What are 'NTs'?
fiddlerpianist
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Saying someone can either be NT or autistic but not both is sort of like saying someone can either be perceptive or paraplegic but not both.
Are you sure of this? There can't be endless ways for the brain to do things.
How could someone be both, from what I know it's a way of thinking based upon what goes to where in you brain, and it can't connect to both places, care to explain?
You could exhibit some autistic traits, say, but not enough for a diagnosis. Your brain, however, may be more closely wired to that of someone with diagnosed AS than someone NT. Does that make you autistic or does it make you neurotypical?
You might be surprised what people can learn to do and how they can apply themselves. It may be way more difficult for some than for most, but just because one person can't doesn't mean that everyone can't.
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"That leap of logic should have broken his legs." - Janissy
Saying someone can either be NT or autistic but not both is sort of like saying someone can either be perceptive or paraplegic but not both.
Are you sure of this? There can't be endless ways for the brain to do things.
How could someone be both, from what I know it's a way of thinking based upon what goes to where in you brain, and it can't connect to both places, care to explain?
You could exhibit some autistic traits, say, but not enough for a diagnosis. Your brain, however, may be more closely wired to that of someone with diagnosed AS than someone NT. Does that make you autistic or does it make you neurotypical?
Depends on what's dominant. If you know which one it is or not is really irrelevant.
You might be surprised what people can learn to do and how they can apply themselves. It may be way more difficult for some than for most, but just because one person can't doesn't mean that everyone can't.
I can tell you I can't, because it don't interest me the slightest. And if I'm not interested I can't learn it, I know, I studied German for seven years and didn't learn anything because it didn't interest me.
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I've always just used the term NT for people who aren't like fitting with the social rules because of a mental disability (I hate that term too, I can't think what else to call it): for example; ASDs, AD/HD, Tourette syndrome. I personally call people who have developed a mental illness neurotypical because despite their problems, they were 'normal' at some point (except more severe mental health problems perhaps). I think that people with down syndrome are definately more like NTs, they just have learning difficulties, it doesn't affect how they interact so much (although they are often more childlike). I don't really know in great depth about this, I try not to think to hard or I get a headache...
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fiddlerpianist
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Saying someone can either be NT or autistic but not both is sort of like saying someone can either be perceptive or paraplegic but not both.
Are you sure of this? There can't be endless ways for the brain to do things.
How could someone be both, from what I know it's a way of thinking based upon what goes to where in you brain, and it can't connect to both places, care to explain?
You could exhibit some autistic traits, say, but not enough for a diagnosis. Your brain, however, may be more closely wired to that of someone with diagnosed AS than someone NT. Does that make you autistic or does it make you neurotypical?
Depends on what's dominant. If you know which one it is or not is really irrelevant.
Say you're evenly split. If you can't know which is dominant, this makes the question rather unanswerable, doesn't it?
You might be surprised what people can learn to do and how they can apply themselves. It may be way more difficult for some than for most, but just because one person can't doesn't mean that everyone can't.
I can tell you I can't, because it don't interest me the slightest.[/quote]
You're saying you're not interested in overcoming impairments to functioning, or is this merely a comment on your example?
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"That leap of logic should have broken his legs." - Janissy
Saying someone can either be NT or autistic but not both is sort of like saying someone can either be perceptive or paraplegic but not both.
Are you sure of this? There can't be endless ways for the brain to do things.
How could someone be both, from what I know it's a way of thinking based upon what goes to where in you brain, and it can't connect to both places, care to explain?
You could exhibit some autistic traits, say, but not enough for a diagnosis. Your brain, however, may be more closely wired to that of someone with diagnosed AS than someone NT.
Does that make you autistic or does it make you neurotypical?
Depends on what's dominant. If you know which one it is or not is really irrelevant.
Say you're evenly split. If you can't know which is dominant, this makes the question rather unanswerable, doesn't it?
Yes, but according to that kind of theory, you allways carry a cement umbrella to shelter yourself from pink elephants raining down. In theory it might happen, but very unlikley.
Depends on your point of view. (This is very much a question of opinion.)
You might be surprised what people can learn to do and how they can apply themselves. It may be way more difficult for some than for most, but just because one person can't doesn't mean that everyone can't.
I can tell you I can't, because it don't interest me the slightest.
