Elon Musk, Neuroindividuality, and 8 Books That Showed Me My Brain (and Yours?)

Neuroscience is revealing that no two brains are alike

Photo by Margot RICHARD on Unsplash.

Elon Musk hosted Saturday Night Live this past weekend, sparking glee and greater fandom in some and disgust in others. I was in neither camp and had never heard Musk speak before, but I was fascinated from the beginning by the awkwardness and quirkiness of his delivery style. He had opened by announcing in the first moments that he has Asperger’s — new information for all, a suspect reveal for some, and a point of contention for yet others related to language and identity issues, and the re-classification of Asperger’s in 2013 as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

It brought me back to a word I just learned: neuroindividuality, the latest development in a newish journey of life experiences and books I consider to have “shown me my brain.” Neuroindividuality as the new normal is a focus of the work of Dr. Nicole Tetreault, who emphasizes that each of our brains is “as unique as our fingerprints” and advocates for using the latest in neuroscience research to nurture and liberate our whole selves.

The tremendous, nonstop busy-ness of my brain as a teenager kicked off two trends that didn’t neatly fit into the blue-collar world of my childhood. The first was a disinclination for driving that continues to this day. Among other things, I just didn’t want to focus on the road when my brain had a laundry list of more interesting thinking to tend to. Its raucous energy and exhaustive activity commanded respect, demanded indulgence.

The inverse trend was the lucky discovery of meditation from a special display of books at a Chicago public library I remember as “All Things California(!),” which lead to an ongoing meditation practice that also continues to this day. It clearly was responding to a need for some mental order, internal calm, even escape.

There were many things that suggested my brain was different, but I never put effort into understanding that further until my son was born, and a few years after that, as I struggled to recover from a concussion. Perhaps you’ve wondered the same — noticed in yourself and those around you differences in scope or style or intensity of memory, perception, cognition, sensory experience, emotion, and reasoning as pronounced as any similarities?

I have an identical twin sister and not surprisingly we have loads of commonalities, but even having shared that for a lifetime was nothing compared to seeing my own brain reflected in elements of my son as he has developed the past 11 years. For example, while we both seem wired for anxiety, we are not avoidant or timid. We appear wired to feel the fear and not think twice about doing something anyway. He has always gravitated to creative expression (me), philosophical questions (me), and mischievous humor (his dad). Before he was verbal, he had ten different ways to say, WOW, including one dripping with baby sarcasm. When he was two and had just started daycare, he sat me down and said, “Mom, two questions: Poop. Just why? School [i.e., daycare], why would a parent send their kid to a place like that?” (He’s still tying school with crap.) Now he can sling verbiage, musings, and boundary-pushing humor in a hash that can be hard to keep up with. It was actually seeing the joy he took in his creative writing assignments during the pandemic that reminded me of my past as a freelance writer, that being a writer was the one recurring thing I wanted to be when I grew up, and that I stumbled into book publishing while trying to be a writer.

Five years ago, I was walking down the street when guys working from a crane five stories up, brushed a pile of building debris onto my head and sent my life into a tailspin for a couple of years. In addition to the nonstop pain, like a baseball bat to the back of my head, my abilities had changed, my thinking had changed, and the experience of being me inside my head had changed. Doctors assured me I had no brain damage and one after another failed to respond to my claims that something was different for me. My head was dark inside. I couldn’t move ideas around or keep track of them; I had no metacognition. My head no longer felt connected to my body. Meditation was different; I couldn’t sink into my normal groove. I had to understand and process the world through my right ear (and I often find my head unconsciously tilted that way, lingering muscle memory from that era). I could read a book and enjoy it one sentence at a time, and tell you what it was about later, but I couldn’t think about the book relative to my stores of knowledge. I was making lots of simple addition and Quickbooks entry mistakes and even told the first expensive neurologist I saw, “it’s as if I’m not seeing correctly.” Eighteen months, piles of medical bills, and eight practitioners later, my pain was handled with a low-dose anti-inflammatory, and it was discovered that I had a visual processing disturbance. After four months of simply eye exercises, I woke up in the middle of the night and my brain, as I had always experienced it, was back.

