The ADHD, CFIDS (ME), Acquired Autism Connection

“You Shall Not Fold Your Wings” argues that a cluster of modern labels—ADHD, CFIDS (ME), “acquired autism”—can look less like separate mysteries and more like one social-physiological pattern playing out in different places. Reciprocality frames this as a set of concrete, testable ideas that also aims to explain awkward observations: why engineers so often recognize the ADHD “type” immediately, why ADHD can look genetic and yet surge in one generation, and why even experts disagree on whether it is a disorder at all.

The original essay was written in a different era of schooling, work, and medicine. The core themes are kept here, but the discussion has been tightened for readability and prepared as a foundation for modern section pages.

This is part of the Reciprocality Project.

Software Engineering

I started teaching software engineering as a practical response to a skills shortage in the mid-1980s. Over time I noticed something that ran against the usual folklore of the industry. A minority of students were “natural hackers” in the original sense: creative, effective programmers, not criminals. But most could be taught to work in that mode. That mattered, because it suggested the difference was not simply “talent versus lack of talent.” It looked more like a difference in cognitive strategy that could be developed.

By watching engineers work, I began describing two distinct strategies that showed up repeatedly. I called them mapping and packing. You need mapping to design systems and hold multiple constraints in mind without collapsing into slogans. Packing is more procedural: it stacks steps, rules, and categories and tends to resist ambiguity. My lectures were not technical recipes. They were practical observations about how work actually goes, plus stories that made people notice themselves. Somehow, this moved many students from packing toward mapping.

In the 1990s, ISO9001-style compliance programs spread through industry. They were often described as a way to make work clearer and more accountable. Yet in practice they frequently degraded into defensiveness and ritual. I became aware of a disturbing pattern. Even as my teams improved at producing robust systems, colleagues inside host organizations became increasingly hostile to our presence. The hostility was not an explicit argument about ideas. It had the feel of aversion: as if the mapper worldview itself was irritating or threatening, even when it was only implied.

The “two natural types” explanation started to feel implausible. It began to look more like a single human capacity that could be suppressed or distorted by social pressure. And with that shift, another observation snapped into focus. A number of friends and colleagues who had been laid low with CFIDS (ME) looked like mappers: people who responded to surrounding stupidity more with sorrow than with anger, and who could be worn down by sustained hostility. The image that came to mind was simple and unpleasant. If you poke a monkey with a stick for long enough, its hair falls out.

A picture of a society unknowingly at war with itself was emerging. Packers were not merely less able to handle complex problem-solving. They seemed driven—without awareness—to persecute mappers.

When I learned about ADHD, I was startled. The ADHD child’s temperament looked like the mapper state of mind I had been learning to induce in engineers. More striking still was the way the child’s behavior was misconstrued, even by professionals. The framing, the loaded language, and the way key points were missed echoed the workplace hostility I had seen—especially in highly procedural environments.

Since placing my lecture transcripts online, I’ve heard from many engineers who recognized themselves in this description and felt relief at seeing issues expressed plainly. They often said they had lived the problem for years but had no usable language for it.

Widening the Problem

These clues suggested that something larger might be operating at the boundary between biology and social organization—touching engineering, schooling, and clinical categories. It did not look adequately explained by cynicism, laziness, or simple incompetence. If anything, the hard reference point of engineering—where systems either work or they don’t—seemed like a better place to anchor the question than the shifting ground of behavioral interpretation alone.

When research discussions of dopamine receptor variation in ADHD entered the public conversation, it offered a hook that felt compatible with the pattern I was seeing. I formed a hypothesis that can be stated cleanly even if it turns out to be wrong.

I propose that humans can raise the level of dopamine as a neuroinhibitor in response to low environmental novelty, reducing awareness and smoothing out discomfort. That capacity may have had evolutionary value in constrained situations. The problem, on this view, is what happens when early childhood becomes heavily constrained and ritualized. Tolerance develops, the child learns to seek repetition, and novelty becomes aversive. Over time, a self-sustaining condition can emerge across multiple arenas at once: neurochemistry, social behavior, and language. In systems terms it behaves like a distributed parasitic flow—something like a tornado, but spread across everyday life. I tagged this flow “M0,” a distributed Monster.

On this model, a class of cognitive faculties—easy to spot in skilled engineers—gets “squelched” when the inhibitory state dominates. At the same time, subjective well-being can increase in the short term, which would help the pattern persist. The individual can also “fix” rituals alone or exchange rituals socially, so groups synchronize: collective tolerance for novelty rises and falls together. In that context, procedural compliance frameworks can become the perfect excuse to generate endless unproductive rituals, especially when much real productive work is automated and prestige shifts toward administration.

In the middle of that, the person with a dopamine-pathway difference could be partially immune to the self-addiction dynamic. They retain the capacity to use feedback in cognition. Their “full cognition” is visible where results matter (engineering), but is not rewarded in environments where repetition is treated as inherently virtuous. They can become socially isolated and linguistically stranded, then targeted by those who experience the immune’s non-participation as provocation, without understanding why.

Clinical Consequences

From this perspective, the ADHD child is not deficient by default. In many cases the child is more aware than the surrounding adults in the specific domain that matters: noticing structure, generalizing quickly, and refusing pointless repetition.

Give such a child one hundred simple arithmetic problems. After a few examples, the child often grasps the algorithm and can handle the general case. That understanding becomes permanent. From the child’s point of view, doing another ninety near-identical examples is not “attention.” It is ritual. So the child looks elsewhere, toward novelty, because that is where learning continues.

