All right. Hello, everybody. All right. I think. It sounds like it's it's I mean you think about it like the the May. Um, I'm just reading something. Okay. Yeah, that's great. Thank you. Okay. All right. I think we're ready. Think we're ready to do the thing. Okay. On our backup recording. Recording progress. Echo. Anyway. Hi, everybody. Lots of this is, this is amazing. It's so great that you're all here with us. Thank you so much. Welcome to brain club for those who I don't know yet. I'm Mel Hauser. I use she they pronouns and I am executive director here.  I so so as we continue our conversation on neurodivergent lived experiences. Today we'll be talking about on some specific themes that many autistic people experience. And I'll give some disclaimers in a minute. But first by way of, because I know this is a many of you are new to brain club just by way of our community agreement. All forms of participation are okay here. 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If you're on your phone, it, I think it looks something like that, but it might be in slightly different order. Okay, we're ready. So we're continuing. So this, this month's theme neurodivergent lived experiences was requested by you. Brain Club regulars requested this theme and I think it's, I, I, I'm really grateful for last week's dialogue on neurodivergent burnout, and like it or not, neurodivergent burnout is, is part of autistic life experience. And so we're, I think, I think, I think that will be a theme that will, will still be revisiting today. So, you know, we're all different people. And when we talk about autistic life experiences, there is not one autistic life experience. And so I thought about how, you know, and, and, and, you know, I think, I think a really powerful brain club probably might, one of my favorite ever brain clubs was the first week of April when we had our panel of late identified neurodivergent adults. I thought about doing another panel.  And so I thought that how we would anchor this conversation is by looking at not, not just a handful of folks, but, you know, 7500 people to look at some trends. And this comes from the autistic, not weird survey, which is an annual survey conducted by an autistic educator. And we'll go through, we'll go through some highlights. Is Lizzie here yet to pop links in the chat? Sweet. Okay. So, Lizzie, if you can, if you can pop the autistic network. Perfect. Thank you. Okay. So, I wanted to begin with this. Misunderstandings. So, quote, the general public doesn't understand enough about autism. So amongst autistic respondents, almost everyone agreed, and almost 80% strongly agreed with that. And when we think about, and we talk about this a lot at Brain Club, the double empathy problem. This is a term coined by autistic social scientists, Dr. Damian Milton, that says that it's not that there is, you know, one normal set of social skills.  It's repeatedly in research findings. What's been shown is that it's the mismatch of worldview, mismatch of communication style that results in miscommunication, misunderstanding. Autistic to autistic communication is often quite efficient, quite effective. And it's the bi-directional, non-autistic people have a really hard time taking perspective of autistic people. And so that's, that this, this survey supports that. Early experiences. And just catching up in the chat, a couple folks sharing that, that at this website you can access a whole range of resources that are really, really awesome. Early experiences. I knew I was different from an early age. 60.7% strongly agree, 27% agree. So almost everybody. And that, that reminds me so much of what our panelists shared in April.  So you can see the trends there. And that's, you know, that's, that's, that's, that's why we have brain club, right? Like this is this, the power of, you know, coming to understand oneself, becoming more familiar with different aspects of one's experience, hearing the experiences of other people, many of whom have, you know, similarities to one's own experience. Many times are different. Like that, that, that's what this is all about. You know, self awareness, self knowledge. So speaking of education, how about educational experiences growing up? My experience at school was positive. And this is of all autistic responses. You can see a large trend toward disagree and strongly disagree. And amongst autistic children, that pattern is, is, is there. I want to share from, you know, a couple of things that I think are, are, are important to, to note and Kelly's just saying that Kelly used this graph when trying to advocate at our old school district, that's really powerful Kelly, but thanks for sharing that. So what we know is that in Vermont, 587, at least, children are secluded and or restrained in Vermont schools. And what we know is that these practices are disproportionately used against children with disabilities and children of color. And Lizzie's just linked in the chat to a website post on our, on our site, lives in the balance. Dr. Ross Green recently released a documentary on restraint and seclusion in Vermont schools. Dr. Green came down and interviewed families, educators, healthcare providers in the ABB village. And so this this is all ABB village members in this documentary. So I invite you it's, it's hard to, it's a content content warning because it's talking about really terrible stuff. And this is part of autistic children's experience in Vermont schools and we advocate strongly against this. Here's a poem from a child in our village. I'm going to read some some lines. When I am here, I feel like a caged bird. School my captor too scared to speak. I stay silent like a mouse. I do my best and still get punished. My brain and my heart are sore. We are all worthy of our own autonomy. I'm going to pause there. What do you think of this? Ready to use the chat. Feel free to unmute. This is landing with folks. Ellie says that's gut wrenching.  