Neurodiversity within a Divided Nation : The Nerve to Unite

This collaborative book by five distinguished scholars in overlapping fields suggests that fruitful living is extremely hard work and that social harmony requires the unlocking and the emancipation of the human brain – the core cerebral source for advancing human coherence, connectivity, cohesion and civility. The stakes are simply too high for stakeholders across our country not to respond to the ongoing and escalating crisis of human division and the desperate need for engagement, enlightenment, and acceptance of human diversity. The authors strongly encourage academic and practitioner psychologists, as well as other students and social scientists, to join a timely framed narrative for greater progress in diversity. Neurodiversity aims to encourage dialogue, discourse, and discovery about what may be obvious to many but avoided by most – because its forces us to look inward instead of outward. We can make such inward observations, through the lenses of psychology, cognition, mindfulness, and underleveraged brain capacity amid modern cultural neuroscience. This is critically important – particularly in a time marked by the widespread amplification of ambiguity, angst, ambivalence, and anger. This book focuses on “crucial thinking” versus “critical thinking.” The authors pose fundamental questions -- about what we are calling a form of cognitive “levitation” and taxonomical “climbing” (CBDT) -- to think about purposes of intellectual discourse, not necessarily to seek empirical evidence. A special feature of this book is the inclusion of sample student learning outcomes as “provisos” throughout the narrative. We have attempted to integrate the student learning outcomes in the text’s narrative and connect them to the sections where they are inserted for the reader. The book’s embedded taxonomies can also facilitate the instruction, composition, and conceptualization of targeted student learning outcomes.