Have you always had the vague, inchoate feeling that you missed the memo? Or that you were out sick the day that some crucial information was handed out in school?

Do you find yourself struggling with things that other people find to be trivially easy, and kick ass at things that other people find difficult?

If you were to plot your strengths and weaknesses, would they make for one very spiky chart?

If you answered “yeah” or “hell yeah” to any of the above questions, you, my friend, may be neurodivergent.

We are a varied and motley group, consisting of autistic and dyslexic folks and people with ADHD. We also include people who have some other kind of brain difference that makes navigating the neurotypical world difficult for us. So whether you’re time-blind, stereoblind, faceblind, or have some as-yet-unnamed neurodivergance, welcome to the club!

Despite our diversity, I suspect we all have a few things in common. Perhaps most importantly, we’d all benefit from wider social norms. Consider the lefties of the world. We used to think they were weird, satanic even, and we forced them to write with their right hands. Now we just laugh at them behind their backs. Just kidding — my husband is a lefty! Now we give them special scissors and we don’t even make a big deal about it.

Accommodating neurodivergent people often helps everyone. The classic example is curb cuts for people in wheelchairs. They ended up being great for all kinds of pedestrians, including people pushing strollers and shopping carts.

ADHD kids need more time to move and play — but so do all kids, it turns out.

Kids with prosopagnosia benefit from teachers who use seating charts and make a point of constantly using their students’ first names — but this also helps students who are simply forgetful about names.

Network Differences

There’s evidence that there may be just two categories: neurotypical and neurodivergent. This would explain why so many of us have multiple overlapping diagnoses.

One 2020 study asked a neural network to analyze brain scans and learning difficulty test scores for 479 children. The AI could not find a relationship between the kids’ test scores and their given diagnosis. It also could not find a relationship between the kids actual cognitive profiles and measurements of the gray matter in their brains. What it did find, however, was a general association between the severity of a child’s learning problems, and the ways that different parts of the brain connected up. A hub and spoke network with a few highly connected nodes and sparser links to more peripheral areas (a strategy used by many airlines), was related to having fewer cognitive impairments, or none at all. 

Brains are so complicated, and there are so many ways for them to work, or to break, it may make more sense to first categorize people as neurodivergent or neurotypical, according to research by H. Moriah Sokolowski. Neurotypical people show that typical hub-and-spoke organization, with a few stable, highly connected areas, and more flexible nodes on the periphery. (See below for more on this.)

In the long run, my guess is that terms like autism and ADHD will go the way of old-timey medical diagnoses like “the vapors” or “consumption.” But I could definitely be wrong

I’m also a hypocrite, because I love my NeuroBuddies and find some labels to be very useful when trying to understand my life.

It’s true that no one is perfectly average, but it’s also true that some of us are a lot less average than others — which is to say, neurodivergent folks will tend to have a higher standard deviation across different cognitive abilities. We’ll be really good at some stuff, and just awful at other things.

Consider an imaginary person named Susie. She just took a hypothetical battery of tests that perfectly capture all her cognitive function.

As you can see, there are some things she’s good at, and some that she’s bad at, but she tends to hover closely around her own average, of 62.

Neurotypical people — most people —- have a relatively smooth profile. They are just a little below or a little above average across all skills.

Compare this to another hypothetical person we’ll call Sadie. She’s VERY good at a few things, and really sucks at others. This is typical of neurodivergent brains.

Now, let’s consider someone who is exactly average at everything. This is so neurotypical, it’s weird. If someone tested like this, we would suspect them of being a robot.

Network differences

An emerging theory is that neurotypical brains are characterized by a hub-and-spoke network, while neurodivergent folks have more of a daisy chain situation. Hub-and-spoke networks are what most major airlines use, and they are highly efficient. You rarely have to make more than one connection to get from Miami to Seattle. Daisy chains, in comparison, have some highly efficient connections, and some highly inefficient connections. So you might be able to get a direct flight from Miami to Seattle, but to get from Miami to Tampa, you have to go through Seattle and Orlando for some reason. This may be why neurodivergent folks have that spiky cognitive profile — we’re very good at some things, and we really suck at others.

What a lot of my fellow neurodivergants don’t realize is that the American Psychiatric Association holds the exclusive rights to many of the labels we’ve come to know and love/hate -- autism, ADHD, learning disability, dyslexia, and dyscalculia to name a few. And what the DSM giveth, the DSM can taketh away. One recent example of this is the disappearance of Asperger’s Syndrome in the DSM-5. People formerly diagnosed with the syndrome were folded into Autism Spectrum Disorder, and many of them felt adrift when their label vanished. The transition from “aspie,” to “autistic,” was helped along by the discovery that Hans Asperger participated in the mass extermination of disabled people in Nazi Germany. I wonder if he was friends with Joachim Bodamer, the guy who named prosopagnosia.

While the neurodiversity movement has been steadily changing stigmatized diagnoses into identities to be proud of, many scientists (and plenty of clinicians) would like to ditch all the DSM categories entirely.

In 2013, one week before the release of the DSM-5, Thomas Insel — then head of the National Institute of Mental Health —- announced that the massive government agency would be pivoting away from funding research based on DSM categories.

Why? Here’s my gloss: The categories were made up in the 1970s by psychiatrists who were panicked about not being taken seriously as doctors. They needed to come up with diagnostic categories to stay relevant and get paid, so they got way ahead of the science and lumped people together into large poorly-defined groups. This is why, after billions of dollars spent on researching these categories, we’ve made little progress in understanding their genetic foundations or how they manifest themselves physically in the brain. 

Insel was more diplomatic. Here’s what he wrote in that 2013 blog post (since deleted.)

“Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever. Indeed, symptom-based diagnosis, once common in other areas of medicine, has been largely replaced in the past half century as we have understood that symptoms alone rarely indicate the best choice of treatment.”

Finding your NeuroCrew

Discovering that my brain is configured differently from most other humans has helped me understand a lifetime of feeling vaguely lonely. People tend to make friends with people who think like them, and there are simply not a lot of people who think like me.

Finding labels that describe my differences has helped me find like-minded folks and suddenly I am not so lonely anymore! That’s why I am trying to bring the groups I personally belong to together, in the real world as well as the virtual space.