The Tricycle

The confident cyclist

On dyspraxia, diagnosis, and how a label can quietly shrink a person’s world

We got rid of the tricycle. More importantly, we got rid of an idea.

This is a story about dyspraxia, and about how a diagnosis (of it or other neurodevelopmental conditions) can quietly shrink a person’s world – and what it took to grow it back.

Two children, two bicycles

When my daughter was about 6 she learned to ride her bike. I vividly remember my own version of that moment: my dad pushing me along the street, and suddenly it just clicked – I could keep balanced. I cycled all the way to the end of our road and back again. It’s one of my earliest vivid memories, and I’ve cycled ever since: for fun, to school, for the commute, for fitness. With my daughter it went the same way. It took a bit of practising, but then suddenly it clicked and away she went!

A bit after this my son was 5, and we were starting to think there was something a bit unusual about the way he moved, spoke, the way he sat and lay and stood. He received a diagnosis of Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD), often also called dyspraxia. I remember clearly feeling that this was clarifying, reassuring to have some kind of explanation – even for why he was lying down on things so much! (That’s partly to have the reassurance of a clear sense of where he is in space, by feeling touch against many parts of his body at once.)

The tricycle

I also remember taking a very specific practical action in response. Rather than expecting he’d learn to ride on his sister’s bike as she outgrew it, I bought a tricycle. I clearly remember assembling it in the kitchen, and thinking how it physically symbolised a change in what we could now expect for Thomas’s future. Learning to ride a bike is almost the canonical example of something that’s hard if you have DCD. With the tricycle he could join our family rides to the park – but of course he would never learn that balancing trick on it.

Thomas with our daughter, joining in together on the ride to the park

The diagnosis was right. That’s not the point.

Over the years since, nothing has shifted me from thinking DCD was a valid diagnosis for him. His handwriting is slow and hard to read, and he’s allowed a laptop for some lessons and exams so he can show what he’s actually learned. He really struggles with hand-eye coordination games like tennis, and practice delivers improvements very slowly.

Nervous in the queue before riding on Colossus at Thorpe Park

When he was 11 we went on a rollercoaster – Colossus at Thorpe Park – that he was certainly tall enough for. He was nervous in the queue, but I was confident that he would enjoy it. He HATED it. As the car came to the end of the ride I realised he was crying in his distress. And then the ride developed a fault right at the end of the ride, and we were stuck there for another ten minutes, prolonging the trauma! Although it’s easy to think that dyspraxia is about coordination, and irrelevant when doing something that involves simply being sat strapped into a seat, I was wrong. I understand now that a big part of DCD is differences in the way the brain processes information from the body – about proprioception, about balance – and he was experiencing the movements of that rollercoaster at an intensity I couldn’t have imagined. I felt awful. I should have known better. Clearly we shouldn’t do that again.

So the diagnosis was accurate, and it was useful. And yet: you get a diagnosis, and it invites a list of things you can’t do. Riding a bike. Rollercoasters. Various sports. The label arrived, and my son’s world got quietly smaller – not because of anything in him, but because of something in me: the decisions I made having been told about this medical label.

What a diagnosis actually is

I’ve found myself needing to explain to people what DCD really is, and to do that I needed to explain it to myself. What I settled on was an experience everyone remembers from school: It’s Games on a Wednesday afternoon, two children are made team captains, taking turns to pick their classmates. To be diagnosed with DCD is to be, constitutionally, the kid who gets chosen last.

If this sounds like I’m joking, I’m not.

People vary in how well they can coordinate and use their bodies. Some are brilliant, and those kids get chosen first. Most are average, and get chosen in the middle. And some struggle, and get chosen last – and the ones chosen last, again and again, share a real set of difficulties.

(An aside on memory and self-image. It’s extraordinary how clearly I can picture this scene from when I was little. I was never picked first, and rarely in the middle, but there was one boy who was even less coordinated than me so to my relief it was him instead who invariably got picked last. Having this experience every week through your whole childhood really has an effect on your sense of yourself and how you compare to others.)

Here’s the part that surprises people… If you go looking in the DSM-5 – the psychiatry diagnostic manual – for the crisp medical test that separates the children who have this disorder from the children who don’t, you won’t find one. The actual wording of the core criterion is that coordinated motor skills are “substantially below that expected” for the child’s age. Substantially below expected. That’s basically it. In practice, clinicians operationalise that phrase with standardised motor assessments and a percentile cut-off – commonly the bottom 5% on a test like the Movement Assessment Battery for Children (MABC). Some guidelines draw the line at the 15th or 16th percentile instead. The experts don’t even fully agree on where the line goes, only that a line is needed.

Score distribution on the scoring scale used to evaluate children for DCD – a score to the right means well-coordinated, a score to the left means less well-coordinated.
Summarised by me (making the bins 3x wider) from Ceiling effects in the Movement Assessment Battery for Children-2 (MABC-2) suggest that non-parametric scoring methods are required, French et al 2018

So run the numbers. Around 5% of children meet the threshold – roughly one in twenty. In a typical class of 30, the least naturally coordinated child is, more or less by definition, diagnosable. Not because something happened to them. Because someone has to be in the bottom slice of any distribution, and we’ve agreed to give that slice a name.

You can also see why 15% might be set as a threshold. It’s visually clear that above that is the ‘normal spread’ of coordination abilities (at least measured by this method), and below it you get into the tail of people with coordination difficulties.

There’s nothing dramatically different between being slightly above or below that threshold. You can see in the chart above that there’s no clear ‘gap’ between the coordinated and less-coordinated kids. The way these things work, there needs to be a line, and it’s drawn where it’s drawn. But the underlying reality is not one where some children have an illness and others don’t. It’s a scale – like height, like blood pressure – on which bodily coordination varies, and the children at the bottom end share a set of genuine difficulties. It’s useful, bureaucratically, to recognise that: these are the children allowed a laptop in the exam, and those permissions matter enormously. But we all have things that come easy and things that come harder. There’s no crisp line in nature between people who can cycle and people who can’t. Look at that chart – there’s no clear gap between one group and another.

The difficulties are real. The line is a convention. The mistake – my mistake, in that kitchen with an Allen key in hand, attaching the third wheel to the frame – is treating the convention as if it were a fact about what a child can become.

Learning the hard way, literally

At 10 we decided to have a concerted push at learning to ride a regular bike. The process was constantly anxious-making and hair-raising for him. We had an elaborate reward scheme – a Roblox subscription if he managed 5 seconds of riding on his own, in-game currency for longer and longer stretches. Without it he wouldn’t have tried; it definitely didn’t come easy. But eventually he managed it. Bravo! He never had that “suddenly it clicked” experience his sister and I had, though. Each step – 5 seconds unaided to 10, 10 to 20, 20 to 30 – was hard. Just starting off – pushing off, getting the feet onto the pedals, starting to pedal, all before you lose balance – was something it took ages to get the hang of.

First learning to ride – in a car park. (Seat nice and low so he can put his feet down.)

