What Causes Neurotypicality?

Sep 05, 2025

What if difference never meant less?

When it comes to autism the question has been asked a million different ways: what causes it? Researchers chase after genes, toxins, parenting styles, diets and now even screen time. Whole careers (that's right, RFK Jr.) have been built on the search for “causes” even when no one can agree on what counts as proof.

But pause for a moment and flip the frame. Instead of asking what causes autism, let's ask this: what causes neurotypicality?

That question sounds silly, doesn't it? And silliness is the point. Because if you stop and sit with it, the absurdity reveals something important: autism only “needs” a cause because it is framed as a deviation. Neurotypicality is framed as normal so it never has to explain itself.

Let’s back up for a minute and explain some terms. Neurology is simply the way a person’s brain is wired — how it processes information, senses the world and communicates with others. Everyone has a neurology. Autism, ADHD and dyslexia are all forms of neurological difference. Neurotypicality is not the absence of neurology; it is the statistical majority profile, the cluster of developmental patterns that happen to be most common in the population.

Yet here’s the twist: most neurotypical people have never even heard the word "neurotypical." They don’t need to. Their neurology is the default, the vast majority, the yardstick against which everything else is measured. That’s how power works. Categories at the center don’t need names because the world is already built around them.

Autistic people, by contrast, are always named, explained, diagnosed and pathologized. We are the ones who need an origin story, a justification for why we exist. Neurotypical people just get to exist without question.

But is neurotypicality really uncaused? Of course not. It is an outcome of human variation, just like autism. The majority of people inherit combinations of genes that shape their development toward what we call neurotypical pathways. And once those pathways become the majority, society reinforces them as the baseline. Schools, workplaces and families reward those traits and declare them natural.

That’s why neurotypicality feels invisible. It’s not invisible because it has no cause. It’s invisible because society declared it the standard. The “normal” child doesn’t have to explain why they are normal. The autistic child does. The “normal” adult doesn’t need to justify their way of communicating or relating. The autistic adult does. Most people don't even know we exist.

Shockingly, many people still imagine autism as something children ‘grow out of’—but autism is a lifelong neurotype. We are not broken; our brains are simply wired differently for the entirety of our lives.

When researchers insist on asking “what causes autism,” they are not really chasing scientific curiosity. They are upholding a system that assumes deviation needs explanation while the baseline goes unquestioned. It’s the same logic that made left-handedness into a problem for centuries complete with causes, cures and corrections. Finally, society stopped pathologizing it. No one today writes grant proposals about “risk factors for left-handedness.” We simply accept that some people, including me, are left-handed and account for about 10% of the population.

Imagine if we applied the same shift to differences in how the brain is wired overall. Instead of chasing causes, we would recognize autism as one expression of natural human brain variation. We would stop asking how to prevent it and start asking how to build a world that can make room for us.

Because in the end, autism doesn’t need a cause any more than neurotypicality does. Both are simply outcomes of human variation. The only difference is that one has been crowned as the baseline and the other has been judged as a deviation, an abnormality.

So the next time you see a headline about ‘the causes of autism,’ flip the frame. Ask what causes neurotypicality—and notice how quickly the logic collapses. That collapse is the sound of the frame breaking open.