Neurotypicals: What makes them tick, and how can autistic people better understand them?

Speaking with Salon last month, autistic comedian Fern Brady decided to put neurotypicals on blast.

For the uninitiated: A neurotypical is a person who does not display autistic or other neurologically atypical behaviors. Traditionally, when commentary is made about autism, neurotypicals are the humorists, and neurodivergent people (those on the autism spectrum) are the targets. Yet Brady upended that dynamic by commenting, “This is most autistic people’s experience: In jobs or in in group settings, they’ll say their own thing and they don’t know why everyone’s offended at what they’ve said.” Autistic people are so frequently misunderstood and excluded by neurotypicals that, both figuratively and literally, “autistic kids are like the one person in their class to not be invited to a birthday party, and then people wonder why the suicide rate for autistic people is so sky high.”

Although Brady is not a scientist, her observation is similar to one made by Dr. Lawrence Fung, director of the Stanford Neurodiversity Project. Speaking with Salon by email for this article, Fung observed, “Most neurotypical people do not understand the world of the neurodiverse people, and vice versa.” Because of this lack of empathy for common autistic behaviors like poor eye contact and social awkwardness, the 80% of the population that is neurotypical regularly imposes on the 20% that is neurodivergent “poor outcomes in both educational and employment settings.”

Countless volumes have been written in attempts to understand the neurodivergent one-fifth, but the observations of those like Brady and Fung raises an intriguing question: What are the defining characteristics of that four-fifths which can be labeled as “neurotypical”?

For one thing, neurotypicals in a very real sense use a different language from people who are neurodivergent. A 2021 study in the scientific magazine Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders found that autistic individuals struggle to identify angry facial expressions when they are conveyed at a speed that neurotypical people find “normal.” That finding reinforces what scientists already know about the so-called “double empathy problem,” or the fact that neurotypical people rely heavily on style, tone and other non-verbal aspects of communication that go right over the heads of many autistic individuals.

PhD researcher Connor Keating, the lead author of the study, elaborated on this issue in an email to Salon at the time. Keating explained that empathy involves both how one instinctively expresses emotions and how one develops certain expectations based on previous social interactions. Since these experiences can be very different for autistic people. this leads to a communication breakdown.

“The double empathy problem was conceptualized by Damian Milton, an autistic academic,” Keating explained. “Many autistic individuals over the years have endorsed the double empathy idea, agreeing that it matches their own experiences.” His study helped demonstrate that “a difficulty recognizing moving, rather than still, angry expressions is associated with autism.”

Building off of Keating’s study and others like it, one can partially define neurotypicals as being individuals whose neurological “language” is that of the majority. If you conceptualize communication styles as existing on a chart, that graph would be shaped like a bell curve, and neurotypicals are the people who rest on the meaty section in the middle.

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“When we talk about neurodiversity, we refer to the diversity of brain functions and behaviors of all people, neurodiverse and neurotypical,” Fung wrote to Salon. “Neurodiverse people represent a large spectrum of presentations. If you know a neurodivergent person, you know only one neurodivergent person.”

After explaining that roughly 20% of the world’s population has neurodivergent conditions “such as autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia,” Fung elaborated that “more and more neuroscience findings have found that specific behavioral traits in a given neurodiverse condition are controlled by brain regions distinctly different from neurotypical people.” As one example, neurodivergent children tend to use brain regions that neurotypicals utilize to process faces in order to solve mathematical problems. This helps illustrate how, to return to the bell curve analogy, “We speculate that there is ‘typical’ neurobiology for neurotypical people who represent the middle part of the bell-shaped curve. The neurobiology of the neurodiverse people represents more of the extremes of the bell-shaped curve.”

At the same time, there is more to being neurotypical than not being a statistical outlier. Neurotypicality is also characterized by (to again quote Fung) how their “abilities in different domains of intelligence” tend to be similar to each other. “For example, the verbal IQ and non-verbal IQ (which assess visuospatial, mathematical, and logical abilities) for a neurotypical person tend to be relatively uniform,” Fung observed. “However, neurodiverse people have distinctly different levels of abilities in various domains,” so that for instance “an autistic individual can be superior in non-verbal IQ and below average in verbal IQ.” Additionally, there are intellectual abilities that cannot be measured by IQ tests “such as athletic, naturalistic, intrapersonal, interpersonal, existential abilities. Some autistic individuals may struggle interpersonally, while they can be very good in science and mathematics.”

Perhaps the best way to sum up what it means to be neurotypical is the definition by Dr. Catherine Lord, the George Tarjan Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Education at UCLA’s Semel Institute of Neuroscience and Human Behavior.

“I think neurotypicals just means anyone who doesn’t have identify or hasn’t been identified as having whatever identity is being focused on within neurodiversity,” Lord wrote to Salon. “Though I don’t have autism, and probably would be referred to as neurotypical by some people, I think other people would call me all kinds of things!”

It seems to be best to allow each person who learns about autism spectrum disorders to — based on their own honest self-appraisals — determine for themselves the exact nature of their own neurology. As Brady put it when explaining why she wrote her book “Strong Female Character,” “Very early on I learned it’s not really safe to talk to most neurotypical people about autism.” She noted that for autistic people to be better understood and better treated by society, “All the progress and change that’s happening is gonna come from autistic people themselves.” Similarly, for neurotypicality to be better understood, individuals who do not fall on the autism spectrum will need to better familiarize themselves with the nature of the unique neurological language that they speak.

Per the 2021 study from the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders: “It may not be accurate to talk about autistic people as having an ‘impairment’ or ‘deficit’ in recognizing emotion — it’s more that autistic and non-autistic faces may be speaking a different language when it comes to conveying emotion.”