Shortly after that we moved house, and suddenly all the roads and paths near us were hills. Not massive hills, but twisty and bumpy, and he simply didn’t have the skill or confidence to cycle anywhere. No more cycling. Back to square one, it seemed. And that would have been OK – a person’s value or dignity is not defined by their ability to cycle.

But the next year I offered to help him build his skills, and we spent the whole summer going on rides. I’d load our bikes onto the car, drive us to a quiet cycle lane – there are several nearby converted from old railway lines – and we’d just practise on these flat, safe paths, with a rewarding destination in the middle. There is so much to learn to cycle confidently! Not just balancing but braking, changing gears, anticipating the gear changes, holding on with one hand so you can scratch your nose, standing up on the pedals for power up hills, what to do around cars. It’s amazing to realise how much there is when you’re alongside someone for whom the learning comes slowly; someone feeling, at every moment, that they might fall.

One of the many things to learn – fixing a puncture

I created a little virtual challenge for us: a record of every ride, with a target for the year. By the end of it we’d ridden so many miles that, laid end to end, we’d have travelled from our home in Hertfordshire to his grandparents’ in Yorkshire. That’s 350km!

How far we cycled one summer to build up Thomas’s cycling skills

He is now a capable cyclist, and going on rides together is one of the things he loves, and me too. He’s got access to a brilliant source of physical fitness. He still finds the steep bits hair-raising.

Hard is not impossible

Here’s the point. Everything above describes something he found harder than most people. “This person has the disorder” is a way of thinking that naturally makes you rule things out. But when you see these things as a continuum, you see that many things worth doing are difficult – it’s only ever a question of how difficult, a question of how much more effort or time it will take to succeed. I’m reminded of JFK’s famous line from 1962:

“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

How close I came to deciding he was never going to ride a bike. I bought that tricycle, after all. I don’t regret it – it let him join in during the years when he genuinely couldn’t have learned. But no matter how much he rode it, he was never going to learn to balance on it. We’ve got rid of it now. Much more important, we got rid of the idea it stood for: that a diagnostic label should tell us what he couldn’t do. The diagnosis doesn’t tell you which things are impossible and which are just hard. That’s the question you have to live with, and the honest answer is that it’s nuanced, it’s subtle, it shifts. It depends. It depends on lots of other things – resources, reward, time, passion, support. It depends on belief.

Support system – driving somewhere quiet and flat

I want to be careful here, because there’s a way of telling this story that does harm. My son’s difficulties that I’ve talked about here turned out to be movable. But for someone further along the same scale, “can’t” can be the plain truth – some things really are off the table, and no reward chart or patient summer of practice will change that. The answer to that isn’t to demand more of the person. It’s to stop building a world that makes those particular things the price of a full life. Someone who can’t safely drive isn’t failing a test the rest of us pass – they’re meeting a world that decided mobility should depend on driving, when it could have decided otherwise. The cruelty aimed at such people – you could if you tried, someone else with your label manages – gets the whole thing backwards. It treats a mismatch between a person and a rigid world as a flaw in the person. The dignity was never in whether my son learned to cycle. It was in being met by a world willing to bend, and given an honest answer, either way.

None of this means the diagnosis is nothing. The difficulties are real, they live in him, and some of them will always be his to deal with. It means the HE was only ever half the equation – and the other half, the world, is the half we keep forgetting we’re allowed to change.

Colossus and The Swarm

One last thing, back at Thorpe Park, the day he cried on that rollercoaster. While we were stuck, a couple of staff members helped look after us. One was a kindly engineer, who told us that this particular ride was especially bumpy – old and rattly – and that another, The Swarm, was much more modern and smoother. Much younger kids, he said, loved that one whilst hating this one.

The same child. The same “disorder”. A different machine.

We let the incident fade and enjoyed the rest of the park, and later we talked about whether he might try another coaster. Near the end of the day, he found the courage to try The Swarm. He was anxious – I could clearly tell – and so was I. Having traumatised him once, was I about to do it again by encouraging him?

He LOVED IT. We rode it five times!

Thomas after riding The Swarm

Not only had he discovered something he loved; he’d faced his fear, taken a leap of faith, and triumphed. That day is seared in my mind, and I find myself tearful at the memory – so proud of the journey he went on, the agency he took in it, and the trust he put in me.

It was a lesson in bravery. And a lesson in not letting a diagnosis shrink our worlds: sometimes the “can’t” was never in the child at all, it was in the world, and in the stories we tell. That’s why I wanted to tell this story.

The Thorpe Park sign says it all… “Fears faced”

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Linkedin Posts

This article was written alongside a set of LinkedIn Posts, each riffing on one part of it.

• “We got ride of the tricycle. More importantly, we got rid of an idea.”
• “One of my worst terrible parenting moments, and one of the proudest, happened on the same day, at the same theme park, on the same kind of ride”
• “In a typical class of 30 children, the least naturally coordinated one has a diagnosable disorder. By definition.”
• “I’ve spent the last few weeks writing about my son, who has dyspraxia, and a tricycle. Here’s what the whole story comes down to for me.“

A better way to think about Neurodiversity – The Doorframes Model of Disability

(Originally published 2023-08-24 on LinkedIn: Post, Full Article)

The Neurodiversity Movement is trapped

I believe the Neurodiversity movement’s goals are fundamentally hindered by the way in which Neurodiverse conditions (NDCs), notably Autism and ADHD, are anchored to their medicalised language and diagnosis. These make it hard for neurotypicals to empathise and engage with neurodiverse individuals. I offer an alternative way of framing these things that would help everyone understand each other better. But first a bit of background…

Is autism a disability? Social vs Medical model.

I’ve recently been reading Neurodiversity: The birth of an Idea by Judy Singer, the lady who coined the word “neurodiversity” about 25 years ago. It’s interesting to see how the neurodiversity movement – the idea that differences in how people’s brains are wired is normal and are not disorders – was heavily inspired by new ways of thinking about disability that emerged in the 1990s.

In essence, these new ideas were the so-called Social Model of Disability, which stands in opposition to the Medical Model of Disability. Under the Medical Model of Disability, a person who struggles to operate in everyday life is seen as being disabled by something wrong with them, something to be fixed, just as the way to help someone with an illness is to heal them. For example, if you can’t walk and so are in a wheelchair then you could be ‘fixed’ with prosthetic legs, which would let you walk around like an able-bodied person. In contrast, the Social Model would say that you are disabled only by the way society arranges itself – in a world full of lifts and gentle ramps people in wheelchairs are not disabled. The staircases and steps in their environment are what disable them. This is the idea that partly energises accomodations being made for people with disabilities, and note that even able-bodied people sometimes benefit from a world of lifts and ramps, whether that’s because of your baby’s pushchair or when you’re older and need to walk with a frame.

This has clearly been a positive and empowering shift in society’s attitudes to disability.

