WHO ARE WE?
Knowing about ourselves, our personalities, our character, our idiosyncrasies, our talents, and our shortcomings is terribly important for a chance to live a happy life, change what we can change, and serenely accept the rest.
Knowing about ourselves, our personalities, our character, our idiosyncrasies, our talents, and our shortcomings is terribly important for a chance to live a happy life, change what we can change, and serenely accept the rest.
The word neurotypical is widely used as that term that describe persons whose brain underwent a typical neurological development. The word neurodivergent describes persons whose brain development followed a different pattern, i.e., diverged from the typical. Neurodivergent is generally not used to describe individuals who have autism spectrum disorders or other developmental challenges. In the 20th century, the words neurotypical, neurodivergent, and neurodiverse came into use as a nonmedical and more comprehensive way to describe the human phenotype (a term that describes the observable characteristics of an organism, including its physical appearance, behavior, and developmental processes).
In any case, the conversation must be nuanced to take into account the unmeasurable variety of brain configurations that exist in the human population. A stigmatizing conflation is often made between neurodivergence and autism spectrum disorders, owing to the presence of autism-like symptoms and features and the cooccurrence of disorders that, especially since the DSM-5, have been grouped together under one label.
Autistic disorder (sometimes referred to as childhood autism or infantile autism) is the prototypic disorder of the group and the one that has been the focus of most of the available research. Research is much less extensive on the broader spectrum of disorders (ASDs) and caution should be used in overgeneralization of results from more “classic” autism to this larger population. – Fred R. Volkmar and Kevin Pelphrey (2023)
In this website, we take the position that neurodivergence in individuals and the neurodiversity of groups is one of many neurovariants, which is to say, a difference in brain configuration and human phenotype as compared to that of the major portion of the human population who presents as neurotypical. To our knowledge, and accounting for the indisputable fact that “prevalence estimates can vary dramatically if different diagnostic approaches are used” (Volkmar & Pelphrey, 2023), our survey of multiple reporting agencies shows a prevalence of neurodivergence of between 15 and 25 percent, leaving the neurotypical phenotypes to account for the remaining 75-85%.
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