NeurosparkleGPS: When the Destination Appears Without the Directions

This week’s Just Right Word is NeurosparkleGPS.

NeurosparkleGPS stands for Gestalt Processing Syntax, a term I coined because none of the existing language quite explained the processing difference I had observed and was trying to describe. I chose the word syntax instead of style because syntax is about order, not eloquence. Syntax determines how words must be arranged for a sentence to make sense, and changing that order can change the meaning even when all the same words are present.

Our individual brains have syntax too. Not only what we think about, but the order in which information becomes understanding.

A Nearlynormie is characterized in my framework primarily by fluency in Neurotypical Linear Discourse. It is the culturally dominant expectation that meaning should be communicated in a straight line: establish the topic in an opening statement, present three bullet points in two or three sentences each, and then summarize what you said in the opening statement in different words that prove you were right all along. A three-act play. An Atomic Essay.

The distinguishing element I have identified in a Neurosparkler is Gestalt Processing Syntax: Gestalt Processors begin with the answer before anyone else realizes that there was a problem to be solved. We absorb the context, contradictions, emotional signals, remembered details, future possibilities and apparently unrelated information until the pattern becomes visible all at once.

Aha moments. We often recognize what something means before we have the Just Right Words to explain how we recognized it.

Then somebody asks us how we got there. Show your work.

That question is difficult to answer because we didn’t exactly get there. We started there. The destination appeared without the directions, and now we have to work backward through everything our brain processed simultaneously in an instant to construct a linear route another person can follow.

This is the core problem that becomes Exulansis Fatigue.

Neurotypical Linear Discourse moves in a straight line from parts to sequence to conclusion. Gestalt Processing Syntax moves from whole to pattern deconstruction to attempted translation.

Neither one determines intelligence, and neither one belongs exclusively to a particular diagnosis. Most people can use both. The difference is where the mind naturally begins and how much energy it takes to rearrange what we know into someone else’s preferred order.

I Wrote a Whole Book This Way

I wrote Through the Hummingbird’s Eye: A Neurosparkle Manifesto as a spoken-word gestalt about NeurosparkleGPS before I had coined the term NeurosparkleGPS.

I did not begin with a tidy framework, divide it into chapters and then choose birds to illustrate each point. The Adventures of Nora and the Neurosparklers book series arrived as a whole: the Hummingbird, the Eagle, the Owl, the Parrot, the Queen Bee of Quincy Bay and the Bird Brain Sanctuary all came later. The birds and bees of Quincy Bay carried something I could already see but did not yet know how to explain in conventional language, so I wrote a book that looked like a metaphorical message.

Except the book and the series that follows the book are literal explanations of How I See it/It/IT told as I see it.

The birds and the bees in the book are specific, real, live birds that I have observed with my own eyes doing what those individual birds are actually built to do. Their different ways of seeing, moving, orienting, communicating and surviving are not human personality traits pasted onto convenient animal characters. They are biological realities of four actual birds and two actual bees.

Over the past 16 years, I have built a literal hummingbird sanctuary at our house overlooking a migratory bird sanctuary right off the Mississippi River. Tonight, hundreds of Ruby-throated Hummingbirds swarmed the 40-plus feeders that I have to clean and refill daily this time of year, while pollinators swarmed the flowers that popped up from tribute seeds left behind the previous year.

The hummingbirds born in the trees around my house will soon migrate south as the days get shorter and the weather gets cooler. The feeders I fill are like a fast-food drive-through where quick and easy nectar flows freely, but the attraction to Quincy Bay began long before I arrived. The birds will continue to return even if I quit filling the feeders.

In the book, the hummingbird says, “Inside my eye’s tattooed a map that guides my DNA.”

A hummingbird can see ultraviolet light that human eyes cannot perceive, but the pull to migrate does not rely on her vision. The Hummingbird is not imagining something that isn’t there, and the other birds in the story are not refusing to see what she sees. They do not possess the same visual equipment.

The hummingbirds on my deck recognize me. They are comfortable perching on my fingers while I hold their feeders, and they sip from flower-sized feeders clipped to my glasses and hats.

The Book Is the Gestalt. The Canon. The whole enchilada in 32 pages.

Through the Hummingbird’s Eye does not explain the Neurosparkle framework—it contains it. I wrote a 32-page book in one spoken-word soliloquy in the bathtub and have used 13 million words trying to explain it.

That statement demonstrates the framework.