Meanwhile increasing numbers of people are being diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), both recognised in UK law as disabilities with attendant legal protections for workers. But in online communities of these people there is sometimes heated debate about whether Autism is a disability, or merely a difference (with strengths and weaknesses), or even a superpower. Reddit is full of some people clearly resentful at how hard it was to get their diagnosis and questionning the validity of others’ ‘self diagnosis’ of autism or ADHD.

The subtext of much of this debate is a kind of hidden ableism – there’s a heap of people out there who recognise that their lives make much more sense if they think of themselves as autistic but don’t want to think of themselves as disabled. Such a reluctance is natural if that word is anchored in the Medical Model of Disability – that this is a thing to be fixed. And autistic people are clear that they do not feel they have something that needs fixing. When 3,430 autistic adults were recently asked “if there were a cure for autism, I would take it” over 85% did not agree (source).

But even the Social Model of disability has inside it an assumption that I don’t think helpful for neurodiversity, namely a kind of binary thinking: you either are or are not autistic. You either do or do not have ADHD. This anchors everyone’s thinking to a medicalised conception of what these things are, and lives on any time someone gets “diagnosed”.

The Doorframes Model of Disability

I find the framing of neurodiverse conditions as a list ‘disorders’ that doctors can or cannot diagnose, and where you either do or don’t have that disorder, as fundamentally disempowering. And more importantly, it creates a huge barrier to empathy and understanding across society as a whole. The vast majority of people are not autistic, and so this sets autism up to be an ‘other’, a label that creates a barrier between the group without that label and the group with it. Autism discussions often revolve around the conflicts being autistics and allistics (a word for non-autistics).

However, consider height. Everyone is very familiar with the idea that we’re all different heights, and of course remembers being different heights through childhood. There are specific medical conditions associated with being extremely short or tall, but also sometimes people just end up being very tall or very short and – because we’re all different heights and can see that in each other – it’s easy for us to at least understand what life might be like being very tall or very short. Indeed, every car is full of features that enable people of different heights to use it without difficulty. (This is a whole other interesting story – read about When US Air Force Discovered the Flaw of Averages)

No-one would say that being 7’7″ tall makes you “disabled”, not by the Medical Model at least. But in fact you would be, because society is not organised for you. You will struggle to buy shoes that fit, there are almost no models of car you can drive, and of course every doorframe requires you to duck under it. You are literally disabled by the doorframes.

Note how this is an extesion of the social model of disability. I’m 6’2″ tall. If I visited Japan I would find myself disabled to some degree by most doorframes, because the standard door size is 6′ tall, which illustrates very well that the height of our doorframes is a socially-constructed thing.

Level 1 support needs: Taller than the doorframes, life has become hard

Level 2 support needs: Much taller than the doorframes – life has become extremely hard

Level 3 support needs: Cannot engage with the outside world

Diagnoses as labels for hitting the doorframe

My view is that the medicalised labels we give neurodiverse conditions are simply us giving a name to when someone becomes so far along a scale of normal human variation it becomes problematic. It reflects the interaction between something about the person – like their height – and something about how society operates – like the doorframe. But there’s no crisp boundary. There’s no clear line you’d draw where you’d say people above that line have tallness disorder and below that line they do not. It’s clear that up to a couple of inches below the standard doorframe height (which captures most of the population) life is fine and you never even thought about the doorframes. But as you get higher than that life gradually starts getting harder:

1. The heights that 98% of the population have – you’ve never even thought about doorframes.
2. Similar height to doorframe: you have to slow down and be careful – you might bump your head walking through the door, and definitely can’t run through.
3. Taller than doorframe: you are inconvenienced by every doorframe and tunnel. A job requiring you to go through doorways would be a constant struggle.
4. Much taller than doorframe: Every single doorway is a huge struggle and you’d avoid them if you could.
5. Taller still: You are excluded from society, trapped when others can move.

So it is with Autism or ADHD. We should think of these as the name we give to being at the ‘edge’ of the scale of normal variation across humanity. This is not in any way to deny that some people’s lives are profoundly hindered by that thing, but the point is that this is not binary – it depends exactly how far along that scale you are, how much your environment makes life easier or harder, and of course interacts with the many other aspects of neurology and personality by which people differ.

(A side note: sometimes people misunderstand the word ‘spectrum’ in Austistic Spectrum Disorder to imply that everyone lies somewhere on a scale of human variation called “the autistic spectrum”, and that it’s valid to say “we’re all a bit autistic.” I don’t mean that, and most autistic people dislike that phrase. Autism being a ‘spectrum disorder’ means that the specific constellation of experiences and behaviours – or as the doctors say the symptoms – vary significantly from person to person, that each person’s version has a different ‘blend’ of colours. As the phrase popular in the autism community says, “Once you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism.”)

How to help people

Another reason I belive this is a useful metaphor is the conclusions it invites about how to help people. No-one would look at Robert Bobroczkyi, the exceedingly tall man appearing in the photos in this article, and think that what he should do is spend lots of time every day practicing bending down to get through low doorways so that he can eventually thrive working as a waiter in a restaurant where he would need to go through the door to the kitchen every few minutes. They would think “this guy should play basketball!”, which is exactly what he does do. It’s not that he can’t duck under doorways, but it’s difficult and doing it a lot would be bad for his body.

A height-diverse person perfectly matched to an occupation

For this reason you wouldn’t ask an autistic person to have a job that requires them to intuit how people are feeling from their faces or handle constant interruptions. And you wouldn’t ask someone with ADHD to do boring repetitive tasks. Just like you wouldn’t ask an introvert to spend all day hosting client meetings. You would seek to match their natural strengths to the things you’d ask of them. All it needs is to understand each of these scales by which people vary, and recognise where each person is on those scales, especially when they’ve crossed a critical threshold that particularly makes life harder.

Is this a valid way of thinking about Autism or ADHD?

You may be reading this and thinking “yes but autism isn’t a ‘one dimensional’ thing like height, it’s a complex spectrum disorder that has many different symptoms.”

I agree that this is true of how these things are currently talked about. That’s why this way of thinking about them is not natural or obvious. But I personally think they can and should be thought of that way, and have written an article laying out how one might do so for Autism:

• Autism as a difference in ‘Snap Synthesis’ – Link to my article on this.
• ADHD as a difference in the balance between your brain’s dopamine-response circuits and Executive Control

But more to the point, this is the reason why we should try to find a way of thinking about ASD and ADHD in these ways, because until we do it’s too easy for people to shrug their shoulders and think of them as a bundle of mysterious ‘symptoms’ that the people who treat illnesses (doctors, psychiatrists) can officiate. If we can think of them as the ‘edges’ of the normal pattern of variation in our brains’ wirings, we can understand, empathise with, and ultimately support each other better.

It may even be we need different names for these things. ASD and ADHD both embed ‘disorder’ in the name, which doesn’t help. ‘Autism’, whilst definitely the term embraced by the community, will always struggle to move on from the fact that until the 1990s this word was exclusively attached to people with such profound challenges that they would generally need institutional care for their whole lives, and is rooted in a negative behaviour (being disengaged from society) rather than celebrating what underlies this difference or even how it can be a strength.

