Neurotypical
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"Neurotypical" (or "NT") is a neologism used to describe a person whose neurological development and state are typical, conforming to what most people would perceive as normal. It is a portmanteau of the words neurologically and typical. The term "muggle" from J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books has also been borrowed as a synonym for this in at least one context.[citation needed]
The term originated in the autistic community, as a way to refer to non-autistic people.[citation needed] It sometimes therefore includes people with other types of atypical neurology such as dyslexia, dyspraxia, epilepsy and ADHD, although ADHD is often found with autism.[citation needed] However, in the strictest sense it refers only to typical neurology; this is how the neurodiversity movement uses the term.[citation needed]
The term was coined by members of an early, private e-mail list composed of mostly autistic adults and a few parents of autism spectrum children.[citation needed] Autistics.org popularized it in 1998 with the ISNT website. As people from the original list joined other lists the term was used by more autistic spectrum individuals, those who study them, and parents.
The use of the word "typical" in place of "normal" hints at an underlying issue faced by neurology: does common (or most common) define normal, apart from a statistical normal distribution? The term is deliberately constructed to avoid prejudging this issue. In the United Kingdom the National Autistic Society recommends the use of the term in its advice to journalists. [1] The term has also started to be used in the scientific literature. [citation needed]
The term is used with varying degrees of seriousness. This ranges from a straightforward factual way to refer to non-autistic spectrum people to a more playfully tongue-in-cheek use in contexts which often strongly imply that the "merely typical" are wasting brain capacity keeping track of uninteresting and irrelevant information such as illogical 'social rules'. [2].
