I’ve been getting so furious every time I think about the concept of intelligence. We talk about it like it’s some objective measurable fact but we have no idea what we are even talking about and then society uses it as a measurement of human value
It's been so helpful to understand my autistic brain and that it runs every single process separately and processes each point of data individually. I can see better now what “intelligence” is in my brain and how much of it depended on the processes learned and data available
Being a depressed kid was good in that I never understood seeing intelligence as value. I was effortlessly good at school and i was miserable all the time because of things I couldn’t stop thinking about so I knew there was no way this was an objectively better way to be a human
It’s been wild to figure out I’m autistic and reverse engineer my brain and see how much of who I am and how I think is thanks to having a mom who thought like me and gave me all the data I wanted. I needed constant input and she made sure I had it. What is my brain without that?
People tend to read me as rich and privileged and it’s always confused me because that’s not my life experience. I’m a public school kid, Army brat, product of generations of social misfits and outcasts, who became a stripper and onlyfans creator to afford to feed myself.
I see now it’s because of all the data in my brain. It’s all the input I got. Getting as much input as your brain wants is associated with private schools, SAT prep tutors, childhood French lessons. It’s the conflation of intelligence and socioeconomic class
That’s not how I got access to information - I got stacks of library books and a mom who talked to me about literally everything because she also loves to learn and wanted me to have all the input I wanted to have - but now I understand why people assume that
We’re just judging people’s “intelligence” and then their inherent human value based off of the information and teaching styles they had available to them. I knew this before but I can truly see it now. My brain isn’t magic, it’s rational processing + lots of data input & storage
My cognitive processing takes a lot of energy and it doesn’t leave my body much else to work with. I have fatigue, I can’t eat a lot or I can’t digest it all, I can have a meltdown from one trip to the laundromat. Everything is a tradeoff. I am not “high functioning.”
I like myself exactly as I am and to me this makes perfect sense. The reason I can't make myself stand in a line as long as every other adult on the planet seems to be able to is because my brain is taking the energy to power my thoughts. That seems fair. Tradeoffs.
This discussion about NDs and math revealed that most of us had discovered how to do math our own way after years of struggling and it made me think so much about learning style. Would I be good at math if I’d been taught the right way for me? Would we have loved it? https://twitter.com/erikaheidewald/status/1380047352736587776
So many nonspeaking autistic people are regarded as NON-THINKING just because there's a disconnect from thoughts to muscle control. Something as simple and obvious as that leads to a dismissal of their intelligence. None of this makes sense! https://tania.co.za/non-speaking-autistics-thoughts-on-aba/
Now that I know just how fully fabricated the public perception of autism is, I can't believe the medical establishment’s definition of anyone else, either. They know nothing about how people think, how they learn, what their brains need to develop. What are we doing to people?
Humans dismiss all kinds of intelligence we don't understand and that makes the concept of intelligence completely meaningless and worthless. We decided our intelligence sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom to justify our control over the world. How’s that going?
Why does any of this connote value? Why do I need to go to the laundromat? Why are some very difficult jobs considered low skill? Why are we still accepting any of this as fact? Why aren’t we even interested in finding out what people’s brains want to be & how they get there?
It's scary and sad to me to realize that if I had different parents raising me, I might not have the brain that I have. My brain is me and it was allowed to become itself and I'm so grateful for that. It's scary to realize what a product of chance your very identity is.
Maybe we could stop categorizing brains by their output measured against an arbitrary standard and instead categorize them by what they need and give them what they need. My brain needs input and data with context all day every day. That does matter. I really need that.
We don't even know what other people’s brains need because we think one kind of brain is more important than another and it's not. Nature experiments, it changes, it grows. Why are we stopping that? We labeled everything and decided that was enough, but we know nothing.
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