Musings - How we think

Let me share something I've been thinking about and pondering and ruminating over the last couple of weeks, even. As my family has come to terms with a couple of ADHD and autism diagnoses within the larger framework of the family, we have really looked at each other and other people we deal with, with a whole new set of lenses and understanding. Someone who has an autistic brain or an ADHD brain is not broken. They operate differently from the majority of the rest of the neurotypical world, much in the same way that a left-handed person is not broken and does not need to be forced into writing with their right hand anymore. We've come to that level of sophistication. Uh, left-handedness is a fact of life for a number of people. This isn't so much just about the autism and ADHD, which has been phenomenal in terms of, uh, looking at people that I could never understand and going, if I see them through this lens without giving them a diagnosis, because that's not ethical, um, but then I can understand a little bit better why how they communicate is so different from how I'm communicating. And we can start to find ways to bridge that gap. But this kind of insight about how our brains think is a critical element that we need to be considering as we prepare for the future, as we move into the future, because our world is getting smaller, because we're communicating on more applications, more apps, more immediately than ever before. And we can have conversations with people in other parts of the world, other cultures, languages, etc. Just as an insight, what is happening in the US with the TikTok ban has meant that many, many US TikTokers have moved over to a different platform in China, and the conversations that are happening on Red Note in China with the American TikTok refugees is absolutely amazing, and a lot of it is about this misunderstanding between us. So let's learn a bit of language. Let's learn a few protocols. Let's just understand each other's cultures a little bit as we start to move together in this space, because we want to get together and learn and communicate and share and grow in understanding each other better rather than being separated ideologically and Politically. There's a book that I've read before about the geography of thought, and, and this comes into a conversation that I had with a colleague who is in Nigeria, and she said, around the world, when we're looking at cultural, cross-cultural projects, we all feel the same, but we think differently. So what I'm learning from understanding ADHD and my own brain is that I think differently from other people, and that could be a bonus in some places and really a cause of conflict in others. But it is one of those concepts we need to learn. The byline that I'm using at the moment for most of my work is that we need to prepare our thinking fit for the future. And if we can only think one way, if we only have one framework, if we are trapped in any sort of frustration or paradigm or polarized thinking concept, we cannot communicate properly, we cannot understand, we cannot know if our message has landed, we cannot grow together, we only create more conflict rather than moving away from the conflict, standing together as humans against the conflict instead of having ourselves on opposite sides of the world. So how our brains think is absolutely amazing. It is cultural. It is based on language. It is different around the world. It is different in different brains. It is different in little girls and little boys, which is why so many older women these days are getting their ADHD diagnoses so late in life, because didn't understand it before when we were little. These are the things we need to think about so that we can create a future together that serves more people. and not just the privileged few, and that we can create that, that future together because we're learning to think fit for the future. Thank you.