If number of undiagnosed neurodivergent people proves to be significant portion, neurotypical means just people who won the standards war of communication protocol
We never know the number of undiagnosed, many may be just capable of pretending but suffering.
Neurodivergent doesn't mean a failure at communication. That is a very reductive view of such a broad statement. Adding to that the concept of Neurodivergent covers a massive range of things. Someone who is ADHD faces different problems than someone with depression. So nearly everyone may be neurodivergent in some form but the average of communication falls within range of how we do now.
That's not what he's saying. He's referring to neurotypicality as just being the standard that won a standards war, as in a format war like VHS vs Betamax or HD-DVD vs Blu-ray.
There are dozens (perhaps hundreds) of different mental models. There is a single mental model that is neither good nor bad that appears to to cover the largest number of living human beings on the planet. Because this covers the largest number of humans, it holds the title of the standard by which all other mental models are judged. It is the baseline. "Neuro" being "of the nerves" and typical" meaning "common". It is, by definition, neurotypical.
So OP continues the thought with: Consider instead of the mental model that is today's "neurotypical", that some other mental model was shared by the largest number of living humans. Would that other mental model, which could be drastically different, be called the "neurotypical".
The answer, clearly, is: Yes. Simply the definition of the term defines it so.
Neurotypical does mean pretty much exactly that, with only the clarification that while communication is significant, it extends beyond that.
That's a lot of why the terminology "neurotypical" and "neurodivergent" exists in the first place - because at this point, it doesn't even pretend to be an objective measure of mental health, but simply a pair of labels with which to describe the degrees to which people do or do not accord to current societal standards.
For example - posit a society in which it has become socially acceptable and even expected, when you meet someone, to punch them in the face.
If one were to ask a person how they feel about punching other people in the face, it's fairly obvious that the objectively psychologically sound view is that that's a thing they would not and likely could not do.
But to actually act in that way - to be unwilling or even unable to do it in a society in which it's the norm and thus the expected and sanctioned behavior - would be "neurodivergent." The conclusion would be that one must suffer from some psychological or physiological affliction that makes it so that one is unwilling or unable to act in a way that accords with expected behavior or societal norms. That one is "neurodivergent" instead of "neurotypical."
You could make definitions of neurotypical and neurodivergent that were based purely on statistical descriptions of the brain. It wouldn’t have to map onto culture at all. It’s not behaviorally or situationally divergent. It’s neurally divergent.
Behaviour is a translation of underlying brain structure, functions and neuronal networks in a given environmental setting. I don't think that you can just classify into "neurodivergent" and "neurotypical" only based on pure brain anatomy. We are all humans, so everyone has a human brain with slight individual variations.
However, functional differences may occur more often and can be distinctive between groups (which network is more recruited for a certain type of task). These functional differences can translate in variations of performance and adaptation in a given setting. Functional brain imaging is generally used to explore and to search for explanations of observed behaviours, but is rarely used to classify or diagnose people.
So, behavioural observations remain the main criteria for classification.
"Neurotypical" and "neurodivergent" are however more of a social construction than a statistical.
Neurodivergent people are not a homogenous group. You can be neurodivergent in different ways and it influences communication in different ways. It is improbable that one of the neurodivergent subgroups is frequent enough to turn out to be an overall majority. But you're not talking about majority, so what portion of the population would it have to be?
Yeah, I’m pretty sure the whole point of that term is to convey the idea that those people aren’t broken, they’re just different from typical people. And in a society dominated by those with what are now “neurodivergent” minds, they’d be the typical “normal” people.
Funnily though, the very definition of many of the disorders specifically state that they are a significant departure from the norm that cause some kind of life impairment.
So what we’re really saying is, stop treating us like shit and using words that describe us and turning them into derogatory words.
Except, it’s human nature to not be very accepting of people we see as different from us. So I guess we’ll just keep playing these stupid semantic games.
And in a way there is no "normal" to begin with. No one describes or thinks of themselves as "normal" when asked. Everyone in some way or another wishes they could just be Normal. "Normal" is what everyone else is, but not who any one specific person is - it's generally unachievable in a literal sense.
In many ways, being able to pretend is the definition. The normal is a game that works for many people, a shared arrangement that keeps the lights on. But the normal has now grown for millennia and it’s become a personality of its own, and that personality views the myriad personalities as threats to itself. Hence we don’t just follow protocol to trade and handle tasks, we follow it in every moment of our lives, and we can only safely express the non-common part, the insane part, when we’re out away from the group.
These days the operations protocol refuses to coexist with the personal styles, except it strictly defined containers where variation is permitted and encouraged.
Actually "normal" conceptually has not been around for millenia, it's origin is actually only roughly three to four hundred years old and came about during the period where societies started industrializing and jobs began having more specific requirements for whom they hired. Prior to that there wasn't really any idea of what a "normal" person was. Differently abled people were quite regular as losing function to injury, infection or disease was very common and not really seen as creating a different class of person. There's evidence of people who had pretty impairing birth defects like fused limbs who were obviously soldiers or hard labourers given their physical development. Personal mental oddities in the absence of the field of psychology categorizing things were just chalked up to being the way that person was and the way people were was myriad.
In English the word "normal" came into being in the tail end of the 17th century and was borrowed off the word for a 90 degree carpenter square to mean "theoretically fit for all kinds of work" . It's entirely a recent social invention in the grand scheme of things.
A lot of neurodivergent traits seem to be sliders rather than buttons, where it's only neurodivergent if the slider isn't in the middle. I sometimes wonder how many people actually have all their sliders in the middle.
I feel that people with mental disabilities/conditions have latched onto the medical "neurodivergent" term as a political "us against them" label. This can backfire spectacularly.
you have people with minor anxiety calling themselves neurodivergent now. the term has sort of lost all meaning. if everyone is neurodivergent, nobody is.
Maybe the experiment that is "normal" was a fad. We didn't even have a word for it until the 1600's as physical and mental impairments were much more common and it wasn't until mass manufacturing and early sciences became a thing that our cultural obsession with uniformity cropped up.
As we built up science changed models. It stopped trying to find easy universal constants and started looking at the just how naturally variable everything is. Like how cancer is actually not a singular diagnosis but a very large family of vaguely related conditions that all operate and respond in very different ways. Curing the entire disease family is fighting a hydra.
We could very easily revert to a pre "normal" society model but instead of that being informed by ignorance it could be through compassionate study.
Though we got a ways to go. A lot of people are very... passionate about holding onto the label of normal and the "right" for others to only be referred to as deviation.