Peripheral Minds

Director Center for Adaptive Stress.
The Evolutionary-Stress Framework, the New Energy Paradigm.

[Peripheral Minds @PeripheralMinds]

An Evolutionary-Stress Model of Medicine. This is seeing mental illness as functional adaptations w trade-offs. Old paradigm is linear w singular causal assumptions. New is nonlinear, stress creates outcomes depending on; person, timing and context. It's based on ecosystems.

[Justin Garson @justin_garson]

It’s hard to call for a paradigm shift away from the disease model of mental illness without saying what we should shift *towards.* So, in a few words…what’s your alternative?

[Peripheral Minds @PeripheralMinds]

@mysteriouskat No, their goals and priorities are different but the big problem is is that one particular political ideology starts with the incorrect premise, and anyway of thinking that starts with the incorrect premise is going to come up with illogical contradictions an cognitive dissonance

[Peripheral Minds @PeripheralMinds]

New paper in Autism in Adulthood argues that autism health disparities stem from chronic mismatch between regulatory architecture and environmental demand — not intrinsic deficit. Introduces: stress incoherence.

Hogenkamp, Sanghavi & Natri (2026)
https://t.co/wrQmPNr1VD

[Peripheral Minds @PeripheralMinds]

Intervention shifts: not fix the person, but design for the system.

This is Paper 1 in a multi-paper arc. Mechanism, empirical predictions, and clinical applications to follow. Stay Tuned!

Video overview: https://t.co/Ns95MvBR5a

[Peripheral Minds @PeripheralMinds]

New in Autism in Adulthood:

"Toward an Emergent Paradigm for Neurodiversity and Health"
Hogenkamp, Sanghavi & Natri (2026)

Why has autism research produced so much data and so little predictive power?

https://t.co/wrQmPNr1VD

🧵

[Peripheral Minds @PeripheralMinds]

3. Bio-neurotypes — neurosocial and neuroperipheral orientations as initial conditions, not diagnoses. Starting configurations from which trajectories emerge.

[Peripheral Minds @PeripheralMinds]

Bad Bunny is going to change the world. We will look back at this point of history and see a tipping point that he just accomplished.

[Peripheral Minds @PeripheralMinds]

@awaisaftab Subjectivity is not psychiatry’s weakness but its signal: the brain’s internal measurement of stress and prediction error. To call mental health subjective is either to dismiss its complexity, or to finally take it seriously as a property of adaptive systems.

[Peripheral Minds @PeripheralMinds]

@MitoPsychoBio How life emerges from energy & matter

How systems self-organize & adapt under stress

How health & disease emerge from energy regulation

How humans, tech & ecosystems can co-evolve sustainably

[Peripheral Minds @PeripheralMinds]

The Cause Illusion: Why We Keep Getting Autism — and Science — Wrong https://t.co/byKtp8Bdt9

[Peripheral Minds @PeripheralMinds]

https://t.co/3Y3teCAKVQ

[Peripheral Minds @PeripheralMinds]

It’s not an epidemic. It’s emergence.

What we’re witnessing in rising autism rates and chronic health conditions is not the result of a single cause. It’s the consequence of complex adaptive systems interacting over time—systems with initial conditions, leverage points, and variable but patterned outcomes. These outcomes are shaped not by defects, but by energy constraints, adaptive calibrations, traits, and trade-offs in increasingly stressed ecosystems.

At the heart of the crisis is a breakdown in energy and stress regulation—not in individual bodies, but in the environments we’ve built. Environments that fail to nurture or even recognize complexity. Environments that are incapable of supporting the bio-neurodiverse needs of our population. We have constructed medical, educational, economic, and scientific systems on the flawed logic of reductionism, linear causation, and statistical averages—leaving behind those whose adaptive patterns don't conform.

The so-called "cause" of increasing neurotypes in distress—especially those with higher support needs and complex medical profiles—is not a mysterious toxin or unmeasured gene. It is the very social and institutional frameworks that refuse to evolve. Movements like MAHA (Make Autism Healthy Again) claim to want solutions, but without offering a systems-based alternative, they risk dismantling imperfect structures only to replace them with worse ones: oversimplified, fear-driven, and biologically naive.

You cannot solve a problem with the same paradigm that created it.
Linear science built the world “not made for us”—a world designed around germ theory, causal logic, and “survival of the fittest.” It framed the average as healthy, and everything else as deficient. But humans were never meant to be uniform. We are diverse, and our survival depends on embracing that diversity.
The only way forward—the only way to avoid repeating the same mistakes at greater scale—is to reframe the problem entirely.

