Cavendish Space: psychologically & sensory safe spaces suited to zone work, flow states, intermittent collaboration, and collaborative niche construction.

We provide Cavendish space of peer respite and collaborative niche construction where our learners can find relief from an intense world designed against us.

Cavendish Space

When everything is a monoculture, diversity can look scary, wild, out of control. It’s understandable, but it’s unsustainable. To reconnect with diversity, we need to expand and rewild our thinking, and change our practices on a fundamental level. We need to notice and challenge the things that we take for granted.

But when we get too used to seeing monocultures, we forget that there can be anything else. We don’t notice what is being pushed out in favour of the familiar sameness we have gotten used to. Diversity becomes worrisome and weird and unfamiliar.

Counselling for different ways of being | by Sonny Hallett | Jun, 2023 | Medium

Recognizing diversity enables collaborative niche construction that supports monotropic minds, and any type of mind. Monotropic people are recognizing and diversifying monocultures so we have the flexibility to create our niche and get into flow states.

Since reading NeuroTribes, we think of psychologically & sensory safe spaces suited to monotropism and zone work as “Cavendish bubbles” and “Cavendish space”, after Henry Cavendish, the wizard of Clapham Common and discoverer of hydrogen. The privileges of nobility afforded room for his differences, allowing him the space and opportunity to become “one of the first true scientists in the modern sense.”

Let’s build psychologically safe homes of opportunity without the requirement of nobility or privilege. Replace the trappings of the compliance classroom with student-created context, BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), and BYOC (Bring/Build Your Own Comfort). Let’s hit thrift stores, buy lumber, apply some hacker ethos, and turn the compliance classroom into something psychologically safe and comfortable to a team of young minds engaged in passion-based learning. Inform spaces with neurodiversity and the social model of disability so that they welcome and include all minds and bodies. Provide quiet spaces for high memory state zone work where students can escape sensory overwhelm, slip into flow states, and enjoy a maker’s schedule. Provide social spaces for collaboration and camaraderie. Create cave, campfire, and watering hole zones. Develop neurological curb cuts. Fill our classrooms with choice and comfort, instructional tolerance, continuous connectivity, and assistive technology. In other words, make space for Cavendish. Make spaces for both collaboration and deep work.

One of the more interesting ideas emerging from attention capital theory is the surprising role environment can play in supporting elite cognitive performance.

Professional writers seem to be at the cutting edge of this experimentation, but I wouldn’t be surprised if, in the near future, we start to see more serious attention paid to constructing seriously deep spaces as our economy shifts towards increasingly demanding knowledge work.

Simon Winchester’s Writing Barn – Study Hacks – Cal Newport

Like Cavendish, we’re autistic. We relate to much of his personal life. He needed his bubble, his cave, his sensory and social cocoon.

He also needed, occasionally, the company of a small set of his Royal Society peers. The Royal Society Monday Club was his campfire, his place where he could lurk at the edges and socialize with a small group on his terms.

Cavendish was very uncomfortable in the public eye. He formed an alliance with Charles Blagden, an extroverted and outgoing Monday Club peer, whereby Blagden introduced Cavendish and his ideas to wider audiences. Blagden brought Cavendish to the creative commons, to the watering holes of science and naturalism.

Cavendish needed intermittent collaboration. Cavendish needed control over parts of his world in order to build his niche.

This is my space. It allows me to have control over one small part of a traumatic and offensive world.

AuDHD and me: My nesting habits – Emergent Divergence

⛺️🔥 Caves, Campfires, and Watering Holes

We provide caves, campfires, and watering holes so that dandelions, tulips, and orchids alike can find respite. Online and offline, we provide individual spaces as well as community spaces so that learners can progressively socialize according to their interaction capacity. Caves, campfires, and watering holes are necessary to designing for neurological pluralism and providing psychological safety. They’re necessary to positive niche construction.

The watering hole is an informal space where peers can share information and discoveries, acting as both learner and teacher simultaneously. This shared space can serve as an incubator for ideas and can promote a sense of shared culture. It is an informal area, where students can share in collaborative learning experiences.

“Some autistic people’s needs will conflict with each other. For example, some autistic people may need the TV playing to calm down, as it can help to focus on specific sounds. But for others this may cause more stress depending on their mental state. Additionally, some autistic people may need to stim to feel relaxed and comfortable, or it may be involuntary when they are stressed, but noises they make (e.g. verbal stims), could really stress another autistic person out. I think the key here is space.”

