This is a post I wrote during and shortly after attending TED in Long Beach this year. This is posted quite a bit late. Ironically, shortly after returning from TED, I started having episodes where I completely lost the ability to speak and forgot how to write my name. Luckily, it was “only” a migraine. I had an MRI, with contrast, and my neurologist declared my brain to be in “pristine” condition, at least the hardware: blood vessels, arteries, tissue. The software, on the other had: a little buggy.

I am the owner of a wondrous, mystifying, maddeningly fickle, slightly broken brain. And so I am thrilled that at this, my first TED in three years, a latent theme across many days and sessions has been our brains: their diversity, their mystery, and the varieties of temperaments and intelligences that emerge from our unique wirings.

On Monday, at the TED Fellows Talks, Gregory Cage laid out his vision to get a generation of kids excited about neuroscience. Laurel Braitman previewed her upcoming book on the mental health of animals. On Tuesday, Susan Cain, author of the instant bestseller, QUIET cast light on the introverts among us, and yesterday, David Hornik spoke out about his dyslexia and other “invisible disabilities.”

We seem more aware now than ever of all the many types of brains it is possible to possess. In the New York Times, in bookstores, on television and in our conversations, more people are speaking out about their struggles with severe brain diseases like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, about autism and anxiety, about different forms of intelligence, and different ways of perceiving and relating to the world. With this new conversation, I like to think that we’ve begun to undo some of the damage of dualism: the idea that the mind is a metaphysical substance that transcends our bodies and brains.

However, there’s also a tension between recognizing, even celebrating our differences and succumbing to our need to make sense of a messy world by forcing people into categories. Categories can help us communicate important, difficult to express aspects of our identities, but they can also be profoundly misunderstood, especially by outsiders.

And I don’t think we’ve ever been particularly good at navigating that subtle valley between “genes as destiny” and boundless free will.

This was the message of Jon Ronson’s subtle telling of the story of one particular psychopath. Ronson described a man who manipulated himself out of a jail sentence and into an insane asylum by mimicking the symptoms of a psychiatric illness he did not have. By the time he’d realized his dreadful mistake (prisons sentences have limits, but a sejour in a mental hospital for the criminally insane is indefinite), the doctors had diagnosed him as a psychopath.

He was let out, eventually; the details of how or why were left fuzzy in Ronson’s story, but apparently someone came around to the opinion that we cannot preemptively lock people up for crimes they may one day commit.

The moral of Ronson’s talk is that just as “journalists stitch together gems”—the most sublime, the most horrible, the most absurd—“and leave what’s normal on the floor,” we should be careful not to “define people by their worst edges” (a theme that also ran through Bryan Stevenson’s talk). The schizophrenic is more than her schizophrenia. The introvert is more than his introversion.

David Hornik spoke about how the same dyslexia that makes it difficult to make out written words also makes him forget, at times, the names of his own children. The cause is some subtle difference, some “broken piece” in his brain. The difference is invisible, he says, and so when he forgets your name you’re likely to assume he’s a jerk or that he doesn’t care. “You’re likely to assume the worst.”