The Importance of Neurodiversity in Permaculture

Let's get this back on topic.

I ran across this really interesting article that seems to support my contention that, at least at an intellectual level, ethnically diverse collaborations seem to have a greater impact than more homophilous ones.

http://www.nature.com/news/collaboration-strength-in-diversity-1.15912

This is based on research that shows that academic papers with a greater ethnic diversity in family names have more of an impact than those from collaborations of people from what are more likely to be similar backgrounds.

The authors speculate that scientists may benefit from the multiple perspectives offered by people from different cultural backgrounds, and from the additional effort required to communicate between them.

This would seem to support the notion that a permaculture community, even an ecovillage of two, would be more likely to be successful, especially if you were to be conducting research into novel ecosystems, with as much diversity as possible.

There's still a lot of work to be done on what makes the most effective scientific teams, and this probably also applies to permaculture. In my case there are partnership arrangements that would result in greater conflict, not better collaboration. Some of the people in my life who I've got on best with have been vegetarian Indians (although Sunder and I had a long and interesting discussion about cows one evening*); meat-eating Americans not so much. I'd probably last a fast ten seconds in a larger community, because of my own limitations.

Meanwhile I'm still looking for my heterobi!sexual, heterophilous life partner-collaborator.

She'll probably turn out to be heterosexual autistic blonde middle-aged Scot, now (I ran across another paper that suggests that many neurodivergent people tend to mate assortatively and homophilously), but that might still work.


* not long after his sister asked for my birth details...

“Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilisation.” M. K. Gandhi

R Ranson wrote:
University was amazing because I learned all these wonderful ideas - and the language that goes with it.  It was a perfect match for how my brain was then.  I couldn't understand why everyone didn't think this way.  How could they be so slow?  Why didn't they care?  How could they misuse such beautiful words that we use so carefully in university?  How come every-day people are insulted when I say something that my fellow students take as kindness?  But at university everyone thought just like me and I was learning to think just like them.  I didn't realize then that it was a trap.  A language trap.

This really resonated with me. In my case, the usual questions were, Why are people so averse to thinking about the implications of their statements? Why can't people see the glaring contradictions in their statements?

But in my case, I don't know whether it was university or ASD. I only know that the aforementioned contradictions looked to me like the elephant in the room: I couldn't keep from seeing it if I wanted to!

So, after a lot of work, I have become sufficiently high functioning to realize that people actually do not like to hear things like, "I can't think as simplistically as you want me to!" Even if that is really the way I feel -- and am frustrated by it because it is a barrier to my understanding them -- I at least have learned not to come out and say it. The hard part, which I still have not figured out how to overcome, is how to understand them well enough to communicate understandably. It is true, I don't like coming across as a know-it-all, since I know that I don't know it all. If I thought I knew it all, I wouldn't ask questions in the first place; getting what seem to me like trite or oversimplified answers frustrates me, or worse, when it looks to me like people answered the question they wish I had asked instead of the question I actually asked. We go round and round and back and forth, until finally I have rephrased my question enough times to leave no doubt as to what I am really trying to find out -- only to get deafening silence for an answer. I am really working on not resenting that.

I suppose there are people who think I am a troll, just trying to stir things up. If only I knew how not to come across that way, because it isn't my intention.

Jason Hernandez wrote:This really resonated with me. In my case, the usual questions were, Why are people so averse to thinking about the implications of their statements? Why can't people see the glaring contradictions in their statements?

Most of them are not using logic to create their statements. They appear to use their "feelings" as a source for their statements and in some cases their view of the world is a "glaring contradiction"…

I guess it can be viewed as two different languages that happen to use the same words.
When person A says "The glass is red" he is expressing he "feels" of the color.
Person B understands that the glass is filtering the light except for the part of the spectrum that is categorized as "red".

Or… A: "The water is cold" vs. B: "The water feels cold"

If you want to explain something to a person speaking another language, you have to translate it into their language …

This has been a fun read, (as I skimmed through)  I am also a plural processor...
I instinctively think of multiple meanings and in layers of application all at once... (I don't have a lot of friends)   [smiles]

I'd be willing to bet a fair portion of passionate off-gridders and dirt-lovin' tree-huggers are aspies <3  We just roll to a different drum!