Mastodawn

The truth is, we autistic people take in a lot!

Both on a sensory level (such as visually) and cognitively (so in terms of information).

When scientists were able to investigate the signals between eye and brain, they were surprised to find that most of the signals moved brain-to-eye, when seeing – and not eye-to-brain, as predicted.

👁️ ⬅️ 🧠

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That means that we humans rely a great deal on priors. Stuff we already know.

We are actually ‘seeing’ far less of what’s in front of us that we’d imagine. We’re mostly ‘filling in the gaps’…

It does make sense, of course. I guess that’s how you can drive all the way home from work without noticing.

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I’m remembering an anecdote about a time Lorna Wing was looking at a dolls’ house with a young autistic boy.

She pointed at the bed and asked, “What’s this?” He answered, “A bed.” She pointed at the cover. He said, “A quilt.” Finally, she pointed at the pillow. He replied, “It’s a piece of ravioli.”

Somewhat astonished, she looked more closely – and saw that it did indeed look just like a piece of ravioli.

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In effect, the boy was not allowing his pre-existing beliefs to cloud his judgement about that piece of ravioli on the bed 😉

All told, could it be that, as autistic people, we’re simply taking in more signals from the outside world than most?

The research of Pellicano and Burr suggests autistic perception seems indeed to rely less heavily on expectations and preconceptions than the norm.

We may, in fact, be more ‘eye to brain’, so to speak.

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All of this means it can be a) more tiring, and b) more time-consuming for us to move through the world, taking it in.

This can make everyday environments more effortful (more processing load, more filtering required), which can feel more tiring and sometimes slower.

This could also account for why autistic people need a lot of low-stimulus downtime, to recover from it all. Anyone would!

End of thread 🧵

Refs below.

x0 Feb 25

@KatyElphinstone This likely has a direct connection to the phrase "just tune it out" that we get all the time, especially with hearing and auditory processing. For whatever reason, I guess the NT brain just has better active filtering on the senses than the autistic brain? I'm blind, but from what I understand that degree of filtering is virtually required for vision to function, as the eyes generate a ton of spurious information such as motion blur on their own, not to mention the sheer amount of detail they can capture, and so the brain subjects it to heavy filtering to try and build a coherent mental perception. With ears, all the info is coming into the auditory cortex which also has to build a coherent mental perception (sound) out of it. And I guess that either the auditory cortex or whatever its output goes to just can have different degrees of filtering? These can be slightly manipulated by people, actually. It's a myth that blind people literally *hear* better than people who are not blind, but the case could theoretically be made that they *listen* better? Their brain, consciously or subconsciously, assigned more processing to their ears than a person who has to spend all that bandwidth on visual input instead. Although I haven't looked at correlations between blindness and auditory processing disorders and likelihood of overstimulation, I wonder if anyone's done research on that!
Edit: Not sure about auditory processing disorders and overstimulation specifically, but there is certainly evidence to suggest that the auditory cortex adapts itself to be more capable of perceiving detail. The example they use here in sound frequency and motion, and the frequency part might have something to do with that anecdotal correlation between blindness and enhanced pitch perception and musicality. https://www.washington.edu/news/2019/04/22/brains-of-blind-people-adapt-to-sharpen-sense-of-hearing-study-shows/

Brains of blind people adapt to sharpen sense of hearing, study shows

Research from the University of Washington uses functional MRI to identify two differences in the brains of blind individuals -- differences that might be responsible for their abilities to make...

UW News

@x0

The bandwidth idea is fascinating. I've spent time thinking about that in relation to social interactions and cues - that autistic people may develop expertise simply in areas other than human socialization. Most humans are not aware of how much bandwidth is dedicated to that topic, never having thought about it (fish: what is water?), & then think autistic people are somehow endowed with incredible/unusual ability.

x0 Feb 25

@KatyElphinstone I assume the existence of the concept of mental bandwidth, but I think most people would agree it's a thing, although one could get into arguments about specializations of certain areas of the brain and how that contributes to things, since it's not just like a CPU that has to execute one stream of instructions. Overstimulation follows simply from there, not having enough bandwidth left to process all the incoming info. Certain kinds of brains that need specific levels of multitasking to keep themselves on track and productive have a minimum bandwidth requirement, otherwise that unused bandwidth is given to ADHD kinds of random thoughts. Drugs, life events, and sleep among many things are known to affect it regardless of what brain you're talkingabout.

compost_funeral Feb 26

@x0 @KatyElphinstone The hardest part of AuDHD is imo this conflict in bandwidth requirements. To actually function, all bandwidth must be filled, I think of it like "slots" (hands, brain, mouth). But filling each slot is inherently slightly overwhelming. So you end up with a hard division between all-slots-full productive time and absolutely crashing, which makes it hard to work at a consistent pace alongside others.

@compost_funeral @x0 @KatyElphinstone I haven't heard this from anybody else but yes! I have to keep my brain from getting bored of work and listening to instrumental or well-known music helps.

Novelty or lyrics generally tend to defeat the purpose and my brain focuses *only* on that input but I can get into a productive groove if I provide just enough non-distracting stimulus.

