what does it mean to be neurotypical

Neurotypical or NT, an abbreviation of neurologically typical, is a neologism widely used in the autistic community as a label for people who are not on the autism spectrum. However, the term eventually became narrowed to refer to those with strictly typical neurology; that is, people without a defined neurological disorder.

In other words, this refers to anyone who does not have any developmental disabilities such as autism, developmental coordination disorder or ADHD. The term was later adopted by both the neurodiversity movement and the scientific community

In recent times, people with any sort of mental disability, whether congenital or acquired, have also been excluded from many uses of the neurotypical label. In this sense, the term is now contrasted to neurodivergent, ND or neuroatypical, an umbrella term inclusive of people with diverse mental and behavioral disorders, such as mood, anxiety, dissociative, psychotic, personality and eating disorders. The conditions themselves, following the neurodiversity and social construction of disability models and in distance from the hegemonic medical model of disability (otherwise known in the neurodiversity community as the pathology paradigm), are often referred to as neurodivergences, that is, neurotypes that are divergent from a given social and medical norm.