[HN Gopher] What Does It Mean to Have a 'Weird' Brain in the Age...
___________________________________________________________________
What Does It Mean to Have a 'Weird' Brain in the Age of
Neurodiversity?
Author : webmaven
Score : 32 points
Date : 2022-03-30 18:08 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vice.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vice.com)
| jotm wrote:
| > 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 prosthesis? 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 wrote:
| Please, don't take the "dying" route. You have much to offer,
| and your life can very much have a point.
| threads2 wrote:
| 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| outdated/vague/meaningless as "hysteria" and "melancholia".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
| TOGoS wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| belkinpower wrote:
| 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.
| mescaline wrote:
| 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
| aidenn0 wrote:
| 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.
| postalrat wrote:
| If someone asked you if a tennis ball could fit into a keyhole
| you couldn't answer?
| Jtsummers wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| 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).
| tux3 wrote:
| A tetrafoo is four times the size of a barbaz. Tetrafoos
| are pretty big things, about the size of a washing
| machine.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| spijdar wrote:
| > without ever being told one is smaller than the other
| and without being able to visualize both?
|
| 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.
| alar44 wrote:
| I'm still all in on these people thinking imagining
| something is a hallucination. There's no way someone
| can't picture their mom in their head. Yeah, it doesn't
| overlay my visual field, and that doesn't mean I can draw
| it. I really think they are being pedantic/obtuse/silly.
| _dain_ wrote:
| uhh ... it _is_ supposed to overlay your visual field
| politician wrote:
| The brain is made up of a lot of regions, so it's not
| unreasonable to assume that the visual recognition and
| imagery parts aren't communicating or indirectly
| communicating at a low bandwidth with the imagination
| parts in some individuals.
|
| Consider the lobotomy procedure, for instance.
| majormajor wrote:
| If you took a picture of your mom into photoshop and
| started to apply a blur filter, and reduced the contrast,
| how far would you have to push it before it resembled
| what you can call up in your head on demand?
| chousuke wrote:
| In my case, that comparison doesn't really make sense.
| Whatever "image" I have in my head has no resolution,
| detail, or colour; it's just a feeling, and not at all
| like _seeing_.
|
| 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.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| > 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.
| caymanjim wrote:
| I can't picture my mom in my head. I can sorta describe
| some basic features like hair shape and color, and I know
| she doesn't have any strong distinguishing
| characteristics like a big scar or something. No idea
| what color her eyes are, can't visualize ear or nose
| shape. Couldn't pick skin tone or eyebrow shape out of a
| set of possibilities. Couldn't describe her to a sketch
| artist if her life depended on it. If I see a photo I
| know it's her, but I have zero mental image.
| majormajor wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| fdgsdfogijq wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Why do they not advertise this? Autistic people are starving
| for employment despite being extremely skilled. Plus a great PR
| opportunity.
| threads2 wrote:
| yeah I always figured the "we hire autistic people" PR thing
| I see some companies do was more cynical than altruistic
| FeaturelessBug wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| > It's also something that is difficult for me because the
| world itself is not designed to be accessible to me
|
| 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?
| rossnordby wrote:
| Not OP, but consider being 6 feet and 8 inches tall. In many
| buildings (especially older ones), you will have to dodge
| light fixtures regularly. Many doorways will actually be too
| short and you'll need to duck. Cooking in most kitchens will
| end up being quite uncomfortable since you'll be hunched over
| the entire time. You won't fit in a large number of cars.
| Flying in planes becomes physically painful unless you get an
| exit row or pay more. And so on.
|
| 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.
| politician wrote:
| You undermine your point with the CTA for the OP to change.
| kashunstva wrote:
| Isn't the built world designed by humans with particular
| viewpoints for other humans with a certain set of
| perspectives, capabilities and capacities to adapt to those
| built realities? (But not necessarily all such
| capabilities...)
| tonymet wrote:
| "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.
| throwaway684936 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| That is pretty much counter to whole realization of
| neurodiversity but ok
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-04-01 23:01 UTC)