I would say that I'm completely and utterly neuro-typical. I don't have anything interesting to talk about. I don't visualize months as colors, my memory doesn't seem remarkable in any respect, my visual and bodily sensations aren't particularly dull or vivid, etc.

I have experienced some pretty extreme social anxiety many times in my life, but it always totally vanishes when I spend any length of time interacting with people (e.g., because a job requires me to). In fact, I tend to have this sort of attitude about most things. It's not really a matter of being fundamentally neurologically atypical; it's probably just something atypical about your lifestyle that makes you like that.

Is this guy physically atypical? Yeah of course. Most people aren't that strong or agile. It's pretty rare to walk past somebody who's at that level. But does that mean that he's fundamentally any different than most people? Probably not. He's no more remarkable than a dude who's super obese. They have different lifestyles, and it results in different looks and abilities.

I don't want to over-generalize my own experience, but I think there's plenty of truth in what I'm saying. I think there's way too much of an emphasis on being born all special and unique, and way too little on just how much control you have over your mental and physical abilities. I'm perhaps an astonishingly boring case when it comes to these kinds of threads, but it may well be because I wouldn't let an arbitrary mental abnormality stand longer than the duration in which I fail to introspect it.

I think there's a way over-emphasis on and exaggeration of mental oddities in communities like this, and I think it's for a very basic reason of social signaling. In a lot of ways, they function as backhanded compliments. Usually they come in packages of great disadvantages but also epic benefits. High-functioning autism comes to mind, where they claim to have various problems (social etc), but then also have a few super-powers. It's socially easier to sell your identity as a bundle of strengths and weaknesses than it is to stroll around claiming to be 100% awesome.

I don't really know anything about autism or Aspergers or anything, and I certainly don't want to insult anybody who really was born fundamentally neurologically atypical, but I think there's a huge social pitfall in communities like this, where people throw around labels like that way too recklessly. I've read countless posts on here that sounded as if they were bragging about their HF autism or even about how the LW community seems to have an abnormally high saturation of this neurological oddity.

It may be important to note that a lot of psychology seems to have a destructive, politically correct outlook on personality types etc. For example, the Myer-Briggs whatever seems to go out of its way to emphasize that no personality type is "better" than any other, and that they're all just different. Each of them has their advantages and disadvantages, just like a ton of the comments in this thread and others seem to imply.

Well I have a different outlook. I'm striving to be an unmitigated success in everything I care about. I don't want to have advantages and disadvantages; I want only the former. And I think it's possible, or at least much more possible than most people seem to act.

In summary, I think a lot of what passes as "neuro-atypical" is simply the result of various lifestyle factors. I see no reason why you can't simply change from being a visual thinker to a verbal one or whatever. Most discussions seem to make it seem like you just get to announce what kind of thinker you are or what your personality type is (introverted or whatever); way too little seem to discuss which personality types or mental oddities are good, which are bad, and how to switch between them.

Less Wrong perhaps does a lot better of a job on this than most, but still not very good.