The Neurodivergent Professor

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Have you ever thought about how complex our brains are? Or about how little we seem to really know about the way we think?

Like, how can we simultaneously love our family but also they annoy us to no end? 

I think this dissonance, this capacity to hold to two seemingly oppositional thoughts at the same time is just something we are able to do. What’s weird it that we try to not do this. When we have two opposing thoughts we say we’re ‘confused’, or ‘demented’, or ‘senile’. We have all sorts of negative terminology to describe what I think is a perfectly normal condition.

I think this all stems from our sadistic love of conformity. 

If you’ve seen any of my work you know I’m not a fan of conformity. Rather, I believe in diversity and variation. Maybe it’s my background in Evolutionary Biology. Maybe it’s that I’ve always felt different, maybe it just makes sense. 

I present both The Evolution Paradox and The Uniqueness Imperative to explain how our genetic makeup, via Natural Selection, creates diversity. Change is the way of the world, not conformity. By definition, conformity goes against the very literal basis of our being.

For more background, I discuss in ‘Let’s Talk About Sex Part 1’ why sexual reproduction is so important and how this facilitates diversity. 

Our biological nature creates diversity and has led to our splendid minds. But what is a mind, exactly? A mind comes from our neurology and our brain but is something different. You can’t measure a mind. It us ‘us’, our individual Self, our Soul. It makes each one of us unique.

And this is where it gets tricky.

Inasmuch as we are a unique member of Homo sapiens, we are also a PART of the collective human race. We are one with the Earth. There is not actual, individual Self. And there is.

This is another thing humans aren’t very good at: holding two seemingly opposing ideas simultaneously. 

But not only is that possible, it is just a feature of life.

The difference, nay, the problem in all this is that has led us, humans, to feel separate, and to promote conformity while shunning diversity.

Think about it. That’s what we do. And it’s wrong.

This episode is chock full of other ditties about evolution, conformity, and neurodivergence. I am on a new path and much of the meat of future discussions are introduced and rehashed here. Please feel free to drop ideas, thoughts, comments, and corrections.

Your mind is a splendid thing. I hope you use it to promote the very diversity that makes you unique.

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Have you ever felt like scientists were assholes? Or at least super arrogant? 

I often hear scientists sound this way. And when I was in academia it seemed they surrounded me. Being an academic seemed synonymous with being so arrogant that you turned people off.

I think many of us have experienced this and it does academia and science a disservice.

It’s like a medical doctor with no bedside manner. If you can’t communicate with ‘normal people’, whatever level of intelligence or value you offer society can be ineffective.

In other words, if you can’t talk to people in a way that doesn’t turn them off they won’t hear what you have to say.

Think about that.

If we can’t communicate well we run the risk of losing our meaning. Our value to society can be severely diminished.

That’s why I have podcasted here and here and even here about the importance of being human — being NON-SCIENTIFIC. Being humble. 

When I say Science is Not the Truth, I mean it. When you hear scientists claiming they (and usually only they) know the truth or have some special access to reality, you should believe them less.

When I say “I Don’t Know” are the most powerful words in the English language, I mean that, too. If you hear someone sound so confident that they stop questioning their brilliance, you should believe them much less. If at all. 

I talk about the truth and facts and science and arrogance a lot. Hell, my very first Episode was about this. 

I talk about this so much because it matters. It is important for us to act as informed consumers. Of goods and services but also of information. It is up to us as a society to reach a consensus via a science-informed discourse. 

Unfortunately, what happens nowadays is that we treat scientists as either Gods or pariahs. Neither moniker is fair or accurate. This is a dangerous practice. 

It’s obvious to me that not everything can be effectively studied using science. Science requires measurements and numbers. 

At the most basic level, all science does is convert reality to numbers and then use math to answer questions.

If you accept that explanation (and I get it if you don’t, because, well, this article and every link in it) then you can entertain the idea that the ‘goodness’ of science is dependent on the ability of the measures to be measured effectively and accurately.

In other words, for things that can’t be effectively measured AND replicated (i.e., measured many times or have many different units to measure) then science just won’t work.