What about me?

I, your humble author, find this a helpful way of thinking about myself. I think I make a lot more sense if you look at me through the lens of ADHD. (My kids probably inherited theirs from someone!) But I don’t have a diagnosis. In fact, I think if I tried to get one I would fail, because I’m not ‘suffering’. Fundamentally I’m doing OK in life, and my tendency to be distracted and my attention captured by things has never stopped me making and keeping friends and doing well at work. But there’s surely a reason why, at the age of 6, the teachers thought I had some kind of learning difficulty that turned to be that I found the books boring; a reason why I only started writing my university essays literally 3h before the final deadline; a reason why I’ve worked in so many different industries in order to have the variety that gives me just the right kind of challenge; a reason why my desk is littered with fiddle toys. Whatever you might call that ‘ADHD energy’, I’m strong on it. Not quite hitting my head on the doorframe, but it’s definitely a part of me, and which I’m clear has been a huge strength (in my ability to be energised by new challenges and finding creative solutions to problems) as much as it can sometimes be a hindrance. And I find it incredibly helpful to know that about myself without needing to get hung up over whether I’m diagnosed or disabled, I’m just me.

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Photos of Robert Bobroczkyi from Washington Post

Snap Synthesis – an idea that makes Autism make sense?

(Originally published 2023-08-09 on LinkedIn: Post, Full Article)

In this article my goal is to help people understand autism better. I describe the traits that make up the autism spectrum, discuss leading theories about the basis of autism, talk about what consciousness is, and share my own theory—Snap Synthesis—designed to demystify autism for ordinary (non-autistic) people and help us all to understand each other better at work and at home.

Autism and The Understanding Gap

I’m an Insight professional—it’s my job to analyse data, make sense of it to arrive at a scientifically valid conclusion, then communicate that essential insight so people can act on it to make better decisions. Ultimately my job is to help people understand the world better using the tools of data, statistics, science and modelling.

So when I started to learn that various members of my family—both immediate and extended—were autistic, I felt compelled to understand this condition, and it became quickly apparent there was a huge ‘understanding gap’, with even the most sympathetic family members or colleagues not really knowing what the hell autism is. When I came to realise that members of the data science team I managed were also autistic, I had colleagues to help me understand it. This article is my take on this. (To be clear this is not a work of rigorous scholarship; it is powered by my desire to make sense of autism for myself and the people I love, but I hope it’s helpful for others too.)

Autism is this weird bundle of things

Take 1 – the features of Autism

I gradually came to get a handle that autism is a condition with many different facets and features, and what those are. Some are clearly visible, some are consciously concealed or ‘masked’, others only ‘come out’ when individuals feel safe or become overwhelmed. I summarise them under 3 Ss…

1. Social: having difficulty with social relationships; not being good at perceiving others’ emotions and ‘reading the room’; often not making typical patterns of eye contact.
2. Sameness: spending large amounts of time on a sustained focused interest; liking routine and familiarity; disliking changes and interruptions
3. Sensory: being hyper- or hypo-sensitive to things like texture in foods, touch in clothes, or sound; sometimes becoming overwhelmed by sensory input.

From these core characteristics flow other common features:

• Experiencing meltdowns or shutdowns after cumulative social, sensory, or transitional overwhelm
• A personal awareness of differences in social understanding and social comfort that leads to anxiety and exhaustion from constantly trying not to commit social ‘blunders’ (also known as ‘masking’)
• Taking what people say at face value, instead of interpreting the underlying meaning (sometimes described as ‘over-literal’ interpretation)
• A need to communicate facts accurately that can be interpreted as pedantic by ordinary people
• ‘Stimming’ and other repetitive patterns of movement that perform a self-soothing function
• Often not being able to recognise and articulate one’s own emotions (alexithymia)
• A higher incidence of being unable to recognise people by their face (prosopagnosia)
• A higher incidence of gender-nonconformity
• A higher incidence of suicide and lower life-expectancy due to accidents, abuse and co-morbid conditions
• A propensity for creative problem solving that inspires creativity in others
• The ability to ascend to greatness unfettered by conventional social expectations
• Logical thinking and analytical skills, and the ability to retain large amounts of information with a close eye for detail
• A passion for justice, fairness, and consistency

What a huge and confusing list!

Given that the autistic people in my life are of both genders, I am also very aware that autism manifests quite differently in men and women, yet clearly has common roots. And there’s a strong inherited component to these things – (Example study estimating autism to be over 80% inherited).

Not every autistic person exhibits all of these, and certainly not all the same way, which is why autism is a ‘spectrum’ condition. Nevertheless they often occur together. And I found this extremely perplexing. Maybe someone out there can explain it?

Take 2 – Theories of Autism

There’s no clear academic consensus on the best explanation for autism, but there are two theories that struck me as capturing something that resonated with the experiences of my autistic colleagues and family.

• Weak Central Coherence (Uta Frith). The term “central coherence” refers to ordinary people’s tendency to pull information together and process information in context, looking for the “big picture” and drawing out meaning, often at the expense of details. By contrast, “weak central coherence” refers to the tendency of autistic people to attend to and remember details rather than global form or meaning. Using Frith’s language, autistic people have an Eye for Detail at the expense of seeing the Big Picture.

Image from Biociety Youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfUiE-s1g9k

• Monotropism (Dinah Murray – article). The most notable theory formulated by autistic people rather than neurotypical researchers ‘looking in’. As the linked article says, “Monotropism is the tendency for our interests to pull us in more strongly than most people. It rests on a model of the mind as an ‘interest system’: we are all interested in many things, and our interests help direct our attention. Different interests are salient at different times. In a monotropic mind, fewer interests tend to be aroused at any time, and they attract more of our processing resources, making it harder to deal with things outside of our current attention tunnel.” If an ordinary mind engages with the world like a lightbulb illuminating the room, an autistic mind is more like a heavy spotlight which is directed more intensely at one thing and is not easily shifted to other things.

image taken from monotropism.org

What’s striking about both of these theories is that they completely share the idea that the autistic brain’s difference is in the balance of attention and processing of details vs broader inputs and context.

Take 3 – Theories of how consciousness works

Autism seems all-pervasive, infusing every aspect of consciousness. Here we bump into the problem that science hasn’t yet arrived at a clear picture of how consciousness works, so it’s hardly surprising we’re struggling to understand how types/flavours of consciousness work.

I don’t claim to have the answer here, but I want to highlight one particular cognitive psychology book—The Mind Is Flat, by Nick Chater—which, when I read it, routinely brought to mind my autistic colleagues, friends and family despite the book not mentioning autism once. The essential argument it makes is that we do not have a hidden ‘subconscious’—there are no hidden depths beneath our conscious experience that we partially experience in our waking experiences. Instead, our minds are at all times constructing a succession of singular interpretations of the things coming into our head. Those experiences are always internally consistent, both with the sensory inputs coming into our brains, and with the accumulated memories and associations we’ve built up over the years. But essentially they are conjured up by our brains without us knowing it. Could autism be a difference in that process?

