A word I will not define
I will not commence
with the apparently obligatory description of that thing commonly referred to
as “autism”.
And for that
I believe some explanation is, if not required, at least expected, and so, rather
than disappoint, here is
An explanation
Autism
appears to have only one characteristic: that it can only be defined in a
clumsy, partial or unwieldy manner.
This
suggests that autism is not, in fact, a thing in itself, but a combination of
several things.
Rather than
struggle with this I will simply ignore the word.
I suspect
that that will not satisfy many people.
Therefore,
may I offer you
Some words I will define
As it is the
name of this blog it is only right that I start this section by talking a
little about what I mean by neurodiversity.
The brain receives inputs. It analyses, categorises, stores and responds to them. Diversity in this context refers to the full range of observable
characteristics arising from how the brain does these things: it is inclusive. In particular, it is focused on those instances which
expand the range of observed characteristics: it is extreme. Finally, it is about the people who display those extreme
characteristics: it is human.
Putting all
those parts together, we can say that neurodiversity is concerned with extreme human
characteristics, with the people who display those characteristics, what is
going on in their brains, and why and how this occurs.
A word which
will come up again and again is why.
I like this word. Get used to it because you will meet it often. Make friends
with it and it will serve you well. Another handy word is how. When why can’t help, very often it is because you are asking
the wrong question. Try asking how instead.
I mentioned people. Neurology does not exist in
isolation, it happens in people. When we look at the signals going to a brain we
will likely start with that person’s senses. When we look at the activities
resulting from a brain’s output, those will be activities carried out by the
person. While that may seem extraordinarily obvious, it does need saying. It is
far too easy to talk about a characteristic or some abstract concept in
isolation as if they had no context. It is important to refer to the
person, and often also to that person’s environment.
Characteristics help us to define aspects of
neurodiversity, and refer to certain clusters of human activity which currently
have labels attached to them, such as ADD or autistic, describe what those
labels refer to, and examine the validity of those clusters and their labels.
I also
choose to refer to the person and to characteristics because they are neutral
terms, carrying no judgement. It is
not difficult to appreciate why avoiding negative terms and words with negative
connotations is preferable: they encourage an end to enquiry, and close off
possibilities. With that in mind the question may be fairly asked: Why not simply
use positive terms? Positive terms also close off possibilities, and can do so
in more subtle ways. Both positive and negative terminology create traps which,
if we are to make honest progress, must be avoided.
Having got
that business of definitions out of the way, let’s move on . . .
Exit MAQQI stage left, carrying a
dictionary