Jake said, I thought a 50 year old adult wrote it. Nope. Yeah, so powerful, so painful. Yeah. When one gets out of school, challenges don't stop. So we know that there's research that autistic people are four to eight times more likely to be unemployed compared to non-autistic people. And we see that there's certainly a distribution. Many, many people struggling with finding employment and retaining employment. And we're going to be talking about neurodivergent challenges in the workplace next week at Brain Club. Steve says in the 60s we were too terrorized to think that way. You mean in terms of reflections on school? Yeah. We've been posting quite a bit about employment and neurodivergent burnout on our Instagram page. And so if you don't already follow us on Instagram, you can check out these posts. We're going to be covering this content at Brain Club next week, as I said. Lizzie, can you dump some links in the chat? We think, especially when we think about how many unrecognized neurodivergent people are out in the world. And neurodivergent neuroinclusive employment, creating workplaces for people with all types of brains to thrive, benefits everyone. And that's many workplaces are designed for one type of brain. And I would imagine that that's not news to you all. Social experiences. The overwhelming majority of autistic people who participated in this survey so that they feel socially isolated. I feel the need to mask my personality in groups of non-autistic people. That's, you know, well over 90, 93, 94% of people. I feel the need to mask my personality in groups of autistic people. Oh, hi, Jake. I didn't realize that was you. Hello. Oh, that's amazing. It's fun to meet people on Instagram and then meet them in real life. In general, how accessible have you found the following? J. Got it. Thanks. Community groups not perceived as accessible. How accessible have you found the following? Schools. Mostly someone inaccessible to largely inaccessible. Healthcare. Someone inaccessible, largely inaccessible. Doesn't surprise me either. When we think about all of the many ways in which people are marginalized and marginalized, and we think about the intersectional experiences of trauma and oppression. When we think about the large overlap, the relationship between neurodiversity and diversity of gender and sexuality, there are a lot of so many different reasons that people are marginalized. So, I think that's why we're going to be talking about these survey responses. They line right up with a lot of the other research that's out there. Before, this is the last slide, lots of time for conversation. I like being autistic. And for some people, I think many people describe that having, that it's for them, it's neither positive nor negative, it just is. And so, I thought this was an interesting way to close in that having just zooming out and describing trends and themes is can be a part of self-awareness and self-knowledge. So, how's this landing? How does what you've seen compare to your own experiences? The numbers and stats are lining up a lot more than I would like. Yeah. I see some knots. We find groups where where the predominant population makes a lot of sense to me, like how the graphs shift when it's a setting where there's no expectation that you would not be autistic. Yeah.  And, you know, most places that I'm in, those ground rules are not established. Kelly says, am I remembering correctly that there's an older chart that showed that most people are embracing their autism now than in the past? I have not seen that in the autistic.weird survey. And I think that, you know, there's, I think there's a lot to be hopeful for. I think that there's, you know, I think the community conversation around neurodiversity inclusion is, is, is shifting. And it's not shifting everywhere. And there's still a lot of trauma. And there's a lot of unlearning that has to be done from all the trauma that's been done before. Laura says, my almost four year old has started vocal stimming, I think, and I've been so appreciative that his school is very open to recognizing this as an important way of regulating for him. Autism hasn't even had to be part of the conversation. It's just recognizing as something that helps some kids, and that has felt promising to me. Christina says, survey matches my experiences. It's funny. I'm glad that I'm autistic in some way, that it brings in the right people in my life. But when we have to navigate those areas where people don't get it, even if I explain it, clearly they still act negatively toward me, especially in accepting my direct communication style. Perhaps it's gender based, but I would like to hear others speak on this. Yeah. Um, does that play out for others? Jay's got a, an infographic in the chat. You know, I think it's a meme of mine. It's, I said, if a couple got their kids kidnapped by a corporate boss, I'm pretty sure the Supreme Court would tell you to be grateful they didn't kidnap the corporation. Well, it's, it's, it's some, you know, I think that there's so, you know, I, one of the things that one of our panelists shared in April about like, one of the strengths of many autistic brains is to be able to zoom out and like recognize something that's not working. Anyway, your meme makes me think about that of just, of, of, there's so much that's broken about society and that, um, it, it's important