One body, many brains: a train timetable, 47 seconds, and the work of attention

One body, many brains

A mother brought her son to my clinic, a boy in primary school. The moment he came through the door he looked up at the fluorescent light and stayed there for a long while. When I asked him a question he did not meet my eyes; instead he recited a train timetable from memory, station by station, minute by minute. His mother's voice was tired. "Doctor," she said, "what is wrong with him?"

I stopped at that word. Wrong.

I had a reason for stopping. Inside her question sat an old assumption, resting there so naturally that neither of us had put it in place: that a child's difference is a malfunction. I do not blame her for it. Most of us were raised on that assumption. But I know that if I begin my answer on top of it, the whole conversation runs in one direction only, toward what is broken in this boy and how we might repair it. So instead of answering right away, I asked about the timetable. How on earth did he memorize all those numbers? It was remarkable. For just a moment, her tired face loosened.

A list of defects, or a range?

For a long time medicine read autism, ADHD, and dyslexia as items on a list of defects. There is one standard called normal, and disability is however far you fall from it. It is as though the world owned a single ruler, and anything that did not match its markings was judged wrong. But the hand does not do the work of the foot, and if you measure both with the same ruler, one of them always comes out defective.

It is worth spelling out how that habit of mind actually works, because it happens in my clinic every day. First we take the average value of some trait and call it normal. Then we measure how far a person departs from that average. Then we give the size of that departure a name: a diagnosis. Up to there, the procedure is necessary and I would defend it. The trouble comes next. If a departure is read only as an error to be corrected back toward the mean, then the possibility that the same departure might be a strength somewhere else disappears from view before anyone thinks to look. Measuring and judging wrong are not the same act, yet older medicine often used them as one word.

In the late 1990s the Australian sociologist Judy Singer gave the alternative a name: neurodiversity. Human brains, on this view, vary widely by nature, the way height or temperament varies, and that variation may itself be an asset to our species.

Left-handedness makes the shift easy to feel. Schools once forced a left-handed child's pen into the right hand, because left-handedness was taken to be a mistake. Nobody thinks that now. A left-handed person is not a defect awaiting repair; they simply use the other hand. Scissors are awkward for them not because the hand is wrong but because the scissors were designed with only one kind of hand in mind.

The same neurological trait can be a burden or a gift depending entirely on where it is placed, and that deserves a slow look. One feature of autistic cognition is an intense attention that stays a long time on detail. Put that attention in a noisy classroom where a child must also read faces, and it becomes the exhaustion of being held fast by every stimulus that others let pass. Put the same attention where a flaw in code must be found, or the brightness of a star measured, or one bar of a score refined, and it becomes a concentration nobody else can imitate. Simon Baron-Cohen has traced the lineage of the pattern-seeking mind that pushed human tools and science forward, and he links it to autistic cognition, while insisting in the same breath on how varied the spectrum is and how real the accompanying difficulty can be.

So neurodiversity does not romanticize suffering. There are people whose autism is severe enough that speech and independence never come, and that burden is not a matter of framing. And yet the same difference is, in other places, a gift: a stubborn attention to detail, a power to read rules and patterns, an honesty less varnished by social convention. The timetable that boy recited was one way a different brain takes hold of the world.

Many parts, one body

Christianity knew about this variety from the beginning. Paul compared the Church to a body and wrote that a body is made not of one part but of many (1 Corinthians 12,14). The eye cannot say to the hand that it has no need of it; on the contrary, he wrote, the parts that seem weaker are the more necessary (1 Corinthians 12,22). A different brain may not be a deviation to be filed down until it fits the standard, but a part the whole body needs in order to be whole.

What makes that image beautiful is that the body is whole precisely because its parts differ. Think of an orchestra. If everyone plays the violin you do not get harmony, only volume. It takes a cello underneath, a horn sounding from far off, a timpani that waits and then strikes once, before there is a piece of music at all. Different sounds are not the flaw; music is what different sounds make together.

Henri Nouwen spent the last ten years of his life at L'Arche Daybreak, living with people who had intellectual disabilities. A man who had lectured at Harvard moved to a place where he helped one person bathe and eat, a person who could not follow a single sentence of a lecture. What the famous theologian learned beside someone who could barely speak was that a human being's worth does not sit in their capacities. He watched the weakest member open the deepest room in the house, and he watched it daily.

The other way attention fails

In the twenty-first century, though, attention is tested from the opposite direction. Not by a brain wired differently, but by our screens.

If neurodiversity is an inborn difference in attention, digital life breaks everyone's attention into small pieces. The screen pushes a new stimulus every few seconds; notifications pull at the circuit without pause. The attention researcher Gloria Mark, observing people at work on computers, reported that the average time spent on a single screen fell over about twenty years from a few minutes to roughly 47 seconds. Our attention is being trained to be short and shallow.

