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?
Yea, youre hot on the trail. If I remember correctly, too many neural connections in certain areas of the brain, too few elsewhere. Read up and comment here. Would make good conversation. I havent looked at this stuff in a while.
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
I wonder what that means for left handed autists.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-asymmetric-brain/202212/left-handedness-and-neurodiversity-a-surprising-link
“The researchers found that individuals on the autism spectrum were 2.49 times more likely to be left-handed than people without autism. Altogether, about 28 percent of individuals on the autism spectrum were left-handed as compared to about 10 percent in the general population.”
Good synopsis. Fascinating stuff. Dunno if youve come a cross simon baron cohen on youtube but he goes deep into the neurology of the confuckulation we deal with. He details a study on infants theyve done that he says is pretty much 100% accurate at diagnosing autism in infants. It shows them pictures of human faces and objects. If they prefer looking at objects more than faces they are autistic.