You know that feeling when you (re)read something written forty years ago and it knows you? Not in some vague literary-mirror way, but procedurally. The way attention collapses without the right interface. The way time dilates in flow and erodes in deprivation. The phantom-limb reach for a tool that isn't there. The body as static when the mind wants signal.
In 1984, William Gibson wrote Case: a console cowboy whose nervous system was poisoned, who "still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly," whose body became a prison when the matrix was gone. The language for adult cognitive mismatch didn't exist yet—not in common speech. DSM-III had "ADD, Residual Type," a diagnostic leftover. "Neurodiversity" wouldn't be coined until 1998. The hacker ethic was forming but unnamed. Gibson had no clinical vocabulary for what he was encoding.
He built it anyway.
This repository contains the evidence.
The Thesis
Neuromancer encodes a reversible, interface-dependent reconfiguration of cognition that exceeds noir alienation.
Case's mind doesn't just suffer when cut off from cyberspace—it changes structure. Attention flattens. Time stretches and accumulates. Memory stays sharp only in procedural domains (matrix operations, icebreaker specs) but fails elsewhere. The body becomes heavy, alien, wrong. When access returns, competence returns. Not relief—coherence.
This is not metaphor. It is mechanism.
The Evidence
This isn't a vibes-based reading. It's a structured textual analysis with explicit falsification criteria, systematic evidence logging, adversarial peer review simulation, and historical reconstruction.
- Deprivation state — 25 entries + 4 counterexamples
- Domain-specific memory — 15 entries documenting procedural precision
- Time experience — 28 entries mapping state-dependent distortion
- Addiction framing — 20 entries testing institutional conflation
- Environmental markers — 18 entries + 14 environments analyzed
Navigate the Repository
The Historical Gap
1984 is a hinge year. Neuromancer arrives alongside Technostress, The Second Self, and Hackers—multiple channels describing the same pressure: minds under load, minds magnetized by machines, minds trying to find a groove inside the speed of the era.
The vocabulary was scattered across incompatible frames:
- Clinical: "ADD, Residual Type" (DSM-III, 1980) — adults as diagnostic leftovers
- Research: Utah Criteria (1976; WURS 1993) expanded adult symptoms but stayed in enclaves
- Cultural: "Technostress," "information overload," "burnout"
- Subcultural: Hacker obsession reframed as mastery, not pathology
No unified language. Just fragments.
The later neurodiversity timeline makes the gap legible:
- 1983: Social Model of Disability formalized (Oliver)
- 1993: Autism self-advocacy ("Don't Mourn For Us")
- 1996: "Neurotypical" coined
- 1998: "Neurodiversity" enters print (Singer, Blume)
- ~2000: "Neurodivergent" emerges
Gibson gathers the fragments into a lived experiential structure. He doesn't name the structure; he renders it in Case's nervous system. The novel is a record of what the era could feel but not yet name.
The Payoff
If this holds, it means:
- Gibson encoded a cognitive structure before the language existed to name it. Not through diagnosis, but through experiential precision.
- The matrix isn't escapism. It's the interface where Case's nervous system finds traction. Cyberspace is his cognitive niche.
- "The body was meat" isn't just cyberpunk ideology. It's dissociation rendered as interoceptive mismatch.
- Case and Molly are cognitive contrasts, not moral ones. She's optimized for embodied precision; he's optimized for disembodied pattern. The novel stages diversity, not deviation.
- Speculative fiction can preserve experiences that clinical/cultural vocabularies haven't caught up to yet. This is "pre-clinical sensing."
For Whom
- SF scholars curious whether cyberpunk experience exceeds genre mood
- Disability studies / neurodiversity researchers tracking cognitive difference in fiction before the frameworks existed
- Cognitive literary scholars interested in how novels encode attentional structures
- Gibson readers who felt recognized and want to know if the text supports it
- Anyone who's ever reached for an interface that wasn't there
"He'd operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix."
The proficiency was real. The mismatch was too.
"This is what he was, who he was."