for people to be able to call that out. Yeah. Okay. Comment real quick. Yeah. Um, it's like, you know, Oh, my last, my first, like my first neurodiversity kind of group project, attempted nonprofit I got involved in, you know, at a certain point in time, it was like one of my, you know, my person who my mentor at the time or friend who put it together, hiring his friends and keeping them happy became more important than like the neurodiversity mission. And it was like the second, the, either the organization became more important than the mission or the people became more important. It was like, wow, we're really useless in helping anyone now. I think, you know, I think, I think it's really important to be, you know, focused on, on the mission focused on the mission of changing the world and making it better for neurodivergent people. And I mean, I would say that because I only say that because, you know, in, in kind of on the flip side, a lot of us are crossed for time and resources. So, you know, it's, it takes a lot of work to like be in any kind of mental health recovery and push your life forward and like, you know, take care of your friends and like, it's complicated. That's all I'm saying. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that, you know, part of being in, you know, an interdependent community, you know, being part of a community village where people support one another. I mean, without that, it's, it's, it's impossible. Allie says, I had a teenage client tell me today, but I hope I'm not autistic while discussing struggles at school. It absolutely broke my heart because she was so fearful of the label. And so uninformed on the beauty of her brain and the wonderful community she so desperately craves, it really hit me how little people in her life, her family and the adults have viewed her with such a narrow minded lens and fixated on the norms of society that she doesn't align with. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I, I was raised in a comparatively neurodiversity affirming household where like three quarters of my immediate family are neurodivergent. And that wasn't known then, but was kind of like fine. And this week in my life, it like, I'm autistic, my sibling is ADHD and my mom is pretty clearly autistic. And this week her dad had a conversation with her where he was like, you know, I've come to figure out that I'm autistic.  Um, it was very cool, but like, I grew up in a kind of like insulated bubble for the most part that was pretty accepting of the ways that I behaved as autistic. And I have these vivid memories of being like told terrible things that are kind of like comparative to what everyone's saying. And I think that like a lot, so for me, a lot of those things were said in private where teachers would know that what they were saying was wrong. Like it doesn't matter if you know that the kid you're talking to is disabled in any way, but like knew that what they were saying was ableist or was like, was a negative way of behaving as a teacher. And I think that, sorry, I'm rambling. I think that a lot of the time administrative- No, start a podcast, keep going. I think that a lot of administrative officials and people like with a lot of authority in bureaucratic structures like schools and after-school programs for children know that what they're doing is shaming and do it in private and that we wind up having the isolated traumatic experiences that we can't really work together about as children because we are absorbing the shame of that of being spoken to alone as though it's so shameful like whatever trait we've displayed is so shameful that it can't even be spoken about in front of other people. Yes, yes to all that. Like Linda's saying, the message is it's okay if you're different, just don't act different. Yeah, I think that there's so many, I think if you have the kind of nervous system that is noticing everything and picking up on these like subtle yet profound messages that there's something broken and defective, how can that not impact you? Just scrolling up in the chat, Laura says, can you imagine what could be possible if we recognized autistics on the experts of parenting autistic children, shocking that it still seems so far away for so many people? Yeah, yeah. I just want to say that I think my, well my nephew I think is autistic and is undiagnosed and is in a pretty severe burnout and 28 has filed, is like now living with my sister and because of my experience with my sister has been such an advocate for me and as a big supporter of me as I've unmasked and got clarity and now that it's like she's starting to recognize the signs where when, I think his first autistic burnout really what major one was when he was 17 and that like the whole thing blew up and so he's just needing to rest and I'm just saying sleep, sleep, if like he sleeps, it's okay, let him sleep. And then her husband basically was like, well, trying to give the idea of like if you just get out and do something, you'll feel better. If you just, you know this whole mentality of and it's so cool because I can see my sister advocating for her son saying that's not actually, he's a lot like Amy, you've watched Amy, you see Amy, he is like Amy, we need to look at it from that standpoint. And so it's been so cool as I've been out and been able to be vocal. And now that's starting in my family to trickle down where the shame is less and that people are starting to get their needs met and having conversations around access needs and how once we can start, I understand it can be really challenging to push back and I've certainly had that pushback, but I also think that if we can keep kind of coming together here, I get a lot of strength coming here and then being able to kind of teach my family and friends what's important and we can start trickling that down to other people.  