I recently had a revelation which will simplify our understanding of the human brain. Reading about yet another celebrity relieved to get a diagnosis of autism in their fifties, or to discover they are on a spectrum of some sort, they report that this explained why they always felt different. But aren’t we all different? Whether you are a psychiatrist or a brain surgeon, nobody understands how the brain works, how that grey jelly holds a universe of knowledge and creativity…
‘A synapse is a structure that permits a neuron (or nerve cell) to pass an electrical or chemical signal to another neuron or to the target effector cell. Synapses are essential to the transmission of nervous impulses from one neuron to another.’
So where does that electricity come from, how did it get into your brain, charged up by your mother’s solar powered battery when you were in the womb?
Enough of scientific talk. The only term you need to know is neuro diverse, it covers everything. The human brain is so amazing it would be strange if it didn’t work in many diverse ways, no one is wrong, just different.
Most of us are not as clever as we think we are. We know that humans are super intelligent because we build cities and space stations and create sublime art and music. Alas, most of us could not even build a garden shed or write a knitting pattern ( the original binary system ) let alone create a computer. But we still have the capacity to find our way round a big city or experience the joys of culture.
When experts are inventing new syndromes they are more interested in our interactions with each other and our talents only come into the equation when everyone assumes autistic people must be brilliant at ‘Something’.
A person who identifies as autistic may feel unable to cope with parties or too much stimulus of noise or lights, but have a wonderfully heightened awareness of music or nature that passes others by. Of course we will never know because we don’t know what others see, hear or feel and if we are experiencing the same sensations. We don’t even know what is mind and what is brain and what is ‘mental health’. I cringe when I hear people say ‘Then I had to leave work because I had mental health.’ Noo , if you had mental health you would be fine…
If you are in the fortunate position of understanding your own mind and everyone else’s, let us know. In the meantime the rest of us have a good standby to cover work and social life.
‘I’m Neuro Diverse.’
‘Oh, so sorry, we’ll move your office desk to a different position and give you a bigger computer screen.’
‘You must come to our special quiet screening of the film.’
‘Would you like someone to accompany you to your hospital appointment?’
For plenty of neuro diversity, why not read one of my books?
Times and Tides of a Beachwriter 
And it’s nonsense anyhow. Out in the real world, a diagnosis of being on any kind of “spectrum” is only useful if it gets you some kind of help. It doesn’t. I saw that with my daughter. Being on a spectrum is academic.
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Yes very true in a lot of cases.
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Another deliciously subversive piece, Janet. (Did you know there are now even special writing sites for ND people? Not sure how they screen for imposters.)
Be careful answering the door; it could be the NHS come to give you some ND re-programming.
PS – Before you leap to your keyboards to cancel me, I have friends and relatives ‘on the spectrum’ and I am aware of, and sympathetic to, the complexities that brings to people’s lives.
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Thanks Doug, most of my relatives are either on or waiting to be diagnosed as on a spectrum, ha ha!
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Why does everything have to be compartmentalised?…a spectrum, an ism… there are so many isms now my heads spinning….:) x
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Yes Carol someone somewhere is busy churning out new isms and exias. I remember when one of the mothers at our junior school announced she was going to see the headmaster to tell him her son had dyspraxia. At the time none of us had heard of that term.
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It’s just crazy, Janet a good percentage of these illnesses are caused by chemicals in our foods and in the air and some is down to spoilt kids with no discipline…That’s my rant of day…lol x
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Yes goodness knows what is done to young brains by pollution, but children still need guidance as well!
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When I was young, ADHD was just called ‘being uncontrollably naughty’. While I am all for progress in medicine, it does seem that new ‘conditions’ are being discovered daily. As for my brain, it seems to be opening up and seemingly expanding its recall as I get older. I suspect it wants to get rid of all the millions of thoughts inside it before I die.
Like wiping the hard drive on a computer.
Best wishes, Pete.
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Yes Pete and our poor teachers did not have teaching assistants and one to one helpers to assist with ‘problem’ children. Wiping your hard drive and downloading onto blogosphere, an interesting concept!
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You are very funny, Janet, with some of your thoughts. We are not all born equal and most of us are just regular. Only a few of us are unusual and that might just be disappearing in our technological age of zombie people.
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Thanks Robbie, I hope we don’t all disappear into zombie levelling.
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The trouble is there is no education system that can teach each individual person in the way best suited to them. We would have to have very enlightened individual tutors. I was trained to help dyslexics and each of those had different abilitiies and needed different solutions.If we studied HOW people learn rather than WHAT we might get a more balanced society.
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Yes Julie, each of my three had a totally different way in to learning to read. What happened to the idea of open plan schools and pupil lead learning?
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Sorry, didn’t proof read ; abilities. Julie.
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I think we all have something unique to offer the world; the key is discovering what that is…
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Yes Jim and often it’s after we have gone!
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