And I am VERY guilty of this because as a scientist I studied streams. Each stream is unique. Every part of every stream is unique. As Hericlitus is supposed to have said, 

His lack of gender appreciation notwithstanding, this is essentially accurate.

Despite my inability to replicate streams I still used math to assess my data. In reality, this makes my science weak, at best. 

Psychological science suffers from a similar shortcoming. It’s hard to measure human intelligence, the brain, or our emotions. But we use scientific methods anyway.

There are many who would thus consider ecology and psychology to be ‘soft’ sciences or pseudoscience. And

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Do you ever think about what life was like for early humans once we had our basic needs met? You know, once we figured out how to procure victuals and maintain a shelter. What was life like? 

Experts including historians, anthropologists, and scientists seem to disagree. Some say we were ignorant savages (I’m looking at you, director of Pocahontas) whereas others claim we actually didn’t work that much but spent a lot of time playing. 

I like to think we were pretty smart. I think we fairly quickly met our basic needs and spent a lot of time enjoying ourselves. Painting caves. Making babies (though we may not have known that’s what we were doing). Learning to communicate, tell stories, and document history.

It’s certainly fun to think about. And I can’t help but think what I wrote in the title above:

Doesn’t it?

And, evolutionarily, wouldn’t natural selection sort it out this way? As in, individuals who had a proclivity or interest in life — living life — would be more likely to procreate and perpetuate their genes into the future. 

I’m making a few assumptions here. Mostly that Nature Knows Best and that the Meaning of Life is to express our individual genome. In essence, to live out our nature. Refer to those episodes for more details.

I think we humans are at a point in our evolution where we are sorting out the recent past. The past 5,000 years or so of recorded history are all we know about ourselves, and that is a tiny fraction of the time we have existed. 

Our ancestors have been around maybe 200–300,000 years. What was going on before, say, Egypt?

Many think our ‘highly evolved brains’ make us ‘better’ than our ancestors. Certainly our non-human ancestors. Modern times have been dominated by decisions and choices that utilize our ‘advanced brains’. This is unique.

During most of our history natural selection was mostly external. As our brains became more complex (and more complicated) humans started to impose selection pressures on ourselves. That’s where things get interesting.

As I mark 150 episodes and over three years of this podcast, I am being pulled in this direction. Along with many other thinkers and creators, I feel a collective emergence of questions. Many people are questioning our human decisions. We are wondering about the direction of evolution. We might be creating more problems than we are doing good. Our capacity to override Nature might be taking us away from where we need to be.

We are in an age where we, and our technology, can act as new selection pressures and literally alter the course of evolution.

Is this good? I argue it is not. 

This episode introduces many ideas that I will explore in the next arc of Knowledge + Experience = Wisdom. I hope you enjoy the summary and will stick around for the future. 

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Do you ever feel like what you want to do goes against what society ‘wants’ you to do? 

Like, maybe you want to be a painter, but your parents and your school tell you that you’ll never make any money.

Maybe you want to take a gap year after high school but your parents fear you’ll never go to college and, thus, never ‘amount to anything’. 

Maybe you are attracted to people of your same sex but your religion tells you that’s wrong.

I think you get what I’m saying. It’s kind of like my ‘Are vs Should Problem’ and the many episodes I dedicated to figuring out who you ARE and who it is you feel like society, your parents, and your religion tell you you SHOULD BE.

So this episode is about that, but it’s also about a more general, yet pervasive, set of ‘rules’. 

For me, this started very young, maybe six years old. I realized that, in order to live my life, I was going to have to spend that life working. I was surrounded by people who didn’t seem to like their jobs, so I also learned that working pretty much sucked.

Even at this early age, I realized life was about things I didn’t want to do. 

I also realized that ‘society’, whatever that was, regulated the things I could and could not do. It was as if I had to get permission to be myself. Surely, many people can relate to this feeling.

The most basic form of permission is working to earn money to pay for your life. 

How awful is that?

