Wednesday, January 1, 2020

My Working Papers on Neurodiversity

I don’t know when I first read the term neurodiversity, but it is likely only within the last decade, or perhaps a bit before. I took a look in Google’s Ngram viewer. I didn’t expect much to show up. I got that right; it didn’t turn up at all. Wikipedia dates the term back to the late 1990s.

Now that I’m aware of it I suppose I first became aware of the phenomenon back in the early 1970s when I picked up a book about the cerebral cortex that was written in the Soviet Union sometimes in the previous decade. I forget the name of the book and, as much of my library is in storage, I can’t dig it out. No matter. It had a number of standard maps of cortical areas as identified by cytoarchitecture, the so-called Brodmann areas. What was particularly interesting is that it had such maps for a handful of different individual differences and the differed from one another in significant ways. I forget whether or not the text talked of behavioral differences associated with those anatomical differences. That, of course, would be important.

But it was the mere fact of difference that most struck me. Up to that point every map I’d seen of Brodmann areas presented them, by default as it were, as pretty much the same from one individual to another. But no, that’s not the case.

ADHD and music

I began to think about neurodiversity in a focused way when I worked on my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture (2001), where the topic came up in connection with autism and with ADHD. Once the book was published I decided to take a look at the literature on ADHD. Here’s the result:

Music and the Prevention and Amelioration of ADHD: A Theoretical Perspective, Version 3, 2009.

Abstract: Russell A. Barkley has argued that ADHD is fundamentally a disorientation in time. These notes explore the possibility that music, which requires and supports finely tuned temporal cognition, might play a role in ameliorating ADHD. The discussion ranges across cultural issues (grasshopper vs. ant, lower rate of diagnosis of ADHD among African-Americans), play, distribution of dopamine and norepinephrine in the brain, neural development, and genes in culture (studies of the distribution of alleles for dopamine receptors). Unfortunately, the literature on ADHD does not allow us to draw strong conclusions. We do not understand what causes ADHD nor do we understand how best to treat the condition. However, in view of the fact that ADHD does involve problems with temporal cognition, and that music does train one’s sense of timing, the use of music therapy as a way of ameliorating ADHD should be investigated. I also advocate conducting epidemiological studies about the relationship between dancing and music in childhood, especially in early childhood, and the incidence of ADHD.

Contents:

Introduction: Lost in Time 1
Grasshoppers and Ants: Cultural Issues 1 2
Music, Time, and Behavioral Mode 3
Play in the Morning 5
Dopamine, Norepinephrine and The ADHD Brain 6
Neural Development 9
Genes and Culture 11
African Americans: Cultural Issues 2 14
Conclusions 15
Appendix: Timing 16

Download at:
SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1527090
Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/238609/Music_and_the_Prevention_and_Amelioration_of_ADHD_A_Theoretical_Perspective

Art and Down Syndrome

Sometime back in the “glory years” of academic blogging I started hanging out at Michael Bérubé’s now discontinued American Airspace (and which is no longer online). He wrote frequently about his son, Jamie, who was born with Down Syndrome. In 2016 he published Life as Jamie Knows It: An Exceptional Child Grows Up (2016). He also posted examples of Jamie’s art online. I looked at it, examined it, and became intrigued. I ended up doing a series of posts, each devoted to a specific kind of non-figurative imagery Jamie explored, and then collected them into a working paper:

Jamie's Investigations: The Art of a Young Man with Down Syndrome, October 2016.

Abstract: Jamie Bérubé is a young man with Down syndrome in his early twenties; he has been drawing abstract art since he was eleven. So far he has explored five types of imagery: 1) fields of colored dots in a roughly rectangular array, 2) tall slender towers with brightly colored horizontal ‘cells’, 3) pairs of concentric colored bands with one pair of concentrics above the other, 4) colored letterforms above a set of colored concentric bands, and 5) arrangements of fairly complex biomorphic forms. Taken together types 1 & 2 exhibit one approach to the problem of composing a page: place a large number of small objects on the page in a regular array. Types 3 & 4 exhibit a different approach: position relatively large objects in the center of the page. In some ways Bérubé’s fifth approach, arrangements of biomorphic objects, can be considered a synthesis of the two other approaches. Moreover the individual objects appear life-like and their arrangement on the page is dynamic, properties not otherwise evident in Bérubé’s art. It is his most recent form of art and may be considered the product of long-term experimentation.

Contents:

About Jamie Bérubé and His Art 2
Emergence: Jamie Discovers Art 3
On Discovering Jamie’s Principle 9
Scintillating Rhythm: Towers of Color 14
Composition: Concentrics and Letterforms 21
Biomorphs, Geometry, and Topology 32
What We Have Discovered? 39

Download at:
SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2853372
Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/29195347/Jamie_s_Investigations_The_Art_of_a_Young_Man_with_Down_Syndrome

Musical “prosthesis” and physical disability

As I understand it, neurodiveristy is about non-pathological differences in the brain and nervous system. By that standard this last paper is not about neurodiveristy; it is about three people who have been so badly disabled that they could not play musical instruments. They were patients at Beth Abraham Health Services in the Bronx, New York (where Oliver Sacks worked when he did the work he reported in Awakenings.) They had been outfitted with devices that allowed them to trigger electronic musical instruments:

William Benzon and David W. Ramsey, Musical Coupling: Social and Physical Healing in Three Disabled Patients, 2002.

Abstract: Some important aspects of physiological function can be conceptualized as a system of coupled oscillators. In a similar fashion, coupled oscillation can be used to understand musical interaction between individuals. The looping circuitry of individual nervous systems can be thought of as a bank of oscillators while musical sound provides the coupling function linking individuals together in a very satisfying form of social interaction. By providing severely disabled patients with simple piezoelectric triggers they can play electronic musical instruments well enough to join together in making music that is satisfying to them and to others as well. This article discusses three such patients and suggests avenues for future research.

Contents:

Introduction: From Shaman to MIDI 2
Music as Coupling: 4
MIDI Instruments for Disabled Patients 11
Group Interaction 20
Lessons and Questions 23
References 29

Download at:
SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1573747
Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/8692351/Musical_Coupling_Social_and_Physical_Healing_in_Three_Disabled_Patients

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