Let us consider that we are all partially insane.
It will explain us to each other; it will unriddle many riddles;
it will make clear and simple many things which are
involved in haunting and harassing difficulties and obscurities now.
—Mark Twain
Americans accept diversity in many ways. We accept the diversity of the color of one’s skin. We accept the diversity of those with physical disabilities. We accept the diversity of those immigrants who have legally joined the rest of us immigrants here in the United States of America. We accept the diversity of age, of religion, even of body type. In fact, it’s the law of the land. Discrimination on the basis of such differences is illegal.
We are becoming more accepting of sexual diversity. The 2014 NFL draft will long be remembered for the selection of the first openly gay college football player. When Michael Sam, a defensive end from the University of Missouri, was finally picked in the seventh round, he wept with joy. Then the African-American Sam provided the NFL with another draft-day first when he gave his significant other, an emotional white male, a passionate kiss on the mouth. In that nationally televised moment, acceptance of diversity of sexual preference had finally come to the NFL.
God makes some of us dark, some of us light, and some of us in-between. He makes some of us tall and others “height challenged.” So why is it so hard for us to accept the fact that God makes our brains different? Is it because there may not be a visual giveaway, like different-colored skin or, in the case of those who are disabled, a wheelchair or prosthesis? When it comes to different brains, it’s time for everyone to stand up and say that we will no longer tolerate society’s one-size-fits-all approach vis-a-vis education and the workplace. Asperger’s syndrome is just one example of the vast array of different brains. There’s the autistic brain, the ADHD brain, the OCD brain, the rest of the learning disorders brains, the psychological disorder brains (anxiety), and the psychiatric disorder brains (bipolar disorder, depression). God saw fit to give us all these different brains. Not better brains, not worse brains. Just different.
In many areas of the United States, if you add up the “minorities”—the Hispanics, Asian Americans, African Americans, you name the ethnicity—they demographically outnumber the Caucasian population. In other words, the once white majority is now the minority.
Just as ethnic diversity has become the rule, the same thing will happen with neurodiversity. The number of people with different brains is growing. If this trend continues, the neurotypicals, the so-called normal brains, will soon be in the neuro-minority (if they’re not already).
And I believe the trend will continue. In fact, it has to if our collective brains are going to keep up with all the advances in technology and all the changes in how we perceive data and images. If you’re a teenager today and your brain doesn’t develop at least some form of ADHD, you might not be able to text on your smartphone while watching a video, listening to music, hearing (or pretending not to hear) your mom’s instructions, checking out what’s on TV, looking out the window, petting your dog, and so on. Your brain had better metamorphose to be able to take in all these stimuli and make some sense of them. In the same way that some Asperger’s syndrome brains have an advantage over the neurotypical brain when it comes to, for example, focusing on numbers for long periods of time, certain types of brains are innately able to multitask. These brains have an advantage over the “old-fashioned” neurotypical brain, which could focus only on one thing at a time.
Back when we were teenagers, Paul Kaliades, Charlie Singer, and the rest of my pals spent countless hours playing stickball in the schoolyards of Jersey City. It was a relaxing way to spend an afternoon. Hardly any brain-related activity was involved, outside of the small talk of sports, girls, and arguing balls and strikes.24
24 For those not familiar with Jersey City–style stickball, the strike zone is represented by a box drawn in chalk on a wall. On a close pitch, it’s up to the batter and pitcher to decide if it was a strike or not (unless there’s chalk on the ball to prove it).
Do you see teenagers playing stickball or any such relaxing activity today? I don’t. Baseball has its loyal fans, but are today’s ADHD teenagers willing or able to put up with its slow pace? Next time (or if) you go to a baseball game, locate a parent sitting with a teenage son or daughter, and see if the kid is watching the game or checking his phone. (The parent may be too.) In fact, when was the last time you were with someone who went fifteen minutes without texting, e-mailing, or checking some data or an app on his smartphone? Our digital communications are endless and relentless. Nobody’s brain gets a rest these days.
Brains are changing in order to parallel the exponential changes in the Internet. It’s not necessarily cause and effect. But look at the pace of change of civilization and technology. The printing press that Johannes Gutenberg developed during the Renaissance, sometime around 1450, changed the world radically, because it led to the first assembly-line mass production of books, but it didn’t happen overnight. It took maybe fifty years. Another invention that changed society was television, and it took perhaps twenty years for the world to change its entertainment habits and become a living room TV society.
But it took the Internet less than a decade to overhaul everything: book publishing, newspapers, music, communication, education, television, sports, the way we read books and watch sports. There’s no aspect of modern life that hasn’t been disrupted by the Internet. And the disruption continues, with social media: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, to name just a few. Today the big changes take place over months, not centuries or decades.
The time has come not just to accept neurodiversity but to embrace it. What I originally thought would be a book about Asperger’s syndrome turned out to be about everything I’ve learned about Aspies that applies to all types of brains, to all types of individuals to our entire society. I’ve learned that every brain is different. But as long as we share a common vision and certain basic values such as “Thou shalt not kill,” “Do unto others,” and so on, then “Every brain that is different” will be an accepted fact of life. Society will adapt to the differences in our brains just as it has to our other more easily recognizable differences. The educational system, workplace, and society will no longer be one size fits all. Each individual will have the opportunity to maximize his or her potential. And we will all be the better for it.