Labels help distinguish fertilizer from herbicide on the shelf at the garden supplies store. In the garden store, there's not a shelf with containers of mostly fertilizer on one side with some herbicide along a continuum of containers with gradually more herbicide to fertilizer until at the far end of the shelf, there's a container for mostly herbicide with some fertilizer.
By contrast, for most of the human condition, our cognitive conditions exist on a continuum. Our various awarenesses and aptitudes exist on a continuum. Even a difference as obvious as asleep and awake exists on continuum as we drift into sleep and rouse back into consciousness.
Within our brains, there are continuums, and among each other there are continuums. No two of us stand in the same place at the same time, look in the same direction, and take in the same sample of what's out there. Are those people standing next to me less intelligent; less moral; less careful than I am? Compared to them, do I have a deficit or a disorder?
What are those labels going to do for you?
Think about right and left lateral dominance -- what we call handedness. It's also a continuum. We label ourselves right handed, left handed, ambidextrous. We have those natural inclinations. At the same time, we don't call ourselves left or right lateral neuromotor deficient to refer to one's non-dominant side. We adapt. Nearly all the physical things we do are the result of natural movements: walking and carrying, for example. Others, riding a bicycle, are the result of training.
I'm wearing glasses to write this. I have custom-made shoes on my feet, not as a fashion flex, but the atypical alignment of my feet makes conventionally-designed shoes unable to fit effectively: I've adapted.
Even for people with conventionally aligned feet, shoe stores are already organized around adaptations for different sizes. Our feet sizes are on a continuum. Those shoe store sizes are rough adaptations to the continuum. My outlier feet need more precise adaptations. Before properly fitting shoes, the adaptation was pain-relieving medication. I'm grateful for it, and it's still occasionally beneficial. At the same time, having precisely fitting shoes has been life relieving.
My optometrist has cool devices to measure precisely the continuum of our visual processing in order to create more optimum adaptations. Not foreseen, and yet, there may be a point when my adaptation is a wheelchair or learning Braille.
Our cognitive conditions are harder to know, and harder to find adaptations for because they're multi-dimensional and invisible.
Those of you subscribing to this newsletter know we've created a cool device for measuring the continuum of our cognitive processing, precisely calibrated through more than two decades of research basis and research validation.
The goal of the assessment has been to identify where you are on our multiple cognitive continuums. That's a starting point, much as when the optometrist precisely measures my vision and the shoe maker creates a precise mold of my feet. Next is to begin the practice of finding the adaptations.
Next posts will look closely at adaptations associated with various positions on our multiple cognitive positions. Previous posts in this series have highlighted our range of cognitive diversity with the goal of making those invisible processes more visible.
Our coaching and advisory work is longer term; and, I like the word, idiosyncratic, from ancient Greek meaning "one's own mixture."
We support individuals, partners, and teams to find the optimum adaptations for your own mixture.
We've been told it's life relieving.
Warm regards,
Francis Sopper
Links
continuum: https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/jnp.10.4.459