WHAT IS NEURODIVERGENCE?
The word neurodivergent describes persons whose brain development followed a different pattern, i.e., diverged from the typical. The word neurotypical is widely used as that term that describe persons whose brain underwent a typical neurological development. Neurodivergent is generally not used to describe individuals who have autism spectrum disorders or other developmental disorders. 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 a human being, including its physical appearance, behavior, and developmental processes).
Neurodivergence is a flexible and dynamic description of the unmeasurable variety of brain configurations that exist within the human population. A stigmatizing conflation is often made between neurodivergence and autism, owing to the presence of symptoms and features and the cooccurrence of disorders that psychiatrist have grouped together under one label, autism spectrum disorders.
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, and within the Society, we take the position that neurodivergence in individuals and the neurodiversity of groups is one of many brain variants, which is to say, a difference in brain configuration as compared to that of the major portion of the human population whom we refer to 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 brain configuration to account for the remaining 75-85%.