In 1997, Steve Jobs sat in a screening room and watched an advertisement he had initially dismissed as "advertising agency shit." The ad, created by TBWA\Chiat\Day, featured Einstein, Gandhi, Picasso, and a dozen other figures who had, in the words of copywriter Rob Siltanen, changed the world by seeing it differently. "Here's to the crazy ones," the voiceover began. "The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers." Jobs came around. Apple ran the campaign for five years. It became the most celebrated advertising manifesto of the twentieth century.
Nobody involved in making it knew how literally true it was.
The Mind You Cannot Imagine
In January 2020, a writer named Ryan Langdon published a blog post with a title that sounds like a joke: "Today I Learned That Not Everyone Has an Internal Monologue and It Has Ruined My Day." It was not a joke. The post received ten million views. It broke people's minds.
What Langdon had stumbled into was a fact that scientists had been circling for decades but that ordinary people had never confronted: the inner experience of human beings is not uniform. It is not even close to uniform. Some people hear a constant narrator in their heads. Some hear nothing at all. Some people can close their eyes and conjure a vivid image of their mother's face, their childhood bedroom, a red apple on a white table. Others close their eyes and see absolute blackness -- not a faded image, not a dim impression, but nothing.
I must say, I find this profoundly unsettling. Not because the science is surprising in isolation, but because of what it reveals about the assumption underneath -- the assumption that everyone's mind works like mine.
In 2015, a cognitive neurologist named Adam Zeman at the University of Exeter gave a name to the inability to form mental imagery: aphantasia. Strict prevalence sits around one percent of the population, though broader estimates push it to five. A decade later, Zeman's work has spawned a global community -- the Aphantasia Network has over sixty thousand members, each of whom spent years assuming everyone else's mental life was as imageless as their own. Then in 2024, psychologists Johanne Nedergaard and Gary Lupyan coined a companion term: anendophasia, the absence of inner speech. Not a deficit. A different cognitive architecture entirely. When people without inner speech are asked to speak aloud whilst solving problems, the performance gap with inner-speech thinkers disappears. The route is different. The destination is the same.
This matters. It matters because for over a century, we have been building institutions, schools, workplaces, and management structures on the assumption that there is a cognitive default -- a standard-issue human mind against which all others are measured. There is no such default. There never was.
The Assumption That Devoured Itself
Russell Hurlburt, a psychologist at the University of Nevada, spent decades developing a method called Descriptive Experience Sampling -- interrupting people at random moments and asking them to report, with forensic precision, what was happening inside their minds. His findings are devastating to anyone who assumes a standard inner life. Across the population, Hurlburt identified five phenomena of inner experience: inner speech, inner seeing, unsymbolised thinking, feelings, and sensory awareness. The numbers are humbling. Inner speech appears in roughly twenty-six percent of sampled moments. Inner seeing in thirty-four percent. Unsymbolised thinking -- thought without words or images, pure abstraction -- in twenty-two percent.
Twenty-two percent of the time, people are thinking without language and without pictures.
The pattern Langdon's viral post exposed is one I recognise from the history of technology itself. When you reveal to someone that their inner experience is not universal, they go through something that looks remarkably like grief. First disbelief. Then a furious attempt to confirm -- "You mean you can't SEE the thing?" -- followed by a long, uncomfortable recalibration of every assumption they have ever made about communication, empathy, and shared understanding. Every time they said "picture this" to a colleague, every time a teacher said "visualise the answer," every time a therapist said "imagine a safe place" -- all of it was built on a foundation that, for a significant minority of the human population, does not exist.
The Campaign and the Coincidence
Now. Go back to that screening room in 1997. Craig Tanimoto, the art director at TBWA\Chiat\Day, conceived the slogan "Think Different." Siltanen wrote the script. The campaign featured Einstein, whose documented traits include what modern diagnosticians would recognise as autism and dyslexia. It featured Nikola Tesla, who occupied the opposite extreme -- an eidetic imagery so vivid that he reportedly could not distinguish his mental inventions from physical reality. Einstein, who by his own account thought not in words but in "muscular and visual images" that he only later translated into language. Tesla, who designed entire machines in his mind, ran them mentally for weeks, then checked for wear on the imagined parts.
The selection criterion for Apple's campaign was not neurodivergence. It was world-changing rebellion. But the overlap is, let us say, rhetorically potent. What Apple celebrated as metaphor -- thinking differently -- was for many of these people a literal neurological reality. They did not choose to see the world differently. Their brains were wired to see it differently from birth.
I think this is brilliant advertising. Perhaps the most brilliant advertising ever produced, precisely because it is truer than its creators knew. "Here's to the crazy ones" -- a slogan written to sell computers -- accidentally became the most authentic neurodiversity manifesto in corporate history.
There is an irony here, and I will name it only once: the technology companies that most loudly celebrate "thinking differently" in their advertising have spent the subsequent decades building cultures that ruthlessly punish it. Seventy-seven percent of neurodivergent employees mask their thinking style at work. But that is a subject for another day.
What Happened to the Ones Who Thought Too Differently
Here is where the history gets dark, and I am going to walk into it because the stakes demand it.
The idea that some minds work differently is not new. What is new is the framing. For the better part of a century, the dominant response to cognitive difference was not celebration. It was elimination.