That is amazing. What an amazing story. And what a gift for your nephew. And only cray and sorry, go ahead, sir. We're gonna say Kelly Gray's hand is up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so Kelly Gray and then Kelly Brudeau, go ahead. Hey, so, you know, I really liked what Theodore said and I think we also need to understand how all encompassing this is psychology books, pamphlets, commercials, teacher education, scientific journals, medical books, like it's really easy some days for me to get into a place where I'm really angry at people because I feel that way because I feel that they're making this choice to talk in a disparaging way, but the more I go out there and have conversations with people, the more I realize how truly surprised they are that I even see it that way. They just think of it as the way they're supposed to talk about it. This is what their formal education, what those around them have always had has been this deficit-based language. And we, because we've got this wonderful community, sometimes kind of forget how far the world needs to get. And I think communities like this one and hopefully more communities like this in schools too are the way to kind of slowly break free of some of this. I have a lot to say about that and we'll come back to me because I'll remember. Hallie, go ahead. I think they did such a great job marketing this as the worst thing ever, right from the get-go. Like never once has autism been viewed as something other than bad and wrong. And one day, this is oldest Phineas, he's 14. So seven years ago, my husband took the kids to the park and he came home and he was just kind of, he was rattled and I could tell and I was like, man, what happened? Did something go on? And he was like, Phineas was like noticing it at the park and he was just observing him. And finally, Finn walked over to the kid's parent and asked the parent, is your kid autistic? And the parent got very offended and got very upset with Phineas and oh, oh no, why, no, no, no. And my husband was like, so I was listening and so I walked over and very quickly stopped the woman. It was like, hey, he's asking because he's autistic. And he just, he likes to try to find people to understand him. That's why he's asking. And then the woman's demeanor changed. Oh, I'm so sorry.  And then they just left the park. But like that just kind of stuck with me that like an adult would react to a child asking such a question about connection. Like I recognize it immediately. It's like, oh wow, he was like totally trying to connect to this kid at the park. He must have seen something that just really resonated with him and to have that mom react like that was just the worst thing. How offensive to ask that about my child, you know? And it just, they did such a great job marketing it and it's gonna take so much work like marketing it the other direction. Yeah, yeah. And I'm curious, did you like, did Phineas perceive this whole situation? And did he like say anything? Like did he wonder about it? Honestly, I'm not sure, Kristen. I don't think he really like checked in with him, you know? Like I think he was just kind of like reeling with his own experience of it. And Phineas really hasn't mentioned it before or since. Yeah, yeah. You know, there's, it's, I think that there are so many, just so much on learning that has to be done when Vermont Public featured, you know, a conversation on autism last week or as a caller called in and, you know, I was asking this question about, you know, I mean, it was just, it was a very ableist question and it was just like, this is what people think. People think that, you know, that a lot of I'm learning to do, you catch up in the chat, just a conversation around just like that it's a privilege to be safe and able to be out in a variety of settings. And there's just so, so, so many people who don't have that privilege because of all the judgment and all of the, you know, not just judgment, but often masking behavior is for survival, literal survival. I wonder when we think back to, you know, so, you know, we started off looking at this data from Autistic Not Weird, what do you think are asked of your autistic lived experience that you think are important to name or that are important to you to name? I don't really have like a single word for it, but the fact that whenever something happened in school between me and an ever student, they never trusted my side of the story because I was autistic. So obviously I couldn't understand what was going on. And this continued into university. I was often told, well, why do you expect people to do that and you don't understand? I'm curious, Liam, when did you reach the point when you recognized that that message was wrong and that this was a reflection on that person and not on you? Very recently, unfortunately, it took me until university to realize what was happening. Yeah, yeah.  