A key insight the book highlights is that our conscious experience is only ever of one thing at a time. We might look at lots of different things in succession, and you might feel like you’re experiencing many things all at once but that’s an illusion your brain creates. In practice each momentary conscious experience is just of one thing. And here’s the key point here: whether that’s one narrow thing (like a single letter on a page, a person’s eyebrow, or a single leaf on a tree) or one combined thing (like a written phrase, someone’s entire facial expression, or the whole forest) is another matter, so the way our brain coheres multiple things into one compound thing is fundamental to how we experience and make sense of the world.

Snap Synthesis – clicking into place

So here’s my—very personal—take on all this. This is all about the essential nature of how our brains take all that stuff flowing in through our senses and turn them into a conscious experience.

I was watching a TV show about autism when I saw this example, and I thought it was brilliant. Take a look at it and just notice the first thing that you consciously experience when you see it—just the first thing that pops into your head.

When non-autistic people see this, they typically say something like:

• (no hesitation) “It says ‘the cat’… Actually, as I continue to look, I can see it’s got some funny letters.”

I have shown this to a number of diagnosed autistic people, and these have been the reactions I’ve had:

• “When I first saw that I thought it said ‘tae cht’.”
• (pause) “Well, it says ‘the cat’, but I feel annoyed by it.”
• “I stared at that for ages before I realised it says ‘the cat'”

What’s going on here? This little image is a perfect example of what life is full of:

complicated sensory input requiring synthesis of multiple pieces of ambiguous information, together with some assumptions, to see it as one single thing.

The image doesn’t say anything in English because it’s got these letters half way between an A and an H. It is ambigious. But when you blend together the various things together—the fact that the weird letters are surrounded by other normal english letters, the fact that they probably form words, the assumption that the two words might form a compound phrase rather than being unrelated—there’s one obvious interpretation, the phrase “the cat”. The difference is that for ordinary people that one obvious synthesis just popped into their head without them even knowing it happened—it happened in a snap, intuitively. Whereas for autistic people it took work, they had to do it intellectually and effortfully. It’s as if that ‘construction of conscious experience’ process that Chater describes is operating fundamentally differently.

And note, of course, that the ordinary people’s interpretation is wrong. It doesn’t say ‘THE CAT’. Their brains essentially disregarded the true details of what they saw, and leapt to some conclusions, in order to come to one singular interpretation.

Life is full of ambiguous information we make sense of by doing synthesis with other things

You can see this is just like what’s going on when ordinary people intuit how others feel. Each individual feature of a person’s face, or gesture, or even what they say and the way they say it is—taken separately—ambiguous. But fuse them together and there’s usually one single clear interpretation. And for non-autistic people it literally just pops into their heads how each other feel and all the subtleties of the things they’re saying to each other.

Autism is being at the extreme end of a scale of ‘Snap Synthesis’: they experience the world using (intentional) Combination rather than (intuitive) Fusion

So here’s my take on these various theories. A fundamental way our brains work is to blend together the various things we perceive into a singular interpretation of those things—to see the forest, and not the trees. Every waking moment most people’s conscious experience emerges from a fusion of things coming in—whether that’s the meaning of a written phrase or the likely emotional state of a person that explains their various behaviours. It’s an amazing feat of computation.

And autistic people’s brains don’t do that, or don’t do it so much. Autistic people absolutely can come up with a synthesis of things—they can work out the coherent interpretation—but it’s work. Their conscious experience is rather more of all those things coming into their system as separate inputs, and they can either work out how they all combine together by conscious effort, or as a coping strategy just focus on one aspect of what’s coming in at the expense of the other things.

This interpretation essentially fits with Frith’s Central Coherence—that autistic brains see the details rather more and cohere things together less. And it also fits with Monotropism—that autistic brains focus on one thing at a time, though perhaps that’s actually a coping strategy in a world where the combining of information across many inputs is hard, and so often people respond by focusing more narrowly.

One other way to see this is that to be autistic is to be disabled by ambiguity. Instead of getting snagged on ambiguity, ordinary people’s brains make assumptions. They not only disambiguate (by blending in other bits of contextual information), but they do it subconsciously so it’s no effort and indeed they don’t even know they’re doing it.

Some illustrations – Social

• The classic obstacle autistic people face is Theory of Mind, i.e. understanding other people’s inner mental states. In most day-to-day settings that involves seeing people’s emotions from their faces and behaviours. No one feature of a person’s face straightforwardly reveals their emotion, it emerges from the combination of features and indeed how they change, and often blended from the broader social context (who the person is with, what they’re doing, who or what they’re looking at, and what that person is doing!) This is the essence of something hard to do if your brain isn’t constantly fusing those ambiguous clues together into a single interpretation.
• Many autistic people make different patterns of eye contact, some not looking at others’ eyes much at all unless they’ve learned to fake socially-expected eye contact patterns. Although it’s said eyes are the “window into the soul”, as Distracted Boyfriend’s partner illustrates they’re very ambiguous on their own. They’re incredibly informative when blended with other information—which is why neurotypicals are constantly looking at each others’ eyes—but not in isolation. So someone who makes sense of the world by combining separate pieces of information would naturally not bother looking at them much as they’re just not that useful to look at!

Some illustrations – Sameness

• Liking routine and familiar things: This is the perfect respite from ambiguity. When you know how things will be because they’ve happened before and they’re in your zone of interest, then making sense of things and handling new events is much easier and less taxing.
• Not liking sudden changes of plans / interruptions: When there’s a change of plans, one suddenly needs to make sense of what this means and how it affects everything else going on. This is an exercise in synthesis, of working out how everything fits together and what it means and what next. It’s hard work!

Some illustrations – Sensory

• A autistic trait is being bothered by labels in clothes, a good example of sensory differences. If a neurotypical brain is constantly doing subconscious synthesis of various inputs to form coherent experiences, then it will constantly discard irrelevant inputs like the labels in your clothes. But if that process is happening—that subconscious layer that blends things together and discards irrelevant stuff—those inputs just come in unfiltered and potentially overwhelmingly.

Why this matters

I do talks on neurodiversity, and this idea—that autism is about a difference in how our brains do this snap synthesis—is one of the key concepts I try to convey. The main feedback I get from people, autistic and neurotypical, is that these ideas really help them to understand autism, to understand why the various features of the spectrum might arise.

In the absence of this way of thinking, “autism” or “Asperger’s” is just a label some people get given according to a complicated list of apparently disconnected symptoms in a diagnostic manual. And it is fundamentally othering—it creates a barrier between people. It’s the basis of sympathy perhaps, but little more.

