Ideas - What it means to fully embrace neurodiversity

Episode Date: June 3, 2025

Imagine a world without Mozart or Michelangelo, Einstein or Edison. Famous for their creativity, a "mysterious force" that psychiatrist and ADHD expert, Ed Hallowell, says is a commonality in neurodiverse people. Neurodiversity is a relatively new term, but the thinking behind it has been going on for a while. There’s increasing evidence that what we know today as Autism, ADHD, BipolarDisorder, Schizophrenia, and Dyslexia may have been a way for us to extend our species chances of survival. And yet the thinking around brain variations like ADHD is that it's a deficiency, something that needs to be fixed. Sandra Bourque's two-part series, The Myth of Normal traces the social and cultural response to neurodiversity and whether there's a way back to seeing this way of thinking as an advantage.

This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayad. Imagine a world without Mozart or Michelangelo or Einstein or Edison. Or a world without the physical genius of swimmer Michael Phelps, or the comedic brilliance of Charlie Chaplin. This mysterious force called creativity is made of neurodiverse people. Neurodiversity captures the idea that variations in our brains are part of the natural human spectrum, part of the normal range of our cognitive capacities.

You know, the social yakity-yaks didn't make the first stone's spear. It was, you know, a person on the autism spectrum that figured out how to invent things like that. There's increasing evidence that what we know today as autism, ADHD, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and dyslexia may not be the result of disease, but may have been a way for us to extend our species' chances of survival. It's rare to find a highly creative person, someone who is original and thinks outside the box and changes the world. It's rare to find someone like that who doesn't have one of these conditions.

Some experts believe these brain variations have been around as far back as we can measure. This is the first of a two-part series we're calling The Myth of Normal from contributor Sandy Bork. Growing up, I always felt different from others. I was restless and impulsive and had trouble regulating my intense emotions. But out in the world, I felt like a kid in a candy store. I wanted to experience everything all at once, and would often leap into action with little regard to danger or consequences.

Friends would sometimes call me crazy or insane. I wouldn't be diagnosed with ADHD until my 50s. As I rewound the tape of my life, it helped me understand why I was impulsive and why I was so easily distracted, but it also explained my strengths. It's just that I'd been living in a world that wasn't designed for me. This kind of mismatch is common for those with ADHD, autism, and other differently wired brains, and lies at the heart of Steve Silberman's book NeuroTribes. In it he poses a simple question. Instead of seeing

these people as having a lifelong disability, why not see them merely as having cognitive differences? One of the things that we've learned in part by studying neurodiversity is the fact that having different kinds of minds working together makes for a more resilient species as human beings, just as a diversity of life forms in an Amazon rainforest makes a community of non-human beings more resilient and more responsive to changing conditions.

Ed Hallowell is a psychiatrist. He's one of the foremost experts on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. He has ADHD himself. Even the term itself, deficit disorder, you know, it states flat out that you have a deficit and that you have a disorder. And it's hard to feel good about yourself if you have a deficit disorder. And it's hard to feel good about yourself if you have a deficit disorder. And so, the name itself, it creates what I think is the real problem, which is feeling that you're less than. I mean, that's what holds you back in life. You feel that you're not up to snuff, you're not

able to fly high. And the truth is completely the opposite of that. It took me years to develop coping skills and to shift my thinking, to understand that terms like ADHD and autism were actually neurodiversity. These labels, well actually, they're only about 80 years old at the most. And civilization, or rather humanity, has been around for hundreds of thousands of years. Some researchers posit that in our hunter-gatherer past, neurodivergent people would have thrived.

Thomas Armstrong is a psychologist and executive director of the American Institute for Learning and Human Development and author of The Power of Neurodiversity. He argues that we're neurodiverse for a reason. Nature did that so that it would have optimal brain power to deal with any kind of changes, adaptations that might need to be done in the environment. I mean, in an earlier evolved state, you know, some more

primitive animal was born with a kind of a hardwired mechanism to respond in fixed ways to the environment. So if the environment changed, it couldn't adapt and it would die and not pass its genes along. So really, one of the most important aspects of evolution in humanity is flexibility. The evidence is limited. It comes from bones and artifacts, which tells us little about the cognitive abilities of prehistoric people. Well we can't really know what went on in prehistoric society. There was certainly a survival element going on in terms of danger from weather, from animals,

from warring tribes, having to get up and not shopping at the shopping market, but having to kill your food or having to go out and gather it and having to endure drought, having to endure floods. And so I think there were a range of abilities that were required in those societies. The individual in today's world who's labeled as ADHD, who has hyperactivity, distractibility, and impulsivity might actually be a superior being back in the prehistoric times. Distractibility might have been a very good thing to be aware of, you know, a 360-degree view of what is around you. So we've got to put ourselves in that world to kind of think, well, what would be the kind of traits that you'd want to have in people? And the amazing thing is that they're often in people with diversity.

