by Ralph James Savarese
Cognition
To understand the relationship between cognition and disability, let us appeal to the concept of “situated cognition” in cognitive neuroscience. The field of disability studies attends, after all, to the situatedness, or social construction, of disability. The two branches of situated cognition—embodied and embedded—can help to illuminate how a different kind of body and a different kind of environment generate a different kind of thought. Embodied cognition repairs the traditional mind-body divide, whereas embedded cognition reveals the extent to which we all depend on our physical and social environments to think. The former thus blurs the line between “physical” and “mental” disabilities because no condition is strictly one or the other, and the latter points to complex accommodative ecologies that enhance cognition by imaginatively distributing it beyond the individual.
Neurodiversity
Almost a decade ago, general internist and health services researcher Christina Nicolaidis published an essay titled “What Can Physicians Learn from the Neurodiversity Movement?” (2012). The mother of a child with autism, she was deeply invested in providing better health care to people on the spectrum. She argued that doctors had to become much less pitying and alienating if they wanted to more effectively treat some of autism’s less salubrious aspects—anxiety, for example. She called on doctors to do two things: (1) learn from autistics about autism and (2) abandon what self-advocates and others call the “deficit model.” “Such a model, which focuses almost exclusively on impairments and limitations, leads us,” she wrote, “to see autistic individuals as broken people who are ill” (503). The neurodiversity model, in contrast, moves beyond illness—without sacrificing treatment—to difference.