Who is "Neurotypical"?

[chaoticidealism]

"Neurodiverse" and "Neurotypical" are words we had to invent because there were no words for "People who have brains that work in a way that's close enough to average to be called average by the general observer," and, "People whose brains are demonstrably not average." You can't say "cognitively disabled", because some atypical conditions like

Comments

[timeprojectile]

I think this is the first definition of neurotypicality and neurodiversity I've seen that included giftedness as part of neurodiversity (and thus an IQ under 130 as part of neurotypicality). Although the IQ is perhaps my least favorite part of being NT, it might have a certain advantage: keeping me humble. A Gifted friend of mine is an unshakable supporter of alternative physics and alternative sociology (a nice way of saying crank and conspiracy theorist), trusting his own common sense over scientific methods designed to correct as best as is possible for the biases found in virtually all humans, even Gifted ones. Some great Gifted scientists, after all, such as Tesla (whom this friend of mine admires), end up going astray on some of their ideas. I'm wrong enough times, and catch myself being wrong enough times, that I can buy into skeptical principles and not trust myself too much when it's unwarranted.

[chaoticidealism]

Absolutely. Gifted people are wrong all the time. Anyone, gifted or not, who loses sight of the fact that they can be wrong, risks not catching the mistakes they make. Making mistakes is normal and expected--but if a person believes that they either are, or ought to be, infallible, the mistakes stick around and build up.

This is part of why I really dislike the practice of grading and ranking students, and emphasizing grades as though the goal of learning were to get a grade. People raised in that system learn to be very afraid of making mistakes, and that keeps them from learning nearly as well as they could. With grades as the goal, the feedback that's so necessary to learning ("You forgot to carry the one, so your answer is ten fewer than it should be") becomes punitive and feared.

[timeprojectile]

Aw, man, totally concur on the problems with emphasizing grades and ranks. "Mindset" by Carol Dweck, a book based on research about this subject and how it messes with (primarily NT) schoolchildren, is the story of my life. Thankfully I've been working on recovering from the damage that's done to me. As a professional scientist, I've been gradually learning to take failure less and less personally and more as the life-experience equivalent of a null study: valuable information about what can go wrong and how it might thus be fixed.

[timeprojectile]

Quite a liar, aren't you?