It's too bad that we need to classify people at all. Too bad people just don't except the differences and enjoy them. Nowadays it seem that if you can't conform to some standard that the Stepford Wives creator set, then there's a drug you should be taking to treat your nonconformity.
I find the categories useful, as long as they are not taken
too seriously.
Mark
Hi, Mark. Becky asked me to look in and also to read your neuroelitism page (I even noticed your comment about "if you have made it this far...") I haven't written here, as yet, so I hope you don't mind if I both reply in part to you but also use this "event" as a segue for some of what I probably should have taken a moment to say, earlier.
My first reaction to your earlier comment, "We are all neurologically different. Everything else is human categorization," was to immediately feel a sense of agreement. The idea that came instantly to mind in support of your comment is evolution, species, and human categorization of genus, family, order, and so on above that. Nature does tend (with exceptions) to show us the concept of species. A species is a natural division of sorts, shown to us by nature, and not merely "human categorization." However, ideas such as genus and family, for example, are human-imposed ideas that help us discuss things with each other perhaps. Nature cares not a whit about genus or family, one way or another. They are human impositions, not natural divisions. One must remain aware of that.
But thinking a little more closely about it, I disagree with you, too. Saying "we are all neurologically different" really says nothing much of use. In fact, there are indeed important similarities about neurological differences among us and nature shows us some of the demarcations rather easily. Let me point out a few that come to mind, which I perceive exist though of course I am open to being wrong about it. Before I do that, let me clarify my meaning about natural demarcation.
Natural demarcations are boundaries that form out of critical self-organization and which nature shows us if we study long enough. Some are fairly obvious, others subtle until we learn more when they also often become clearer to us. For example, there is are several clear demarcations between an "atom" and a "molecule." I won't belabor these here, but suffice it that these demarcations aren't at all human-imposed (so far as I'm aware) but instead derive from rather wide, vacant gaps between different areas of interest. I don't mean gaps in the sense of distance only, but on scales of natural force interaction, mass, distance, etc. Which you prefer depends on what you care about at the time, but it does turn out that the distinction between 'atom' and 'molecule' as well as 'nucleus' and 'subatomic particle' all exist because of what nature has shown us as opposed to just being some arbitrary classification. A more subtle case is the now-famed dwarf planet, Pluto. In that case, the demarcation is nearly as pronounced (a separation by at least five orders of magnitude on some useful metrics about planets recently developed) as those regarding, say, whole atoms and their nuclei. But that recognition took some additional study and thinking to arrive over time. When it did, the arguments were made and rather clearly appreciated by those informed on the subject and examining them. So the choice was made to place Pluto into a different category -- not because of some arbitrary division, but instead because of what nature itself does with solar systems more generally and with ours in particular. We just came a little late to understanding it. But eventually did come to see better.
The axioms and simplfiying physical theory we find valuable, by the way, are ones that (using my phrasing and no one else's) "sing to the mind" in a very biological/evolution sense. Ones we can use to help us think quantiatively about nature around us. Whether or not an alien race (not human in any sense at all, let's say) would find the exact same set when developing the "laws of nature" would be something else, again. Perhaps nature itself would limit the range of possible configurations of fundamental axioms and rigorous deductions that could be usefully juxtapositioned with their "experience" of nature so that they would arrive at the same mental artifices we find useful to us. But I honestly can't say for sure. It's possible there exists some other basic set of axioms they would find easier as starting points and from which they could arrive at simplifying laws equally as quantitatively useful in predicting natural experience, as they seem to share it with each other, as our own highly unified science knowledge is for us.
All this takes me back to "everything else is human categorization" from your comment. No, not everything else is just that. Much categorization (not all, of course, as my earlier example of genus and family point up) is merely helpful for communication between humans and has little other value. But some categorization (together with differentia) closely mirrors nature, too, and the natural demarcations that collective experience shows us.
...
I was shy, never dated (in fact, not until I was mid-24 in age -- Becky is my "first and only"), and literally would run away if a girl asked me out. Not because I had any particularly bad experiences on this score. I just knew how important all this was to me and I was afraid of my own inability to understand how others behaved. (My only frightening experience came in my last year of high school. A high school teacher stood over me while I worked late after school let out and said, "Kiss me." I literally ran away, that day. And never went back to that class.) Part of the reason why I avoided dating, I suppose, was also because I absolutely hated typical group interactions (small talk is literally like rusty nails on chalkboard to me -- asking "What do you think of the weather?" quite literally runs physical sensations of shivers down my spine and makes me want to quickly go somewhere else.) Again, this had little to do with specific bad experiences and mostly to do with times when people around me would mysteriously behave in ways that appeared to be quite natural to them and where I simply couldn't fathom how they did it -- it "didn't compute" to me. I couldn't guess about it and I knew this from observation and trying to figure it all out. It was mysterious to me on the one hand, but even worse for me was that I physically reacted to small talk and more so when it was directed to me. On the other hand, I really liked one-on-one serious discussions. And I loved to read, too. In science classes, I got a chance to talk with teachers after class in a one-on-one situation and with other students, also, when involved in a team project. At those times, when the focus was on a subject "parallel" to me -- by this, I mean where each of us was thinking about a problem and thus mentally pointed in a common direction and not pointed at each other -- I was much more comfortable and there was no "grating" on me. I could talk freely. At least, as well as I was able to talk. Which is another thing, altogether.