We need complexity science.
We need bio-neurodiversity as a foundational principle.
We need to ask better questions, rooted in systems thinking, energy dynamics, and emergent adaptation.

Because what we’re facing isn’t a crisis of genetics or toxins. It’s a crisis of paradigm. And the only way out is through a new one.

[Peripheral Minds @PeripheralMinds]

It’s not an epidemic. It’s emergence.

What we’re witnessing in rising autism rates and chronic health conditions is not the result of a single cause. It’s the consequence of complex adaptive systems interacting over time—systems with initial conditions, leverage points, and variable but patterned outcomes. These outcomes are shaped not by defects, but by energy constraints, adaptive calibrations, traits, and trade-offs in increasingly stressed ecosystems.

At the heart of the crisis is a breakdown in energy and stress regulation—not in individual bodies, but in the environments we’ve built. Environments that fail to nurture or even recognize complexity. Environments that are incapable of supporting the bio-neurodiverse needs of our population. We have constructed medical, educational, economic, and scientific systems on the flawed logic of reductionism, linear causation, and statistical averages—leaving behind those whose adaptive patterns don't conform.

The so-called "cause" of increasing neurotypes in distress—especially those with higher support needs and complex medical profiles—is not a mysterious toxin or unmeasured gene. It is the very social and institutional frameworks that refuse to evolve. Movements like MAHA (Make Autism Healthy Again) claim to want solutions, but without offering a systems-based alternative, they risk dismantling imperfect structures only to replace them with worse ones: oversimplified, fear-driven, and biologically naive.

You cannot solve a problem with the same paradigm that created it.
Linear science built the world “not made for us”—a world designed around germ theory, causal logic, and “survival of the fittest.” It framed the average as healthy, and everything else as deficient. But humans were never meant to be uniform. We are diverse, and our survival depends on embracing that diversity.
The only way forward—the only way to avoid repeating the same mistakes at greater scale—is to reframe the problem entirely.

We need complexity science.
We need bio-neurodiversity as a foundational principle.
We need to ask better questions, rooted in systems thinking, energy dynamics, and emergent adaptation.

Because what we’re facing isn’t a crisis of genetics or toxins. It’s a crisis of paradigm. And the only way out is through a new one.

[Peripheral Minds @PeripheralMinds]

There is no singular cause of autism—because autism is not a condition that fits within the causal paradigm at all. It is emergent, shaped by dynamic interactions over time. The diagnostic label reflects a clustering of traits and trade-offs, not a fixed biological defect to be rooted out.

Autistics are not the problem. They are the signal—a signal that our scientific frameworks are misaligned. For too long, we have ignored the evolutionary roots of stress, energy allocation, and developmental calibration. Autism reveals how far behind our models are when it comes to understanding diversity in complex adaptive systems.

The logic behind most causation claims—that a “cause” must be found in everyone with the condition—is based on Koch’s Postulates, designed for Germ Theory, not neurobiology. That framework was useful for identifying pathogens—not for decoding emergent properties of brain development or adaptive responses to unpredictable environments.

It’s time to reframe our frameworks, our logic, our arguments, and our questions. Only then can we move beyond outdated models and begin to understand the true nature of neurodiversity.

[Peripheral Minds @PeripheralMinds]

@DrNeilStone He's a tool for Trump and MAGA to soe distrust in establishment and science, why don't we just improve the science to include nonlinear complex adaptive systems?

[Peripheral Minds @PeripheralMinds]

@WarlordDilley

[Peripheral Minds @PeripheralMinds]

@MitoPsychoBio Emotions as energy-in-motion is core to the Evolutionary Stress Framework too—IL-6 isn’t just inflammatory, it’s a social energy signal, preparing bodies for relational adaptation. Let’s talk allostasis and bio-neurodiversity?

[Peripheral Minds @PeripheralMinds]

Correct—Cartesian dualism doesn’t hold up. Neuroscience, systems biology, and interoception research show that mind and body are not separate. Consciousness, emotion, and health emerge from dynamic brain-body-environment interactions (Barrett, 2017; Picard, 2021). We’re not machines—we're ecosystems managing energy allocation.

As Barrett puts it: “Your brain’s most important job is not thinking. It’s running your body.”