Sunday, August 8, 2010

Spectrums Everywhere

The concept of neurodiversity seems to have originated with respect to autism, but it is now being generalized to nearly everything else. Thomas Armstrong explains one of the key components in a recent interview:
Genomic studies continue to struggle to find correlations between specific polymorphisms and psychological traits (see here). What this indicates is that a bunch of little genetic polymorphisms shift your tendencies in one direction or another, but there are no large discrete steps.

So, statistically speaking, we should all be somewhere on the spectrum of every sort of tendency and disorder. Now, people surely shift along these spectrums, due to changes in one's environment, developmental clocks, and the probabilistic nature of gene expression. But people should still remain somewhere on the spectrum of any given cognitive style.

I will spare you my rampant speculation from this point on, but believe me, I could go on for days. The bipolar spectrum, the schizophrenia spectrum, the addiction spectrum, to name a few: it is very interesting to extrapolate from the idea that we all should be at least somewhere along these.