The book contained the Bird Brain Sanctuary before I understood that I was building it in my real life. It contained the different ways of seeing before I organized them into the Bird Brain Johari Window. It contained the difference between recognition and explanation before I coined Gestalt Processing Syntax. It contained the Just Right Words before I understood that finding and creating those words was the work I had been trying to do my entire life.

That is how gestalts work for me.

The whole arrives carrying meaning that can take months or years to unpack. I know that everything belongs together long before I can tell anyone else exactly how it belongs together, which means I often look as though I am changing subjects, abandoning projects or adding unrelated complications when I am actually trying to illustrate a pattern I can already see.

Other people may read my book as a poetic fable about metaphorical birds. I recognize it as a map of my mind.

Before you can understand NeurosparkleGPS, you must understand that the Bird Brain Sanctuary is not a metaphor. It is my real life.

The Bird Brain Sanctuary is the place I am creating because I needed somewhere my mind could exist without first being translated into Neurotypical Linear Discourse. The Neurosparkly Hummingbird is not merely a symbol for seeing differently; she represents one actual bird who showed me how I experience seeing what other people cannot yet see.

The Bird Brain is not whimsical branding added to make a cognitive framework more charming. It is the ecosystem I have spent my life inhabiting, observing, protecting, explaining and far too often apologizing for.

The Bird Brain Sanctuary is what happened when I stopped trying to make that ecosystem resemble somebody else’s path to content creation. It is where the way my brain works becomes the architecture of my operating system instead of an accommodation for my disability.

This is also why I have had so much trouble explaining what I am building. People keep asking for directions to a destination I can already see, while I keep handing them pieces of a map that makes complete sense inside my own mind. When they cannot recognize the territory, I assume I have failed to explain it and begin producing even more words.

The problem was never that I did not know what I was creating. The problem was that I did not yet have the Just Right Words to translate the gestalt.

When Gestalt Processors recognize the whole, we often assume that if we provide enough of the pieces, another person will eventually see what we see. We offer context, background, an example, the exception to the example and the apparently unrelated story that reveals the pattern connecting everything we have been trying to say. Meanwhile, Nearlynormies who are fluent in Neurotypical Linear Discourse wonder why we cannot simply get to the point.

We are at the point. Gestalt processing is the point. That’s the whole point.

What looks like a detour may be our attempt to reconstruct a linear path to something we understood all at once. That is why a Neurosparkler can sound completely certain about a conclusion while struggling to explain the reasoning that produced it. It is why we can give you the answer before we can show our work, and why forcing us to explain something too early can sometimes make us lose access to the very thing we are trying to translate.

The Just Right Words do not create the gestalt. They allow us to make the gestalt visible to someone who did not receive it whole.

Gestalt Processing Syntax is not a claim of superior intelligence, and fluency in Neurotypical Linear Discourse is not a deficit of imagination. One person recognizes the whole and translates it into parts; another gathers the parts and constructs the whole. Both can arrive somewhere true. Both can also be completely wrong—or completely right—and still not reach common ground.

The trouble begins when the collective “We People” mistake the syntax that is easiest for us to explain for the only legitimate way of knowing. A person who can show every step is not automatically more correct, and a person who recognizes a pattern before everyone else is not excused from testing that recognition against what is visible and available.

That is why Neurosparklers need Critical Thinking and Communication Literacy. We need to distinguish between recognizing a pattern and proving that the pattern exists. We need to translate what we see without allowing the demand for translation to convince us that we never saw it. We need both the gestalt and the ability to interrogate our inklings.

So that is my question for you this week.

• Do you construct meaning from individual pieces, or recognize the whole and then work backward?
• Have you ever known something long before you could explain how you knew it?
• When someone asks you to show your work, can you identify the path you followed, or do you have to create a path after you have already arrived?
• How much energy do you spend translating your natural processing syntax into the order other people expect?
• What have you created that made complete sense as a whole before you understood all of its individual parts?

Maybe you are not scattered, skipping steps or making something unnecessarily complicated. Maybe your mind reached the destination while everyone else was still waiting for the directions.

I wrote Through the Hummingbird’s Eye before I understood that it was the map. I built the Bird Brain Sanctuary before I had published the language to explain why it was a real place inside my real life. I created NeurosparkleGPS because I finally recognized the cognitive syntax connecting all of it.

The book is literal, disguised as a metaphorical message. The gestalt came first. Now I am finally finding the Just Right Words to explain its parts.

May You Choose to See What Was Always There,

Auntie Paige

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