Teenage awareness, observations of a late-in-life mom, prolonged concussion recovery, books that showed me my brain — all stepping stones that brought me to a place of investigating my own neuroindividuality. Check out my top four reads and additional four recommendations in this area and see if one or more won’t do the same for you.

The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness

by Todd Rose

“The ‘extensive’ differences that [Michael] Miller [UC Santa Barbara neuroscientist] found in people’s brains aren’t limited to verbal memory. They’ve also been found in studies of everything from face perception and mental imagery to procedural learning and emotion. The implications are hard to ignore: if you build a theory about thought, perception, or personality based on the Average Brain, then you have likely built a theory that applies to no one. The guiding assumption of decades of neuroscience research is unfounded. There is no such things as an Average Brain.” (p. 22)

Memorable Takeaways:

• While the mathematical mean (average) may be useful in some situations, the concept of an average anything does not exist in nature and our continuing to act as if it does leads to all sorts of errors, suboptimal situations, and misguided expectations.
• Our institutions are still organized around “an arbitrary standard — the average — compelling us to compare ourselves and others to a phony ideal.” (p. 10) It is not hard to imagine how the invention of average as a concept let to a standardized world.
• Talents are jagged (chap. 4), traits are a myth (chap. 5), we all walk the road less traveled (chap. 6), and we’re entering a new Age of Individuals (Part III).

You may always have suspected the ultimate messages of The End of Average*, but this is mind-blowing stuff and you owe it to yourself to read this book and grasp its implications more completely. It may forever change the way you understand and relate to yourself and others.

Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology

by Daniel J. Siegel

“Mind relates to our inner subjective experience and the process of being conscious or aware. In addition, mind can also be defined as a process that regulates the flow of energy and information with our bodies and within our relationships, an emergent and self-organizing process that gives rise to our mental activities such as emotion, thinking, and memory. Subjective experience, awareness, and an embodied and relational process that regulates the flow of energy and information are fundamental and interdependent facets of mind.” (1.1) [Emphases are all in the original, they indicate other entries in the pocket guide.]

Memorable Takeaways:

• Interpersonal neurobiology, also called relational neuroscience, explores the contributions of many fields — anthropology, biology, computer science, neuroscience, psychology, sociology and systems theory, to name a few — to better understand human development and human experience and to find applications for healing, mental health and well-being. It is particularly concerned with the relationship component of those things as well as development and the ability to thrive across the human lifespan.
• Our brains’ neuroplasticity refers to its ability to change, rearrange, grow, and rewire itself over the course of one’s life as a response to learning and experience, as a byproduct of our relationships, or after an injury.
• The mind as embodied refers to the physical structures of the brain and its connections the rest of our bodies. These are critical for our subjective experience of mind.
• The mind as relational indicates that the brain’s actual mechanics and uses are shaped, and re-shaped, by its experiences, particularly those connected with its most important and emotional relationships.
• The mind can be considered a relational process and that who we are exists as much between us as it does within us. (Remembering that systems theory contributes to an understanding of interpersonal neurobiology may help with the conception of this.)

This book* is a thick, dry, intense, and usefully repetitive read for those wanting to wrap their minds around its paradigm-shifting ideas. More accessible entrées to interpersonal neurobiology include Seigel’s Parenting from the Inside Out: How a Deeper Self-Understanding Can Help You Raise Children Who Thrive* (with Mary Hartzell) and Aware : The Science and Practice of Presence*.

