Clearly along with Senior Service cigarettes and the odd whisky and ginger, my mum must have had too much N-(4-hydroxyphenyl)acetamide when she was pregnant with me. The Flintstones in the White House have so decreed. What does Wilma make of all this?
Last night we watched a film “The Accountant” in which Ben Affleck played a neurodivergent maths whizz who was a trained martial artist and special forces trained assassin sniper. He is a big bloke. His dad told him,
“Different is scary! Sooner or later different is scary and they don’t like it. Fight. Don’t be a victim.”
Or words to that effect. He encouraged his son to fight back when bullied.
I have experimental evidence gained from a FFT EEG; a fast Fourier transform {FFT} frontal lobe electroencephalograph that my brain waves differ from family and friends. The experiments were not exhaustive, they were indicative. The fact that I downloaded and worked through the patent for the device is unusual for others, not for me. I wanted to understand the instrument and its limitations. I know more about FFT than many because I did my undergraduate third year research project using a state of the art Bruker FFT infrared spectrometer on 77K solid state Platinum and Palladium mixed valence compounds. I looked into Fourier transformation. It had a tenth of a wavenumber resolution and could measure tiny site splitting in crystal lattices. We were particularly interested in very low frequency vibrations along the pseudo one dimensional longitudinal crystal axes.
On this basis it is safe to suggest that I could be classed as neurodivergent, without specifying in which manner.
As a further piece of evidence I cite the dream data catalogued here. It diverges significantly from normal.
Using the tag line from the film, some people might find me scary others just odd. I can say that when viewed from a neurotypical perspective I have trouble making and sustaining friendships. I do not engage in the highly transactional itchy back game and quasi-sycophantic behaviours often deemed necessary for career progression. I am not a toady or an arse licking nematode.
If an increasing number of people are being “diagnosed” on the spectrum is that indicative of an increase in the number of people who have passed the qualifying workshops to make such a diagnosis or is it a real thing? Is humanity evolving? Will neurotypicals become an artefact and extinct? The dinosaurs will die out from measles and COVID soon enough…
Of course if you are scared of people like me it is easy to prescribe chemical cosh medication to make the anomalous more compliant. The “monged” argue less. You could suggest that the entire reason I have such an active dreaming is that I have simply forgotten to take my medication like a good boy.
“Have you forgotten to take your meds again?
Just take a few of these and everything will be alright…
You will be normal and somnambulant like the rest of us.
Look here is a big new mobile ‘phone.
Pretty, shiny, precious….
There, there, don’t fret…”
Dreamyoga 