Episode: 4229
Title: HPR4229: Neurodiversity and Hacking
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4229/hpr4229.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 21:46:01

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4229 for Thursday the 17th of October 2024.
Today's show is entitled Neurodiversity and Hacking.
It is the tenth show of Lee and is about 21 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, Lee talks to Matthew about the link between Neurodiversity and Hacking.
Hi, I'm Lee and today I'm joined by someone I know from the Neurodiversity Group in the British
Computing Society and his name is Matthew and today we're going to be having a chat
about Hacking and Neurodiversity.
Hello Matthew.
Hi, thank you for talking to me today.
So to start off today, would you like to introduce yourself and tell us where your interests
in technology and Neurodiversity derive from?
Yeah, absolutely. So hi everyone, I'm Matthew Bellringer.
I'm a Neurodiversity and Innovation Specialist.
So I work with Neurodivergent people and businesses.
We're coming up with new approaches to things and using technology to do so.
I also work with organizations that want to deliver innovative services to Neurodivergent people.
My relationship between technology and Neurodiversity go a very long way back.
At the age of six, I was diagnosed with dyslexia, having been kind of thrown out of infant
school and I ended up the psychologist who diagnosed me, recommended that I get a computer.
And this was in the mid 80s, so this was not the situation we're in where computers were
ubiquitous in every household as they are now.
So I started using that and kind of always used computers right the way through my school
and just to get stuff done. And over time just became very proficient in using them.
Before most people had even used them regularly for productivity.
And so what happened is when I went to university and then the first time around I went to
university again, undiagnosed autism and ADHD, I didn't do terribly well, I left in a hurry and
then I started doing assistive training for other disabled people around how they could use
their computers and use them to work with, you know, as it really is an accessibility aid.
So this relationship between technology and Neurodiversity has run through basically my entire
career and continues to do so today around where I'm working with Neurodivergent people about how
they can use technology to make their lives easier, make, you know, play to their strengths
rather than struggling with difficulties and those kinds of things.
Okay, that's that's interesting. It's actually a new guy at school. He had a laptop because he had
dyslexia and I think that led him very directly into a career in IT. That was me. That was that was
basically me. Yeah. Yeah. So let's go back a little, what does Neurodiversity mean?
Oh, okay. So, so Neurodiversity, for me, I use, I use the kind of standard original definition
of Neurodiversity, which is that everyone is Neurodiverse. We're Neurodiverse as a population.
Everyone has different experiences on the basis of their Neurology. We think and feel
and experience the world differently because we all have different neural wiring.
And that that's a simple factor biology. It's a simple part. It's just part of humanity.
And I happen to view it as largely a, the Neurodiversity exists because in general, it is beneficial
to us as a species. So there are situations where to the individual and perhaps to society,
it isn't beneficial. But in general, the idea that we all have these different experiences is
beneficial to everyone. Within that space, there's also the idea of Neurodivergence.
And to be Neurodivergent is to sit outside the expected norms of how your brain is supposed to
work, how you're supposed to experience, think and feel about the world. And those are social.
They're partly kind of weight of numbers as well. More people do think more similarly to each
other and they're kind of the middle of the bell curve. If we sit outside of the middle of those
whatever bell curves we're talking about, then we're Neurodivergent. We experience things
differently to the way that they're expected. And that can be associated with a specific
condition like autism ADHD, dyslexia, Tourette, all of those things. Or it might not be. It might
just be that fundamentally experiencing the world differently. And as I say, I think the thing
to understand is, is that plurality? Is that it's not that one is better than the other? It's about
the range than the diversity within the population and how we all communicate that matters.
Okay, so I could describe myself as Neurodivergent. If I'm on the autistic spectrum, for example,
other people might say that they have ADHD, they also would call themselves Neurodivergent.
You'd expect some quite different things from someone who has ADHD, from someone who has autism,
but there are similarities maybe on a more abstract level about those different conditions.
Completely. Yeah. So what is your understanding of the term hacking? And would you say there's
a crossover between Neurodivercity, unconventional perspectives in hacking?
So I understand the term hacking to mean making systems behave in ways that they weren't designed to.
And as a morally, completely morally neutral thing, it's simply finding a system and exploring
the other ways, the other modes of behavior that weren't originally intended when it was put together.
I think there's also a big aspect of that that's about combining things in unexpected ways.
Things that aren't supposed to go together aren't supposed to be used together,
but happen to cause different behavior systems to behave in different ways when they are combined
in that way. And then there's looking at things just from a fundamentally different perspective.
If you look at things from a different angle, you can see ways of the system could behave or
that things could be used that are fundamentally different to the conventional view.
And because as Neurodivergent people, we are often in that situation, we're coming from a different
perspective. We tend to see opportunities for the system to behave differently. And because
every system is designed, whether it's intentional or unlike whether it's been consciously designed
or whether it's just kind of come about through people making a whole bunch of decisions.
Those decisions support certain ways of being in the world and so certain ways of thinking about
things. And they implicitly exclude other ways of being in the world and other ways of thinking
about things. And as Neurodivergent people, we are living counted a lot of
situations where things basically just weren't designed for us. And that I think is a really
core aspect of why Neurodiversity and hacking intersect is because we kind of have to do this.
