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Research documents the sensitivity and pattern recognition abilities of neurodivergent people.

The canary metaphor reflects the experience of many neurodivergent people at school and work.

Design from the margin can use the sensitivity of neurodivergent people to improve systems for everyone.

"I tried to explain that the enterprise software we were getting was going to be a problem, but they told me to shut up. Years of reworking things and who knows how much lost money later, they are now looking for someone to blame."

"Back when I was at school, I tried to persuade them to change how they organized extracurriculars. Nobody paid attention. Now they are in the news for all the wrong reasons, over things they could have corrected. I was a canary in the coal mine."

It seems like most neurodivergent people have stories like these. We feel danger before others. We see problematic patterns. And too often, we are ignored.

“Canary in the coal mine” is not just an expression referring to an early and often lone warning of danger. The true story of canaries in coal mines offers many lessons for designing environments fit for humans.

On sentinels and sensitivity

Sentinel species are animals or other organisms sensitive to environmental threats and able to react before humans. At different points in history, birds, guinea pigs, mice, rabbits, horses, and other animals had served as sentinels of toxins and other dangers. Canaries were the original carbon monoxide detectors in mines. In the presence of toxic air, birds would show distress before miners were significantly affected. This gave the miners time to evacuate safely and to revive the canary using oxygen from a bird-sized oxygen tank. In the UK, canary birds went underground with the miners until 1986, when they were replaced by electronic detectors.

Canaries were selected among the other potential sentinel species because of their small size, and especially because of their intense air metabolism. Some people assume that canary’s sensitivity reflects a defect or a weakness, but the opposite is true. Birds’ intense breathing makes them sensitive to airborne poisons—but it is also what allows them to fly. Sensitivity is a part of design for strength.

The metaphor of the potentially life-saving sensitivity became a part of many cultures. And when applied to neurodivergent communities, the parallel is rather direct—both in physiological sensitivity to noisy or otherwise harsh sensory environments, and in reaction to psychologically toxic cultures.

Neurodivergent canaries

When schools allow bullying and are misaligned with how students actually learn, autistic, ADHD, and AuDHD students feel it sharply. Exclusionary norms, psychological pressure, and other aspects of toxic workplace cultures strongly impact neurodivergent people and their career opportunities. And that hum of the open office that makes workers stressed and sick, even if they do not make a conscious connection? People with sensory sensitivities suffer intensely and make the connection clearly.

Research explains the mechanisms making neurodivergent people canaries of humanity. For example, contrary to the “unfeeling autistic” stereotypes, theory and experimental research indicate that autistic people experience the world more intensely than the average person, and autistic brains generate more information at rest. We process more of the world, and we process it more intensely. This explains why research has documented autistic strengths in attention, memory, pattern detection, affective empathy, and more. But the intensity of processing also explains why we feel environmental toxicity earlier and why it harms us deeply.

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Neurodivergent people are also often the ones to raise the alarm. Members of ADHD communities are particularly sensitive to injustice. Autistic people are strongly focused on fairness and feel the strong need to intervene when harm occurs.

Unfortunately, many societal institutions respond to canary warnings not by improving the environment for all, but by systematically excluding neurodivergent people. Starting with preschool, ADHD students are more likely to experience expulsion, and autistic students are bullied and excluded by peers and are unsupported by systems. Adults don't have it any easier. In the UK, 50 percent of managers admit they would not hire neurodivergent candidates. That’s despite the fact that “canaries” generate higher-quality creative and innovative thinking, and discover causes and effects others miss.

Excluding “canaries” not only hurts people and robs organizations of unique talent but also disconnects the organizational toxicity alarm. The exclusion itself is a sign of toxicity, but many chose to blame canaries for not being able to breathe. We are told we are “too sensitive for our own good.” We are told to “toughen up.”

When the most sensitive are pushed out, and the toxicity detector is switched off, the psychological climate in many schools and workplaces deteriorates. Student mental health is in crisis, work stress results in serious illness and death, and unethical behavior has become routine in organizations. It is long past time to heed canaries.

People who suffer first can show us exactly where the system can be redesigned. This is why in my book, The Canary Code: A Guide to Neurodiversity, Dignity, and Intersectional Belonging at Work, I argue for design from the margin—a more flexible, participatory version of universal design. Design from the margin considers “special cases” first and actively involves marginalized people in the process, treating lived experience as crucial knowledge and resulting in more inclusive, flexible, and disruption-resilient solutions.

If we want environments truly fit for humans, we have to treat the distress of sensitive canaries as a non‑negotiable design constraint, not as background noise or ignorable data on acceptable collateral.

For everyone's health and survival, it's overdue to ask neurodivergent canaries for their input, and to truly listen.

Here is how you can start:

Create protected, anonymous signal channels. Neurodivergent people have learned, through painful experience, that their signals are unwelcome. Help them to speak up again.

Stop pathologizing the signal. When a canary's distress is medicalized or individualized, the institution reframes systemic data as an "outlier problem." Not helpful.

Close the feedback loop visibly. The fastest way to silence a canary is to ask for input and then demonstrably do nothing with it. Rebuilding trust requires evidence that the signal changed something real.

Institutions constantly choose which inputs count as valid data. Whose observations are treated as signal and whose are treated as noise. Whose distress is read as information about the system and whose is filed as a personal problem.

Right now, too many institutions exclude exactly the people whose nervous systems are wired to detect what matters earliest.

That is a survival problem.

As the canaries have been warning all along.

Some sections of this post appeared in Fast Company. It is also based on my book, The Canary Code: A Guide to Neurodiversity, Dignity, and Intersectional Belonging at Work.

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