Our ancestors first emerged between five and seven million years ago. There were periods when at least three or four species of hominins lived at the same time, even in the same place. We, Homo sapiens, appeared between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago, and are now the sole surviving species in this once-diverse family tree. It was brutal, hard, and short. And so it was a difficult time getting along. I mean, you get a little infection, and next day you're dead because there's no antibiotics.

For about 95% of our existence, we lived in small, tightly-knit groups, following migratory herds and foraging nuts and berries. So it was very, I think, touch and go. And it was amazing that humans actually survived at all, I think. But we did because of the evolution of this brain of ours. Surviving didn't mean just physical strength. It also meant mental strength,

creativity and problem solving. This is Suzanne Antonetta reading from her book, A Mind Apart Travels in a Neurodiverse World. ADHDers would have thrived in nomadic hunting and gathering societies, with a rapidly shifting but intense attention span, and a taste for novelty and risk, important traits in the search for food. It would have taken a great deal of quick thinking to surround and bring down an orc, ancestor of the cow.

These skills would have been highly advantageous in securing rewards like a mate. So I don't think that there's any one particular constellation of genes that was optimal back in those times, but I think that the individuals who have these neurodiversities that were probably useful to survival in the wild. And I think back then they were more attuned to making the most of what they had, and that included human resources. So I suspect that while there might have been some of this isolation and ostracism going on,

there also was some degree of trying to make use of the traits that these neurodiverse individuals had and finding a place for them in the society too. We don't value the people with autism and schizophrenia and ADHD and dyslexia. we see them in terms of their negatives, when in fact, if they were back in the prehistoric times, they would have been contributing their positive traits to the survival of the group as a whole. I think it's important to think in terms of the traits, because what evolves is not a disorder.

A disorder could not possibly evolve. Bernard Crespi is an evolutionary biologist at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. But if we think of the individual traits, what we see pretty much across the board is a mixture of benefits and costs, advantages and disadvantages. So for example, autism being associated with technical abilities and engineering, schizophrenia and bipolar, to some extent depression, being associated with aspects of creativity and imagination and sociality. These balances of benefits and costs are what has evolved. Creatures that survived moved their genes forward the whole package. Negative, neutral, too, as long as the whole continues.

There's a lot of evolutionary flotsam in there. Negative, neutrals too, as long as the whole continues. There's a lot of evolutionary flotsam in there. The appendix, the gillslets and embryos, even body hair. See yourself as a Frankenstein being stitched together from a geologic graveyard of parts. You and I are the result of millions of years of successive mutations, the improbable descendants of those who survived and thrived. The brain, according to Gerald Edelman, who's a Nobel Prize-winning biologist, is more like

a rainforest than it's like a machine or a computer. The neurons are in fact like little organisms that are in a struggle for survival, for evolution. The brain being incredibly adaptive, incredibly flexible. There's evidence that those with traits associated with autism, ADHD, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, dyslexia, and depression have consistently represented at least 20% of our population and may have been our very first specialists. Steve Silberman. As Temple Grandin has said, a neurodivergent person would have

been not the people making chit-chat at the front of the cave, but the guy or the woman at the back of the cave who was more comfortable by themselves testing various rocks to see if they would make good arrowheads for hunting. Temple Grandin is an author and professor of animal science at the University of Colorado. She's neurodivergent herself. She's autistic. Well, one of the big two skills of being able to find the things that you would gather, berries, nuts, different things you would gather,

