How regulatory bandwidth gives an already-named idea something to measure.
Most of the case for neurodiversity has been made in the register of the mind — different ways of thinking, attending, communicating, perceiving. That register is where the movement did its hardest and most important work, and it is not one I want to leave. But a neurotype was never only cognitive. The way a person allocates energy, predicts, and responds to stress has a biological face, and that face has been the harder thing to talk about without sliding back into the old language of deficit and defect.
The most important correction to that old language did not come from biology at all. It came from the relational turn — above all the double empathy problem, which moved “social deficit” out of the autistic person and into the mismatch between differently disposed people. Communication breaks down in both directions; the difficulty lives between them, in context and under unequal power, not inside one party’s neurology. Nothing here undoes that. So let me be exact about what adding a biological dimension does and does not mean. It does not return the problem to the autistic person’s body. The body enters not as the seat of autism but as the place where being persistently misread accumulates — where mismatch, masking, and the daily labor of translating oneself into someone else’s expectations become metabolic and regulatory cost. Sociological in its target; embodied in its consequences. I reject the reduction of neurodivergence to broken biology, and I reject its mirror image just as firmly: a disembodied account in which persistent mismatch somehow costs the body nothing.
“Neurodiversity gains a body without losing its meaning: different architectures, differently loaded, each with a state you can watch change while there is still something to protect.”
In Toward an Emergent Paradigm for Neurodiversity and Health, I named that biological face directly: the bio-neurotype, the biological dimensions of an emergent neurotype — the parts, as I put it there, potentially measurable through indicators such as mitochondrial function, autonomic flexibility, and interoceptive processing. It was a deliberate claim and a deliberately unfinished one. “Potentially measurable” is a promissory note. Naming a measurable thing and actually reading it are not the same act, and that paper left the second one open on purpose.
Regulatory bandwidth is the reading. In Regulatory Bandwidth, just out in Psychoneuroendocrinology, I set out what it means to take a present measurement of exactly those biological dimensions: how much regulatory margin a person’s coupled stress systems have right now, across autonomic, endocrine, inflammatory, and metabolic channels, and how that margin is shaped. The indicators line up with the ones the bio-neurotype pointed to — autonomic flexibility, metabolic flexibility, and the rest are precisely what bandwidth is read through. So the two constructs are not two ideas that need bridging. One names the biological face of a neurotype; the other is how you take its pulse.
This is where emergence stops being a slogan and does real work. A bio-neurotype is not a type you read off a checklist. It emerges from organism–environment transactions, stabilizing over development into a recognizable configuration — and because it emerges, it has a present state that can shift. Regulatory bandwidth is that state variable. It tells you whether an emergent architecture is currently holding together or coming apart: whether the system is in what the Emergent Paradigm called emergent allostasis — sustained, coherent regulation — or tipping toward stress incoherence, when long-standing calibrations no longer fit the conditions they meet. The new paper draws the same fold in its own terms: bandwidth stays preserved — flexible, recoverable, stable — or narrows toward volatility, slowed recovery, and breakdown. Two vocabularies, one boundary.
What that boundary lets us do is the whole point for neurodiversity. Read this way, a neurotype is a different regulatory architecture with a measurable present state — not a deviation from a single norm. Because bandwidth is a profile and a property of architecture, not a scalar score of how far you sit from average, you can finally tell apart two things the old vocabulary kept collapsing: a system that is organized differently from a system that is overloaded right now. You can ask whose bandwidth is narrowing before it fails — which is not an abstract question when autistic adults carry the burnout, the multimorbidity clustering, and the health disparities the Emergent Paradigm documents. And you can match support to the structure in front of you rather than to the average of many, because the profile shows you where the margin actually is.
None of this converts difference into defect, and the guardrails that kept the first paper honest have to travel with it. Potentially measurable is not already measured: the bio-neurotype remains a construct that requires direct empirical testing, and a bandwidth reading is a present-state estimate, not a verdict on a person or a fixed ceiling. The language of adaptation and calibration must never be turned around to deny support on the grounds that a trait is “adaptive” rather than impairing — that inversion is exactly the misuse the first paper warned against. Biological explanation does not substitute for structural accountability; naming why a neurotype struggles in a given environment is an argument for changing the environment, not for asking the person to be a different system. A reading tells you how much room is left. It does not tell you what a life is worth.
So the arc is simple to state and slow to earn. The first paper argued that neurotypes are real, emergent, and have a biological face worth naming. The second gives that face something we can actually read — a present, structural measure of whether the system still has margin. Between them, neurodiversity gains a body without losing its meaning: different architectures, differently loaded, each with a state you can watch change while there is still something to protect.
Toward an Emergent Paradigm for Neurodiversity and Health (Hogenkamp, Sanghavi & Natri, 2026) is published in Autism in Adulthood. Regulatory Bandwidth: A Theoretical Integration of Present Multisystem Stress-Regulatory Capacity (Hogenkamp, 2026) is published in Psychoneuroendocrinology, Vol. 192. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2026.107955
Center for Adaptive Stress · ndstress.org
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