NVLD people are NT

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I have a non verbal learning disorder. I think an NT because my brain wiring is nomal but it just broken because of a head injury I got as a child.

I got no idea. Psychologists for the most part don't either, who has AS and who doesn't. As I said, it's my theory that AS is a conglomeration of neurological disorders, and NVLD is thrown into the mix in varying degrees, and NVLD is one of the disorders that classifies people as "AS." It's the same as a diagnosis of fibromyalgia or chronic pain, sure there's symptoms, but what's the root cause of them?

That said, people who meet me generally think I'm super weird, and psychs agree I got Aspergers. I also have friends who are diagnosed Aspies, too, and get along quite well with them.

Who knows. Nobody does.

No, brain injury makes you no longer NT.

Generally when I start talking to psychs about NVLD and how it's not Aspergers, giving them a big long talk about it, they'll be like "stop it dude, you got Aspergers."

I think NVLD should go into the same category as ASD's. They aren't the same thing (even though there's some overlap) but NVLD is a neuro-developmental disorder.....it may be caused by a combo of early environmental factors( subtle prenatal/natal brain injury) and various genes. Nobody knows exactly what causes it....certain neurological correlates have been identified (right hemisphere, white matter etc) but not found to be associated in every case, and it tends to run in families but no specific genes have been identified. This is so similar to AS and ADHD in that they are neuro-developmental disorders....either brain wiring, structure, transmitters used in communication between parts of the brain are screwed up at birth and the person grows up with a different type of brain and has trouble fitting in to our society. So, no I don't think NVLD=NT.....and I really really think NVLD should be added to the new DSM as a separate entry under neuro-developmental disorders.

No one knows, and no one seems to care either about NVLD and similar conditions. Otherwise, there would be a lot more research Has any psychologist, neuro-psychologist, grad student, etc. ever come to this forum and tried to learn from us? If not, then why not? Why don't they research us? Why don't they come here, and recruit us for PET scans, functional MRI's. etc?
Psychologists are more interested in your feelings than they are in the reality of how your brain works. They don't care about learning disabilities much anyway, especially is one is gifted at the same time. When I was twenty five, I took the Rorschach and other psychological tests. They made me out to be a nut case, but did they ever even ask me about previous cognitive test scores? Don't listen to the shrinks, and anyone who is more interested in feelings than in hard core reality.

No, I'm not "NT."

Because they know labels like NVLD are extremely heterogeneous and can apply with people with a bump on their right frontal lobe or someone who's missing lots of white matter or someone who shows no clear physiological signs of damage, but whose brain is shown to have poor functionality by some other measure.

NVLD was essentially formulated as a right hemisphere/white matter symptomology, which is very general to begin with, yet it can occur behaviorally in individuals who, upon "gross" physiological examination are found to have damage that doesn't fit the RH/WM profile.

What would be the point of "studying" NVLD in this sense?

Also, do you think there would be any point in studying the brains of people with intellectual disability in this way? Just curious.

I think that a label like NVLD (or "intellectual disability", for that matter) is too broad to be a good topic for study. They would have to have more specific criteria for inclusion into their study; otherwise there'd just be too many extraneous variables fuzzying up the data, and you couldn't detect an effect even if there was one.

NVLD doesn't have to be the result of a head injury or illness. It can be developmental, too. As far as I can tell, it usually is.

There are many disorders that are like that. Take prosopagnosia--face blindness, the inability to remember faces. You can acquire it from a stroke or a head injury--or you can be born with it. You can lose the ability to read after a head injury, or you can be born with dyslexia. You can have an injury to your frontal lobes that causes executive dysfunction, or you can be born with ADHD and get executive dysfunction from that.

The difference tends to be that the developmental version--the one you're born with--is milder and more integrated, better compensated for. That's because you grew up with it, because during those early years of plasticity you learned how to cope without a skill you were born without. If you were born face-blind, you learned to recognize your mother by her voice, your friend by her very light-blonde hair. If you were born with dyslexia, you learned how language works, so that you could fill in the gaps when your reading ability wasn't good enough to decipher text. If you got a head injury--and the later you get it, the worse it is and the less you accommodate--the deficit is sudden and obvious and you have no coping skills. Someone with acquired prosopagnosia may see a stranger in their room and not know it's their husband; someone with developmental prosopagnosia will say to themselves, "Okay, I don't recognize that person right away; but I observe that their movement style is my husband's, and that they smell like my husband, and their voice sounds like my husband's--that's my husband standing there."

An early head injury often results in an adulthood ability profile much like the developmental version of the disorder. If you're hit in the head at age two, your brain is still very flexible, and you're still going to be able to develop and learn in a way that is optimal for you and for the world around you. So you end up with an NVLD diagnosis rather than a TBI diagnosis. Neither one is neurotypical, but if you're diagnosed with something after a head injury that happened when you were very little, chances are that your development--both natural and compensating for the injury--has as much to do with the diagnosis as the original head injury did.