I started writing this out (finally: I'm a few years in now on testing-against-observations and refining-the-detail) to explain my response to a reel by a trusted ADHD content-creator, and then (1) it was getting really long for a Fb post EVEN FOR ME and (2) I realized having it in blog-form would DEFINITELY be useful for linking as a reference in future social-media reactions -- plus (3) I think I finally found an autism researcher who might have the right mindset to take seriously a hyper-intelligent dilletante -- so here we are, back in the longform blog I haven't been using much in recent years, because I am fairly confident about this and if I'm right it's not only useful but also important to share this.
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Terminology:
Although I have recently (2025 as I write this) heard that the term "neurotypical" was invented by a neurospicy person to make "medical diagnostic" commentary about how "weird" non-autistics are to autistic people -- objectifying and "othering" them and pathologizing their behavioral patterns and ways of perceiving the world for political/ psychological commentary in a parallel way to how the social establishment treats people who display autism -- it has come into general use without the satire attached, and I object (heartily) to the presumption then (ironically) attached to the "typical" part of the term. In science, a "type" is the standard of a species, against which all individuals are measured for divergence, and fuck that as a presumption.
So, many years ago now, I switched to using "neuronormative," and I have strongly pushed others in my sphere to do so as well, to defang the rhetorical implication that the social norms reflect the core "type" of homo sapiens. In science, the term "norm" gets at many of the same concepts as a "type" does, but it recognizes that the centering definitions are mental constructs, not actual (psychologically-fundamental) truths -- that the standard against which individual datasets are being measured might not actually be standard, that the "standard" is a useful-seeming guess, not a stand-alone reality.
So: violent-control social dynamics/ social structures founded on coercion are //normative// in most human societies today, often from the smallest social unit all the way through to the largest, but -- once one looks at history, anthropology, archaeology, or animal studies with ANY sort of objectivity -- violent-control dynamics are NOT, on the evidence, //typical// (fundamental to the definition of how humans-in-society most-instinctively or most-"naturally" work).
[Side note: The concepts of "instinct" and what is "natural"
will be a significant portion of the body of this essay.]
I am not at all convinced that what English-speaking societies are now comfortable calling "neurotypicals" are in fact "typical" of the species, nor even perhaps that they are the genetic majority of the species. I suspect the prevalence (or perhaps the degree) of the neurotypes, and the social norms associated with specific societies, over the last 100K years has shifted back and forth depending on survival needs in each population (place, time, surrounding events).
[I will give, that my perception that we (neurospicy people, non-normies,
auties) might not be as "unusual" as mainstream society would like to
perceive, is likely at least partly due to living in a city which clearly
displays HEAVY genetic lean towards non-social-norm neurotype people.
(Apologies for the "incorrect" use of commas in that sentence, I'm using
them there in the traditional sense: indicating a partial-stop, in verbal
speech ... a sense-making pause, rather than a "correct" written structure.)]
Similarly, although I used "divergence" in the title of this post for clarity to any strangers to this level of my conversation, I object (heartily!) to the way the term is applied as the other half of a binary that (in real-time/ functionally) assumes a dominant/normal population and a subordinate/weird population.
I don't have a term I'm really satisfied with to counter the concept of a standard and a "divergent" population, but many English-speaking adult autistics use "neurospicy" to try to get at both (1) denying the (false) concept of a clear binary and (2) accepting that, although they do seem to be somehow related, the ways a person might be "on the spectrum" (autistic or autistic-trending), ADHD. or several other statistically-correlated "diagnoses"* of "disability"* can vary widely. It's also resonant to the famously/infamously "spiky" and sometimes unpredictable [capabilities] and [lack of capabilities] neurospicy people and/or people "on the spectrum" (autistic, but setting aside the 20th c. prejudices and eugenicist definitions) experience living with.
So I will here use "neurospicy," a term adopted and used by many neurospicy adults in the newly-available free-wheeling conversations enabled by the internet since around 2019(?).
(Enabled: Not only including increasingly-global connectivity,
even for socially isolated persons and communities, but also
including that permanently or temporarily non-verbal people
can communicate in real-time via technology and specifically
via text ... more on that later if I remember to add it.)