“It’s Not Rocket Science”: Considering and meeting the sensory needs of autistic children and young people – NDTi

Our cave, campfire, and watering hole moods map to the red, yellow, and green of interaction badges (aka color communication badges). The three-level and three-speed communication flow used at distributed companies reflects the progressive sociality of cave, campfire, and watering hole contexts and red, yellow, green interaction moods. All of these facilitate intermittent collaboration.

Perhaps the most important form of control over one’s space is authority over who comes in and out—a point missed by those who believe that our workspaces should resemble a bustling coffeehouse. The informal exchanges facilitated by proximity are indeed generative. But the value of such interactions can be extracted only if it is also possible, when necessary, to avoid interacting at all.

The Extended Mind – Annie Murphy Paul

We use Cavendish Space to pursue special interests and assist attention tunnels so that learners can slip into flow states.

People need to feel appreciated and safe, to give themselves to an activity; and they need to feel like they are making progress to keep giving themselves to it. To get into The Zone, you need to know you’re getting somewhere, that you’re in the process of mastering a skill – you need ongoing feedback, whether from another person or another source. There is also something uniquely satisfying about working with other people effectively, towards a shared goal; in my experience there is no substitute when it comes to building a community.

Flow states are the pinnacle of intrinsic motivation, where somebody wants to do something for themselves, for the sake of doing it and doing it well.

Flow allows us to recharge, to feel a sense of achievement and satisfaction, and a kind of respite from the often-baffling demands of the school social environment.

Craft, Flow and Cognitive Styles

When focused like this an Autistic person can enter a ‘flow state‘ which can bring great joy and satisfaction to the person experiencing it.

Monotropism

Entering flow states – or attention tunnels – is a necessary coping strategy for many of us.

Fergus Murray

🌷 Dandelions, Tulips, and Orchids

🏗 Niche Construction

niche construction may be every bit as important for survival as natural selection 

Reimagining Inclusion with Positive Niche Construction

Seven components of positive niche construction in the classroom:

• Assessment of students’ strengths
• The use of assistive technology and Universal Design for Learning
• Enhanced human resources
• The implementation of strengths-based learning strategies
• Envisioning positive role models
• Activation of affirmative career aspirations
• The engineering of appropriate environmental modifications to support the development of neurodiverse students

Reimagining Inclusion with Positive Niche Construction

• Organisms are not passive.
• The environment is a product of organisms.
• Interactions are reciprocal.
• Ecology, development, & evolution are interdependent.

Niche Construction

When we operate within a space over which we feel ownership—a space that feels like it’s ours—a host of psychological and even physiological changes ensues. These effects were first observed in studies of a phenomenon known as the “home advantage”: the consistent finding that athletes tend to win more and bigger victories when they are playing in their own fields, courts, and stadiums. On their home turf, teams play more aggressively, and their members (both male and female) exhibit higher levels of testosterone, a hormone associated with the expression of social dominance.

But the home advantage is not limited to sports. Researchers have identified a more general effect as well: when people occupy spaces that they consider their own, they experience themselves as more confident and capable. They are more efficient and productive. They are more focused and less distractible. And they advance their own interests more forcefully and effectively. A study by psychologists Graham Brown and Markus Baer, for example, found that people who engage in negotiation within the bounds of their own space claim between 60 and 160 percent more value than the “visiting” party.

Benjamin Meagher, an assistant professor of psychology at Kenyon College in Ohio, has advanced an intriguing theory that may explain these outcomes. The way we act, the way we think, and even the way we perceive the world around us differ when we’re in a space that’s familiar to us—one that we have shaped through our own choices and imbued with our own memories of learning and working there in the past. When we’re on our home turf, Meagher has found, our mental and perceptual processes operate more efficiently, with less need for effortful self-control. The mind works better because it doesn’t do all the work on its own; it gets an assist from the structure embedded in its environment, structure that marshals useful information, supports effective habits and routines, and restrains unproductive impulses. In a familiar space over which we feel ownership, he suggests, “our cognition is distributed across the entire setting.” The place itself helps us think.

The Extended Mind – Annie Murphy Paul

For an autistic person ‘it’s about finding the right niche’, because ‘if you have a particular interest, you can really thrive in a particular niche.’

Happier on the outside? Discourses of exclusion, disempowerment and belonging from former autistic school staff

Living by her own rules has had a massive positive effect. She’s constantly making adjustments, finding new ways to make herself more comfortable. “Everything feels different, it really does impact everything. Like my body was masked!” she says. Now that her daily environment works with her body rather than against it, she feels physically and mentally free. Marta Rose writes that divergent design should honor the unique relationships Autistic people have to objects.

Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity (p. 16

Autistic people have built many niche communities from the ground up—both out of necessity and because our interests and modes of being are, well, weird.

Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity (p. 218)

It took me decades to learn how to change my environment to make myself comfortable.

@willaful

It took decades to learn I was allowed.

@steve_asbell

🌈 Cognitive Diversity Exists for a Reason

It doesn’t take long to figure out when observing the natural world that biodiversity creates pathways for organisms to not just survive, but also to thrive within ecosystems.

Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools

If neurodivergence is essentially disablement, why do we keep replicating the gene pool? The less extensive, yet persistent, body of work indicating specialist strengths within neurodiversity, supports the hypothesis that the evolutionary purpose of divergence is ‘specialist thinking skills’ to balance ‘generalist’ thinking skills (as per the ‘spiky profile’). The evolutionary perspective is congruent with the Neurodiversity movement and essential to understanding the occupational talent management perspective that is currently in vogue.

The spiky profile may well emerge as the definitive expression of neurominority, within which there are symptom clusters that we currently call autism, ADHD, dyslexia and DCD.

Neurodiversity at work: a biopsychosocial model and the impact on working adults | British Medical Bulletin | Oxford Academic

🤲 Social Buffering and Collaborative Morality

“It was diversity between people which led to human success and it is particularly important as it gives you different specialised roles.

“We are arguing that it is the rise of collaborative morality that led to the possibility for widening the diversity of the human personality.”

Autism and human evolutionary success

Here we argue that social buffering of vulnerabilities through the emergence of collaborative morality will have opened new niches for adaptive cognitive strategies and widened personality variation. Such strategies include those that that do not depend on astute social perception or abilities to think recursively about others’ thoughts and feelings. We particularly consider how a perceptual style based on logic and detail, bringing certain enhanced technical and social abilities which compensate for deficits in complex social understanding could be advantageous at low levels in certain ecological and cultural contexts. ‘Traits of autism’ may have promoted innovation in archaeological material culture during the late Palaeolithic in the context of the mutual interdependence of different social strategies, which in turn contributed to the rise of innovation and large scale social networks.

Extensive evidence for support for individuals with disabilities in the distant archaeological record (Hublin 2009; Spikins, Rutherford, and Needham 2010; Spikins 2015a; Tilley 2015) argues that selection pressures within human societies were not simply orientated around immediate responses or short-term social value, and that social buffering of vulnerabilities was common.

Whilst we generalise evolutionary pressures as proceeding towards greater cogitation of other’s thoughts and feelings and increasingly complex intuitive models of other minds, the reality is likely to have been more complex. We argue that social buffering of vulnerabilities in increasingly complex human societies may have encouraged a range of different strategies to pro-sociality that go beyond increasingly recursive theory of mind, and lead to a wider range of pro-social human personalities.

Rather than social astuteness, signals of pro-social motivations and behaviours that positively affect the group thus become a major factor in reputation and selective success (Tomasello et al. 2012; Silk and House 2016). Third, the food sharing, collaborative parenting and maintenance of egalitarian dynamics which form the basis of human evolutionary success (Whiten and Erdal 2012) buffer individual shortfalls not only in resources (the basis for economic success) but also in abilities.

We argue that as a transition to collaborative morality(Tomasello and Vaish 2013b) occurred within human groups, new opportunities arose for alternative strategies to sociality, including those which do not depend on complex social understanding and theory of mind.

Are there alternative adaptive strategies to human pro-sociality? The role of collaborative morality in the emergence of personality variation and autistic traits

Collaborative morality opens up opportunities to be respected and appreciated through the emergence of distinct abilities, virtues or spheres of elevated influence and respect even when these are associated with deficits.

Are there alternative adaptive strategies to human pro-sociality? The role of collaborative morality in the emergence of personality variation and autistic traits

🤝 Interdependence and Collaboration

The notion of disability in our society is underscored by a bizarre conception of “independence”.

It is time to celebrate our interdependence!

THE MYTH OF INDEPENDENCE: HOW THE SOCIAL MODEL OF DISABILITY EXPOSES SOCIETY’S DOUBLE STANDARDS » NEUROCLASTIC

Magic happens when you combine collaboration and neurodiversity.

Celebration of interdependence | Autistic Collaboration

It is time to celebrate our interdependence! Collaboration allows us to create genuinely safe spaces for autistic and otherwise neurodivergent people. We should expect society to support us in establishing new forms of creative collaboration, and we should not be forced individually to be “included” in toxic exploitative environments.

The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale: Timeless patterns of human limitations