But understand autism and it’s clear that autistic minds are better suited to many things in life. It’s well-established that autistic people are much more often found in the fields of science, engineering and computing, and seen through the lens of snap synthesis this makes perfect sense. Autistic people thrive in a world where things are explicit and clear rather than ambiguous—a great fit to coding, but also writing clearly and getting things structured. Autistic people get good at intentionally piecing together information to make sense of the world with patterns, theories and frameworks they can actually articulate, rather than their brains popping an answer into their heads—a perfect fit to science, as well as making them great people-watchers and so great managers or HR professionals. And their tendency to have a sustained special interest gives them the potential to be deeply expert and knowledgeable about all sorts of things.

Knowing that autism might actually be a single simple idea—albeit one that plays out in complicated ways—is the basis of true empathy and connection. And that is the key to a future where autistic people and neurotypicals can thrive together, and truly fulfil the Neurodiversity mission.

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You might also be interested in my article about my ‘Doorframes Model of Disability’, which builds upon these ideas to give a new way of thinking about autism as a difference / disability / superpower.

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Follow me for more articles and posts on the subject of neurodiversity, as well as on the insight and data science stuff I do for a living!

Some thank yous to people who helped me formulate these ideas and commit them to writing: Jonathan Usmar, Cat Wood (Leonard), Nicolina Țurcan, Elva Ainsworth, Catherine Ainsworth, Nick Chater, Alex Lewis, Samuel Livingstone, CFA, Kamil Bartocha, Olivia Regan, Mike Clarke, Elizabeth Atkin, Derek Power, Dr Helen Davies, Dana James-Edwards, Mike Renwick

Why can’t we all get along? What really motivates Data Professionals

(Originally published 2023-07-11 on LinkedIn: Post, Full Article)

Mapping our motivations

Early on as we were building a new Data Science team in Schroders – we were about 15 people at this point – we were finding we were encountering some issues about how we organised ourselves. In particular, some people were perfectly skilled for the jobs we were assigning them, but they were grumbling and sometimes not applying themselves to the aspects we wanted them to. Somehow things weren’t gelling.

To try to help make sense of this, we ran a session at a Team Offsite, where we got everyone to place themselves on a ‘map’ of what really motivated them. Suddenly everything became clear – we understood exactly why some people weren’t meshing with their tasks, and in fact we understood exactly what the next phase of our team’s structure should look like. Not only that, it exposed a gaping hole in our team’s ‘motivation mix’ which set the scene for the next hires we needed to take on.

What was this map? Let’s back up a bit.

What is a Data Scientist really?

I still think a great articulation of a ‘Data Scientist’ is Drew Conway‘s from 2010. He laid out that a data scientist blends three key skill/knowledge domains:

Drew Conway’s Data Science Venn Diagram, 2010

So a data scientist combines knowledge of maths/stats (to arrive at true and accurate conclusions), is skilled at hacking stuff with computers (to get things done in the world of data), and has substantive expertise in a specific problem area (in order to be solving useful business problems).

Another nice definition I’ve encountered is a Data Scientist is better at stats than any programmer, and is better at programming than any statistician.

All these definitions highlight the wide breadth of the skills of a data scientist – business domain, maths/stats and working in code.

A classic illustration is the data scientists’ workflow: a data scientist can build a data engineering pipeline, fit a valid statistical/ML model, and deliver the resulting insights to a business stakeholder who can act on them in a valuable way. But will they do all these things equally well, and will they actually enjoy doing them all?

Data Science Motivations

Jono Usmar – who was a core part of my leadership team from the beginning – came up with this neat framework for thinking about what motivates data scientists, which was built upon some ideas from Idea Work (2013) by Carlsen, Clegg & Gjersvik.

The Data Science Motivations Triangle

As data professionals, everyone is motivated by some blend of…

• Mission – a drive to make a difference, to have a commercial impact. Often get lots of satisfaction from direct contact with people using the team’s outputs. Hate not being able to see clearly how their work directly delivers value.
• Mystery – a drive to discover the truth, to pursue knowledge. Often fascinated by the unknown, and elated by new insights. Hate the idea that people are acting on incorrect conclusions.
• Monument – a drive to create awesome stuff. They enjoy leaving a legacy of things that endure, that scale, that make everything (and everyone) work better. Hate doing a ‘bodge job’.

And here’s the thing – to succeed a team needs to cover all these bases.

• Without Mission it won’t be seen to deliver value and get its budget renewed.
• Without Mystery its insights won’t be depended on because it eventually becomes apparent that its ‘insights’ aren’t true and accurate.
• And without Monument it will be unable to scale up and let the team operate efficiently, and may eventually drown in technical debt in the absence of people building things properly.

Mapping the team

So we drew this triangle on a flipchart, and asked everyone to pick up a pen and put a mark on it according to how much each thing motivated them. We had a team member who was deep into the Mystery corner, and this definitely explained why he disliked working in our ‘quick customer response’ part of the team. We had someone deep into the Mission corner, which explained why his code was often so clunky and hard to maintain. And although the team (including the engineering team that supported us) had the technology skills, no-one actually put themselves in the Monument section – we were totally missing anyone who loved building stuff.

We reorganised the team, with each section of the team focused on one corner and with team-members aligned with their motivations. And we were clear we needed to hire some new people to fill that Monument gap.

I was the founder and leader of the team, and interestingly I was much closer to the centre of the triangle than anyone else. This is probably quite a common pattern for founders/leaders of data teams, because for the team as a whole to succeed it needs to cover all parts of the triangle, and if I hadn’t had my own personal blend of those 3 things I would have struggled to bootstrap the team into existence in the first year (during which time the team was just me!).

When new team members joined, Jono would often get people to place themselves on this triangle, just to understand what makes them tick and how we should think about their future path through the team. An interesting thing he noticed was that sometimes people felt awkward doing so. It always turned out that the issue was a big difference between what that person was really motivated by and what they were currently being asked to do, or what they thought they ought to be doing. Identifying that disconnect and discussing it was always very helpful – better sort it out now rather than later when the person gets frustrated in their role or neglects aspects of what’s expected because they don’t enjoy that part.

What’s this really mapping?

Having thought about this view of the team over many years, and observed the backgrounds of those team members, I see that it really maps two dimensions. Top to bottom is ‘proximity to impact’ and left to right is science vs engineering:

And these two dimensions are where the arguments come from.