My mom told me, when I was older (teenager), that I "didn't speak until 6." Now, I am not sure how much of that to believe. But it doesn't really matter. The general idea is probably enough to get the point across. She was concerned because of how long it took me to speak and so were others, as well. In any case, my first recognition of a marked difference in my own thinking about my world around me came when attending Portland State University's "University Scholar's Program." I had scored a perfect 800 on the math section of the SAT and something in the sub-600 on the English part, but somehow this qualified me for the program there. I wanted to take science and math and the program "sounded good," plus it promised to pay for half my schooling. And since I was poor and had to work for my education, this was important. But the program was there, as I shortly found out, in part to force "humanities" education upon unsuspecting science geeks. I was required to take such a class, every term. I hated it. One of the classes I had to take took on the idea of "how we think" and one of the books we were forced to read and discuss floated the idea that the language we think in limits and shapes our ability to think about the world around us. That book talked about different languages, a bit, too. What bothered me about it was that I didn't use English to think. Not even a little bit. Everything was pictures. Numbers are sized-circles, in a way, though that doesn't exactly capture the idea. Meetings with people are things I can later rotate in my mind, while thinking later on them. Unstated emotions and failed understandings are rather easily observed, for me. But I have no idea who said what and in what order, later on. The meeting is like a painting and I cannot say which brush strokes were first and which were later on, just looking at it. Some vague memory of the time sequences remain, but not so much as most folks seem to retain.
Which brings me to my speech patterns. I would speak in spurts. People would all too often try and insert themselves into the gaps in my speech, imagining that I'd turned the discussion over to them because of the delay. But I was still working out the words. The process is something like this: I'd have an image I wanted to convey, I'd develop a sentence drawing poorly from my sad lack of ability in "looking up words" and then cycle that sentence through my "English to gestalt" (a word I later learned) processor, then I'd compare the original image with the new one and if they weren't close (and they all too often weren't) I'd repeat the process until I was either satisfied or else frustrated enough to just say one of the earlier phrases and hope for the better of it. I seemed to be readily able to process English into the images I think with, but have great difficulty fabricating the English words that would well reflect the images I wanted to convey.
Yeah. I spoke up in the class about this, sincerely mystified how this book we were discussing hadn't included "my" way of thinking in it. And I was sincerely abused in the class, by both students and teachers (it was the only class I had where two teachers ran the class -- they were lesbian lovers.) No, I didn't try and bring this up to anyone again for more than a decade because of that experience.
Is this just my own impressions, but perhaps largely of "no difference" really? In other words, perhaps everyone uses pictures to a degree and perhaps I don't realize just how much English I do use so maybe there isn't so much of a difference, here?? Could be. But let me pose a few thoughts towards that. I was contracted to help a team of optical physicists and polymer chemists in their development of the first writable CD. They had been working on this project for going on three years when I arrived to help in analyzing various optical configurations. About a week into my involvement, I was talking to their lead optical specialist and asked a question. After answering, he went back to his office but about a half hour he came back and said, "Jon. How did you decide to ask that?" I said, "Hmm? Well, it seemed interesting to me and I wanted to know what you were doing about it." He replied, "Jon. That question didn't occur to us until well past our first year working on this. It isn't obvious, not even now." I said, "What do you mean it isn't obvious? Of course, it is." That was when he took me back to his office and we talked for a couple of hours about it. In the end, I realized that he was thinking in terms of algebraic manipulations, with stepwise application of transforms that he didn't actually visualize directly but instead understood in a distant, almost abstract instead of visceral way. I have had to struggle with mathematics, but mostly because I cannot memorize names and cast-iron formulaic approaches to things and instead had to visualize everything in order to "get it." Once I got it, though, I could re-derive anything I needed almost trivially. That became my power to compensate my weaknesses. And it had helped me in this particular case. I could "see" what he couldn't. Not because I had had more training in mathematics. I hadn't had more. But because I was forced to visualize everything I learned. So it was more a part of me, so to speak. Burnished deeply into my soul and not some "mere memory of a formulaic approach."
In my field, all this has helped me perhaps as much as my other deficits have hurt me. I have poor skills in organization, time sequence, name and event memory; but to compensate, I have good facility with applying visualization. In physics and math, this is more positive than negative, on balance. In many other areas in my life, probably more negative than positive.
In watching my youngest son grow up, Lee has made me recall much more vividly my own youth. He was so very slow at learning English (he was placed into self-contained, special ed classrooms almost immediately upon starting grade school) and yet quite capable at reading to himself. His ability with mathematics and physics is similar and I find him often "seeing" the next thought in some mathematical excursion, asking about the idea in just such a way that makes me realize that he sees these things as I do. (I have taught undergrad mathematics, physics, and computer science as an adjunct so I have at least some experience comparing how he "sees" and asks with how others do.)
In short, yes, I think there are some useful distinctions to be made. Some demarcations that nature may yet show us more clearly, as we continue to learn more about how we think. What those may be is for some other researcher to discover, of course.
Hope you don't mind me being argumentative. Actually, I agree with your crafted statement as far as it goes. And it is important to keep in mind the ease with which we may perceive categorizations imposed by cultural meme rather than by natural demarcations developed out of critical self-organization. But I think there remains some useful things to discover there and I wouldn't sweep them all under the rug of "We are all neurologically different. Everything else is human categorization." That seems to argue to me that there are no natural demarcations to be found and that this is just some muddy and murky mush into which we can never hope to see any further. That, I can't agree with.
Jon