Your Rainforest Mind: A Guide to the Well-Being of Gifted Adults and Youth

by Paula Prober

“If you think of people as ecosystems, you can see some as meadows, others as deserts, some as mountains — and some as rain forests. While all ecosystems are beautiful and make valuable contributions to the whole, rain forests are particularly complex: multi-layered, highly sensitive, colorful, intense, creative, fragile, overwhelming, and misunderstood, while thick with possibility and pulsing with life, death, and transformation.” (p. xi)

Memorable Takeaways:

• The sensitivities, empathy, and intensity of rainforest minds may incline people to angst, boundary-issues, social isolation, and vulnerabilities, but also resilience, divergent thinking, moral complexity, and a deep experience of the world’s richness. (chap. 1)
• If you have a rainforest mind, you need outlets and relationships where you can be yourself and not be considered “too much,” situations in which you are validated as you are.
• “Intrinsic perfectionism” may be entwined with self-actualization, a desire to manifest a specific inner vision and reach one’s full capacity. However, you can give up perfectionistic tendencies without abandoning high standards and high ideals by focusing on wholeness, balance, failure acceptance, and a growth mindset. (chap. 3)

Your Rainforest Mind* is an easy read filled with examples of real people, some scholarly background, and nuggets of easy-to-digest advice. As a challenging follow-up, I’d recommend Living with Intensity*, edited by Susan Daniels, PhD, and Michael M. Piechowski, PhD. It includes fifteen different takes on the work of Kazimierz Dabrowski, a psychologist whose personality theories of overexcitabilities and positive disintegration have changed the study of “giftedness.”

Refuse to Choose! Use All of Your Interests, Passions, and Hobbies to Create the Life and Career of Your Dreams

by Barbara Sher

“Most Scanners aren’t as attached to stability as other people. They seem to have retained the inborn security of a young child, the same love of what’s new, the drive to learn and understand everything they see. While most of us find the prospect of change disruptive, even threatening, Scanners thrive on it. They don’t mind being beginners as much as most adults…” (p. 28)

Memorable Takeaways:

• Replace the self-criticism that comes from absorbing the projections of those who don’t understand your wiring, with an appreciative interest in this aspect of yourself. There is power in knowing your identity. True, whether or not you’re a scanner. (p. 25)
• Your ideas are valuable and interesting even if they don’t come to fruition or make you famous or rich. “Respect for ideas is the same as respect for the idea maker: you. (It will also help you respect the ideas of others and might make a huge difference in their lives, too.)” Respect the new ideas you may be having and where they might be leading you. (p. 17)
• Give yourself permission to move ahead on all the things that matter to you. And, give yourself permission to stop when you get what you need from each experience. A goal is a guide not fixed in stone. A choice now isn’t a life sentence. You always have the option to make new choices from where you find yourself next. Honor and explore all the things that matter to you and how they might fit into your life — this is joy, not a mandate. (chap. 3)
• “Each time you judge yourself, you break your heart.” (p. 43)

This book* was life changing in a delightful, lighthearted way rather than a heavy dose of uber-significance and I wrote it about it in greater depth in this Medium article. A more recent book on the same multipotentialite track, also recommended but written for a more bullet-point attention span is How to Be Everything: A Guide for Those Who (Still) Don’t Know What They Want to Be When They Grow Up* by Emilie Wapnick.

Mid-way in his SNL monologue, Elon Musk said:

“Look I know I sometimes say or post strange things, but that’s just how my brain works. To anyone I’ve offended I just want to say I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?”

It was an assertion of neuroindividuality and I’ll be on the look out for more such personal statements and behavioral demonstrations from others. For myself, I feel like I’ve entered a new phase of just trying to appreciate and enjoy my brain without tangling that up with probing or taming, explaining or controlling. That’s how I relate to my son and I hope I’m cultivating the practice of extending that openness and curiosity to others.

I’ll show you my brain if you show me yours…

Sharon Woodhouse is the owner of Conspire Creative, which offers coaching, consulting, conflict management, project management, book publishing, and editorial services for solo pros, creatives, authors, small businesses, and multipreneurs.

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