Welcome, and thank you!

Short answer: yes, absolutely.

Longer answer: it's actually a core premise of what I'm building here.

I've been developing a framework called Working Memory Fragility that treats ADHD, autism, and giftedness not as separate conditions but as different expressions of the same underlying cognitive architecture. The differences are real (my ADHD looks nothing like my autism on any given Tuesday), but the infrastructure underneath them is shared. Stochastic resonance, subcortical compensation, working memory bottlenecks. Same engine, different calibrations.

There's actually a massive Nature study (over a million cases, 14 psychiatric diagnoses) that found five broad genetic families explaining most of the variance across conditions. ADHD and autism cluster together in a neurodevelopmental neighborhood. Depression, anxiety, and PTSD share a neighborhood. The borders between our diagnostic labels are, genetically speaking, very fuzzy. I have an article coming on this.

I also build AI-powered life models of real people. Each with detailed cognitive, emotional, and behavioral architectures. And I haven't met one "neurotypical" yet. Not one. Just people who mask better than others. The more granular my model gets, the more every single person reveals some configuration that doesn't fit the "standard" template.

Which makes your point exactly. Although I think "neurotypical" might just be the word we use for people whose masking hasn’t been questioned (yet).