Lauren. Yeah, I don't know. This just keeps coming up in my brain this whole discussion. I grew up in a household where I'm realizing that I'm pretty sure all five of us are autistic. Maybe my mom is just ADHD, but the more I know, the more I'm pretty sure she's autistic, but no one was diagnosed except my brother was diagnosed at 23, but he also had lots of learning disabilities, difficulty in school, like school was a nightmare for him even, you know, regardless of the diagnosis, but autism in my family culture is so steeped in the deficit model that it has been really hard for me to have any kind of conversation about it with my family that comes from any other kind of perspective. And it's almost like his diagnosis became this like, oh, well, this is why all of these things, this is what's wrong with him, you know, this is like all of that model, like I was so steeped in it. And it's so part of my family dynamics and interaction that it feels really hard to untangle. I've tried having some gentle conversations with my mom about neurodivergence and neurodiversity and looking at things from a different lens, from that lens and not from a deficit lens, but like the closest she can get is like, oh, well, I told him like, look how well you're doing, you're a part of the 15% who can have a job.  Like you're completely unaware of how horrible that sounds. But like it's so, I just, I'm sure other people have had this experience of it becoming so entrenched in family dynamics and family culture that it feels kind of silly. It becomes like family is not a safe place for me anymore. And that's been a really difficult thing to come to terms with. Thank you for sharing that, Lauren. I think two things that came up. So one is like, the enmeshment of like, and you know, called denial or whatever, like it's very hard to make someone have insight about their own selves, right? Like that. And like a separate theme is that when you are self-aware, when you've worked really hard to grow in your self-awareness and you've worked hard to show up as your true self and design a life that works for your brain. And then when you're in environments that invalidate that, it becomes intolerable. It's very hard to go back. Yeah, Lauren. I can remember. Oh, sorry. I was just gonna say I bothered me before, but I could never put my finger on exactly what like made me feel, you know, bad about that way that it was talked about. But now I know exactly why I bothered to spend a night. Yeah, take it. Yes. Christina and Sierra. Yeah, I have the same experience, Lauren. I understand cognitively and logically why my family can't get to the point where I could feel safe talking with them because it would require them, each person reframing their whole existence and accepting some really hard things about how they went through life and how they didn't get their needs met. And there's just a lot of layers of stuff that like, I feel like I've had the time to work through that they haven't had the time to work through. And so I understand I can't ask that of them. So it is a little sad. I've kind of had to grieve the loss of that kind of connection by trying to like make new ones like this group and stuff, but it is a little weird to sort of like, sort of like the depth of something that I always thought was kind of like maybe in the realm of possibility, but it's just, it's a lot for them to deal with so they can't get there. So it isn't, yeah, it is very similar. Yeah. Yeah, it is a loss. It's grieving relationship or some former narrative. Sierra. That's actually unmute. Yeah, one thing I've been talking to a lot of people that recently is like there's the idea of like skill regression with autism. And I think especially for a lot of adults, a lot of times it's really that you're just not willing to put up with stuff anymore. So like, oh, I used to be able to work 14 hours shifts every day and now I can't work more than eight hours in a day. Well, that's not skill regression. That's just me accepting that 14 hour shifts are a limit of mine and not something that's able to be done. And just that kind of process of like unmasking really does sometimes it is a grieving. It's losing that masked self that you were and that can be losing relationship, that can be losing person you thought you were. That can be a lot of different things. Yeah, it is. Sierra, thanks for naming that. I think two things come to mind for me. There is one 14 hour shifts are not healthy for most brains, so there's that. But there's so much that the compounded upon internalized ableism of like there's something wrong with me that I can't do this thing. And so it feels like a regression as opposed to like, I know my access needs now, but there also is loss of skills associated with burnout. So it may actually be that sometimes I can read. You know, like I was reading somebody sent me really lovely article to read and I was like, oh, I guess I'm processing that. And it's just, it's a cognitive load thing. And I think that's real. Reading in the chat, Aaron shares, I've been engaging with my family a lot about autism, neurodivergence and intergenerational trauma. It's helping me move through it to relate to the internalized ableism I expect many of my ancestors carried. That's really powerful, Aaron. I think that it's also really amazing that you're engaging and dialoguing with your family. I've not had that experience, but I can imagine it. I imagine in perspective shift around like, oh, well that happens because I'm imagining what that must have been like for this family member. But it's being able to, when you have two or more people who are self-aware and can figure out what another's access needs and figure out a way to negotiate, that's a completely different story than when one person is doing all the work. Allie says, I've been stuck in this slump lately of feeling like I used to have it together much better but really I was overwhelmed and I've just learned my limits now. Yeah, I think a lot of people say that when they begin the unmasking process that, you know, they start, quote, acting more autistic and really they're unmasking. And that's, first off, it requires so many extra spoons to mask. And so in the setting of burnout, you know, it may actually not be possible.  