What does it mean to be neurotypical?

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A member asked me what does it mean to be NT ? I told him that the definition meant Neurotypical... but while thinking about this term.. I was thinking.. what exactly does Neurotypical mean.. who is neurotypical? I don't just mean 'not on the spectrum' I mean who is to say or define this, and who gets to be included in this bell curve?

Possibly I'm not explaining myself right.. it's a philosophical question.. What does the label mean anyway.. who is neurotypical? It seems to me the word "normal' mean nothing, as everyone I've ever met seems to have something going on... when I think about how many people have something going on.. it seems to me like those who would consider themselves "normal" are actually a minority...

sorry if this is a rant.

Sorry that you are being ignored. Apparently more posters are interested in gay sex, and speculative ancestry.

NT-ish-ness is probably best defined as a state lacking deviations significant from a perceived physiological/biochemical norm. The term is not perfectly defined as it was created by autism groups to label non-autistic people. Obviously the term is sort of grey, and meant to address a form of normalcy, but so long as some rough guide post of normalcy can be asserted, the term has utility. In all actuality though, nobody reflects the norm completely, so the issue is then figuring out psychological measurements, a position of perfect normalcy, and then figure out who is normal based upon statistical analyses and an arbitrary definition of the distance from the norm that includes or excludes people from normalcy. I am not sure if this really gets you to any point at all, but hopefully it has some validity.

I added the bold because I think that basically answers it. Not that all neurological traits are necessarily on bell-shaped curves, but that neural variation is almost a continuum, so "neurotypical" oughtn't be a discrete category. Instead it ought to be a multi-dimensional spectrum. There are many ways that brains can vary, and the more one varies from the norm in any respect, the less "neurotypical" it is in that respect.

There won't always be hard and fast lines (unless the variation is discrete, like if it's controlled by a single gene or something). At best, it could be a fuzzy category, just as is autism.


Edit: While people who are completely normal in all respects may be a minority, in any given trait that varies, there's somewhere where the distribution reaches its peak, and that is the norm for that trait. Maybe the probability a random person would fall within some "normal"-defining error bars on any given trait is very high, even if the probability that they'd fall within those error bars on all traits is low.