* (In "" because "diagnoses" are, in the end, things normative society finds inconvenient enough to consider "broken" about a person, not all of which are actually about the person; many are more or completely about social norms. "Disability" can be of the person -- various people have various physical, mental, or spiritual aspects that make survival and enjoyment of life more challenging rather than less challenging -- but often "disability" is about society making things easier for some people and harder for others, and/but refusing to acknowledge that the lack of potential ease and joy in our shared lives is a failing of the society and not a personal failing of the individual. For easy witness: the shifting written-and-published definitions of perversion in the formal psychological diagnoses of the last 100 years.)
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ACTUAL ASSERTIONS:
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TL;DR (academically known as the article's "ABSTRACT" ;) ):
For those who haven't chatted with me in person in the last couple of years and therefore haven't heard from me about my Universal Theory of Neurodivergence, I'm fairly sure that what differentiates a neurospicy brain from a neuronormative one is that we neurospicy folks, for one reason or another, can reactively or (when older) semi-consciously turn off/disable the chemical signaling that neuronormatives consider a baseline of "human" functioning.
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Underlying brain structure working-theory:
Not big visible structural differences, but about strength and number of connections and neuron pruning
Neurospicy people, by my observation, live more in the newer parts of the brain than in the older parts. This was the key to unravelling the tangle of symptoms that both irritate modern mainstream societies and frustrate those of us on the spectrum while trying to be accepted as "human beings" by our various modern mainstream societies.
Lest one think I mean neurospicy people are “better” humans: nope! Just a different evolutionary experiment ... a different weight of resource allocation within the spectrum of possible human neurological variety. Probably a more "advanced" sort of evolutionary experiment, just based on the fact that it had to begin after the development of all the newer parts of the brain, but please remember that most evolutionary experiments fail, so being a "next step" does not inherently imply "better" or "more useful." I think in the case of humans it is at least useful in providing population-level variation in capabilities, but pretty clearly (in modern social structures) it has usually not recently been "useful" to the individual humans embodying it (higher rates of social ostracism => less happy human, and a variety of health, death, and lack-of-breeding consequences).
Living more in the newer parts of the brain has very practical positives and negatives. It means we tend to be extra-sensitive about things housed in the newer parts of the brain, like constructed logic systems and fine-tuned sensory issues (the latter can be beneficial or disabling), and less connected to what society sells as deeply “automatic” behaviors, feelings, and patterns (which can be, I won't lie, very freeing, and/but it can also trigger people who can't perceive that freedom as "natural" to dehumanize us/ see us as other ... quirky in times of less social stress, dangerous in times of high social stress ... largely depending on how well we can mask that we don't react "naturally"/instinctively, which depends on us noticing in the first place that we lack a "natural" reactive feeling, which ... well, you can I hope begin to see the psychological and intellectual tangle THAT could be!!).
I talk about the feelings part in the rest of the original post, but the patterns/behaviors piece deserves some explanation here: Lacking a reliable connection to "instinctive" reactions and behaviors (brain chemical signals, it turns out) means that we (depending on how much our individual brain disregards the more ancient style of in-brain messages) don’t form habits, we use routines … meaning, to “brush my teeth” or to “get ready to leave the house” or “to take a shower” — for someone like me anyhow (I might be an extreme case?) — never “becomes routine” (a habit, I don’t have to think about it) … I have to think about it, still, in steps, every day, in my 50s.
This takes enormous mental processing, all the time, every day, not even getting into the processing required to “pass” as normal in real-time interactive social behaviors without the support of "instinctive" reactions.
For me, the social behaviors part I can move into habit, but any expected/normed behaviors not based instinctively (for me) on kindness and love has to be constructed fairly consciously. Rejoining physically-interactive society after the pandemic meant re-learning "how to human" with my body signaling and verbal patterns, after a couple of years of almost-exclusively online text communications. Eventually starting to work in an office again led to another round of trying to remember long-disused skillsets for "how to human, subset: office setting." I was raised in a very masculinized social environment as a kid and then had (what I now recognize was) a remarkably neurospicy set of peers in school, so I didn't get a handle on how to present smoothly as a normative human female-presenting person until my late 20s when a well-meaning older friend pushed me into a leadership role in a group of 200 very socially-normed women and the behavioral-analysis task became vital ... no longer could I be the quiet quirky one on the edges of the social group who found ways to be accepted by doing quietly useful things, I needed to be able to communicate smoothly with the normies without triggering what we now call the Uncanny Valley reaction.
