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Comment by PuppyTailWags | Hacker News Reader

I think part of the difficulty is that there is an assumed notion of an objective reality when it comes to motivations, relationships, and anything else relating to internal experiences. Neurotypical people will find significant overlap with other neurotypical people's internal experiences and therefore assume that's objective fact, and are only exposed to radically different internal experiences in the context of "Crazy", "Psychopath", etc. In fact, as a fellow non-neurotypical person, I see different neurotypical people differ in internal experiences from other neurotypical people all the time (see: introverts vs extroverts, love languages, other pop psychology) but they're just not categorized the same for seemingly arbitrary cultural norm reasons, aka popularity.

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Should we even be using the term "neurotypical"?

Like, I don't know a single person that actually suits some magical mean. The term can only possibly represent some abstract, non-existent, unidimensional person. And you can't extract hypothetical expectation sets from the public reliably because they're in constant flux.

Maybe social and private dysfunctions, with some degree of overlap, but there's a pretty wide band, which appears to be ever-growing in which a huge variety of internal morphologies can operate.

I do think though, that we all too closely observe psychology - itself an instrument with two cutting edges. On one half, you offer support and vindication to some extent, and on the other stigma and hopelessness. If we excised our newfound habit of wanton prognostication - what we're left with is "they're a peculiar sort" and I wonder if that's not - at least in less extreme cases - preferable as it forces us to assess from the ground up the individual rather than some categorical definition which to me reads as something much more just. An end unto themselves.

I think neurotypical accurately describes people who don't have neurodevelopmental disorders like ADHD, Schizophrenia, or Autism. There are distinct brain architectures involved here; autistics generally have statistically significant reduced brain activity in response to the human face compared to neurotypical people. This is a bit like arguing that because some people learn to read slower than others, or learn to read by sounding out the words vs memorizing consonants, that dyslexia shouldn't be differentiated from non-dyslexic people.

Of course you can be varied and neurotypical. There are neurotypical people who focus well and some who struggle with that a bit more. There are some people who struggle to read facial expressions and others that can accurately guess nuances. But that doesn't mean that they're not neurotypical, and that their internal experiences aren't more widely represented and reflected in the cultural norm.

I'm leaning more towards the fact that umbrella terms like "neurotypical" are setting forward something that doesn't exist, and that everyone has some aberrant wiring. I just find that a lot of this tends to boil down to people scree-ing at one another, coming up with broad generalizations, boxing themselves and others...

It should be "normal" to be different - 'cause that's the reality, even if you're in the tails.

And to be fair, I did add a caveat where... "Clinically" severe cases probably do need some formalities. It just seems like, reading through the DSM, knowing clinical therapists, and having my own deal of insight on these matters that we're (society) actually pathologizing functional people. That we're giving people language and identities to fixate on or to affix onto others and we do it in a way that is inconsistent even at the clinical level.

I think of "neurotypical" as an idealized version of what society expects a person's thinking to be. In a similar way to society defining gender roles. Not only does it not apply to any single person (but rather, people will conform more or less to that neurotypical construct), but it will vary based on country, social class, etc... Being neurodivergent means that you significantly diverge from said ideal, leading to all kinds of problems.

Tbh, the more I have to deal with NTs the more convinced I am that the majority of them do not have much of an inner world or defined personality.

There seems to be a complete inability for real introspection or even “third thoughts” as Pratchett liked to call them; thoughts about thoughts.

I would give more of the benefit to NTs; they simply don't have to develop the skill of explaining their own inner workings to the level of neurodivergent people at a complex level. Often times they can speak in a generality and assume the vast majority of their nuance will be captured by their audience, which is a strategy often validated by other neurotypical people.

There are plenty of neurotypical people talking about their thinking patterns in the form of pop psychology, horoscopes, MBTI, meditation, YouTube/TikTok cultural commentators, etc. It's just not viewed that way because it's viewed as "normal". But earnestly I don't see a difference between a neurotypical person saying their love language is acts of service and an ADHD person telling me that when they talk at length about their special interest with me it's a sign of psychological safety.

A more likely explanation is that they may choose not to show those thoughts to you.

Yep. That is clearly it.

> Neurotypical people will find significant overlap with other neurotypical people's internal experiences and therefore assume that's objective fact

Wouldn't it be funny if the whole world ran on this phenomenon? And even funnier: if there were large organizations whose duty was to coordinate and normalize people's perceptions of what is going on?

I wonder what that would look like in action.

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