It is worth unpacking what 47 seconds means. To hold your mind on one object, the brain has to push other stimuli aside and gather its resources in one place. If a new alert scatters that gathering every few seconds, the brain repeats the labor of gathering from the beginning, again and again. A muscle that keeps tensing and releasing never lifts the heavy thing. The power to hold on for a long time dulls that way, a little at a time. I see it in the clinic too. Patients who would once have read a paragraph through calmly now interrupt my explanation of their test two sentences in: so what is the bottom line? I do not think this makes them worse people. It is a signal that all of us are being trained in the same direction.

I am not free of it either, and it would be dishonest to write this as if I were. I set down one paragraph, a notification sounds, my hand reaches the screen before I have decided anything, and when I come back I have lost the sentence I meant to write. Perhaps you have glanced at another window once or twice while reading this. That is not shameful. But knowing you are being trained and not knowing are two different conditions.

Prayer, deep love, and looking at one person for a long time all draw on the same finite muscle.

Why should any of this be a spiritual matter? Because Simone Weil held that attention, taken to its full degree, is prayer, and because repetitive prayer has always worked by gathering a scattered mind into one place. Prayer asks for sustained attention. So does love. So does the simple act of looking at one person long enough to see them. If digital life erodes that sustaining, then what is at stake is not productivity but the soul. The distraction the desert fathers warned about under the name acedia now lives permanently in our palms.

Back in the consulting room

I told that mother her son was not wrong, but different, and that we would look together for where the difference becomes a burden and where it becomes a strength. On his way out the boy ran a fingertip along the grain of the doorframe, and the sight of his back stayed with me. He may have been reading a texture of the world the rest of us walk past. And quietly I put a question to myself as well: am I looking at this boy, at this mother, with my eyes off a screen that keeps buzzing?

Treating a different brain as a dignity, and gathering my own scattered attention back together, turn out in the end to be one task. Both are about the strength it takes to look at one person, as they are, for a long time.

📖 These reflections draw from my books. Start with The God Neuroscience Found on Amazon, or see all my books on my author page.

These essays are personal reflection at the intersection of neuroscience and faith — not medical advice.

댓글

댓글 쓰기

이 블로그의 인기 게시물

Ninety-nine degrees: what the brain does in the moment a life turns

이미지
There is a kind of suddenness that neurologists are trained to fear. When a patient tells me something happened all at once — the weakness, the drooping face, the loss of speech — I immediately start thinking about blood vessels. In my clinic, sudden usually means something tore or something clogged. But there is another kind of suddenness, and I have never known how to chart it. A man came to me for years with chronic headache. Fifteen years of it, and somewhere along the way the painkillers had quietly become part of the problem rather than the solution. I explained this to him at nearly every visit. He nodded at nearly every visit. Nothing changed. Then one morning he sat down and said, before I had asked him anything, "I can't live like this anymore." And from that week he did rebuild all of it — the medication, the sleep, the coffee, the way he carried his work home. Not gradually. From that week. What had I said that day that I had not said for fifteen years? Nothi...
자세한 내용 보기

The more I learned about the brain, the more I found God

이미지
When I was younger, I assumed that knowledge and faith were on a seesaw. The more science you loaded onto one side, the higher belief would rise off the ground — until one day it floated away entirely. Learn enough, and God would simply have nowhere left to stand. Thirty years inside the human brain taught me the opposite. Here is the strange thing no one warns you about in medical school: understanding does not shrink the mystery. It relocates it, and usually it makes it larger. You finally grasp how a neuron fires — and behind that clean fact stands the question of how eighty-six billion of them, firing in the dark, produce the experience of tasting coffee, or missing your mother, or believing anything at all. Every answer in neuroscience is a door, and behind almost every door is a bigger room. We honestly understand less than one percent of the human brain. The more precisely we map that one percent, the more clearly we see the size of the ninety-nine. ...
자세한 내용 보기

Even When You Did Not Answer, You Were There

이미지
Even in the silence, someone is there. Even When You Did Not Answer, You Were There A neurologist remembers three patients, and the dawns he spent beside them Tae-Ho Guak, MD (John) · Neurologist Back to the dawn shift in the ER These days I see patients in an outpatient clinic in Bundang. But when I was first starting out as a neurologist, one of the things I did most often was assess a patient’s level of consciousness in the emergency room. “Open your eyes for me.” “Squeeze my hand.” “Can you hear my voice?” I would go through the prompts in a fixed order and note at which step the response came, then convert it into a number. That instrument is called the Glasgow Coma Scale. The numbers were added up and written into the chart as a single line: GCS 9. GCS 11. That one line settled the matter of a person’s consciousness. At two in the morning, again at four, I would repeat the same assessment once an hour. Back the...
자세한 내용 보기