Anyhow, point being, normies mostly have no damn clue at all how much WORK those of us with neurospicy brains are doing when (if) we manage to pass for normal. Most of my adult life, out in physical society, I pass extremely well for normal. I'm one of those people that "normies" prefer to disbelieve when I mention that I consider myself at least autism-adjacent if not actually autistic.
(Occasionally displays of my high intelligence will trigger the
uncanny-valley effect even without any of the behavioral-display
triggers. I tend to foray displays of high intelligence that cannot
be plausible-deniability'd away only under three circumstances:
(1) I actually trust the person(s) present to keep seeing me as
human despite being slightly-creepy, (2) I don't expect to ever
see the person(s)-present again so if they see me as slightly-creepy
it doesn't matter, or (3) if it is VERY necessary despite the
probability of never being able to recover the social relationship(s)
again. Uncanny-valley triggering sets off core chemical "fear"
reactions and in practical terms is very difficult and sometimes
impossible to recover from, and I don't like being an object of
fear. There are several aspects of who I am that trigger fear in a
lot of people, and started teaching myself as a child to avoid
displaying those. (More on the Uncanny Valley later.))
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Neurochemical aspect:
(Now back to the original post I wrote last night, which focuses on the neurochemical aspect of my unified theory, starting with copy-pasting the thesis from the Abstract/TL;DR:)
I'm fairly sure that what differentiates a neurospicy brain from a neuronormative one is that we neurospicy folks, for one reason or another, can reactively (instinctually) or (when older) semi-consciously turn off/disable the chemical signaling that neuronormatives consider a baseline of "human" functioning.
And to some extent we can (sometimes at least) turn it back on later. Probably only partially though, like learning a language before age 5 embeds it naturally in the brain at a very different functional level than learning it as a gradeschooler, high schooler, or especially as an adult. Neurochemicals we've turned off the production of or stopped acknowledging the signals of (either works, although the former is less stressful on the body for sure), especially if we turned them off as an infant or a young person, re-learning them later in life will never be as instinctive or fundamental to our perception and situational analysis as they perhaps were to start with, nor as instinctive or "fundamental" as neuronormative folks experience them.
Reactively turn them off: I watched two of my kids at two different times -- one the first week of birth and one at about age 30months -- turn OFF a sensitivity that they very obviously started off with. (At the time I didn't think of this in terms of chemicals signaling.)
--> The baby, we got it switched back on with an intervention after a couple of days (yes, dear child: this input *is* important and despite the overwhelming amount of it, is isn't data-noise, it's important to track).
--> The toddler, I did what I could to keep the option open in the long-term despite very real experiential stresses I couldn't completely mitigate, and around age 18 they felt ... safe enough? not oppressed enough? not overwhelmed enough? ... to start exploring *feeling* that set of mental/ sensory/ chemical signals again. Somewhat.
--> I know from both their self-reporting and my longer-term observations, that one of those kids turned off several other inconvenient, distracting, or considered-useless sorts of nerve-/brain-/sensory-input- signals later in childhood.
(Again, this was all before I pulled the pieces together to construct my unified theory here.)
I also know (and again, I recognized this stuff before I constructed my unified theory) that *I* did this signal-dump/ signal-editing:
--> When I was a child and teenager, in several stages in each case, about some "basic" human functions (hello, refusal to deal with horrendously negative social pressures about sexuality and food)
--> As an older teen and young adult, my disgusted rejection of the stupendously counterproductive experiences of hatred and jealousy meant I just … never felt them again. (At the time I thought it was great moral discipline on my part, which is also true, but now my theory would suggest I had a physical brain capability on my side that made these experiences a one-and-done moral development instead of an ongoing psychological struggle.)
--> See also: My extremely "odd" (according to what society insists is "normal") relationship with safety and threat, wherein most of the time (unless deeply overwhelmed), I simply (it feels simple to me, I now understand it is NOT simple for a lot of people and maybe most people) dissociate from the panic and Do Shit Anyhow, and then later deal with (some times more successfully than other times) the “feelings” engendered by whatever panic chemicals got loose into my bloodstream. It’s a weird (from a normative point a view) ability to discount/ ignore the “basic” reactivity of a mammal.
