I like to look back at the whole picture, and when I do that it makes the concept of normal very, very questionable, very muddy. “We're set up with a culture in such a way that we have expectations for behaviour, we have constants, we have guidelines, we have morals – and all for good reason,” says Armstrong. “But why is it ‘abnormal’ to want to move and learn at the same time?”Īfter all, these norms are often the result of social convention. Clearly, that is not the way that most of the stationary audience are behaving. He points out that when he is delivering lectures, some people with autism will walk around the room. There’s certainly a need to reduce the stigma.Īs Armstrong argues, we should try to question our assumptions about different behaviours and the value judgements we place on them. Ultimately, many people with conditions like autism find that the term neurodiversity (and its contrast, neurotypical) is a useful and positive way of self-defining their identity and their community. And if we see each child, each teen, each adult as a unique individual, then all bets are off as far as creating a dividing line between those who are neuro-diverse and those who are neurotypical.” So, in terms of defining these kids, we can say neurotypical, but to tell you the truth, ultimately, I see that the more we learn about a child, the more they appear in their true diversity as a unique individual. “It doesn't necessarily define what is ideal, as an abstract concept, but it says this is what's typical.” That makes it preferable to something like “normal”, in his eyes.Įven so, Armstrong agrees that reality is far more subtle than these terms would suggest. “I think that the term neurotypical is a good one and is an improvement over the term normal,” says Thomas Armstrong, author and executive director of the American Institute of Learning. Other experts are more positive about the terms. In his opinion, “the vast majority of neuroscientists will probably have never heard of these terms”. “It’s the property of the whole biosphere.” She draws a parallel with “biodiversity”, which is not used for a particular type of plant or animal but the overall variety of every living creature. “You cannot have neurodiverse as an adjective to describe anything else except the whole world,” she says. Instead, she meant to for it to be used in a more general sense, to describe the variety of all brains. But Singer had never intended for it to be used to describe a particular condition. The term has since been employed for many purposes – as a word for empowerment, a means for celebrating qualities some neurological conditions can bring, and as a term of identity. We needed a movement, like the feminist movement, and that's where it came from.” With our stupid educational systems, we're trying to lock people into this narrow channel, instead of exploring what this diversity can bring us. “I just thought, this is incredible diversity. There are so many things in the mind that we never imagined. “I was just so overwhelmed with all these senses that people had that we didn't even know about – people who couldn’t recognise faces, people with extraordinary synaesthesia. “It was a time of incredible sharing and exploration,” she says. As Singer explains to me, her original aim was to draw attention to a wide variety of conditions. Shortly afterwards, it was picked up by a US journalist writing in a 1998 edition of The Atlantic, and the term began to evolve from there. The word neurodiverse was first coined in 1998 by an Australian sociologist, Judy Singer, who used it in her honours thesis. But these terms have a long history and their meaning is constantly evolving. People involved in the diagnosis and discussion of these conditions often use the term “neurodiverse” to describe the differences, and “neurotypical” to describe everyone else. That’s not to mention many other conditions – such as dyslexia, Tourette’s and Williams Syndrome (which involves a hypersocial personality) – that are also be due to differences in the brain’s anatomy. According to one survey from 2016, around 62 million people across the globe were thought to have an autism spectrum disorder (including Asperger's syndrome), and 63 million had ADHD (though there can be crossover as some with autism can have ADHD and vice versa).
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