1. Proximity of impact. A key area people can disagree is whether to focus on quick wins or enduring capabilities, of delivering now or building for the future. The right balance between these two depends on the situation, but generally I find each person tends to have their own internal preference. And this preference largely reflects their own internal ‘discount rate’, the degree to which they focus on ‘jam today’ or ‘jam tomorrow’. People who do a quick-and-dirty solution are delivering value now. People who build awesome things, or who discover profound truths, are equipping themselves or others to deliver even more value in the future. Every debate about how much time to spend refactoring code and paying down technical debt, or between doing planning up-front vs working things out as you go, revolve around this tension. And those discussions are often a bit dysfunctional because people rarely address this fundamental point – they usually argue over the specific thing in front of them without noticing the reason they’re disagreeing is a different preference about whether to invest in the future or focus on the immediate.
2. The Science vs Engineering education fork in the road. It’s obvious to attach ‘Engineering’ to building things and ‘Science’ to discovering things. What is more useful is to recognise that most data people found themselves having to choose between these aged 17 when they were deciding what subject to study at university. Pretty much all sciences from social sciences like Psychology or Economics to hard sciences like Physics or Biology are about learning how things got discovered and how future things will be discovered – they’re motivated by Mystery. And engineering subjects (whether civil, mechanical, electrical, or indeed computer science) are motivated by building things well, by Monument. That choice of degree subject is driven by knowing you’ll spend 3-4 years studying this thing, so you’ll choose something that really appeals to you. So I often found knowing someone’s degree subject tended to reflect which side of the triangle they chose. And those choices can then turn into almost tribal differences of outlook on what work is worth doing and how to do it, often between IT (filled with Engineers) vs other departments.

Interestingly, several times I found people who studied Maths put themselves half-way between Mystery and Monument, and these were often great ‘all-rounders’. After all, choosing Maths is to avoid choosing between science and engineering, it transcends them both!

The Power of Motivations

When I interview candidates I am focused on understanding what motivates them – what they enjoy, what they dislike, what they’re attracted to. Fundamentally people get good at the things they do, and people do the things they enjoy. So understand someone’s motivations and you understand their future – you can see what they’ll become great at. Whether through this framework or any other, that’s why I’ve found it so useful to really unpick what motivates people separately from what skills and knowledge they’ve acquired.

Will knowing whether Mission, Monument or Mystery motivates you and your colleagues be useful for you?

The Hidden World of Neurodiversity

(Originally published on LinkedIn on May 22, 2023: Post, Full Article)

Last year I had an experience I find so extraordinary, deeply impacting the lives of several of my colleagues, that I know I have to do something more with it, but I’m still working out what that is.

Entering the world of neurodiversity

My journey into the world of neurodiversity started 7 years ago, as I discovered that both my kids were neurodiverse. They have official diagnoses of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and also have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). It took a lot of reading and several excellent courses from a local charity (ADD Vance) for me to wrap my head around this – what it meant, how to support my kids better, and what it might mean for their futures. Next came to discussions with friends and family, helping them to understand what these things meant and that, no, this wasn’t just a fashionable label attached to normal kids behaviour, nor does it mean they can’t have brilliant successful lives. Then came the realisation that, given how inheritable autistic and ADHD traits are, that one of the reasons that our families’ responses were “but that’s just normal behaviour isn’t it?” was that all of us had, to varying degrees, traits of autism and ADHD.

At the same time as all this I found myself having parallel discussions with some of my colleagues. With one of my direct reports we came to the realisation that they were autistic. I also found myself channeling my knowledge of autism in helping one of the managers of my team help another team member who was coming to understand that they were autistic and how to help both of them achieve their best.

The power of differentness in teams

I came to realise that my whole life – from growing up with my family, the friends I had at school or university, the friends from my (supremely uncool) hobby of church bell ringing – was one of being surrounded by highly neurodiverse individuals, often people who were quirky and different. And in the process I came to realise how deeply I held as a value to appreciate and treasure those differences. I realised that I valued differentness.

During this time I was leading a data science team in a big company, and getting clearer that my values as a manager were to understand each individual in the team, think about each person’s unique qualities – strengths, weaknesses, and motivations – and shape the structure and work of the team so that each person could have a role that played to their strengths, and leaned on their colleagues to support them in their weaker areas. I was mastering management of diversity of thought, not only because you can get amazing things out of a team that way, but also because it was authentically aligned to my values.

Making sense of autism

It is in this context that I got asked to contribute to a series of talks organised by our IT department about different topics in the area of diversity. Mine was titled What is Autism? It was my very personal take on what it’s like to be autistic, what things are easy or hard, and a single simple idea to make sense of what this difference in brain wiring is – that autistic brains’ key difference is in information synthesis. This idea sets up why it might lead to all the difficulties that cause it to be an official disability, but also why it can be an amazing strength that lets autistic people be completely brilliant. My position, fundamentally, is that autism is not a disability – it’s a difference. (Though I completely recognise that for a subset of autistic people that difference really does make life incredibly hard.) I support a world where we embrace people’s differences as strengths to be harnessed rather than problems to be fixed. That is a world where not only autistic people can thrive and be happy, but anyone who’s different from the norm can thrive. The talk was accompanied by a written Q&A where I and those autistic team members answered the many questions people had asked in my talk.

The revelation of my hidden autistic colleagues

What happened next had a profound impact on me. In the months after my talk, three people stepped forward and ‘came out’ to me as being autistic, having hardly told another soul in the company. It was amazing to meet with them and hear their stories of how they’d maintained their ‘neurotypical person mask’ all this time, and how appreciative they were to know that someone was speaking out for people like them and trying to make more of their colleagues understand what they might be dealing with.

Even more extraordinary was what happened over later months, when I realised the self-discovery I’d unlocked. Eventually another three people told me something along the lines of…

“Mark, that talk you did was the moment I started to realise that maybe I might be autistic. Last week I got my official diagnosis, and now all the decades of my life up to this point are making so much more sense than they ever did before.”

I was just an unbelievable privilege to learn that these people had gone through this transformation of their understanding of themselves, and amazing to think that I might have been the start of that.

(Interestingly, 4 out of those 6 people who shared their autism secret with me were female. The world is full of undiagnosed and masking austic females…)

The challenge ahead

This whole experience leaves me with a clear sense of the challenge that lies ahead. The vast majority of the world don’t know what autism is, or think they do but are wrong.

I want my children to grow up into a world where they can, without shame or hesitation, tell their friends and colleagues that they are autistic and those people will know what that means. They’ll understand that makes some things hard for them (and what those things are, and how to help them) but also makes them brilliant at some other things.

That challenge starts now. I hope you can help me.

Bellringing Survey

Over 10 years ago I, together with my sister Elva, my mum Marion, along with Simon Linford and Alan Regin, created a survey designed to dig into what characteristics made someone well-suited to becoming a church bellringer, and particularly to whether they were going to have the potential to ‘go far’.

Follow this link to read the article we wrote summarising the results: Ringing Survey Results 2004.

In summary, the key points were:

• Factors that are associated with ringing advancement and ability include:
  • Years ringing
  • Age when you started (the younger the better) – very rarely do people who start ringing as adults achieve high levels of advancement.
  • Opportunities to ring with other good ringers
  • Number of peals rung
  • Being ambitioius
  • Time prepared to be given regularly to ringing
  • Fitting the image
  • Conceptual preferences
  • Attention and stamina
  • Memory and Adaptability
  • Good sense of rhythm
  • Visual skills
  • Hearing skills
• Factors NOT associated with ringing progress:
  • Being tough-minded
  • Sociability
  • Ringing out of a sense of duty
  • Current age
  • Whether you got started through a family connection

We’ve now got a revised version, and if you’re a bellringer you’d be very welcome to try it out. It’s similar in some ways but has a few improvements and additions. In due course we hope to be able to let people see their individual profile after they’ve done it, but for now you’ll just be contributing your data, which will be much appreciated!

