Bounded Uncertainty was founded on a simple but powerful idea: the spectrum between typical and atypical presentation and its traits are better understood as differences in how brains process and predict information, not as disorders or deficits. There is no denying that some clusters emerge, and those are categorised as disorders such as autism and ADHD, or anxiety and depression. However, bounded uncertainty is not a student of that school of thought. Bounded uncertainty believes that the huge heterogeneity of human diversity is better explained by a first-principles approach. This is why we use the Free Energy Principle, Active Inference, the Theory Constructed Emotion, and George Bonanno’s resilience and flexibility studies, literature and research to get to the core of an individual’s differences in his or her web of interactions with other people in the specific context he or her participate in.
In other words, our first-principles approach based on these scientific frameworks aims to elucidate but also create a level of self- and shared understanding that supports new pathways of understanding and better adaptability. It’s not an exercise in top-down mechanistic approaches; We’re not allergic to saying that, for example, a 3-year-old child may have autism and therefore they’re likely to benefit from the support which a 3-year-old child with autism might benefit. However, we’re more interested in deconstructing whatever experience that is, even if it doesn’t align clearly with a prototypical diagnostic category of autism. We would be more interested in analysing the uniqueness of the 3-year-old and talking, for example, about supporting their high sensitivity to sensory inputs for which they struggle to predict or their high intolerance of uncertainty. But it doesn’t stop there. Our approach is centred on unlocking understanding of the uniqueness of these three-year-olds, understanding how their core functioning and their differences unfold in the situational context he’s in, but also how the niche created by those differences invites others to respond to those differences in a particular way. In this interwoven, intricate relationship where the three-year-old is embedded in the worlds of others, our goal is to shed light and clarity for all those involved.