It's just to get by. And so that all experience is a big aspect of just being Neurodivergent in the
world doing what we need to do. We need to develop some degree of skill in working with systems
so they work for us, which implicitly means working with systems in ways that they weren't
designed to because when they were designed, the person wasn't thinking of us when they were designing it.
Okay, so you're kind of saying the reason Neurodivergent people might be more attracted to the
making systems behaving the way they're designed to is firstly that different unconventional
perspective, but also just a matter of necessity of having to do that in everyday life.
Yeah. Okay, so where do the concepts of Neurodiversity and hacking not align? For example,
can Neurotypical people be proficient hackers? I think so, but perhaps with a slightly different
emphasis on what those outcomes are. So I like to and thinking about this from an innovation
perspective, which is a very similarly related concept. I sometimes divide two types of innovation.
One is more of the same, but better. That tends to focus on efficiency. It tends to focus on
improvements to existing methods. And the alternative to that is something that's fundamentally
different, something that's blue water innovation that establishes a new way of doing things on a
more fundamental level. And Neurotypical people tend to excel at the more of the same, but better.
So where there's opportunities for optimizing the behavior of the system.
That can often be a very good thing that Neurotypical people can do because they're coming from a
similar perspective to the person who originally designed the thing. They can kind of put
themselves in those shoes and then add their extra knowledge. Whereas for Neurodivergent people,
we're very often coming from a different perspective. And so we can spot those opportunities
looking from the outside. So I think if you think about the kind of hacking that where you're looking
from within the thing, that's actually often more effectively done by Neurotypical people.
Whereas the kind of hacking that comes from looking at the thing from outside and getting that
kind of outside of you, that's very often more effectively done by Neurodivergent people,
or people with other forms of cognitive diversity. So that's another aspect of this. Neurodiverstia
isn't the only form of cognitive diversity. If we have different life experiences, if we
grew up in a different cultural background to the one around us, or we had an unconventional
childhood, that can also lead to quite differences in perspective that can give you that outside
a perspective too. Right, thanks. What common misconceptions are there about
versus Neurodiverstia and secondly hacking, would you say? Yeah, so I think there are, I mean,
there are a lot of misconceptions about both. For me, one of the big ones is this fundamental
concept of neurodiversity. Is this idea that individuals are neurodiverse and that there's just
this kind of monolithic group of neurodiverse people, or more commonly, actually, that neurodiversity
basically equals autism. And so that idea that we're just almost like it's a polite way of saying
autistic. Personally, obviously, I don't feel that there's any shame in being autistic. It's not
something that needs politeness. It's just an aspect of my identity, just like I'm quite tall.
So it's neutral in the same way. So that idea of like neurodiversity and not being comfortable
talking about the actual conditions. And related to that is the stereotypes we have associated with
each of the conditions. The idea that one person who has a say, if one person is autistic,
that their experience is going to be very much like someone else who's autistic, which just isn't
true. There's so many different aspects of experience and the way these conditions show up is so
different. And then you get these kind of stereotypes around strengths and what people are good at
and how the things combine. So there are a lot of, you know, particularly in the tech industry,
there's a specific kind of sort of stereotype about someone who particularly is autistic or is
neurodivergent. And those just aren't necessarily very true. They don't fit a lot of people's lived
experience and they're very limiting even where people do claim to fit them. So I think those
the stereotypes and the associations that people have are one of the big areas where I think there
are a lot of misconceptions around that. And now in terms of hacking, I think the first one is
obviously that hacking is a destructive thing. It can be a very creative thing. And it can be a very
necessary thing. As I've mentioned, we some of us just need to make systems behave in different
ways in order to get through the day. So the idea that being able to do that is a marker of some
kind of ill intent is really problematic. And I think you can see that. Sometimes it shows up in
the medical system, actually, and the way people are treated is like, you just do what you do to get
by. And then that's pathologized. That's seen as problematic. That might be seen as something
you get punished for. And very often, we might have experienced that at school. I very much learn
around, you know, I had to work things out my way and then show my working in inverted commas
in the way that I was taught to working backwards from the answer that I got my own way.
So yeah, that reminds me of the film about Ramanujan, the mathematician and he hated writing
proofs, but he knew all these wonderful theories. He just couldn't prove them.
Yeah, exactly. And it's just we go a different way. And I think another it like, and maybe there's
one slightly more trivial one is this is just the idea of like ADHD hacks or this idea of these very
trivial interventions. They kind of can be useful. And I think remembering that sometimes when we say
hacks, we mean something that's quite quick and dirty and can be used in the moment, but isn't
something we necessarily want to rely on long term. It's not something we want to design in
necessarily. It's a temporary thing. I think this idea of like, oh, you can kind of fix your
experience as a neurodivergent person by adopting a relatively simple strategy that someone can tell
you in a short TikTok video is probably not a helpful thing to believe or to be telling people
is available. Yeah, I mean, I have to say sometimes tell my supervisor, I think this is a bit
of a hack. And he generally he'll say to me, he thinks hacks can turn out bad in the long term.