that would require somebody with really good memory. Being a good hunter. In fact, autism and ADHD have a genetic crossover in both clinical presentation. But a person that had very good memory would be valued as a gatherer, because each year you'd remember where food was located. Back in the day there was no writing, there were no books, and cultural knowledge was in people's memories. So people with exceptional memories would have been very valuable. Enhanced sensory ability in in autism. This is found commonly in autistic individuals and typically some level of enhanced sensory abilities like hearing or vision would be expected

to be adapted. And those with dyslexic traits may also have been of great value to the group. Dyslexics often see the big picture so that they would complement the people with autism in that they would complement the people with autism in that they would see the forest rather than the trees, and they would be able to look at kind of whole differences in the terrain, for example, looking at patterns of being able to see the big picture of where you are. Among hunter-gatherer groups that exist today, these kinds of big-picture traits are still prized. The ability to use the stars for reckoning, for example, the ability to look on the horizon

at little bumps and recognize what islands they represent, the ability to look at the shades of dark and light on the water so that you know if you're getting close to a coral reef and so on. So all these kind of visual spatial skills were highly prized and still are highly prized. And whereas there are a lot of kids today with high visual spatial skills, a lot of our kids who are labeled dyslexic, for example, growing up in a culture like that, they might be very well the gifted ones. You know, if you're the sort of person that can't find his car in a large shopping mall,

then you would be at a great disadvantage in a culture like that. You might be disabled in that culture, navigation remediation disorder or something like that. So you know, we could go on, but I think we can see there is a reason why these genes are still in the gene pool. If we are meant to be infinite in all directions, then I guess neurodiversity must happen also. Schizophrenia, bipolar, or autism occurring at first here and there and dying out because of shunning. Or bad choices. Or simply lack of a breeding partner. Over there an Australopithecus male, short and hairy as all pre-humans were, who unaccountably foams in terror at the frogs his companions eat, or stares at

the rings in rocks. Some females regard him with irritation and do not present him with their backsides. End of story. But some do. The genes move on. Individuals with special wiring, so to speak, and I'm speculating, were often regarded as having special gifts. People with schizophrenia might have been the charismatic leaders of ancient times, might have been the ones with visions and had a different take on things, a different perspective and might have gathered people around them and led a migration to a more favorable spot in the land. So in that respect, they would help people to evolve. Some of the more aggressive, I guess, migrations

might have been people who were a bit manic, who were willing to take those chances to move into a colder place or a very different place. If they weren't giving some evolutionary benefit, then they probably wouldn't have lasted. evolutionary benefit, then they probably wouldn't have lasted. Our migratory impulse may have a genetic basis, the DRD47R gene. It's one of the many studied sources for links to ADHD. Laura Honus Webb is a psychologist and author of The Gift of ADHD and has ADHD herself. So the DRD4 7R gene has been called the restless gene, and it has been called the nomadic gene. And I like to think of it as you see a horizon and you run for it. The DRD4 gene influences dopamine, which helps regulate our emotional responses and to take action.

It's also responsible for our feelings of reward and pleasure. Those with the DRD4 variant have a lower sensitivity to dopamine and therefore find it difficult to find reward from ordinary activities. They must look for novel, creative, and more exciting experiences to increase the release of dopamine. And so you can imagine so many different professional careers where that restlessness is absolutely part of it. And I have written about the rockstar gene. Many rockstars have publicly said that they had ADHD

from Adam Levine to Justin Timberlake to Will.i.am. And they attribute so much of their success to their ADHD. We're endlessly curious. We are driven by curiosity. The ADHD mind is like a toddler on a picnic. It goes wherever curiosity leads it with no regard for danger or authority. All the fossil record tells us is that our ancestors, homo sapiens, wandered out of Africa about 185,000 years ago, and about 50,000 years ago developed the symbolic consciousness we know as fully human, which means inner narration, voice, dictating to yourself what the chicken

will become and the world beyond the chicken. As cognitive neuroscientist Merlin Donald says, fully human consciousness is inconceivable without language. Indeed, inconceivability itself is inconceivable without language. Scientists call this the big bang of the human mind. After the bang comes masterful and balletic and even senseless hunting, art, jewelry, ritual. The images of horses and reindeer and bulls molder on the walls of caves. It is important to bear in mind if we go back 20 or 30, 40,000 years, those people were

really not different from us to speak of. They were just as intelligent as us. They mainly just didn't have the complexity of the technology that we have or the big populations that we have. Otherwise, they're really the same. I remember taking a trip to see some of the cave art in southern France, that astonishing work of blowing paint through bird bones, sticking with this, making it essentially what we now understand must have been a life's work in a culture where it would be so easy to die while you're in a cave painting animals on the wall. And it's just astonishingly beautiful ways.

