn about responding to a great many classes of treatment, well _or_ poorly, but at least one medication just made me feel completely numb while being extremely helpful to another relative.)
It can also be a weird multidimensional variable in ways many people don't expect - one medication I'm currently taking for depression is 4 pills twice a day (very short half-life), because I was gradually tapering it up. We tried switching to the same manufacturer's single pill that was 4x the dose, twice a day, and immediately I started feeling extremely nauseous whenever in a moving vehicle, which has never happened before. Switch back, problem goes away.
(I know the above sort of outcome is not exclusive to mental health medications, but in my personal experience, I've never had any other medication type vary in outcome based on whether they gave me one or multiple pills adding to the same dosage.)
As far as I know, LSD and psilocybin both have a roughly two week tolerance curve.
How would we separate various mental differences into "disorder" vs "diversity"?
a) Your condition prevents you from being a functioning adult in society. You have to be in someone's care in order to function at a basic level.
b) You're a functioning adult in society but you (or others, or both) perceive your condition as a handicap that hurts areas of your life and needs to be fixed.
c) Your condition is a mixed bag and you perceive it as beneficial in many ways.
I'd say (a) is definite "disorder" territory, (c) is leaning into "diversity", and (b) is a gray area. It could be "diversity" if you choose to embrace it and live with it, or a "disorder" if you're set on keeping it at bay.
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.
I don't understand what you mean by that. The world is not "designed" in any way for anyone, all beings from bacteria to animals and humans live as they can, so you probably want to say something else, can you please tell that with different words?
You can still interact with the world, but being an outlier adds a whole lot of little bits of friction and discomfort that a more statistically average person doesn't experience.
It appears that when another person recounted how their experiences are different in a way that can sometimes be unpleasant, you assumed that they were placing a burden on others to change for their benefit (or that they were entitled to it). I don't think that is a correct interpretation.
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.
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.
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.
I'm trying to understand how things can be compared without some sort of internal visualization.
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).
Now I've said nothing specific about either these things, besides size.
Can you tell me if a barbaz fits through a door? Probably.
Can you see that you can reach that anwser without doing any math about how big doors and washing machines are, but just with implicit knowledge?
The source of truth here is not visualization, it's knowledge. In fact, whatever you visualized, I gave you too little details so that your visualization would have to make up extra things that aren't true. You don't even know if the shape of those things is square or circular.
So even if you can't do it without visualizing, you should see that visualization is really just pulling from some other source (abstract knowledge). You can bypass that step and just get to know the result, without visualizing it.
I'm particularly curious about a bowling pin because we often only see them from far away, so size is harder to gauge in the first place. I can't form detailed images of anything in my mind, but those images are also all "normalized" to an extent - e.g. in my head, both bowling pin and baseball bat seem to be similar in size. Even though that's very much not true. So to me, visualization and size comparison are totally different faculties.
A bat is definitely longer than a bowling pin, but not by much. I don't see either in mind when doing this referencing.
These ideas are linked through memories of spatial relatedness, not imagery.
I once had an interesting discussion with someone who had participated in unique treatments for PTSD. The councilors advised the patients, when they saw disturbing imagery in mind, to place the imagery on a poster. They indicated that most patients could do this task. They then proceeded to have the patient put the poster on the wall "across the room". The image "shrunk" in mind by forcing it into spatial perspective. They then had the patient put the poster on a telephone pole "across the street". This shrunk it even more. A diminishment in the strong feelings (stress) related to the imagery was reported in some patients. So, the smaller something appears, the less some appear to react to the imagery. Small monsters vs. large ones, I guess.
At least to me if you are even just imagining the lengths you are still visualizing.
I don't assign numbers when mentally comparing things. I compare them relative to each other. I think that's why it's hard to compare things that have a large difference in size.
As opposed to never having seen or been told about a tennis ball or a keyhole, and expected to know which is smaller?
