Glossary

Quick reference. 41 terms, each a brief gloss. The full Definition follows from the gloss page when one exists.

A

Academic Ableism: Systemic oppression in education that disadvantages disabled students by treating certain abilities, like speaking fluently or sitting still, as the standard for learning and intelligence.
Adaptive Functioning: The practical skills and abilities needed for daily independence. In neurodivergent individuals, these skills often follow distinctive patterns that don't align with cognitive abilities, creating natural variation rather than deficit.
ADHD Tax: The accumulation of extra financial and life costs that ADHD people face because their executive function, attention, and time-perception differences collide with systems built around neurotypical expectations.
Agency & Self-Determination: Agency and self-determination are a person's capacity and right to make meaningful choices about their life, identity, supports, and environments, with recognition that they are the ultimate authority on their own experience.
Alexisomia: A neurological variation in bodily awareness in which a person has difficulty recognizing, interpreting, and communicating physical sensations such as hunger, fatigue, pain, and temperature.
Alexithymia: A neurological variation in how people process, identify, and express emotions, involving difficulty naming feelings, distinguishing emotions from physical sensations, and communicating emotional states.
Anomic Aphasia (Anomia): A language difference characterized by difficulty retrieving specific words, especially nouns, while speech remains fluent and comprehension stays intact. Character Count: 162
Autistic Emancipation: The ongoing individual and collective struggle for liberation from oppressive systems and social barriers that marginalize Autistic people, advocating for the freedom to exist without pressure to conform to neurotypical norms. Character Count: 261
Autistic Flat Affect: When an autistic person's face, voice, or body language shows limited emotional expression despite experiencing deep, complex emotions internally—creating a disconnect between felt emotions and how they appear to others.
Autistic Neurolingual Patterns: Distinct communication characteristics expressed by autistic individuals, including personal speech rhythms, accents, vocabulary choices, and non-verbal expressions that form individual linguistic styles and some shared community features. Character Count: 228
Autodidactism: The practice of self-directed learning without formal instruction, often manifesting as a natural strength in neurodivergent individuals who leverage hyperfocus, pattern recognition, and intense interests to develop deep expertise in subjects that capture their attention.

B

Beyond Behaviors Approach: The Beyond Behaviors approach, developed by Dr. Mona Delahooke, is a neurodevelopmental framework that views challenging behaviors as stress responses rather than willful misconduct, focusing on understanding a person's unique nervous system functioning to develop supportive, relationship-based i…

C

Community of Practice: Communities of Practice are groups of people who share interests, learn together through regular interaction, and develop collective wisdom. They create spaces where neurodivergent people can belong authentically, contribute meaningfully, and grow through genuine connection.

E

Epistemic Injustice: Epistemic injustice occurs when people are harmed specifically as knowers: their testimony, interpretations, and lived experience are systematically dismissed or distorted due to prejudice, often leaving neurodivergent people without the language to describe their own reality or the credibility t…

H

Hyper-Empathy: An intensified sensitivity where others' emotions are absorbed as if they were one's own, making it difficult to distinguish between personal feelings and those picked up from people nearby.
Hyperthymesia: A rare ability to remember nearly every day of one’s life in extraordinary detail, including dates, events, and personal experiences that most people would forget.

I

Identity-First Language: Language that places disability terms before "person" (like "Autistic person" or "disabled person"), recognizing disability as an integral part of identity rather than something separate from who someone is.
Indigenous Perspectives on Autism: Knowledge systems from Indigenous peoples worldwide that understand autism through frameworks of spiritual gifts, different ways of being, and community belonging rather than deficit or disorder.
Inspiration Porn: Media that portrays disabled people as inspirational simply because they exist with a disability, serving primarily to make non-disabled people feel better about themselves rather than accurately representing disabled lives.
Interoception & Alexisomia: Your body's ability to sense internal signals like hunger and pain, while alexisomia describes difficulties recognizing or interpreting these bodily sensations, affecting how people respond to their physical needs.
Interpersonal Neurobiology Framework: Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) explores how human relationships directly shape brain development and neural functioning, providing insights into how different neurotypes experience social connection and emotional regulation.