Ability to (whether from birth or learned during life) discount the "basic” mammal [chemicals/feelings reactivity] freaks a lot of neuronormative people out, and is a big part of what makes [very neuronormative people] X [very “autistic” people] often not really, at a deep level, be able to instinctively register the other sort of person as entirely “human."
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The reason I put together/ realized it might be deep-level chemical reactions, is that I read a (fairly annoying, but intuitively I knew there was something in it I needed to read) book by a business coach who was spending alllllllll this time talking about how amazing his work was, helping people to avoid business mistakes that were "very understandable" but very stupid. I've forgotten what the other ones were, but about 3/4 through the book he went on and on about "revenge." Speaking of "revenge" as if it were a natural reaction. As if it not only was it "natural," it was "of course" SO VERY overwhelming that it would make business owners and managers tank their business if the reactivity got triggered. And that he as a consultant was a big giant hero for helping coach people on how NOT to let this amazingly-basic perceived-"need" run away with them and irrationally ruin their own lives.
Y'all. The level at which this was shocking to my perceptive system cannot be overstated. Literally WHAT?!
... but then. But then I realized that movies and books and songs and sometimes in conversations, this was indeed treated as if it was a fundamental human experience, that explained (and sometimes "justified" -- but not really) plotlines and actions and psychological crises and just All Kinds of Things ...
... it was like the day I realized the way people talk about sexual attraction in songs was actually the way they felt, and not odd (and often very unpleasant) poetic metaphorical language.
And then I realized. I realized that everything "autistics" do "wrong" is monkey-brain stuff. We are demonized (and sometimes feared as "other" -- the uncanny valley) for doing all the basic stuff, "wrong." We do lust "wrong." Hunger "wrong." Fear/panic, "wrong." And, although I had never in my life (before this business consultant started riffing on his amazing anti-instinctual prowess) seen it cast into the same pot as all these other "basic animal instincts," revenge ... revenge we also, consistently, do "wrong."
"Wrong" in all these cases might be too much, or too little, or weird pockets of yes and weird pockets of no within the category, but we don't experience lust, fear, hunger, and revenege in a flow-state of inevitable naturalness than neuronormatives (on evidence of nearly every book, song, poem, and movie, now that I am aware to notice) do ...
.... and certainly not in the overwhelming way that neuronormatives need to believe "everyone" feels them in order to make deeply immoral behaviors "understandable" (usually implicitly therefore "justifiable").
(Or to make plotlines FUCKING PLAUSIBLE. A plotline based on hot-blooded reactive revenge or lust making someone do inexcusable things makes NO SENSE to me, y'all. It was always apparent that to some large part of the population, it actually does feel understandable, and directly-cathartic to partake in. But the level at which that *does not have a correlate* for me, is so extreme it might be absolute.)
The daignostic storyline for autism -- the one driving interventions in the 20th c. especially -- tended to focus on gaps that should be pushed into displayed-compliant behaviors, and oversensitivities that should be bullied into NOT-displaying them via behaviors. Somehow conceptually, the overarching bubble of 'what autism was' was a problem with overactive primitive-brain reactivity, when on the evidence, it's actually a difficulty with overactive newer-brain reactivity and unreliable connection to older brain patterns. When I first had the insight that neurospiciness was actually living 'too much' (for social norms) in the outer brain and 'too little' (for social norms) in the inner brain, I happened to be living with a K-12 autism specialist nearing the end of her career, and her immediate trained academic reactivity was (paraphrased broadly) that, no, autism is about being too trapped in the more primitive parts of the brain. (To her credit she quickly grasped my alternative interpretation of the data, and uncomfortably it added to her store of pain for how autism intervention for children in schools was managed, especially in the early part of her career.)
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Conclusion:
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Anyhow. EVERYTHING about autism
-- and from what I understand of them, at least several of the other statistically (and increasingly, genetic-marker) correlated diagnosable (remember: "diagnosable" = inconvenient for society) issues which are more and more coming under the umbrella of neurodivergence/ neurospiciness in the popular conversation even if the medical establishment is not seriously considering some of them yet (so, not only autism spectrum brains, but also brains that get diagnosed with ADHD, schizophrenia, BPD) --
EVERYTHING makes more sense if neurospicy brains default to perceiving+processing the world more in the new parts of the brain and default to being able to disregulate or stop the more primitive perceptive+processing aspects of brain-structure and brain-function.