I see a lot of neurodiversity in there. Obviously these people were supported by their cultural group, their tribe, family, or whatever you want to call it. Given they were fed, they were allowed to do this work. And I saw there just this explosion of that kind of artistic gift and whatever you want to call the cognitive ability to say, I'm not going to go hunting today, this is what I'm going to do. That shows a mind not just reactive but reflective, able to plan. Modern humans now called Homo sapiens sapiens become an astonishingly dominant species. You're listening to Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America, on Sirius XM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. Neurodiversity is a relatively new term, but the thinking behind it has been going on for a while.

The notion that what's often seen as debilitating conditions now may have been integral to our evolution as a species. Scientist William Calvin, author of A Brain for All Seasons, theorizes that before about 50,000 years ago, humans lived in a long childhood of dwelling in the present, and that over time these many different minds formed a web which developed into consciousness, what we call inner narration. Other theorists of the mind, like neuroanthropologist Merlin Donald, posit that consciousness developed

as our social groups grew in size, and may have switched on and off like a light bulb about the same time, about 50,000 years ago. So there were moments like those early birds idly flapping their stubs, when consciousness began and flipped off, trying itself out. Suzanne Antonetta is author of A Mind Apart Travels in a Neurodiverse World and Identifies as Bipolar.

She imagines how our neurons may have suddenly started working together, emitting their first spasms of thought. I picture in that moment a woman. She would have looked surprisingly familiar to you, I think, though she'd have a shag of hair, worn teeth. She gnawing on the fresh mow of a reindeer, when suddenly she saw herself, a woman gnawing on a bone. She saw herself unnerving. Why should she be there at all? A woman chewing marrow. A woman whose tucked form, let's say, will be cast forever at the base of a cave somewhere. This is the first of a two-part series from Ideas contributor Sandy Bork called The Myth of Normal. I have a memory of myself as a young child watching my mother standing in

front of the television crying. I was three years old and John F. Kennedy had just been shot. From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time. At least I think it's my first memory. But when was my first moment of consciousness? When was that moment when I first thought about myself as I? We know that most children by the age of two can identify themselves in photographs. But there's no way to peer inside the brain to find the answer to where consciousness lies

or when it begins. If we could, we'd know a lot more about the origins and function of neurodiversity. Imagine the moment when life first emerged from the water, making its way out onto land, continuing the inconceivably long, slow process of evolution. Imagine the first ancestor who thought about himself as an I or about herself as a me. At first I imagined we had scarcely a few words, just enough to contribute to survival. Then gradually the neuronal connections began to build and the inner narrative became more frivolous. Not just antelope over there, but I look good,

peering into a pond. I wonder, was knowing I look good somehow necessary for our survival? For a minute, an image may rise to her out of a pool of water in her memory. She puts that image together with the self she catches appearing in front of her like a picture, chewing out black, hidden meat.

It's the mask she feels suddenly, fitting loosely over this consciousness of hers, terrifying maybe for the seconds it lasts. Then she gets thirsty or something and it's done. I can call her Eve, the mother of thought. Could this kind of thought, consciousness, be something our bodies just dragged along? A happy accident? A fluke?

The short answer is, we don't know. That doesn't mean that the evolution of consciousness itself was a mistake, because you would presumably have had selection for consciousness, whatever that is. Evolutionary biologist Bernard Crespi. And it would very commonly involve social scenarios that one plays out. And that would absolutely have been advantageous, especially in the context of humans competing with other humans than in between groups. In hunter-gatherer societies,

flexible minds that could process information differently, see the world more broadly, and adapt more readily would have had a distinct advantage. Such minds would have transformed our ancestors' lives, a transformation that could have led to the creation of social hierarchies. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] From the evidence of private burial sites,

some of us had far more things. Went to our graves with a great deal more fanfare than others. Certainly we lived in tears of importance as well. And we accelerated with language our development of killing tools. Toggle-headed harpoons, spear throwers, the bow and arrow. headed harpoons, spear throwers, the bow and arrow. If language is a killing tool, handed down to us from the first small grunt coordinated javelin thrusts,

