I say Cognitive Diversity, You Say Neurodiversity

Let's call the whole thing off

At least once a week I am engaged in a healthy conversation on how best to name this community. The issue is that we want to be accurate and all encompassing, while remaining pithy - preferably one word or two. The other challenge is that we need a term that can bring people together to feel seen and build a purposeful identity.

To start, the lens from which I derive is that of twice-exceptionality (2e). In short, 2e is the apparently ironic combination of being gifted and, wait for it, learning disabled. You have to break the threshold to be two different types of outliers. In other words, it is the Ginger Rogers of labels, you get to be really “special” while at the same time you have to do it backwards, in high heals, and with a diagnosis.

To make things even more complicated, we then use the term “masking” to describe when the intellectual gift is able to cover up or mask the disability and the other way around. A disability masks or covers up giftedness.

And, of course, the elephant in the room is this term gifted. For some people they see gifted as a cultural term that is used to separate children of privilege from the rest of the population. For most of us in this field, we see it as people that are wired differently who have different experience in life who exist in all cultures. We have great discussion around terms like G and Multiple Intelligences.

There is the exploding field of neuroscience that uses fMRI to analyze brain activity. This research is finding interesting results, but there is some criticism in the field that is not as valid as we would hope. What I take away most from neuroscience today is that brains are as unique as fingerprints. My friend Nicole refers to it as Neurouniqueness.

We are literally just getting started. We can look at people within the contexts of family, social, and broader structures using Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory that explains people existing in different worlds. While Piaget and the constructivists explain that the individual develops cognitively based on their interaction within the construct of the environment to build individual schema. We also look at the additional challenges for people from underprivileged homes as having an additional high hill to climb and we try to lump it in as another threshold level “disability” calling it 3e.

To keep it short, I will throw in one more term which is quite popular these days which is intersectionality. For everything that has been barely mentioned above and all of the rest which wasn’t or could be implied, we have a lot of factors to make for very unique individuals. The interaction of these challenging variables can make for escalating difficulties.

At the end of the day, does our approach at seeing the world by applying the normal distribution’s bell curve to explain all of this even make sense? Is each person the result of a stochastic model to make them a population of 1? The short answer is that I don’t know.

At this point, I return to being a bit overwhelmed. If feels like each uniqueness becomes a cherished micro-identity that needs to be defended. I want to use two different terms for broad consolidations which are diversity and uniqueness. Functionally and academically we need to acknowledge the value of diversity and its power to create and define the human condition. At the same time, the result is that each of us is a unique combination that gives us our singular imprint.

I have no major conclusion and know not which term(s) are most accurate. What I do know is that I would like to see a term that encompasses diversity, uniqueness, and intersectionality. I have been playing with it in my head for quite a while. To paraphrase a line from an old text, we are that we are. How I wish that were enough to say. We are just unique creatures affected differently by the interaction our particular biology and our culture that changes from moment to moment.

Oh yeah, let’s call the calling off, off.