Kelly says, I had a, quote, learning center teacher, quote, tell me that when we flip our lids, we are regressing to childlike behavior and that the most important thing is to pull people out of it before, quote, sticks. Ew, gross. This is literally what she was taught in school and only got her master's two years ago, terrifying. Yeah, you know, I have a limbic response when people use the word like, tantrum, like they refer to themselves as having a tantrum.  That's what's happening. Amy. I had an idea that came up. It's something that my therapist has been talking to me about, which is talking about being the identified patient in a family system. And that often we can be perceived as the problem or we use like sickness instead of access need. And so I think one of the things that Brain Club helps me with is learning my access needs and communicating that instead of saying, sorry, I'm not feeling well, I won't. And my sister recently said, you know, I thought when you said you were sick, it meant you were stressed or anxious. I didn't realize that you were actually like, you know, having mast cell activation or something. But I think the idea of being the identified patient in the family and kind of taking that back and saying, hey, I'm actually not the only one who has access needs. Like, so at family functions, like I've requested like doing, having a puzzle out so that we don't, so if I can just be there by being in parallel play and what I've noticed is that everyone's requesting the puzzle now. And so it's starting to like point out, like see, I'm not the only one who is like bored and everyone's on their iPhones or has a hard time with like small talk or conversation. And so I just wanted to, I didn't know like if that was, like I had never really heard like the identified patient in a family system before. And so I just was thinking about that, like in the school system or, you know, like I was thinking about Liam's comment, like, oh, like he's the, you know, they're the identified patient. And so that therefore like, we're just gonna use that as the excuse instead of looking at what's happening in the culture or the system. Amen. And Steve is sharing the puzzle as universal design. Yeah. Sarah. What Amy was talking about, about the identified patient thing, just connected some dots for me about what we may be up against as a community. There's actually in the mental health movement at large, there's a program in Finland called Open Dialogue that's basically eliminated schizophrenia in that area of the country. And one of the things that they did that they realized that they had to do was they couldn't separate patient, the reason it's called Open Dialogue is because they couldn't separate patients from their families. If they put the patient in the hospital, the person got labeled this identified patient and then the family moved on with their life and didn't have to do any work. And so it's like if we get put in that identified patient role rather than the family, rather than the family being, rather than, and not just the family, but our community actually being, having an obligation to try to communicate so that it works for all of us, we just get siled off and the normative culture goes on the way it usually goes on and nothing changes. And there's a lot of internal conflicting access needs and a lot of identity shifting. And again, when you have multiple people who don't have self-awareness, that is really hard to bridge. I'm just gonna, I'm gonna just comment. There was a really important question in the chat that I just wanna comment. Question was about what an access need is. So just like, that's really referring to anything that anyone needs to fully and meaningfully participate and everyone has access needs, like Sarah says, everyone on the planet has access needs. It's just that when we think about neurodivergent people have, you know, being far more likely to have our access needs not met by the defaults of society. There's a question on the chat about neurodiversity, inclusive neurodiversity for main recovery resources. If anybody has any thoughts on that, if you could share that either out louder in the chat, that would be great. Christina says, I like that concept, Sarah. I think that even in child and in schools, they label disabled kids as, quote, the identified patient. I think that that, yeah. And that there is judgment associated that, as opposed to, you know, something, it is what it is. I, so Aiden, I think the other thing that I'm gonna post in the chat, Lizzie, can you post the Brain Club 2022 archives list, the like the table of all the old Brain Clubs? Cause we have a ton of resources about access needs. So an example of what that means. So I have it, you know, if I have an access need for, you know, when I'm talking, I have an access need for like a visual support of what I want to say, otherwise I meander and I go all over the place. I have an access need for quiet in order to think most of the time. When I'm, you know, when I'm reading, I need high contrast. Like these are all different examples, but, you know, there's emotional access needs, there's physical access needs, there's environmental access needs, there's interpersonal access needs of people who like need to know that they are well regarded by the person they're interacting with in order to feel safe. I could talk about access needs all day. So as we wrap up today, I really appreciate all of you being here and sharing and, you know, and building this community. And because I think that part of shifting the community conversation on neurodiversity also requires people to have a community where they can show up as their true selves, to do that work of unlearning and rewriting narratives together. And that's, you're helping us do that. So I thank you all so much for being here and I hope you'll join us next week where we're talking about neurodivergent challenges in the workplace. See you then. Bye.