But I'm the hack is the right way of doing things. That's the other side of the coin. Yeah,
there's kind of it points towards a good solution sometimes, but it isn't necessarily a good
solution in and of itself. I think that's an important thing to remember.
Yeah. Okay, so can you give some examples of individuals or groups of people or subcultures
or instances in the major out of neurodiversity and hacking?
Yeah, absolutely. I think the two big areas that jump out for me, particularly in the tech
industry and the amount of neurodivergent people working in testing and working in IT security.
Because both of those practices really that that value of seeing things from the outside,
seeing problems from a different angle means that it's incredibly helpful to be able to account
for all the possible cases that you might encounter when something gets out into the outside world.
And to kind of illustrate this, there's this joke about a tester walks into a bar and
they order one drink and then they order 2037 drinks and then they order minus one drinks
and all the testing goes fine. And then the first customer walks into the bar asks,
where's the toilet and then the bar explodes. So those kinds of those kinds of iterations where
you're coming at things from a different angle where where you need to step outside of that space,
that can be really, really useful for neurodivergent people. And that's also why it's so effective
in IT security because it's, you know, you see a system working. It's very hard to step outside
of the assumptions you've made about how that's designed. If you're coming from a different set of
assumptions, you can see that much more clearly. So how does this insight inform how we should
go about educating and introducing people into this space as a correct IP? Yeah, I mean, one of
the difficulties is if you are a neurodivergent, you're probably not have had an ideal situation
in education, particularly in the UK, we're not very good at delivering an education that really
supports a wide range of different thinking styles and approaches. We're very much do it this way
and very specific about that and all of the ways that things are assessed are very specific
and expect you to do things in a very fixed, wrote way. So I think for me, one of the big things is
multiple pathways, flexibility, making things more centered in the individual person and how they
want to do things, which is a very big picture answer. But I think it's really important to say,
if we want more people to be able to do this, we need to give people flexibility and let people
practice this, you know, like it shouldn't be something you have to hide. It should be something
that you can cultivate and that you get support in cultivating. And I think there's a big thing
around this around how we're evaluating whether someone is capable of doing something and very often
qualifications are problematic because they're like, can you follow this method? That is the right
method of doing things. When we're fundamentally talking about someone with skills as a hacker,
what we're looking for is not someone who can follow a wrote method. That is the right method.
We're looking for someone who can find their own method, which often doesn't do terribly well in
qualification scenario. So I think looking to alternative things like accreditation, where you're
evaluated on stuff you have actually done in the real world rather than these imaginary scenarios
can be a lot more effective about getting people in if we actually want to see more of this.
Yeah, I mean myself I much prefer than to be the assessor and interview rather to actually be
set a real world task to complete. And then even if it means I do it in my own space and my own time
which I would actually do if I was actually doing the job rather than sitting in I don't know
somewhere or talking to someone on zooms they're asking me a question me telling them something
back that doesn't really assess what I'm capable of I don't think.
So let's finish off with a more lighthearted question. What do you think has been the contribution
to humanity of hackers? Well I mean I think hackers people who are looking at all of this stuff
we've designed and built and going oh this could be different. I think it's such a fundamental
contribution to humanity over time that I think it's really important that generation of
innovation of different ways of doing things and the opportunity that that creates for everyone
is a huge benefit. And I think we often see this in these strange edge spaces these spaces which
aren't really mainstream where you've got these funny little niches that then end up creating
something that's incredibly useful for everyone. One of it like a good example of this is say the
worldwide web and like HTTP as a protocol that was developed for very academic knowledge sharing
the whole internet was to some degree but that then becomes this incredibly useful platform for
a whole ton of different things but started off as this very niche little area solving a very
specific problem. And I think those strange little niches are very often really rich spaces for
hacking and for new ideas and for neurodivergent people. And ultimately I mean I fundamentally believe
that these alternative approaches these alternative perspectives can really work with problems that
can't be worked with effectively from a conventional perspective. So when we've got really big
problems that are going to affect everyone we need as many different eyes on the problem as
possible from as many different perspectives as possible because that's the only way that we're
going to get the kind of insight that will let us actually fix things and resolve that that's
going to be good for everyone. All right thanks very much Matthew for coming and talking to me
and talking to the HPI listeners. Is there anywhere that you would recommend people to look you up or
other resources people could look at to find out more? Yeah absolutely yeah I thought well thank you
for thank you for the interview of your very insightful questions and really really interesting
set of questions. So people want to find me they can find me at MatthewBelringer.com and they can
also find me on LinkedIn. There aren't that many MatthewBelringers on LinkedIn so you should
comfortably be able to find me with a headline around neurodiversity and innovation. I'm on both of
those places I share quite regular resources about really what it is to be being neurodivergent either
running your own business or working for other people in a professional capacity and how you can
really do more of what you like doing unless of what you don't that's a really big thing for me.
So yeah so please do reach out if if anyone has any questions or anything I'd love to
talk about this stuff as maybe obvious so please do get in touch if that's something that you're
interested in too. Okay well that concludes this episode and thank you everyone for listening.
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