(All of which ignores the question of spirituality, and we can pretend it ignores the question of psychic or other body-related but not body-enclosed energies (although it doesn't). But one of the useful things about this Unified Theory of Neurodiversity is that it implies a bunch of avenues of (boringly, lol )physically-empirical testing could be possible.)
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leftover thoughts about "revenge"
Autistic people pretty infamously do "justice" not "revenge," but (also infamously) are often absolutely dogged about "justice" (and fairness). This is one of the places we first least that society lies through its teeth about what "society" itself is like/ wants/ requires, because fairness and justice are not even on the actual menu most of the time, much less are they reliable or truly expected. The disillusionment and distrust because of this ONE social lie is a huge initial emotional and psychological trauma for a lot of neurospicy people, and foundational (in my observation) to many neurospicy people feeling not only no guilt about questioning, but actually a moral responsibility to question, social rules and authority assertions. (Not that we usually love hierarchy anyhow -- another common "no, we don't access the primitive brain's reactivity for that reaction" issue society -- as it stands today -- finds frustrating.)
But, caveat: When we get abused enough that the brain chemicals turn back *on,* (1) they tend to be overwhelming because we haven't grown up practicing coping mechanisms to not act on them like neuronormatives apparently have to and (2) it's hypothetically reasonable (imo) to presume that we are *extra* sensitive to a lot of inputs and sometimes that is specifically *why* we turned them *off* ... so if someone abuses us hard enough to turn them *on,* they are very, very, very "on." Neurospicy people I've seen triggered to the point where they feel a need for revenge, it scares me in a way normal everyday "revengey" people don't. We tend toward "cold-blooded" actions in this arena (if justice needs doing and we see a way to accomplish it, we don't pursue it in a revenge'y way, although we might feel positive if/when the deserving party gets the comeuppance/ consequence they've chosen to deserve); adding "hot-blooded" reactivity to the "cold-blooded" calculation makes a person's choices less predictable and way more likely to be harmful to themselves and collateral people around them (like, now that I know to look for it, "regular" revenge'y feelings do for neuronormative people, which is what that business consultant was so -- justifiably I now realize -- proud of himself for being able to redirect and defuse).
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... on abusing people into being "properly" "human" (also called "socializing" someone):
Abuse is also how many "rehab" training programmes (spelling deliberate, I mean programme -- structured 'teaching' imposition, a word really used that way only in British English) work on "correcting" how "wrong" an autistic person might be about displayed food behaviors (or uncomfortable lack thereof), displayed sexual behaviors (or uncomfortable lack thereof), or displayed fear behaviors (or uncomfortable lack thereof).
A lot of the ways kids have been "treated" to "fix as far as possible" these "socially disabling" (unconforming) behaviors could be seen as not "help them to get along in society" (I do believe that most adults involved in the abuse think of their actions that way), but instead
--> "abuse each kid into acting normal until the negative stimulus is so great their monkey-brain chemicals are finally stimulated at a level that makes the kid's reaction 'correct'," or
--> "abuse each kid into acting normal by making the overall pain in the system worse for them if they keep the nonsense-data (chemical) switches off, so the child (consciously or instinctively) turns them back on, and then their reactivity, although from the child's inner perspective more dysregulated than it was before, now looks more 'genuinely human' to us neuronormatives -- who were very uncomfortable with the ways the child was trying to find a way to live comfortably in this highly-artificial built environment."
We could (and should), especially with this new "brain chemicals work fundamentally differently" lens, design radically different early- and childhood- interventions for young people with perceptive systems overwhelmed with modern environmental input.
Many "alternative" educational environments already seek to do this, by having observed children and designing their pedagogical and physical design choices around the demonstrated needs of the children (without requiring an explanation for those observed needs) instead of around dehumanized goals imposed by society (and particularly by ideologies like capitalism or authoritarian communism).
