neurodiversity

AMA with Jeffrey Ladish. Wednesday 2/4 at 2:00 PM CT

Executive director of Palisade Research; studying AI loss of control risks.

Internal Representations: Do you think in words, pictures, smells, something else? When I was 17 I had a conversation with my friends Dave S. and Kirky that blew my mind. It was in that conversation that I discovered some people have a continuous internal monologue.

Prior to that conversation, I was aware of internal monologues from movies and novels, (I was reading a lot of Stephen King and he uses them liberally).

I'd always assumed this was just a kind of narrative convention. Of course people don't actually think in words. You just have to write it like that to make it work in a movie or a novel.

But then I had that convo with Dave and Kirky and they both insisted that they literally had a voice talking to them in their head pretty much all day.

I don't think in words. I also don't think in images, at least not very clearly. I'm somewhere around the middle of this scale



But "the middle" here still feels pretty impoverished, and I certainly don't do most of my thinking in a primarily visual way.

I'm also certainly not enlightened. I'm thinking much of the day, just like almost everyone else.

The most natural way to describe my experience of thinking is "I think in thoughts," but that's a bit circular. My thoughts are something like shapes in some abstract space, something like feelings, sometimes with a bit of fuzzy visual information, sometimes with a bit of language. There's a thing in NLP call Visual-Kinetic Synesthesia which is probably closish to the mark.

So, it's always gratifying when I hear someone else describe something similar, like in this passage from a recent substack article

In the 1940s, when the French mathematician Jacques Hadamard asked good mathematicians how they came up with solutions to hard problems, they nearly universally answered that they didn’t think in words; neither did they think in images or equations. Rather, what passed through the mathematicians as they struggled with problems were such things as vibrations in their hands, nonsense words in their ears, or blurry shapes in their heads. - Henrik Karlsson

This passage, and the article, sort of implies that this mode of thinking is especially smart. For the record, my guess is that's not true. Perhaps different modes are better suited for certain kinds of tasks. I'm not even convinced of that. I'm a little above average at math, but my strongest talents are linguistic, which would naively make you guess that I thought primarily in words. And there are brilliant visual artists who are fully aphantasic.

I'd love to hear from you about your experience of thinking, especially the internal sensory experience.

A Future I Love is One Where I Can Be Autistic Safely. “You don’t look autistic,” I’m told as I open up about it for the first time with someone I barely know.

This conversation is familiar, considering I have it at least once a month. Thankfully, since I’m not in middle school anymore, this is no longer met with strange looks or shocked laughter; however, adults are just as messy as children – they’re just better at covering it up.

With social advocacy for everyone being newly-prevalent in our society, so many people call themselves “allies,” but never actually do the work that the term requires. Rather, the term they should use is “accomplice” – not actually calling autistic people the r-word or straight-up bullying us, but side-eyeing us when we walk by and treating us like puppies. 

Parents often believe that the minute you step foot in a university, you become more mature. However, especially for fresh-out-of-high-school students, they’re still their same high school-selves, just with an added sense of responsibility. Fortunately, I’ve been able to have accommodations in my classes that allow me frequent breaks and the ability to leave class as needed, yet some professors have seen this as a challenge:

“Elwyn, where are you going?”

“To the bathroom.” I lie. I’m about to have a panic attack and don’t want to make it everyone else’s problem.

My face is red with embarrassment as students stare at me, familiar stifled giggles ringing through my ears. It’s either to console the teacher’s feelings, making a spectacle out of myself as I apologize for interrupting his speech about American history and explain to the entire class that I’m special needs, or leave and not come back.

I take the latter.

Thus, to me, a future that I love is one where I can exist safely, where I can be seen as a person: nothing more and nothing less. Of course, as children, we are taught to “treat others how [we] want to be treated,” though we often leave out conversations surrounding those who are “different,” or, in modern terms, neurodivergent.

One way that I believe a safer future can be created for neurodivergent and Autistic individuals is through education that actually aims to teach people that we exist and are equals, rather than having materials that are a personification of “getting it over with.” Likewise, representation in children’s media is extremely important, especially for those who might not otherwise meet Autistic and other neurodivergent people in their lives. Modern television shows, such as Sesame Street and the character Julia, represent Autistic people in a way that is both educational and respectful, though significant work needs to be done.

Additionally, not only is representation important, but it is needed for neurodivergent and Autistic children. Growing up, I often did not see characters explicitly stated as neurodivergent despite having those traits, and found myself relating to them, such as Mabel from Gravity Falls or Samantha Coleman from Wii Deleted You, leading to my own sense of representation despite the characters never having been confirmed as Autistic. Autistic individuals might see shared traits in fiction and “head canon” a character to have their diagnoses, more confirmed representation is necessary for a kinder future.

While many psychologists say things along the lines of “small steps lead to big change,” it is clear that this is absolutely true – you just have to come to those conclusions yourself. In this case, though, small and seemingly insignificant things that might mean nothing to us can mean the world to someone else. As adults we can think of something as a child that shaped us, and in my case, I believed that I couldn’t go into the bathroom late at night or else Slenderman would get me. Seeing Autistic and neurodivergent characters in media and also learning about how children can treat others who might not think similarly to them, can make a necessary change in our society that creates a future that not only I would love, but other Autistic people would, too. 

#FutureYouLove