Doodling or fidgets seem to occupy a similar "keep the distractible monkey mind busy while we do stuff" space.

@gooba42 @compost_funeral @KatyElphinstone I, myself, do not do background music, it's too problematic for my attention, but that might be a case of a problematic overlap, as i'm blind and thus my computer speaks to me. SO trying to be productive while listening to music turns into having to work with two completely incongruous inputs with the same senses, both hearing. I imagine someone who is primarily working with their eyes might have an easier time of it, because they don't have to spend so much mental effort getting the signal from the noise. Agreed on lyrics though, even when i listen to music in general I prefer instrumental electronic music, but even then I'm focusing on it. Listening to it in the car etc.

@x0 @compost_funeral @KatyElphinstone Absolutely, I could see doubling-up on a single channel (be it visual, auditory, or something else) would be massively disruptive. I'm a sighted programmer so I don't have the same limitations on which channels I have open but now I'm thinking about playing with which inputs I add to the "fidget" pool to shape my attention.

@gooba42 @compost_funeral @KatyElphinstone I wonder how viable intensely focusing on, say, reading something while softly petting an animal or interacting with a plushy would work? My mind doesn't handle multiple streams very well, if I'm spending concentration on petting a cat I start to drift on snippets of audio at any normal speed for a blind person though audiobooks are often slow enough by default to not have that problem. I personally know a guy who runs his computer speech at upwards of 600 WPM, has virtual voice conversations with me and others, and is also watching a twitch stream in the background of GDQ or something, all at the same time. Completely baffles me how his brain doesn't melt and how he somehow manages to keep proper attention on everything. My absolute failure to do anything of the sort has resulted in me taking a somewhat negative opinion of neurotypicals who are having an actual conversation with me and are also doing something else at the same time, because I'm under the impression that it compromises their attention, and meanwhile I'm giving them 100% of mine. But my experience with him has had me try and reframe that slightly, or at least I'll look for obvious signs their attention is slipping, like needing me to repeat myself. Hate, hate hate, repeating myself. Especially since I can't guarantee I actually know what all I said! How much am I repeating? A single clause? Or an entire paragraph? It's not as if I draft all my speech ahead of time!

@x0 @compost_funeral @KatyElphinstone When I was much younger, high school or so, I spent a lot of time in IRC where I would regularly keep up with 5 conversations at once and even split threads to have two conversations with one person.

I don't think I can do that anymore but I couldn't say how or why that changed.

@gooba42 @compost_funeral @KatyElphinstone I can have two conversations with one person, verbally or textually, and I can maintain multiple text conversations in general so long as the actual rate of communication isn't ridiculously fast and that the emotional context of all the conversations in question is relatively similar. Having a conversation where I'm very emotionally involved and sad with one person and having a chipper conversation with someone else starts running into context switching overhead, what I saw one website call monotropic split, I think? Effort required to wrench brain from one path to another. Meanwhile, I cannot easily maintain an ongoing voice conversation while doing that, and if I'm on a voice chat platform and people are talking even in the background it disrupts my ability to write and read, but again, screen reader.

@gooba42 @compost_funeral @KatyElphinstone The multiple conversations with one person often ends up interleaved for me in the same thread, but that might be a platform limitation really, since we're talking about typical DMs where there aren't threads or they're too clunky to use. When doing so it's usually easy enough for me to pick out which of the ongoing threads a given message belongs to, and typically the conversations differ enough that I assume it is for the other, unless someone starts responding with ambiguous answers, like just yes or no when multiple questions were asked, at which point I'll clarify did you mean in response to this or this. Having a system that can mark what message you are replying to there helps disambiguate that. Pretty sure I've maintained up to 5 parallel threads of conversation with a person once.

@gooba42 @compost_funeral @KatyElphinstone It started as one or two conversations but sort of branched into deeper rabbit holes in parallel, and later collapsed into less streams. Somehow I didn't run into serious bouncy ball brain while doing that. If neurotypicals are so obsessed with multitasking, how come they don't tend to communicate like that? They'll also maintain plenty of parallel text conversations I think, but I'm unsure how many will do parallel conversations streams with one person. Why change the subject? Just add a subject!

@x0 @compost_funeral @KatyElphinstone Now I'm wondering if there's maybe a split between discretionary bandwidth and dedicated bandwidth.

Auditory gets X amount of bandwidth until you're paying attention to it, then some of the discretionary bandwidth gets reallocated.

With ADHD in the mix, it's less like missing stuff and more like that discretionary bandwidth isn't tacked down. "I heard it but couldn't interpret it" is a thing that happens for me.

@gooba42 @compost_funeral @KatyElphinstone I also likely have some sort of auditory processing disorder, I can handle one (simple) background element and one forground element. Ambient music might actually be doable, but I prefer EDM and dubstep and that isn't the kind of music that lends itself to background. I haven't tried jazz because as a musician I'll start focusing on the playing.

@gooba42 @compost_funeral @KatyElphinstone Sorry, does anyone here want to be removed from the thread? There's a third person that got pulled in somehow and IDK how that even happened, boost maybe? And Katy's mentions are probably getting blown up by far more than just me.