it bears this mark, the reek of blood, the coarse hairs from the downed bull that must have marched like a demi-god through the world before those grunts came to mean throw. Language thrusts influence not just in a political sense, but a personal one as well. Your inner narrative will at times and diverse, forging new ways to think. There's music intelligence, there's picture intelligence, there's a physical intelligence,

there's a social intelligence, and so on. Psychologist Thomas Armstrong. And this model made it really clear why it is that some individuals are really good at something and really bad at something else. You know, how is it they can have these differences? And it's because the brain is a very diverse organism. And in certain areas of the brain, it can work very well, in other areas not well. Probably the best example of trade-offs in the brain comes from savant abilities that are associated with autism. In order for the brain to specialize, it needs to trade off with other things. Bernard Crespi. And there we have people who have these absolutely astounding capabilities, for example, with memory or

music or computing ability. And with savantism, it almost invariably goes along with very severe problems in the social domain. And so there clearly is a tradeoff there. As science and technology advanced, the value of some trade-offs grew. Steve Silberman is author of NeuroTribes, The Legacy of Autism. One of the stories that I didn't get to tell in NeuroTribes was of a man who lived in a small village in Europe in the 19th century. And what he did was he kept

everyone's drains and gutters cleared and fixed in the whole town. And he was known never to join in the village dances, never to join in the big village parties and whatnot. He kept to himself, but he kept the systems in everyone's houses running perfectly. And I would suggest that people with autistic traits in Silicon Valley now are performing the same function for us, except instead of fixing gutters, they're fixing a worldwide communication system. The ability to hyper-focus, to essentially shut out the rest of the world, is a defining feature of autism. And maybe its contribution to world culture

has been underestimated. Today, being social is a lot more important, but you need the people that are good at doing things. Many highly gifted people, you think of Bobby Fischer, for example, he was really good at doing things. Many highly gifted people, you think of Bobby Fischer, for example. He was really good at one thing. He was really good at playing chess. But when it came to human relations, he was terrible.

I've often thought that, you know, the monks that made the beautiful illuminated manuscripts, some of those may have been autistic, to just sit there all day making those absolutely beautiful things in kind of solitude. Let's say autistic monks would have been well suited to create those gorgeous illuminated manuscripts. But for many, those with different minds, finding their place in society wasn't a given. Well, if you look through history, the ruling model was the moral slash religious model. Ed Hallowell is a psychiatrist and author of more than 20 books on ADHD.

And you know, that was you are healthy and good to the extent you try to be. And you know, original sin, and so all we can do is try to be good. And if you failed, that meant you were possessed by the devil, influenced by the devil, and the treatment, quote unquote, was to punish you, particularly children who couldn't control their behavior or their thinking. And then as you got older, if you were different, you could be burned at the stake as being a witch,

because people who are depressed are not a lot of fun to be around, the stake as being a witch, because people who are depressed are not a lot of fun to be around, so you must be a witch. And people who were psychotic were, you know, clearly that was the devil's work. So it was all a moral slash theological model and the locus of control was free will. It was the devil's work, because if you allowed God into your soul, then you would, of course, not be depressed. You'd be filled with the joy of God. And it's just—and that's how people thought!

They not only thought how they felt and believed it and enforced it with a frenzy and a passion. You know, it's analogous to thinking the earth was the center of the solar system. And then when Copernicus said, no, the sun is, you know, he got into a lot of trouble. We don't like to feel that we're not in charge. At that time, psychiatry was just, it wasn't even really a science and it was mostly just abuse. But they also believed that there was a strong theological need to care for people that they considered mentally ill. So there was also a lot of prayer, a lot of religion, a lot of exposing them to religious

practices. So there was this weird dichotomy there between just this abusive behavior and this attempt to care, to introduce them to concepts of mercy and forgiveness and redemption. But then the kinder side of that became more and more just the side of restraints, starving, whipping, people put in basements, you know, kept in essentially dungeons. So the historians tell us that industrialization was one very big factor in the growth of the asylum movement. You know, previously, most people lived in rural areas and population density overall was pretty low. But then if you get a situation where suddenly you've got to move vast numbers of people

off the fields and into the cities in order to provide labor for factories, then they're going to rub up against each other and having somebody who doesn't follow the rules and is distressed and they don't fit in, they're going to be very disruptive. So what you do, you build asylums and you put them in asylums. The Bethlehem Hospital in London, England was one of the first to specialize in housing people who were deemed mad or lunatic. Bethlehem, later known as Bedlam, became so famous that tourists would visit just like Westminster Abbey. It inspired countless poems, plays, and works of art.