I’m not sure what initiated this feeling that I needed permission, but it is a fairly pervasive element in this life we live. If we are privileged enough to have a choice. 

But we don’t need permission to live. The fact that we are lucky enough to be born is all the evidence we really need. I talk about this in Episode 99: The Uniqueness Imperative. But we miss that. Society, religion, family, work, and culture beg to differ. They want us to EARN our way, and I just can’t get behind that.

We don’t need permission to live.

If only it were that simple. I can tell you all day long that you don’t need permission to follow your dreams, date who you want, or wear whatever clothes you want — as long as you obey the Golden Rule and harm no one in the process. But it won’t do any good. The brainwashing, the INDOCTRINATION that you experienced is just too strong.

We really need to get away from the idea that earning money permits us to fulfill ourselves. 

We deserve to get our needs met, as long as doing so doesn’t harm others. Though we don’t all have equal access to pursuing our dreams and needs, those of us that do owe it to everyone to try.

We owe it to our ancestors who suffered for our success. Whose traits were selected for and persist in us. Expressing these traits is the highest of achievements. 

Yet, that’s not how we measure achievement. 

We measure ‘success’ in the form of money. How effed up is that?

Money is just something we made up. Your DNA is what makes you you and links you to everyone else.

But you don’t have to play this game. You can do what you want. You can follow your own path. Listen to the beat of your own drummer. Listen to your heart. Whatever it means to you to be yourself. The person you ARE.

You have my permission. Not that you needed it. www.chrisburcher.com

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you remember the term ‘coping mechanisms’? We used to hear this phrase often, usually when people were referring to our bad habits. 

Like, smoking is a coping mechanism for stress. Avoiding conflict is a coping mechanism for people who don’t want to get involved. Denial is a popular coping mechanism for avoiding hurtful truths.

Though the term ‘coping mechanism’ has sort of gone out of style, we still talk about the same phenomenon. 

We talk about people wearing masks and changing our personalities depending on who we talk to.

We talk about limiting beliefs affecting how we navigate our lives.

All of these terms describe how we can respond to life in ways that aren’t necessarily how we would choose to act. It’s like our reaction to things depends on the situation. In different situations, we employ different reactions or strategies.

This is most obvious to me when I take psychological tests or quizzes. I had to do this recently with my therapist. I found myself thinking ‘it depends’ in answering many of the questions.

For example, a classic Meyers-Briggs personality question is about introversion vs. extroversion. A question might be something like,

• Do you enjoy being in a crowd of people?

Well, yes and no. It depends! Or sometimes we think, “I don’t know”.

Another example is related to autism. 

• Do you find it difficult to make eye contact with others?

Again, it depends!

In this case, I do find it difficult BUT I have learned to make an effort to have eye contact because I understand it improves communication.

So, which is it? 

This got me thinking about coping mechanisms, limiting beliefs, masks, and how we alter our behavior in different situations.

Most importantly, it made me wonder who I am and where is my Self.

In Internal Family Systems Therapy, Richard Schwartz describes how personality is comprised of multiple parts. These parts perfectly address these coping mechanisms.

Dr. Schwartz describes how trauma, or uncomfortable situations, can lead us to create masks or sub-Selves that help us navigate our lives. We learn to alter our behavior to protect ourselves.

Thus, there are many attempts to understand how and why we wear masks in our lives to cope with stress.

In the end, I think it comes down to this:

• If we aren’t getting our needs met, we implement strategies we learned as children 
• Many of these strategies no longer work for us as adults
• If we can figure out how to meet the unmet needs we no longer need the mask

Life, then, becomes about finding our Self and discarding the masks we wear.

I hope this episode will help you on your journey of self discovery.

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If you’re familiar with me or craft beer (or maybe both?) you may be familiar with the phrase, “The brewing industry is 99% asshole free”. This quote became famous when Sam Calagione, founder of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery published his book “Brewing Up a Business”. This book was an inspiration to my brewery and a big part of the craft beer explosion.