Ringing Motivation Profiler

Thank you very much. Watch this space, and The Ringing World, for updates.

The beard effect

So I grew a beard, then got rid of it…

When I was 31 I decided I would try growing a beard. I had the perfect opportunity, a 3 week holiday in the form of my honeymoon, long enough to pass through the scruffy-looking tramp beard stage. I’ve not got that heavy a stubble, and my beard is quite ginger, so it needed all the help it could get!

After a year I decided to give it the chop. Enough people said they liked it for me to keep it going for quite a while (most women said they liked it), but not quite enough people for me to really feel it was for me. The tricky thing is that people are quite hesitant about telling you what they really think about it – they either tell you they like it (though they may just be being polite), or they say nothing at all, which is the polite way of saying that it makes you look like a tit.

… but not before doing some quantitative analysis

So anyway I decided to shave it off. However, when I cut it off I thought I would take the opportunity to do a bit of quantitative analysis of the effect my beard had on what people thought of me. In particular, many people had said that they thought it made me look more authoritative or older. But how much older? And if it did make people think I looked older than I really was?

I hit upon the idea of using the rather splendid website guessmyage.net. As a visitor to guessmyage.net you get shown a picture of a person and you have to type in how old you think they are. On hitting submit you get to see not only the real age but also the average of everyone else’s guesses. This page also shows you another person, and you just can’t resist having another go. And so it goes compellingly on.

When I shaved my beard off I took a succession of photos showing me in various stages of debeardification. We had some fun with it…

I then submitted the following two photos to guessmyage.net, together with my actual age which at that time was 32 though very close to my 33rd birthday. I then waited until I’d got 50 responses on each photo. The results are shown below:

So it turns out that my beard aged me by 4 years. But also that people clearly think I looked a great deal younger than I really was, so much so that people still thought I was 3 years younger than I really was even with my beard.

(I have a residual concern that my photos weren’t quite similar enough. In my bearded one I’m smiling a bit more, so my crow’s feet are a bit clearer. )

Proper Research

This is all very consistent with academic research on the effect of beards on perceived age. Dixson and Vasey (2012) contrasted otherwise identical pictures of men with either a very full beard or being clean-shaven, and found that having a beard led to men being perceived as…

• Older (by 2-3 years)
• Higher social status
• More aggressive
• Less attractive

The literature is thoroughly confusing on the question of whether beards are actually attractive. Dixson & Brooks (2013) found that the most attractive level of beardedness was of intermediate length. Reed & Blunk (1990) found that beards made prospective management job candidates more likely to be chosen, whereas Muscarella & Cunningham (1996) found that beards were considered less attractive. And Janif, Brooks & Dixson (2014) found that attractiveness was influenced by whether beards were ‘normal’ or unusual, leading to many news articles talking about the current fashion for beards perhaps resulting in us hitting “peak beard”.

Finally, this study found that cats do not like men with long dark beards or with ‘incomplete’ beards. Something to bear in mind, I’m sure you’ll agree.

5 years later

A few years later, then aged 37, I decided to grow my beard back. I had a new job as an independent consultant and so I felt it would be a good thing to make myself look older and wiser. I keep it shorter these days – better to be light than fuzzy, I reckon. I submitted another pair of photos to the website. This time I took more care to make sure my facial expression was identical between the two, and gathered more responses too. Here’s the result:

So there you have it, these days my beard adds 2 years to my perceived age. But is this a statistically significant result?

In an earlier version of this post I’d asked people to predict what the age difference would be.

They over-egged it a little, with a mean guess of 3 years. But that’s provided me with a crude indication of variation in perception. This is enough to confirm that the difference is statistically significant (t-test, n=200, p<0.01), which will be a weight off your mind, I’m sure.

What to measure next?

For now I’m planning on keeping my beard. I don’t have an easy way of statistically measuring its effect on my perceived attractiveness, intelligence, social status, aggressiveness or appeal to cats. Putting a poll here won’t be much good because you’ve read the article so you’ll be influenced by that. But feel free to post a comment with your views!

What’s the perfect speed to drive?

My family and I often drive 180 miles between St Albans and Huddersfield to visit the in-laws, most of which is just going along the M1. It’s common knowledge that the faster you go the higher your fuel consumption, so I was wondering what speed I should go at to get the optimal balance between time taken and money spent on fuel?

Is Toy Story the Greatest Movie Trilogy of all Time?

In Mark Kermode’s review of Toy Story 3 (available as a podcast and here), which he liked a great deal, he contemplated that Toy Story might be the best film trilogy of all time. This is mainly because the last film is extremely good, and that’s not the normal pattern with sequels. The other main contenders he considered were The Godfather (let down by number 3) and the less-well-known Trois Couleurs trilogy.

I saw it the other day and felt inclined to agree – it is really excellent. After mentioning this on Facebook and getting some good counter-suggestions from friends (Bourne, Indiana Jones, Back to the Future), I thought I’d find out if he’s right with some hard-core analysis…

Confusing Alphabet

My new daughter is currently too young to learn her alphabet (10 months), but it won’t be long and I was thinking about putting one of those alphabets up in her room where there’s a little picture of something for each letter.

My brother-in-law (Iain Anderson) and has been collecting the basis for a nonsense alphabet – a set of words for a children’s alphabet board that would really mess up my daughter’s education if I pinned them up in her room! Below is my slightly improved set [EDIT March 2011: now including some commenters’ suggestions]

• A for Aitch *
• B for Bdellium †
• C for Cue * / Czar †
• D for Double-U *
• E for Ewe *
• F for Ghoti ◊ [thanks Greg!] / Fillip §  [thanks Nobf!] / Vescent ¤ [thanks David!]
• G for Gnome †
• H for Hour †
• I for One ‡
• J for Juan ◊
• K for Knight †  (or even the double-meaning “K as in Knew” †*)
• L for Llandudno ◊ / Fifty ‡
• M for Mnemonic † / Thousand ‡
• N for Entropy ¤
• O for Ouija ◊
• P for Psalm †
• Q for Quay ◊
• R for C Clark ¤ [thanks David!] / Arson ¤ [thanks Seven!]
• S for Sea *
• T for Tchaikovsky †
• U for Youth ¤  [thanks Seven!]
• V for Five ‡
• W for Why *
• X for Ten ‡ / Xylophone/Xanadu ◊
• Y for You *
• Z for Zori §  [thanks Nobf!]

I’ve indicated why it’s in with a category, as shown below in decreasing order of how much I prefer them…

* – sounds like or is another letter word
† – silent initial letter
‡ – roman number
◊ – unusual initial sound
§ – sounds like another (more common) word with similar pronunciation
¤ – word starts with the sound of the letter word

If you can think of any better ones (ideally using one of the same tricks this list uses) please post a comment with your suggestion!