The Perils of Using "Reasonableness" &/or Past Experience as a STAND-IN for "I Don't Know"

Val's Take

• Executive Functioning, Metabolic Differences, Ramped Up Stress Responses, Speech Gifts and Deficits, etc.

AND

• Some BIG SUBSTANTIVE STRENGTHS

[Hyper-Sensuality--- is part of Neurodiversity and it doesn't necessarily look like what one might expect.

   I think the Denver Art Museum's Sinners, Saints, Lovers & Fools --- gets pretty close to the truth ---
there's nothing quite like being Hyper-Sensual and Hyper Self-Conscious at the same time.]

Executive Functioning Differences

• My own belief is that many of these EXECUTIVE FUNCTIONING DIFFERENCES are driven by the DEMANDS OF GREATER PROCESSING:
  • Short Term Memory Issues
  • Planning
  • Decision-making
  • Organizational Issues
  • Emotional Regulation
    • Those HYPER-CONNECTED LOGICAL BRAINS are ironically requiring special care to avoid MELTDOWNS, PANIC ATTACKS, BURNOUTS and/or BREAKDOWNS
  • And just to make it more fun --- this is coming in all kinds of COMBINATIONS.

Past experience of most people would say ---- MOST PEOPLE DON'T NECESSARILY HAVE THESE ISSUES

• Therefore, if you do have these issues --- IT IS NOT REASONABLE
• AND/OR --- you can't have any really big STRENGTHS OR TALENTS
• For the ASYNCHRONOUS PERSON DEPENDING WHERE THEY HAVE LANDED in the SOCIAL HIERARCHY and what their STRENGTHS and WEAKNESSES actually are and what the ENVIRONMENT is like---
  • May believe they are BETTER than other people
  • WORSE than other people
  • That some people are just BETTER and WORSE than other people.

CLARENCE DARROW in his 1903 address to the inmates of Cook County Jail in Chicago --- now recognized as probably the largest Mental Health Institution in the country:

• "In one sense we're all equally good and equally bad --- we all do the best we can under the circumstances."

At some point, I think Stanford Professor Robert Sapolsky's 2017 book "Behave" is going to be one of the milestones and privotal events in the process of changing our understanding of human behavior.

I would say there are at least 4 BIG CATEGORIES of "CIRCUMSTANCES" people are contending with:

• one's own biology (which is NOT ALL HUMAN btw)
• the biologies of the people around them (again NOT ALL HUMAN)
• the social environment
• the physical environment (including toxins)

and these CHANGING CIRCUMSTANCES  impact OUR BIOLOGIES.

Beyond that --- IT'S NOT JUST THE BRAIN, IT'S NOT JUST "NEURAL."

Neuroscientist & Author Antonio Damasio

It is really from having been surrounded by ASYNCHRONOUS PEOPLE all my life that I know there are SOME BIG STRENGTHS, SOME BIG WEAKNESSES --- and they are:

• NOT THE SAME
• they are INDIVIDUAL