The building itself was so opulent, it was compared to the Palace of Versailles. Initially, the asylums were supposed to be, as the word applies, places where the people could just go away to get away from it all, but of course they became hideous and quite abusive institutions in the end. Society, as the French philosopher Michel Foucault writes in Madness and Civilization, has a large stake in the mad. We serve as foil, entertainment, glorified scandal, and

objects of a kind of ultimate dread, since human culture rests so heavily on its sense of the mind. It was the time when people would go on Sundays to walk through the asylums as if they were zoos and gawk at the patients. Because they were chained, they were allowed to taunt them. So they were really treated as freaks, essentially, to use the word the way we would use it relating to our sideshows and things like that. It certainly led off that tradition of using whips, using violence, using chaining and restraining. And they took people for being

melancholy. And I don't know many people who haven't experienced depression at some points in their lives. So you have to ask yourself, who did we lose? Who did we lose in that asylum? These are people that we lost because they had no ability to get to the easel, get the pen and paper. We have lost a lot of people of value. But as time went on, the role of the asylum continued to expand. And there was an enormous filling in of asylums in Europe throughout the 1800s. Then these might be slightly inaccurate, but with something like 5,000 hospitalized people at the turn of the century and then by 1900, something like 100,000. Enormous, enormous increase in what was essentially warehousing people.

With the Industrial Revolution, being normal meant being able to produce something of value to society. Science, music, or art. So there was some room for the mad genius. One famous example, Vincent van Gogh. He had trouble keeping a job and during his lifetime was considered a failure. His asylum records describe traits consistent with what we'd now call bipolar disorder. Despite his difficulties, he completed thousands of paintings and sketches, several of which are among the most expensive in history.

When you look at a Van Gogh painting, you see this incredible, moving, living world. And I think he gives us the gift of re-entering the world in that way. It's moving, it's living. He's almost breaking down our gating mechanisms in a way. And so I think those are some of the gifts that you see and the gifts of simply thinking differently, which means solving problems differently. Solving problems differently.

Consider these famous figures, Sir Isaac Newton, the great 17th century scientist, had few intimate relationships in his lifetime and was suspicious of most people. He wrote letters often filled with delusions. Yet he invented calculus, explained gravity, and built telescopes among his many scientific achievements. Thomas Edison was, of course, one of the most prolific inventors of all time.

But he was known as a difficult child and a persistent questioner. At age seven, Edison's teacher said that, quote, the hyperactive youngster's brain was scrambled, unquote. Certainly people like Thomas Edison would have been a big candidate for ADHD. He couldn't pay attention at school. He got out of his chair a lot.

Edison ran away from school, and he was He got out of his chair a lot. Edison ran away from school and he was home-schooled by his mom after that. Edison went on to invent the incandescent light bulb, the phonograph, and the motion picture camera. Paul Dirac, who is really one of the giants of physics, without whom we wouldn't understand sort of basic things like the photon, he spoke so rarely that people joked it was less than a word an hour, and that wasn't entirely false. He climbed trees in a business suit.

He behaved in ways that if he had probably not been a brilliant physicist would have gotten him locked up somewhere or at least medicated. The point here is to recognize what neurodiversity can offer, not to romanticize it. And I'm not dismissing the fact that people might suffer distress, certainly with depression, but also with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder. But I think the gift is things like the way depression sort of breaks down what psychiatrists sometimes call gating mechanisms, which is the kind of walls that exist around you and what happens around you so you somehow compartmentalize and not experience what others around you are experiencing.