Between 1936 and the late 1970s, American surgeons performed between forty thousand and fifty thousand lobotomies. Sixty to eighty-four percent of the patients were women. The procedure -- an ice pick driven through the eye socket into the frontal lobe, sometimes without anaesthesia -- was performed on people whose crime was often nothing more than being difficult, anxious, or inconvenient to their families. Rosemary Kennedy, the eldest Kennedy daughter, was lobotomised at the age of twenty-three at her father's instruction. She had been described as "slow" and "rebellious." The procedure left her permanently incapacitated, unable to speak coherently, institutionalised for the remaining sixty-three years of her life. Her family did not speak of her publicly for decades.
Rosemary Kennedy was one case. There were tens of thousands of others.
Running alongside the lobotomies was a programme of forced sterilisation that American courts not only permitted but endorsed. In 1927, the Supreme Court ruled in Buck v. Bell that compulsory sterilisation of the "unfit" was constitutional. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, one of the most celebrated legal minds in American history, wrote the majority opinion. His words: "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." The ruling led to over seventy thousand forced sterilisations. It has never been explicitly overturned.
The people subjected to these procedures were not, by and large, people with severe disabilities. They were people who thought differently, behaved differently, or simply existed inconveniently in a society that had decided there was a single correct way to have a mind.
Then Like Now
It took until 1993 for someone to say, clearly and publicly, that the framing was wrong. Jim Sinclair, an autistic activist, delivered a speech at an autism conference titled "Don't Mourn for Us." It is the founding document of the neurodiversity movement. Sinclair's argument was devastatingly simple: autism is not a disease that has kidnapped a normal child. It is a way of being human. The grief that parents feel is grief for a fantasy child who never existed, projected onto a real child who does exist and who is standing right there, watching you mourn for them.
The term "neurodiversity" itself was collectively developed by autistic communities through the 1990s, though it is often attributed to sociologist Judy Singer. Its core claim is not that everyone is special. Its core claim is that there is no neurological default. That the assumption of a standard mind -- against which all other minds are deviations, deficits, or disorders -- is itself the error.
This is where the science and the history converge into something that should shake us.
If aphantasia, anendophasia, and unsymbolised thinking are not deficits but different cognitive architectures -- if some people think in pictures, some in words, some in pure abstraction, and some in combinations that defy categorisation -- then the concept of a "normal mind" is not merely imprecise. It is fiction. A fiction that was enforced with ice picks and scalpels and court orders for the better part of a century.
'OK,' you might be thinking, 'but that was then. We don't lobotomise people anymore. We've moved on.'
Right, about that.
When a company designs its communication norms around the assumption that everyone processes information verbally, when a school tests children exclusively on their ability to visualise, when we build entire management structures on the premise that there is one right way to think -- we are not performing surgery, but we are enforcing a default that does not exist. The violence is softer. The assumption is the same.
Alison Reynolds and David Lewis, writing in Harvard Business Review, found that cognitively diverse teams solve problems faster than cognitively homogeneous ones. But -- and this is the part the LinkedIn crowd never quotes -- only when psychological safety is present. Without safety, cognitive diversity is not an asset. It is a source of conflict, masking, and silence. The different thinkers learn to pretend they think like everyone else. The organisation gets the appearance of diversity and the reality of conformity.
Then like now, the institutions that claim to celebrate different thinking do so only on their own terms.
The Reframe
I want to be clear about what I am arguing and what I am not.
I am not saying that cognitive science has proved we are all beautiful snowflakes. The counterarguments deserve respect. Prevalence numbers for aphantasia and anendophasia are soft -- ranging from under one percent to nearly nine percent depending on measurement method. Kahneman and Tversky's work on cognitive biases demonstrates deep shared architecture across all human minds: we are all subject to loss aversion, anchoring, and the availability heuristic, regardless of whether we think in words or pictures. There is a real risk of "neurodiversity lite," where the concept expands until it means nothing more than "people are different" and loses all explanatory power. And the TikTok self-diagnosis phenomenon is inflating identification beyond what the science supports.
But here is what the counterarguments cannot touch. The inner experience of human beings varies along fundamental dimensions -- imagery, speech, abstraction -- and we have spent centuries pretending it does not. We assumed a default that was never there. We built institutions that enforced that default. We destroyed the minds and bodies of people who could not conform to it. And when we finally began to understand the variation, the first reaction of millions of people -- Langdon's ten million readers among them -- was not "how interesting" but "how is this possible? How did I not know this?"
The answer is simple: we could not see inside each other's minds, and so we assumed they all worked like ours.
What follows from this is not a comfortable corporate lesson about hiring neurodivergent people for your innovation team, though that is part of it. What follows is something harder. If there is no cognitive default, then every system you have ever built -- every school curriculum, every meeting format, every performance review, every communication norm -- is built on a fiction. The question is not whether you are accommodating different thinkers. The question is whether you have ever once stopped to ask how the people around you actually think.
I suspect most of us have not. I certainly hadn't, until the science forced me to confront it. The Apple ad was right, but not in the way Apple intended. The crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels -- some of them literally could not think the way the rest of us thought, and that was never their weakness. It was ours, for never noticing.
We are still not noticing. And until we do, "Think Different" will remain what it has always been: a slogan on a billboard, written by people who had no idea what they were actually saying, celebrated by companies that would fire the very minds it was written about.
(Views in this article are my own.)