Many of us have been saying the same things for years, in different words.
In autism and ADHD discussions: that “high functioning” and “superpowers” describe what people see, not what a day costs. That the same person can do something on Tuesday and have no access to it on Thursday — and that this isn’t inconsistency, it’s how regulation works. That losing speech under load says something about state and demand, not about what a person knows. That support which adjusts us toward a standard nobody questioned isn’t the same thing as support.
And many of us have heard the same reply: if that’s real, put it in the scientific literature, where it can be tested.
So I did. The paper is peer-reviewed and published — link at the end. I’ve also been writing a three-essay series that makes the argument in plain language. Here is the whole shape of it.
Essay 1 — the fight over where disability “is” asks the wrong question. The medical model points inside the person; the social model points at the world. Both see something real, and the argument between them never ends because it is held at the wrong level. A person and their environment form one coupled system. Quiet the room, and the intervention is social but the effects are biological. Treat pain, and the intervention is medical but the effects are social. The models don’t need a truce. They need a larger geometry.
Essay 2 — “how much” was never the right question either. In the 1830s an astronomer named Quetelet noticed that human measurements form a bell curve and decided the average was nature’s ideal. We have been graded against distributions ever since. The error isn’t averaging — population statistics are genuinely useful. The error is converting a population summary into a claim about what one person is. Two people can receive identical scores for completely different reasons; the number records an amount and throws away the organization. “High functioning,” “low functioning,” and “severity level” are exactly that move: profoundly different configurations collapsed onto one line, with the middle of the curve installed as the destination.
Essay 3 — the question that actually matters: what changes what? The dimensions of a living system move one another. Arousal changes language access. Effort spent now changes capacity later. The same small increase in noise is nothing on a rested, safe day and a cascade on a depleted one — the stimulus is the same, the system is not. And burden moves: performance can be held together with continuous effort and paid for afterward, somewhere nobody is measuring. But — and this matters — “everything interacts” is not yet science. A claim counts when it is specific enough to fail.
The paper is that specific. Regulatory Capacity Is Not a Scalar (Frontiers in Network Physiology, 2026) puts these claims in formal, testable form — including what it looks like, mathematically, to measure how a person’s regulation is organized instead of how far they sit from an average. It states what would prove it wrong. That is not a weakness. That is what makes it count.
None of this settles the community’s debates, and it isn’t meant to. It changes which questions get asked: not where is disability, not how much — but what changes what, for this person, in this state, at what cost.
Essays: [link 1] · [link 2] · [link 3] Paper (open access): https://doi.org/10.3389/fnetp.2026.1961712
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