I think that a lot of schizophrenia, bipolar,, breakdown gating mechanisms. It makes it hard sometimes to ignore what's going on around you. Certainly you can see that with somebody like Greta Thunberg and her role in climate activism. I have Asperger's. I'm on the autism spectrum, so I don't really care about social codes. In some circumstances it can definitely be an advantage to be neurodiverse, that makes you think differently and especially in such a big crisis like this when we need to think outside our current system that we need people who think outside the box

and who aren't like everyone else. outside the box and who aren't like everyone else. Autism is as much about what is abundant as what is missing, an over expression of the very traits that make our species unique. The autistic out humans the humans and we can scarcely recognize the result. You could also argue that bipolar disorder, too, outhumans the humans, living so fully those human qualities of pure joy and grief. Manic depressive Vincent van Gogh, Sylvia Plath, Georgia O'Keeffe, Blake, Rossini, are ironically the artists people are least likely to define as incomprehensible.

Tectonic shifts in culture entail tectonic shifts in how we function within it. Take the printing press. It had been up and running in Europe since 1450. Before then, in the pre-modern era, we lived in what's been called an image society, dominated by paintings, drawings, and handwritten notes. Back then, a person's inability to read wouldn't have mattered because few people were literate. But once the era of the printing press began,

we shifted from an image society to a word society, and that affected and continues to affect many people, particularly those with dyslexia and autism. Reading is an incredible thing and writing. They allow things to happen that could never happen before. The ability to say a sound or put a mark on a piece of paper and have an action done by somebody else. You know, sometimes when I do workshops on literacy and I'll put up on the screen something like stand up and jump up and down 10 times, I won't say anything, I'll just put it up

on the screen and everybody will stand up and jump up and down 10 times. And I'll say, that's magic. How did that happen? I just put this up over here and you did this up over there. And that's exactly what literacy has done. It's extended our reach in terms of tool use, in terms of communication, in terms of getting things done vastly. And a child who can read a book can go into worlds

that they could never go into otherwise. In today's world, in the United States, for example, or in Canada or the UK, that would just be something to kind of, well, I can't carry a tune, ha, ha, ha, ha. But nobody goes around saying, you know, I really can't read and expect that people are going to say, oh yeah, ha, ha, ha. I mean, we can even say, I can't balance my checkbook, you know, to talk about a logical mathematical example. And people will say, yeah, yeah, I know, I

can't either. But a person who says, I can't read and write, that would, you know, everybody would be kind of shocked by that because we have this expectation that reading and writing is something that everybody needs to do. And so, you know, the individual who's not particularly gifted in that area is going to be the disabled one. [♪ music playing on speculation he would have been diagnosed with ADHD. Despite his gargantuan accomplishments, he jumped from project to project and struggled to complete things. It took him 16 years to finish the Mona Lisa. I have offended God and mankind because my work didn't reach the quality it should have. Leonardo da Vinci.

Look at ADHD, the classic triad of symptoms that define ADHD, what Russ Barkley calls the Holy Trinity of ADHD. Distractability, impulsivity, and hyperactivity. Well turn each one of those on its head and you get a tremendous positive. The flip side of distractibility is curiosity. What's that? What's that? What's that? What's that? We're endlessly curious. We are driven by curiosity. Albert Einstein was famously disorganized and forgetful. He had problems with spelling. His teachers complained he was slow to understand basic concepts. Some psychologists believe he may have had dyslexia, autism and ADHD.

Well, he wasn't, you know, he wasn't the best student. But the thing is, it's sort of like growing a flower garden. Temple Grandin believes Einstein's time working in something as unpromising as a patent office was exactly the kind of environment he needed. Think of what he would have been exposed to there in the patent office. He would have been looking at so many new ideas and they would have given him all the electrical patents. He also loved music and he played the violin and that sometimes when he was couldn't figure out a math thing he'd play the violin. And one odd thing about him,

he wore green corduroy slippers with pink roses on them to the patent office. He wanted to be comfortable. His mind was focused elsewhere. He wasn't that concerned about, you know, what particular socks he was wearing. Sometimes he'd forget to put on his socks. We had a term for this called the absent-minded professor, and we

regarded it as kind of within the bounds of, you know, relatively normal behavior, and now we pathologize it. With the coming of classrooms and jobs that required a lot of staying still and being quiet and adhering to codes of so-called normal behavior, life often became torturous for those whose brains weren't cut out for those settings. A lot of these kids that learn best by moving are going to have a horrible time,

and they may be the ones who are being regarded as the defective learners, the feeble-minded learners, and so forth. Psychologist Laura Honus-Webb. I always kind of extrapolate also into the classroom. And you can imagine that the creative, innovative people, people who go on to be battlefield commanders, what is that like for them to be sitting in a classroom,

having to sit still and stay very narrowly focused? One of the first official attempts to gather information about mental health in the United States was the 1840 census by the American Psychiatric Association. It used a single category, idiocy, insanity. In 1851, a high percentage of free black people were diagnosed under this category. The numbers were so great it was given its own term, Drapetomania, the disease causing slaves to run away.