Evidence on the ground (around the world) shows that nervous systems held gently (physically and emotionally both) will quite often regulate themselves over the years, without pushing and trauma and imposition of outside judgements of how to be a "correct" human. And the ones that maybe never will, it's still overtly an evil act to impose what is OBVIOUSLY trauma on a young person, no matter what the theoretical social goal is. (On adults is arguable -- there are some adults who definitely cannot be trusted to be out and about in society -- but on young people, imposing trauma is evil and statistically related to producing the sorts of adults that end up untrustworthy in society. Which ... it's not an irrational reaction to a society that tells you you are fundamentally unacceptable and feels not only no-guilt but feels righteous about abusing you and people like you. I'm not saying it's healthy, I'm just saying society is objectively really, really stupid about its stated goals versus its demonstrated goals :(.)
The cost to society of all the imposed trauma (not just on neurospicy people, but on all people) is HUGE.
People (all) who are affected by trauma are (shown by scientific studies) less facile thinkers, less facile emotional-processors, more prone to both short-term and long-term diseases.
Not scientifically studied, but just on observation and logic: we all spiritually stunted and psychically stunted from our potential because of truama-blocks.
We tend to pass these damages down to younger generations (some through chemicals in the womb and through genetic damage, some through how we treat them and the lessons they learn after birth).
Like most aids for disabled people, making life objectively easier for neurospicy people by removing the expectation that traumatizing or ostracizing anyone who is socially inconvenient is "going to help them adjust" is also going to aid everyone who isn't as obviously socially inconvenient, and also literally everyone else. Removing all acceptance of manipulative violence (physical, psychological, eomtional, spiritual) would be even better.
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As I've stated in several unrelated posts, but it applies here too:
Evil only exists because we can't (of late) bring ourselves to believe it's not necessary.
Each person can *always* choose kindness. There are no circumstances where one is prevented from maximizing kindness. There are no circumstances that, in the moment, justify choosing evil.
Every breath is a new opportunity to choose <3.
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Some miscellaneous related thoughts:
(1) Homelessness: I recently read in passing some statistic or other that asserted an unreasonably (by population statistics) percentage of homeless people are autistic. I don't know where they got their data (if they actually had any) and I don't remember what the stat was, but it reminded me that I had come to this same conclusion several years ago once I didn't have a car anymore and relied on biking, walking and transit for all travel. It matches my frequent observation of our local homeless population for sure, many of whom show behavioral patterns that demonstrate sensory-avoidance or sensory-seeking typical of a more-overtly-autistic person at any age, a lack of understanding of social norms (not just a reasonably-rational choice to perhaps not respect social patterns that have left them homeless, but an actual lack of easy-perception of them at all) ... and then also the reasonably-rational choice not to respect the social "requirements" would also be more within the roundhouse of an neurodiverse brain than a neuronormative brain ... .
This is important for society to consider(/acknowledge), because
--> if neuronormative people (mostly the ones in power politically and regarding money) are designing ways to keep people from becoming homeless, help them when they are homeless, get them housed, and keep them housing-stable ... well. If neuronormative people are designing (and approving resources/ funding for) for these programs, they will, by and large, be unlikely to work well with a large portion of the homeless population that experiences the world and the choices "available" to them entirely differently than the people making choices about how they "should" be able to.
--> in real-time, those of us interacting with homeless people in our day-to-day might have a useful lens to understand both how much them being on the streets is a measure of our social structures excluding them and how much of their "odd" (uncomfortable) behaviors might be explicable by them being literally in sensory-overwhelm, or literally helplessly-confused as to how to behave "normally" (normatively).
(2) How chemical addictions/ self-medication works for neurodiverse brains and for neuronormative brains is probably two really different answers. As far as I know it's quite established (at least anecdotally in the adult neurospicy conversation) that reliance on alcohol and pot are EXTREMELY common for neurospicy people (although many don't admit it is -- or if they are lucky, was -- a reliance until middle age). This tracks to my theory about turning brain chemistry off selectively, and also tracks to the scientific work that got some attention in the 90s in the book "Potatoes not Prozac" that tracked how sugar addiction and alcohol addiction both trigger the same temporary "fix" of a neurochemical gap in the addicted individual (the book suggested steadier and healthier ways to prop that gap closed).
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... I think that's it for now, but I might come back and refine/add stuff.
