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A very rich conversation last week, as evidenced by the thoughts already posted here. A good followup to the previous week on "broken brains?", and a good foundation for the coming week on brain and education.

I very much share Stephanie's thought that thinking about diversity in terms of "fairness" can be usefully supplemented by thinking about it as well in terms of ... what it is good for/not good for in day to day life (I'm not sure "productivity" quite captures this, but its close enough). And I think Rebecca's and EmilyA's point is an important one as well ... humanity has a long history of presuming that some forms of humans were better than others and acting to try and eliminate those thought to be less good. The struggle between efforts to make things better (and more homogenous) and .... belief in the value of difference is an old one, not one that first appears with advances either in genetic manipulation or in brain science.

In this context, it seems important to entertain the possibility that advances in biology and neurobiology might be used to gain greater insight into the origins and significance of diversity, rather than as new tools for "optimizing" individual humans. And here I do think it is useful to think about the generalization that all successful biological systems, ourselves included, are in fact systems that function well precisely because of the diversity of their components . And, more specifically, to think about the benefits of "mental diversity". Maybe, though, in this class, we could find a term that is more encompassing? As a neurobiologist, my inclination is to suspect that the physical and the mental are much less clearly separable than is usually thought. So how about we talk about "neurodiversity"? With the clear understanding that "neurodiversity" is a function not simply of genes but of life experiences as well. And that neurodiversity is not only or even primarily a function of group differences, but is a property of individuals which may in turn contribute to group identities. As Danielle says, "Each person is their own sub-group of diversity".

The questions that then arose had to do with the balance between "efficiency" and "productivity", the significance of "intelligence" as measured by test scores and the like in comparison to other aspects of neurodiversity, the importance of communication/coordination, and the issue of whether there are limits to the range of diversity that can contribute to productivity. These aren't simple questions to answer but it does seem to me they represent at this point a potentially much more promising way to think about diversity than the traditional fairness approach (cf The Brain, Story Sharing, and Social Organization).

And, of course, they set an interesting context for next week's discussion of brain and education. Does education as it is currently practiced increase or decrease neurodiversity? What would we like it to do? Looking forward to that conversation, and to hearing more about what others heard/took away from this one.