If the adult culture around the child is already deep into ritual-fixing, the child’s refusal to co-ritualize is taken personally. The teacher may frame it as deficiency: “can’t pay attention,” “won’t learn,” “won’t comply.” Genuine concentration—when the child is engaged with something that contains structure—is relabeled as “hyperfocusing,” as if it were a quirk rather than the obvious definition of attention.

In that setting, emotional distress is not evidence of disorder. It can be a predictable response to sustained misunderstanding and social coercion. The more effort the child makes to be understood, the worse the response can become, because the environment treats the wrong signal as the important one. Over time, the child may develop anxiety, anger, shutdown, or despair. Then the secondary injury is diagnosed as the primary problem.

This framework also makes a claim about thinking styles. People trapped in ritual addiction often imagine thought is measured by quantity rather than quality. They assume good thinking means effortful grinding, not elegant compression. Insight becomes “the penny drops,” a rare accident, rather than something you can invite through sustained contact with reality. As that attitude spreads, institutions shift toward compliance enforcement and away from excellence—whether in classrooms or in engineering organizations.

In this climate, stimulant medication can be misunderstood as a simple fix for “hyperactivity,” when in some cases the deeper issue is an environment hostile to novelty and deep structure. For a distressed child with strong cognition who has not been taught how to use it safely, stimulants may increase surface speed while reducing contemplation. The result can look like “compliance” while the inner life deteriorates.

On this model, the larger social cost shows up as stagnation. When compliance ritual replaces real feedback, commercial software production becomes brittle and slow, while creative, voluntary work (where mapping is rewarded) can flourish.

The same stress pathway can also be used to connect to CFIDS (ME) and some “acquired autism” presentations without claiming they are identical conditions. Sustained social hostility and prolonged physiological stress can weaken immune resilience in vulnerable people. If certain infection patterns are then observed in ADHD-type children or in exhausted adults, it does not automatically mean “the virus caused the cognition.” It can also be consistent with “stress made the body fail.”

To make the link to autism more explicit, return to the engineering workplace. A mapper attempting to hold complexity calmly can be surrounded by “yammering”: rapid subject-changes, assertions without grounding, and argumentative noise that makes contemplation impossible. In that situation, self-soothing behaviors can increase (rocking, head rubbing, withdrawal). The person eventually either explodes or flees. If a society produces enough ambient yammering, a sensitive child may retreat early, especially during language acquisition, when social noise becomes inescapable. The older “sensory overload” hypothesis can be seen in this light: not as a lack of relationship capacity, but as a defensible retreat from a hostile signal environment.

There may also be a link to “savant”-like leaps of intuition: the ability to seize on a pivot point without consciously knowing why. Engineers, diagnosticians, and artists sometimes report this experience. It may be the same sensitivity that makes a mind more vulnerable to ambient noise and coercion.

Beyond Dopamine Self-Addiction

A key claim of this project is that our culture contains distortions that make the cognitive component hard to describe in ordinary language. Once you have a workable model of that distortion, you can subtract some of the “stupidity” it accounts for and see what remains. In the original project, that next step was discussed as a separate idea, “The Ghost Not,” treated as a map of what a culture systematically fails to notice.

Whether or not every part of that re-evaluation holds up is less important than the method. If a dopamine self-addiction dynamic exists at all, it should be testable. And if it is real, it points toward practical changes: reduce coercive ritualization in early childhood, create learning environments that reward structure-finding instead of repetition, and protect cognitively strong children from being punished for not participating in group rituals.

The practical bottom line is simple. If someone tells you a child must be drugged for having a genetic disorder that appears to have exploded in one generation, or tells you a serious illness does not exist and must be forced out of the body through humiliation, or tells you a withdrawn child is “broken” because the child will not conform to worsening social norms, then consider refusing the script.

Protect the healthy child, not the administrative convenience of adults and institutions that have mistaken ritual for virtue. In many cases, the ADHD child is not “less than.” The child may be what normal human awareness looks like before it is trained out. Such children can sometimes learn rapidly when given books, quiet, and meaning. They are not superhuman. They are simply less willing to trade their cognition for social compliance.

“You Shall Not Fold Your Wings”

Would that I could gather your houses into my hand, and like a sower scatter them in forest and meadow.

Would that the valleys were your streets, and the green paths your alleys, that you might seek one another through vineyards, and come with the fragrance of the earth in your garments.

But these things are not yet to be.

In their fear your forefathers gathered you too near together. And that fear shall endure a little longer. A little longer shall your city walls separate your hearths from your fields.

And tell me, people of Orphalese, what have you in these houses? And what is it you guard with fastened doors?

Have you peace, the quiet urge that reveals your power?

Have you remembrances, the glimmering arches that span the summits of the mind?

Have you beauty, that leads the heart from things fashioned of wood and stone to the holy mountain?

Tell me, have you these in your houses?

Or have you only comfort, and the lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house a guest, then becomes a host, and then a master?

Ay, and it becomes a tamer, and with hook and scourge makes puppets of your larger desires.

Though its hands are silken, its heart is of iron.

It lulls you to sleep only to stand by your bed and jeer at the dignity of the flesh.

It makes mock of your sound senses, and lays them in thistledown like fragile vessels.

Verily the lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral.

But you, children of space, you restless in rest, you shall not be trapped nor tamed.

Your house shall not be an anchor but a mast.

It shall not be a glistening film that covers a wound, but an eyelid that guards the eye.

You shall not fold your wings that you may pass through doors, nor bend your heads that they strike not against a ceiling, nor fear to breathe lest walls should crack and fall down.

You shall not dwell in tombs made by the dead for the living.

And though of magnificence and splendour, your house shall not hold your secret nor shelter your longing.

For that which is boundless in you abides in the mansion of the sky, whose door is the morning mist, and whose windows are the songs and the silences of night.