All right, we've seen with the binomial probability distribution that that's useful for calculating the probability of some number of events happening when there's only two options, maybe A and B, or heads and tails, or spin up and spin down. More commonly though, we have more than two choices, more than two outcomes or results that can happen for molecules. So we need to be able to handle more than just two events, so that's where we need the multinomial probability distribution. So suppose we have a total of big N events that are going to happen, let's say in addition these are independent events, they might be coin flips or rolls of the die, or they might be individual molecules that behave independently from one another. And those events can have some number of outcomes, for example heads and tails, or molecules can be in energy level one or two or three or four and so on. And those outcomes happen with different probabilities. Outcome one, whatever that is, might happen with probability P1, outcome two might happen with probability P2, and so on. We might have a very large number of these different outcomes. Then what we need to know is we'd like to understand what's the probability that I get some number of outcomes of type one, some number of type two, and so on. So these numbers are, and one is the number of outcomes that we see out of these grand total of capital N that have type one and two would be the number of type two and so on. So if those are binomial distribution, if we only have two possibilities then we already know how to write down the answer. That would be if we want the first event to happen, first type of outcome to happen N1 times. Each time it happens, it happens with probability P1, multiply that together N1 times because the events are independent. The second type of event happens with probability P2 and that happens N2 times, so we multiply those together as well. And then the number of ways of shuffling these independent N1 outcomes together that are all the same, we would multiply that by big N choose little N. So that's what the result would look like if it were a binomial distribution. That's not what we have here. We have more than just two outcomes. We have perhaps three or four or more outcomes. So we also need to include P3 and P4 and so on. And then instead of a binomial coefficient, we would have a multinomial coefficient with an N1, an N2, N3, dot, dot, dot. So that's the only difference between the binomial and the multinomial probability distribution is we include all the different outcomes when we multiply the probabilities together for each set of outcomes and then we use a multinomial coefficient instead of the binomial coefficient to calculate the multiplicity. So let's do an example and make sure that's clear. And we'll use our butane molecule for that example, where again we know that at room temperature we've used these numbers before. The probability of being in the anti-configuration is 68%. The probability of being in the Gauche plus configuration is 16%. The probability of being in the Gauche minus configuration is 16%. And then what we'd like to know is let's say what is the probability that with N equals 12 butane molecules independent from one another, what's the probability that there are, let's say, four anti, four Gauche plus and four Gauche minus. So equal number in each confirmation. So the result of that calculation is we just plug those numbers into the binomial probability distribution. So we need four molecules in the anti-configuration, 68% chance that any individual molecule is in the anti-configuration. 0.68 to the fourth is the probability that it's going to happen four times. 0.16 to the fourth is the probability that a Gauche plus event with probability 16% will happen four times. And then in addition to that, 0.16 raised to the fourth is the probability that a Gauche minus event will happen four times. And we need to multiply all of that by the binomial or the multinomial coefficient. 12 choose 444 on the bottom. So that would be a 12 factorial divided by 4 factorial, 4 factorial, 4 factorial. So this is a relatively small number. These fractions multiplied by themselves a number of times, multiplied by a relatively large number. When we combine all those two things together, first of all, the decimals by themselves give us 9.2 times 10 to the minus eighth. And the multinomial coefficient is 34,650. So again, the multinomial coefficient's large, the probabilities are relatively small. When we combine those two things, the net result is .0032. So the numerical answer to the question, what is the probability if I have 12 butane molecules under these conditions that an equal number of them are in each of the three different states? There's only about a .3% chance that that's going to happen. There's other possibilities that are slightly more likely, such as, for example, most of the molecules being in the anti-state, because we know that that happens most of the time. But regardless of which individual combination of occupation of these states we're interested in, we can calculate that now with the multinomial coefficient. So this completes the set of basic probability rules that we're going to need. And the next step will be to start using those to calculate properties like these and more interesting ones for real chemical systems.