When someone tells me they have a learning disability or a cognitive disorder, what that tells me is they find it hard to do things that are important to them.
Often a professional diagnostician has given a professional diagnosis. Sometimes they've identified with a published description of behaviors that have been assigned a name. While I know what all those names mean --I've been in the field my entire adult life -- they aren't helpful. While they may for some, accurately identify a problem: dyslexia for example, they are very loosely connected to the solution.
These names are a huge advance over the identifiers of my childhood: stupid, lazy, odd, or crazy. At the same time, while they are more dignified identifiers, they create an identity around what's hard for people to do, and separate us from our abilities and gifts. The move toward identifying as neurodiverse is a step away from this, but it raises the question: diverse from what?
We still have some heavy lifting to do. People seek out these identifiers because they find it hard to do things that are important to them.
We're all familiar with the population bell curve. Whether it measures height, IQ, speed one can travel a mile, it shows the distribution of people for a particular measurement, left to right, from lowest scoring to highest scoring.
If you divide the bell-curve distribution into nine sections -- the standard because it divides the curve into four groups on the left; four on the right with a group centered in the middle of the distribution. This standard nine or stanine simplifies the understanding. Instead of each one of us being in a unique place on the curve, it groups us for categorizing.
In a stanine distribution, the center of the bell curve, which typically contains the largest group, nonetheless represents only 20% of the population. Eighty percent of the population is, well, diverse from the so-called normies.
Here's the distribution of a so-called normal curve
Stanines:
| 1 -4% | 2-7% | 3-12%| 4-17% | 5-20% | 6-17% | 7-12% | 8-7% | 9 - 4% |
Here's the fallacy of the bell curve. It leads us to see the center as normal, when, in fact, that center position is different, or shall I say, diverse, from 80% of the population. It's not just the people at the edges who are diverse, the people in the center represent only 1 in 5 of the population at large.
For starters, let's stop calling some people diverse. We're all diverse.
Since all of us have our own way of being, in a room of 100, we're diverse from the other 99. Out of a million people, you're one in a million. So when a one in a million you shows up in front of me, I'm not interested in your diagnosis. I'm interested in what's important to you.
Then I want to know: What's important to you that's easy? What's important to you that's hard? What catches your attention? What misses your attention? What raises your energy? What depletes your energy?
What is it about you that makes you that one in a million?
Here's a quick win. We all have attention spans. Our attention spans are predictable within a range. We have different attention spans for different cognitive processes. Start to measure your attention for the important things that are easy for you and the important things that are hard for you.
Best news ever! Short or long, your attention span is renewable. When you lose attention, don't fight it. Take a break. Let it renew. Pick up where you left off. Sometimes that break is called sleep. Repeat for the rest of your life.
Tell me how it goes.
Shout out to The Economist this week "ADHD may simply represent another point on the spectrum of neurodiversity: the range of different ways of thinking and behaving that count as normal."
And to the UNC Chapel Hill Child Development Laboratory and All Kinds of Minds who have been on this since the mid-nineties and whose work has powerfully influenced my own.
https://www.csun.edu/sites/default/files/EED-561F-Conversation-with-Mel-Levine.pdf "Levine says he has never seen a child’s mind so gifted that it had no weaknesses or a child without some area of “potential or actual giftedness.”
Warm regards,
Francis Sopper
REFERENCED IN THIS LETTER:
Laboratory: https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.160.1.198
All Kinds of Minds: https://allkindsofminds.org/
https://www.csun.edu/sites/default/files/EED-561F-Conversation-with-Mel-Levine.pdf