The quote suggests that the beer business is more cooperative than competitive. It turns out this is not true. Like any business, breweries compete with each other. And as the number of breweries increased, so did the number of assholes. In the end, Sam’s quote is not true, and there are as many assholes in the craft brewing business as there are anywhere.

Surely you have assholes in your life. Maybe a boss or coworker. Maybe a family member. Maybe your president. What’s crazy is that these jerks seemed to be more loved than hated a lot of times. How did they get to be the boss in the first place?

In fact, in our white patriarchal plutocratic world being an asshole seems like a requirement. Many people in power are admired for their assholery. 

This makes me wonder how much we are all complicit in these assholes' success because we enable it.

Now, I get it. Many people are not in the position to refuse an asshole. When they are in positions of power over us, there is little we can do that doesn’t harm ourselves. We lose jobs, relationships, and money if we rebel against their poor behavior.

But enablers and complicit behavior don’t help drive assholes extinct. 

Have you ever thought about a time when there were no assholes? I often think (perhaps naively) that we didn’t have a lot of assholes until we had social hierarchies. Depending on when that began (and we’ll never know), there may have been a time when social groups had mechanisms to PREVENT assholes from gaining power rather than ENABLING them. 

In fact, I will suggest here that shame was one of these mechanisms. Shame is a terrible thing, and I have shared about this here and here. But shame evolved for some reason. I think groups of humans, and maybe other primates, used shame to call out and DISABLE poor behavior. So when our ancestors acted like assholes, they got kicked out of the tribe. The asshole genes were selected against, in an evolutionary sense.

As our societies modernized and became more numerous the asshole reduction behaviors have been forgotten. Most assholes needed to get punched in the mouth or otherwise publicly shamed but were not. I think some elements of modernity, including social hierarchies, power, land ownership, and money, created artificial evolutionary selection pressures FOR assholery.

In this episode I talk more about why it is critical we reverse this trend and rid ourselves of the assholes in our lives.

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What matters to you? What is important? What do you value (Episode 46 Values)? We say things matter to us when we put energy into developing, protecting, and thinking about them.

Our families matter. Our relationships matter.

Things that matter have meaning to us. What is meaningful to me might not be meaningful to you.

But as I have said before, I think there are some things that have universal meaning. They matter to us all.

Life. Peace. Calm. Justice. Love. Integrity.

Many would argue these things matter.

But how about power, wealth, or truth? Do these things matter?

Probably there are some fairly universal things or concepts that matter to us all. Whether we realize this, of course, is open to debate.

What really matters, then, depends on awareness. About trying. About making an effort to do the things I talk about in other Episodes like 136 Human Values are Common Sense, 133 What Freedom Means to Me, and 123 Nature Knows Best, 121 Awareness. Cultivation and Growth, 82 What Do You Need?. We have to care about ourselves and each other. 

I also think that defining what matters can be incredibly helpful to us as individuals and to our society. I may even argue that it is essential to define what matters if only to reduce the things we spend time worrying about.

For those of us who are anxious, letting go of things that DON'T matter, or that matter less, can be freeing. We could all benefit from a personal inventory to help eliminate things we worry about but that probably don't matter.

Many of us probably waste time on things that don't matter. 

Many of us also probably never thought about it.

I invite you to take an inventory (Episode 51 Personal Inventory) of your life and ask yourself, 'Does this matter?'

If it doesn't, let it go. 

If it does, hold it close and protect it.

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You're probably not old enough to remember, but a commercial in the 70s reminds me of this episode. In the commercial, a woman who represented Earth informed the viewer, 

"'It's not nice to fool Mother Nature."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDkiq5jD5Hc

I don't know if this ad made an impression on me, but my adult self agrees with it.

I don't think we consult Mother Nature often enough. It might be my Evolutionary Ecology background showing, but I tend to think of things in terms of evolutionary history. In many ways, I use Nature as a reference in most of my life.

I have done several episodes honoring the beauty of evolution.