You're saying you're not interested in overcoming impairments to functioning, or is this merely a comment on your example?
First one was basicly correct.
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Most people use NT on this site to be people who aren't on the autistic spectrum. I think it means accurately "neurologically typical to the species." For instance, herding is very typical to the human species, so herding is a neurotypical trait that is not considered an autistic trait. But instead of describing traits, most people put it on people, like NT's have herding instinct and autistic people don't, and then people argue that you can't make generalizations about people, and nobody ends up discussing the herding instinct until someone words it less general or less offensive (as generalizations seems to also be synonymous to offensive). Either way, if we are talking what is typical to the species, normal is almost a safe synonym if people didn't read too far into it, and it wouldn't include people who have a disorder that puts them in a position to not neurologically be typical to the species (which would be almost any disorder would exclude them from that category), but generally on this site, it just means non ASD and non AS.
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fiddlerpianist
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If you use "neurotypical" to mean "someone who does not have a mental, neurological, psychological, or otherwise exceptional mental condition", then it could easily be a plurality, not a majority. Non-NT would then include people with things like epilepsy, cultural/familial MR, synesthesia, giftedness, OCD, head injuries, or dementia. The majority of people will experience some mental or neurological condition or other off-the-norm descriptor during their lives. The majority of those will not consider themselves nontypical, though, in a sociological sense, so that the people who consider themselves atypical are probably still a minority.
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Last edited by Callista on 10 Aug 2009, 11:10 pm, edited 3 times in total.
yep
Huh.
Absolutely. Though I would like to say that sometimes AS people can be in the herd, ie this photo here
A crowd of 750,000 on a cold february saturday in london, people were pretty fired up to get out of their warm homes to stand in the freezing cold and protest. I was in this crowd, with 2 other aspie friends .
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Taking a break.
yep
Huh.
People behave differently in groups than they do individually. As they get into groups, they do have a herding instinct that doesn't seem to come natural to the Aspergian culture, although I'd swear I have witnessed it on this forum to a very small degree. Anyway, you can almost look at a group of people (such as an office group) and see an alpha male (or female) who is the "leader" and a bunch of people who follow that person. Let's say a fire alarm goes off in a busy building. More than likely, unless you know of the nearest exit and all that, most people are generally going to follow everyone else out of the building and stand where everyone else is standing. Also, like in high school, a lot of times, the popular kid (the alpha male) will maybe start bullying a girl who didn't want to go out with him, so then all his friends and followers will start bullying that girl for no real reason. I'm not saying if one guy bullies someone, that everyone around that guy is going to jump in. But I'm saying if that guy is the leader of a small group in an unwritten sort of sense, then the group is going to follow what he does. There's a reason they have the cliche... "If all your friends are going to jump off a bridge, does that mean you will too?" My friend's child once responded with, "Well, if the water's warm." LOL.
Has nothing to do with autism. It just means that it is someone with no developmental abnormalities.
fiddlerpianist
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fiddlerpianist
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I thought that BAP was looking at a range of people in a particular family for patterns of autism, not any one individual. If this is not true, please explain how the BAP differs from PDD-NOS, because apparently that's a commonly held belief.
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LOL It's more like a herd of sheep with no shepherd just following each other. I guess in a sense, religion is supposed to act like a shepherd to some flocks, but most sheep are too stupid to distinguish between a shepherd and a wolf. As long as they have their food and a false sense of security, they are good to go. But I will say there's a genius quality to the herding instinct. Like once I was in NYC, lost in lower manhattan. My friend was driving, and we were trying to get to Jersey. I had a map, but everytime I figured out where we were, my friend was already somewhere else, so it was useless until she'd pull over which there wasn't a place anywhere to pull over. So, finally frustrated, I said, "See all those cars with Jersey plates...follow them." Needless to say, we found Jersey so easily that way.
But I see a lot of reference to this herding instinct, which is so funny because I've always seen myself as a cat stuck in a dog eat dog world. Then I come here, and everyone else seems to agree that Aspies are like cats. So it makes sense that NTs, in a loose sense, would have more dog like instincts, and the wolves have a very strong sense of herding, more so than most cat families (however cats have it too, like Aspies, but as usual, it's more often misunderstood rather than lacking all together).