The idea of aphantasia doesn't imply being blind. Assuming someone is sighted, you can still see objects and internalize an order of "small to large" things without necessarily using mental imagery to make those connections. I'm not sure if I have some "kind of aphantasia" but I also don't generally visualize things in my head, instead remembering logical relations based on my (non-visual) memories.
I literally can't imagine what it's like to have a vivid imagination because to me my perception of reality and whatever I can "imagine" are as obviously different as black is from white. I could never confuse one for the other, and I don't know how they can even be compared.
This gets back a bit to what alar44 was saying:
>> I'm still all in on these people thinking imagining something is a hallucination.
Having a vivid imagination is not the same as hallucinating. There is no confusion in my mind between what is real and what is imagined (visual or auditory imaginations, I can also imagine smell and taste, but to a much lesser extent). I don't "see" my mental images through my eyes, in the sense that if I want to imagine what a chair would look like in the corner of my loft, I see the real scene (loft without the chair) and imagine (in my mind) a separate scene, the same (to the accuracy of the imagination) but with the chair.
But it very much is an image in my head. It's not an abstract sense of what it would be like to have the chair there, it is the same as recalling a scene from the past to me. But deliberately altered, rather than accidentally altered based on faulty memory. In the same way, I can recall the visual image of pages I have read (this ability has declined with age) and read the words off that recalled image.
I get more of a picture than `chousuke, but it's certainly not a scene or an image. The best way I can think of describing it is a very low-res/blurry/faded image. Like I sorta can picture my mom's hairstyle and sorta put it on top of a face and pull in a few other details from specific memories here and there. But things like color of eyes, or size of certain facial features vs other? No way.
Consider the lobotomy procedure, for instance.
> There's no way someone can't picture their mom in their head.
No matter how limited your thinking of other's experiences, I don't consciously see an image of anyone or anything at anytime while awake, in mind. Period. I know exactly what my mom looks like, but I still love her with all my heart. She is aware that I can't see her in mind and has said that she always knew I was different, but loves me just the same! I guess she "makes up" for my lack of this ability, given she can take herself back anywhere at anytime and see anyone that was there in that place in excruciating detail. It's a bit odd, but she has reported she can't see people in mind she doesn't love. I view this as a "tag" on which she is able to recall the images...
I thank you for your question, given it has given me a rather large dump of an idea into thinking mind that I will implement in my conscious AI project. Gratitude also goes out to whoever put spacial search into Solr: https://solr.apache.org/guide/8_1/spatial-search.html
<flip>.com~> Should I use whomever or whoever in this sentence: Also, thanks goes out to whoever put spacial search into Solr?
system=> No training data found for that command. Consider revising. x
ambrosial-hound*> ...
ambrosial-hound*> There is no definitive answer to this question, as both forms are considered acceptable. However, many people prefer to use "whoever" in situations where the subject of the sentence is unknown or unclear.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.
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
It's similarly hard to hold onto a mental picture of a puzzle piece profile I'm missing or such.
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".
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.
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.
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.
Of course, first and foremost, one must understand and accept the risks.
I do suffer from ADHD (which has been getting more severe over the years), which leads to anxiety and depression (I call it the ADHD->anxiety->depression circle, vicious thing).
It doesn't have to be accepted. It needs to be fucking fixed.
I am in Europe, where it's "accepted" as laziness. So I can't get proper medication and recently started my own mini lab risking years in prison. I realized I am absolutely, undoubtedly fucked without medication, and that's the only solution I came up with, judge me lol. Chemistry is fun, though.
The heavyweights at the firm all scored in the “definitely see a clinician” range.
My personal opinion of it was the “pretty boys” were in it for the dough and the prestige and not the love of the game. Personally, I joined for wanting to work and hone my skills. I could see it being a viable recruiting strategy.
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.
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.
Not everything is a disease. Human behavior is very diverse and there's a broad spectrum of perfectly normal individuals.
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.
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."
schizophrenia isnt even in the newest DSM