We know that we behave and think differently. We generally have more difficulty with social situation and are hypersensitive to sensory input. But to me, these seem like impacts of a fundamental difference. For example, we have social difficulties in NT environments because something with our neurotype is different. What is that fundamental difference that manifests into the symptoms of autism?
So far, my best guess is that we don’t have the filter that NTs have with sensory input. They can decide what sensory information to focus on, allowing them to process information they see as important in real time. Additionally, they seem to be better able to multitask. For us, since we don’t have that filter and multi-core processor, it takes us longer to process sensory input.
The other thing is that since we are more sensitive to sensory stimuli, we can get overwhelmed much easier, which limits our ability to process the info.
These two together make it so that social situations are difficult to navigate. There’s wayy to much information to process in real time for us, so we end up missing a lot of the communication that is going on. For example, a person will send a nonverbal cue of some sort, but since we’re still focused on what they said and processing all the other surrounding stimuli, we miss it. Maybe much later, when alone and reviewing the interaction or discussing it with a friend, we might finally get to the nonverbal cue and realize we missed it.
What do you guys think? Am I on track? Are there other fundamental differences between neurotypes?
Windows NT is a proprietary kernel developed by Microsoft. Autism is free and open source brainware.
Also, Windows NT is no longer supported while the support for brains running autism has only grown over the last few years and no general end-of-life date has been announced for that support.
Are you familiar with the theory of predictive processing? If not, look it up esp. In relation to autism. Tldr: human brains do not process information to form an image of the world, but we predict what the world may look like at any given moment. We use our sensory input only to correct errors in our prediction. There are two thing at play with autism here. 1. We are aware of more errors than NTs (inability to sift critical errors from non-critical ones) 2. When human brains detect an error it can choose to believe the input or the prediction. NT brains assign higher value to normative rules (sometimes they value input more and other times the prediction (internalized belief)) While autistic brains give more value to sensory input. Anyway, this is what I know of the current state of neurological difference, but I’m no scientist.
This one is interesting:
https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/me-and-monotropism-unified-theory-autism
omg, this is what I was looking for. thank you very much. special interest focus, activate!! 🦸
It said too many local connections, not enough long range connections, ie get stuck on details and no big picture. It’s pretty close to what I know as autism, but in medical jargon. It doesn’t state an important known part though, in that autistic left/right hemisphere utilization is the opposite of a normal brain. Normal is something like 45 left/55 right, autistic is 55 left/45 right. If you’ll notice, autism causes issues with all skills considered to be right brain (language, emotions, spatial, etc)…
tl;dr overthink step 1, forgot step 2 though 9, last step failed, meltdown
Yes, I believe that you are on track. It is mostly sensitivity that makes us overwhelmed a lot, which can cause the symptom of freezing (like, standing still completely) or panicking.
The upside of it is that it makes it possible to go much more into depth with complicated topics than NT people, the downside is not performing well in crowded areas.