M

Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS): A chronic condition where mast cells inappropriately release inflammatory chemicals throughout the body, causing multisystem symptoms and frequently co-occurring with neurodivergent conditions, hypermobility disorders, and dysautonomia.
Meltdown/Shutdown (Acute Responses to Monotropic Split): Meltdowns and shutdowns are involuntary neurological protective responses that occur when monotropic split exceeds tolerance, with meltdowns expressing overwhelm outwardly through intense visible reactions, while shutdowns direct protective energy inward through withdrawal, both serving as essent…
Misophonia: A neurological condition involving intense emotional and physiological responses to specific trigger sounds, such as chewing, breathing, or repetitive tapping, that cause significant distress and are not attributable to their volume.
Moral Reasoning: How people think through ethical questions to determine right from wrong. Neurodivergent individuals often approach moral decisions with distinctive patterns characterized by analytical depth, systematic thinking, and principled consistency.

N

Neural Pluralism: Neural pluralism, or "neuralpluralism," is how cognition arises from the balanced interaction of multiple specialized brain systems working simultaneously. Each contributes unique processing, creating a neural democracy where thinking emerges from collaboration, not hierarchy.
Neurodivergent Love Locutions: Five ways neurodivergent people express care and connection: infodumping (sharing knowledge), parallel play (shared presence without interaction), support swapping (mutual aid), deep pressure (proprioceptive comfort), and penguin pebbling (exchanging small, resonant objects or media).
Neurodiversity Paradigm: A conceptual framework recognizing neurological differences as natural variations in human diversity, not deficits or disorders to be corrected.
Neuroeducation: Also known as "educational neuroscience," neuroeducation is an interdisciplinary field that draws on neuroscience, psychology, and education to develop teaching approaches grounded in how the brain actually learns.

O

Object Personification: When someone experiences non-living objects as having personalities, feelings, and relationships—a common and meaningful experience for many autistic people that creates genuine emotional connections with their possessions.
Oppression Olympics: A term coined by Elizabeth Martínez for the dynamic where marginalized groups compete to prove whose oppression is worse, undermining the coalition-building needed for collective liberation.

R

Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria (RSD): Intense emotional pain triggered by perceived rejection, criticism, or failure, even when none actually occurred. The response hits fast and feels physical, going far beyond ordinary disappointment.
Representation Gap: The widespread absence or distortion of neurodivergent people in media, culture, and leadership positions, which limits identity development and reinforces stereotypes while excluding neurodivergent perspectives from important decisions.

S

Social Navigation: The process of reading, interpreting, and moving through social situations. For neurodivergent people, it often involves distinct perceptual strategies, higher energy costs, and processing approaches that most social environments were not designed to accommodate.
Structural Ableism: The systematic discrimination against disabled and neurodivergent people built into society's institutions, policies, and practices that treat neurotypical and able-bodied ways of being as the default standard while creating barriers for everyone else.

T

Technoableism: When technology is designed and promoted on the assumption that disability should be eliminated or corrected, rather than recognized as a natural variation worth accommodating.
Temporal Perception Difference: A neurological difference in how the brain processes time-related information, affecting the ability to accurately perceive duration, estimate task length, and intuitively track time's passage in daily life.
Tendril Theory: Neurodivergent minds extend "mental tendrils" during focus, which need gentle retraction for comfortable transitions rather than the painful disruption of abrupt interruptions.
Toolbelt Theory: A self-determination framework that empowers individuals to develop personalized collections of tools, strategies, and solutions they can select from based on specific tasks, environments, personal capabilities, and available resources—replacing prescribed one-size-fits-all approaches with intent…
Transepistemics: A framework for learning from multiple knowledge systems and lifeways to enable non-hierarchical knowledge co-creation across languages, peoples, cultures, and lands.

U

Unmasking (Autistic): The process where autistic people gradually reduce camouflaging behaviors developed to appear neurotypical, allowing their authentic traits to emerge while developing self-acceptance and challenging societal expectations.