S2 EP 20 - Unpacking Neurodivergence: She Blinded Me With Science

a little bit about neuroscience today.

So, hi, I'm Suzanne M. Swain and I'm really, really glad you're here today. I am a child therapist, master or middle school teacher and child sociologist and we are here to talk today a little bit about brain science. So, this is something that a lot of families and teachers really want to know more about

“and to my young folks out there, I think it's important for you to learn about psychoeducation”

of the words, learning about how your brain works, so that way you can have more self-regulation skills, right? You can learn to control yourself a little bit better and react in a more appropriate way. So, today's a science episode, love science, I was trained as a science teacher, so this is really exciting for me, can't wait to show you some new information that we've gathered.

I've done a lot of research here and can't wait to share it with you. So, we're not going with trends, we're no hot takes or anything, not everyone is neurodivergent now type of thing, we're not going there. Well, we are talking about our peer reviewed research from 2024 and 2025 is actually showing about neurodivergent brains.

So, because the science has evolved and families deserve to evolve with it, so I think you

“need to know, it's very important to know as much as possible to help our kids and ourselves.”

So, it's really not one gene, it's hundreds. One of the biggest updates in the past couple of years comes from genetic research, actually, in 2025 in a paper in molecular psychiatry, they looked at something called polygenic overlap,

which basically means just instead of one gene causing something like ADHD or autism, researchers

looked at thousands of tiny gene variations that interacted together. Well, what'd they find? Pretty cool. They're significant biological overlap between ADHD, autism, and mood regulation differences. So, that doesn't mean that the same condition, it just means that brain systems involved

kind of shared developmental pathways. So, when a child seems like a blend of traits, attention differences, sensory intensity, emotional sensitivity, the science now says, "Well, that makes perfect sense biologically." So, it's a system's wiring issue and not a person hourly flaw.

“So, that's really common, very important stuff.”

Now, let's talk about something really fascinating, my favorite thing.

The superior temporal gyrus, this region is basically involved in your brain where it deals

with auditory processing, social nuances, picking up on social cues, things like that, language integration, and multi-sensory pattern detection. That's really important. So, what that means is it's the part of your brain that senses patterns. Are you the kind of person that can just look at something and be like, "Wow, that's not

real." Or, "I just can sense the pattern and you just have a sixth sense about it." Well, you probably have a pretty astute superior temporal gyrus. So, in 2024 and 2025, multiple FMRI and EEG studies, including work at the Drexel University and Network Neuroscience Groups, published journals like neuroimaging biological psychology

that have shown differences in activation and connectivity patterns into moral regions among neurodivergent kids. So it's not damaged, it's not deficiency, it's different connectivity patterns, once again. So when temporal regions show stronger or differently organized coupling with the default mode network, the system involved in imagination and internal narrative, researchers

believe that this may actually contribute to heightened patterns, strong associative thinking with multi-sensory connections, vivid language, and creative ideation. But there's kind of a trade-off. In the same network dynamics, though, it can make it harder to disengage from a thought stream.

So the brain that events in entire fictional universe may struggle to exit the universe when asks to, you know, clean their room, the rabbit hole effect. It's not defiance, it's just network persistence. So sensory dreams and internal worlds and things like that, well, this is the one families rarely hear about recent cognitive neuroscience started examining default mode network activity

and REMs who sleep related processing. So published in 2024, developmental neuroscience journals suggested that individuals with stronger sensory integration differences often report, they have much more vivid dreams, they have more sensory rich imagery, more detailed daydream narratives, and so on.

The same systems that process sound and texture and movement and internal stimulation during

the waking hours are active during dreaming. So children with heightened sensory integration patterns may experience things like very immersive in her worlds, you know, that child that kind of zones out will not really zoning out. They're in a world that they've created that is probably pretty complex.

They're not disengaged, they just may be internally simulating at a pretty high resolution. This challenge is not imagination, it's switching networks. Imagination is involved in the creation of the world, but it's a way for someone to switch in networks and it potentially even provide a protective area. So network switching.

So modern neuroscience doesn't really talk about single brain areas much anymore. It talks about networks. So default mode network, which is like your internal thoughts, your executive control network, so that's your tasks and your salience network, which decides what deserves attention when.

So in a 2024 review in nature reviews neuroscience, it emphasized that many neurodevelopmental

“differences involving switching efficiently between these networks is very important.”

The one switching is slower or less synchronized, you may see things like hyperfocus, deeper avatoles, difficulty shifting, intense rumination, and again, that's a coordination issue and not a character issue. So it's all the brain. I mean, development isn't linear folks, a lot of things aren't.

Large NIH funded longitudinal studies published in 2024 in the JMA Psychiatric and developmental cognitive neuroscience show something really important. Executive function does not develop in one universal timeline. In other words, not all learning happens in a line. There are multiple growth curves, environmental factors, biological factors, so many different

things. Some children show delayed executive skills that may serve later in life. Some kids are just late bloomers. Some shift from external hyperactivity to internal restlessness and adolescence. It's pretty common.

But this is where learning regulation is extremely important and to model it for them. How do you do with that yourself? What did you do when you were feeling overwhelmed? So by modeling that, we can help our kids to learn to regulate. There's an alternative.

Though we're all out of it, it's now really being replaced with they may grow along a bit of a different curve, which is much more hopeful.

“Honestly, so biomarkers and some personalization.”

The future of support is moving towards personalization, which is great. I love that.

It's about a person first.

It's about getting to know the human being before we get to know a, we want to call disorder issue concern. Recent work in the translational psychiatry and NIH funded EEG studies also were sparring whether certain brainoid patterns predict which ADHD interventions may work best or whether resting connectivity produces anxiety vulnerability or whether digital phenotyping, passive

behavioral data can guide some support. In other words, you know, doing some genetic testing from the family, you might be able to find that you might have a predisposition for one thing or another. We're not diagnosing kids with brain scans or anything, but we're just learning that biology can help to tailor support.

How you choose to do that in your own family is WTU. That's progress.

“Of course, you know, eating healthy, getting plenty of sleep and exercise, I think, and”

do a world of wonder. So in closing, just a little reflection, my big takeaway at all this and out of the things that I've been learning is that neurodivergent brains are not broken versions of typical brains, please don't think this. This is a cognitive distortion.

They're just differently organized networks with a totally different filing system and probably one that's very complex. The same wiring that can produce vivid sensory dreams or detects complex patterns, lots of them, maybe die deeply into ideas, create richly textured internal worlds, and maybe also struggle with switching and fatigue more quickly and they need a little bit of help.

And maybe it's hard for them to ask, "That's not pathology, it's trade-off biology." Science isn't here to label or kids, it's here to help us understand them.

And when we understand the wiring, we respond with wisdom instead of worry and it's always

a beautiful day to bus in cognitive distortions, right?

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Until then, stay clever little foxes, have a great day. (upbeat music)