Replace "Neurotypical" with "Heteristic"

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Heterism, Autism, and Neurodiversity

I've just discovered the term, and it makes such utter sense to me, but is not yet in common usage. I can't explain it any better than this blog article (link is above).

I don't really agree, as since it's a spectrum, you wouldn't just call someone who like, is an introvert, autistic, there has to be other neurological things going on. For calling someone heteristic, they'd have to be at the extreme end of the spectrum. I mean it's a neat term for sure, but to divide the world between two extremes is kinda dumb.

I have read the term "plethism" on WP to describe people now known as neurotypical. I have used the term myself.

The description from the OP's excerpt is not the difference between introversion and extroversion. It does get at the difference between autism and plethism. Plethistic people have brains that are socially oriented, automatically and mandatorily. Filtering out background noise to enhance speech processing, emphasis on human faces over background objects, recognizing states of mind in human faces instead of physical details - these are all automatic subconscious processes in the brains of plethistic people. In autistic people, these processes are attenuated, there being less top-down modulation of low-level sensory processing, so we don't filter as much, and we don't filter in the social direction that plethistic people share as a set of synchronized stimuli-to-responses that make plethistic people able to be plethistic, and things that go into our brains are not auto-guided through a social tunnel and into a social box. For plethistics, things are, whether they are introverts or extroverts, whether or not they are consciously aware of the process.

Interesting post. So we are now to say that NTs--excuse me--Heteristics, have a condition too? So perhaps they are the freaks and we are normal? Or perhaps we are all freaks, or all just a different flavor of normal? I will definitely give this some thought.

I really don't agree either. Typical doesn't necessarily mean normal. Cancer cells can be "typical" if they are compared to other cancer cells. Typical is a term of relativity. If most of society were Autistic, Autism would be neurologically typical, not necessarily "normal."

Neurotypical seems fine to me. Change it to anything else you want, and someone somewhere will have a problem with the new term.

It's just a word. Some don't use it correctly, some do. Same would happen with any other term. This is just semantics. I think it's better to educate people who misuse it. You'd have to do that no matter what the term is.

I don't care about the terminology - neurotypical or typically developing or normal or freaks or whatever. But I do think that thinking of NT as it is described in the OP's excerpt is useful to understand the differences between autistics and NTs, so people don't generalize NTs as all having an extroverted personality and being a certain way, and same for autistics. The traits below don't have much to do with personality, but more with functions of the brain.

I must say, I like the term plethistic as well.

NT doesn't bother me as a term. There's nothing wrong with recognizing something as typical. Who wants to be typical after all? What I like about heterism or plethism, is that it kind of gives a balance to the word autism.

This is not about labeling non-autistic people as having a "condition". It is about re-framing the label to get away from viewing autism as a disease. Considering so much misunderstanding, thinking we are dysfunctional, mentally ill, for having what they have given a clinical label, I feel like calling non-autistics by a similar but contrasting opposite term promotes the idea that neither is wrong, that the words are simply descriptions of the processing model your brain uses.

Being able to form independent opinion regardless of peer pressure. See things like they are separated from what other thinks, or how they are supposed to be.