Another conference over. Sad but true. It was about 50 hours of video and face to face over the week. As with conferences it was hyper focus for the week followed by info digestion time. Well meaning folk talk about looking after yourself, only doing x hours, regular breaks etc. and a lot of that is right. I would sleep in 1-3 hour shifts but my waking focus was all on conference learning and sharing. I’ve tried other ways of being but it’s not healthy to be honest. A little thing that allistics don’t really understand is that it’s not the hours that cause stress but the human interaction and switching between tasks that really get us. Suffice to say that it was a great conference with a lot achieved.

As always I went to quite a few Customer Relationship Management lectures and picked up a great suite of recommends – some that I’ve been wanting to read for a long time like “Nudge” (Thaler and Sunstein), “Decisive” (Chip and Dan Heath), “CRM at the Speed of Light” (Paul Greenberg) … and the huge favourite “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Nobel prize-winner Daniel Kahneman.

So I started by post conference reading on Daniel Kahneman. This book has come up in many conversations and readings over the years and is built on 40 years of research. Systems processing in psychology breaks thinking into 2 processes

System 1 “is the brain’s fast, automatic, intuitive approach”. System 1 activity includes the innate mental activities that we are born with, such as a preparedness to perceive the world around us, recognise objects, orient attention, avoid losses – and fear spiders! Other mental activities become fast and automatic through prolonged practice. 

System 2 is “the mind’s slower, analytical mode, where reason dominates” . Usually, system 2 activity is activated when we do something that does not come naturally and requires some sort of conscious mental exertion.
https://www.marketingsociety.com/think-piece/system-1-and-system-2-thinking

Of course I’ve come across intuition and heuristics before. I was a psych major and spent untold hours as an acting student at university in Sandy Meisner “magic circles” acting impulsively. These things were either ideological (the former) or a bit of a pretence (the latter). I was always told that I was too ‘much in my head’ as an actor and not impulsive and ‘gut’ enough. I got better at faking it OR rehearsing so much at home that the thinking became unrecognisably fast, like remembering lines by reading them off the script in my mind. I’d argue that people were just ignorant of the calculations that they were doing in social situations and the amount of relationship math that was going on to interact with others were just the thing that they liked to call “intuition.”

Then I discovered I was autistic.

Well it was a long time coming to be honest. I was many times called autistic or aspie (amongst other things) when I was overloaded enough that the mask dropped. I rolled with it and tried harder. and harder. and … well it got to a point when I was working with others a lot more than usual in strategy and inter-team negotiation. And when my boundaries were crossed one to many times I did what comes naturally – I researched – and discovered my autistic self. Meeting more and more autists I realised that I was not just hard work, a broken person, or less – but a fully functioning autistic adult. That’s a conversation for another time.

Back to “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman I was reading about word association games and impulsive thinking and exactly how (neurotypicals) think about these things. Having thoughts that just into their mind when another is said as if by magic. You see this doesn’t happen for me. When word associating with my wife and she says yoghurt I think hard and come up with the yogurt that I just put into the fridge and make a conscious choice that I’d go with blue like the navy blue sticker that was on the carton. Or if she said smile I would conjure the list of emoticons and go to the next one in the list as a conscious choice. Impulsive thoughts to me are just cognition at speed.

I’ve posited this to my autistic psychologist friends and looking forward to what they have to say. From the recent feedback they seem to agree. We don’t do System 1 thinking. We don’t attribute malice to a big triangle that is following a smaller one (you neurotypicals are weird), we think about it and respond ‘appropriately’ (I realise this is laughingly subjective). It’s the same reason I believe that we autists have a large disregard for gender stereotypes with our high gender queer constituency and a high sense of justice in our shirking of nonsensical social convention. Of course I’m massively biased but I know that because I don’t do System 1 thinking. I think that we do an incredible processing job emulating heuristic thinking and doing so wonderfully well. But I’m sure that my thoughts on this will evolve when I talk to our incredible community further who will enlighten me more.

Literally food for thought.

Stay safe