Slave owners used this to argue that black people were mentally unfit and unable to handle freedom. 40 years later, in 1880, the list grew to seven categories, mania, melancholia, epilepsy, dementia, dipsomania, monomania, and paresis. The first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, as it's generally known, was published in the U.S. in 1952. It was the first published tool for psychiatric diagnosis and listed about

60 different mental disorders. By the end of the 1980s, the DSM listed almost 300 disorders of the mind. Today, the DSM is nearly a thousand pages long and weighs more than three pounds. Apparently, a lot can go wrong with the human brain. There are certainly genetic determinants and that's still a fuzzy science at this point, but is caused by our lack of appreciation of diversity in the world. And I'm talking about neurodiversity,

I'm talking about racial diversity, I'm talking about cultural diversity. You know, it's an oppression is still exists. And so these things will absolutely create problems that the DSM describes. Before the DSM, people didn't know what they were talking about. You know, nobody could agree on what's this and what's that. So it's a taxonomy, but it shouldn't be thought of as, you know, the manual of human nature. I'd paraphrase Shakespeare and say there's more in heaven and earth than was ever dreamt of in the DSM.

You know, there's more in human nature than the DSM could ever begin to encounter. Treatments changed with every medical advance. The 1930s saw hydrotherapy, convulsion therapy, and insulin shock therapy. This gave way to psychotherapy in the 1940s. By the 1950s, doctors favored a more direct assault to the brain, lobotomies, and electroshock. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"]

We, homo sapiens sapiens, or man wise wise, are left, the lone animal genus on the planet, to have one species representative. One face, walking or crawling around. around, hundreds of species of monkeys, then only one hominin, one human. Neurodiversity ultimately describes everyone. Like ethnic diversity, it describes the human range. For all of us, consciousness is a spectacularly private and particular phenomenon. Though as with ethnicity, there will always be those on the marginalized ends of the spectrum who make others uncomfortable, whose life ways, whose mind ways pose a challenge when they're seen and they're heard. But maybe this is another one of those cultural false divides.

Maybe we're all different as shards of broken glass. We are the developers. We're the pioneers. We're the groundbreakers. We're the disruptors, in the best sense of that word. We are the people who bring them the new things that they want. The PCR test, that was an ADD guy who developed that. It's the whole foundation of forensic science. So, yeah, they should desperately want us, and they should stop persecuting us because they misunderstand

us because we're different. And we tend to be weird, but that's okay. As long as we're not hurting anybody, I think most people would agree. There's no that be weird, but that's okay. As long as we're not hurting anybody, I think most people would agree. There's no that we know of, there's no more complicated, complex, intrinsically unique piece of matter in the universe than the human brain. And so we've really got to change our ideas about the human brain itself. My van Gogh's disease has a place in the world. But as long as I've been aware of what's come to be called neurodiversity in my own

thinking, which in some form I think I've been all my life, and I've come with wonder to the whole question of consciousness If other people don't have word aversions How do they feel what they read? How do they think? You've been listening to part one of a two-part series we're calling The Myth of Normal from IDEAS contributor Sandy Bork. Guests in this program, writer and poet Suzanne Antonetta, psychiatrist and ADHD expert Ed Hallowell. Lara Honos Webb, clinical psychologist specializing in ADHD. Temple Grandin, author and professor of animal science at the University of Colorado. Bernard Crespi, professor of evolutionary biology at Simon Fraser University.

Psychologist Thomas Armstrong, executive director of the American Institute for Learning and Human Development, and Steve Silberman, author of Neuro Tribes, The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity. This episode was produced by Sandy Bork and edited by Nahid Mustafa. Technical producer, Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso.

Senior producer, Nikola Lukcic. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayed. MUSIC For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.