Anne-Laure Le Cunff

Given the extent of overlap between the conditions, the under-diagnosis of females who instead present with anxiety, depression or eating disorders, and the estimated prevalence of each condition, a reasonable estimate of all neurominorities within the population is around 15–20%, i.e. a significant minority.

Educational neuroscience is a thriving field of research, and there are many excellent and doubtless well-meaning researchers doing rigorous and valuable work in the area. Unfortunately, there are also businesses that want to exploit teachers’ lack of experience and middle-class parental anxieties about school attainment.

A mind garden is not a mind backyard. It’s not about dumping notes in there and forgetting about them. To tend to your garden, you need to plant new ideas. The best way to do this is by replanting stems and cuttings from existing ideas you’ve added to your garden—by consistently taking notes, and combining them together, a bit like grafting.

People think, learn, behave, and experience the world around them in many different ways. Some of this diversity is due to neurological differences. Neurodiversity refers to those variations in neurocognitive functioning.

Central to neurodiversity is the idea that naturally occurring variations in the human brain should be seen as differences rather than deficits. Some people consider neurodiversity to be related to the concept of biodiversity — a term you will mostly see being used for the purpose of advocating for the conservation of species. 

Applied neuroscience explores the applications of neuroscience in real-world settings. Where most of the work in other neuroscientific branches is done in an academic setting, applied neuroscience is used by practitioners — professionals who work in clinics, hospitals, labs, schools, and companies — as a way to support their core discipline.