Episode 44, 'Unnatural Selection' suggests that humans have altered the typical course of evolution using things like technology and machines.

https://chrisburcher.com/2021/03/26/kew-episode-44-unnatural-selection/

In my 100th episode, 'The Evolution Paradox' I discuss how strange it seems that humans resist change despite being entirely driven by adaptation to a changing environment. Quite literally, the only thing we can depend on is that things change.

https://chrisburcher.com/2022/06/03/life-is-supposed-to-change-its-up-to-you-kew-episode-100-the-evolution-paradox/

Truly, most of my thinking assumes that the evolutionary model and history tells us a lot about success.

Fitness, according to Darwin, is essentially biological success. The things that persist on Earth are 'fit' for the environment. Fitness is good. Extinction is bad. 

Here I am going a step further to suggest that we treat Mother Nature as our ally. Our therapist. Our counselor. Why would we not consult this wisdom when making decisions about our future?

This consultation is toward what I am calling 'Natural Law', though this term has been used before and isn't quite suitable here.

I'm simply suggesting that we look to history to think about the future. 

Kind of like how meteorology and predicting weather is more 'hindcasting', or looking to the past, than it is 'forecasting'. 

Instead, humans often assume we know better than Mother Nature because we are so evolved and intelligent. We create technology that helps our bodies live longer while our minds rot. We burn fossil fuels that help us fly around the planet while we destroy the systems the planet relies on for life. We're good, but we're not that smart. 

This sort of unnatural selection is dangerously arrogant and, arguably, is leading to our demise. 

The most obvious example of this erroneous and arrogant thinking is Capitalism, and I discuss this in detail in Episode 37, 'The Currency of Life'. 

https://chrisburcher.com/2021/01/08/kew-episode-37-currency-of-life/

Humans think we can do better than Mother Nature. And maybe we can, but we certainly shouldn't implement these strategies without consulting her first. 

Our ancestors knew this. We just forgot.

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Are humans inherently evil? 

There’s a popular hypothesis that says we are. It’s a great excuse for bad behavior. But believing we can’t help ourselves has never set well with me. Kind of like when some guys use ‘millions of years of evolution’ as an excuse to not be monogamous.

My hypothesis is that humans aren’t inherently evil, and I’m going to tell you why.

In Rutger Bregman’s ‘Humankind: A Hopeful History’, he makes a convincing case for why he doesn’t think humans are evil. He cites another book, William Golding’s ‘The Lord of the Flies” as a popular example arguing against his thesis. He explains that “Lord” is a popular book based on no evidence. In fact, Bregman further describes, the only evidence we know of refutes the premise that humans would behave like they did in Golding’s story.

I think being evil and doing evil are different things. Kind of like how shame is about being bad and guilt is about doingbad. I don’t think people are inherently evil. I believe we are born good. And always have been.

Before I share my thoughts on why I think people are not inherently evil, please allow me to share a story.

My brother is a bicycle rider. He has been my whole life. Sometimes he has to share the road with cars. Thirty years ago he told me he was literally run off the road by an intolerant (evil?) driver. For years I used this story as an example to illustrate that things were getting better. I thought those days were behind us.

Just a few days ago my bro shared more recent anecdotes about having a dirty diaper and a bottle of human urine dumped on him by drivers while riding his bike. WTF is wrong with people?

Were these people evil, or were they just doing bad things?

I refuse to believe people are evil because I don’t think natural selection would have favored it. I think the social nature of homo sapiens depends on lots of positive interactions. I think ‘good’ is considered evolutionarily fit, and thus selected for whereas evil is not. 

So, why, then do people do bad things?

I believe people do bad things because of trauma. Acting out distracts people from their pain and provides an escape. A hit of dopamine or oxytocin to cover up their wounds. Probably because other people did bad things to them. Other people who had their own trauma. Who also were not evil.

These people, traumatized people, don’t need our hate. They need our love. https://www.buzzsprout.com/530563/12353141

In order to send love to and empathize with people who do bad things, we have to do our own work. This begins with us, as individuals. 

Next, we can learn to extend love outward toward people in need. We can demonstrate tolerance and empathy.

Self-awareness is contagious, but it is a luxury. Those of us who have it need to share it. This is the beginning of how we get to where we need to go.

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