Theories of Autism
One of the overarching theories of the autistic neurotype that I’ve been most interested in recently is known as the predictive processing (or predictive coding) framework. First, though, it seems important to mention several of the other theories that have been hypothesized over the past few decades. I say “hypothesized” because there’s yet to be a clear consensus about what ties all the experiences and traits associated with the autistic neurotype together. One reason may be that there is such a wide range of autistic presentations. As Dr. Stephen Shore, an autistic advocate, has been quoted as saying: “If you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism.”
Past theories, some that have been debunked and some that continue to be held, included significantly less neurodiversity-affirming lenses. For example, the “Theory of Mind” hypothesis is a belief that autistic people are inherently less able to understand their own and others’ internal thought processes than allistic people. In fact, when autism was initially identified, it was thought to be a form of childhood schizophrenia (a theory that has been debunked).
As our understanding of autism has continued to grow and autistic people’s own report of their experiences has been included in the developing frameworks, several other hypotheses have been explored. I think they’re really well described in 2 books by autistic authors: What I Mean When I Say I'm Autistic: Unpuzzling a Life on the Autism Spectrum, by Annie Kotowicz (she/her), and The Autistic’s Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult, by Sol Smith (he/him). (These are affiliate links.) Therefore, it seems to make more sense to just quote the short sections of those books,
From Annie Kotowicz’s What I Mean When I Say I’m Autistic:
“Seeing autism as a neurotype helps to explain why it has a unique effect on each person. But why does autism create such a wide spectrum of traits? Autistic people process information differently, because our brains are hyper-connected in some places and less connected in others. This difference is visible on brain scans—we have neural pathways that others don’t, like secret passages all over our brains. This results in a torrent of information for each of us to process, including physical sensations and pattern recognition.
By default, everything is intense, which has been called “Intense World Theory.” We survive by filtering some parts out. It’s as if every form of input has a volume knob, and ours are all the way up by default—so we turn some down to compensate, but can’t control which ones. And here’s what creates the variety: Different people filter out different kinds of information.
Then, what we don’t filter out becomes our focus. It’s comforting, and often necessary, to drown out the noise by turning all of our attention to one thing at a time, which has been called ‘Monotropism.’ With such intense focus, we often miss clues about what will happen next in our environment and interactions.
Thus, a lot of autistic distress comes from living in a state of constant surprise. This is one application of ‘Predictive Coding Theory,’ also known as ’Predictive Processing Theory.’
Any of these theories, alone or together, can explain the variety of traits that we label as autism. It affects our social interactions, communication, relationships, physical movements, habits, interests, and sensory experiences—all of which are mentioned in the DSM. However, autism can cause additional effects beyond what the DSM describes, especially when it intersects with co-occurring conditions. There’s a kaleidoscope of ways to be autistic, and that’s why we call it a spectrum.”
From Sol Smith’s The Autistic’s Guide to Self-Discovery:
“Autistics have more synaptic connections than do allistics: 11 percent more is the number usually found in postmortem brain comparisons, but it can run as high as 25 percent. Hyper-connected neurons sound like an advantage, and I suppose there are probably applications where it could be helpful. I'm happy to speculate about some. However, I also want to remind the kind reader that in a world that’s not in tune with extra neural connections, they may not always work in one's favor, especially if they're being used to figure out perpetually if someone is being nice or wants you to drop dead.
In fact, on average, you can count on extra synapses being a liability day to day. For example, an autistic's default mode net-work, or how ‘noisy and active’ a brain is when it's at rest, is 42 percent higher than that of an allistic. That's a lot of cognitive excess, especially when you consider that humans spend more energy on our brains than other mammals do, so much so that our brain's first and foremost goal is to not think as much as possible. Thinking is costly. Autistics fail at this task so much that they would have to do tens of thousands of hours of meditation practice to come close to not thinking as much as an allistic does.”
The Predictive Processing Framework
Sarah Bergenfield is an autistic researcher and coauthor of the book Wired to Feel: Autism as a Condition of Sensory Surplus (affiliate link). She’s spoken extensively about the predictive processing framework as an approach to understanding the mechanisms through which the autistic neurotype operates. Although it’s a fairly complicated concept (at least for my brain) are some aspects of what I understand it to mean: Humans have evolved to be able to effectively process information we gather from our senses to inform how we experience the world. But, instead of taking in the sensory information of every new environment and reprocessing it all every time, humans (like computers) are able to use predictions based on past experiences to anticipate how new environments will look, feel, and behave. We’re then able to notice just the errors in our predictions, or things what stand out as being different, and integrate that into a new conceptualization of what we’re experiencing.
However, autistic people, because of our heightened attention to sensory data and bottom-up processing, tend to notice more errors and expend more effort before we can weigh whether to:
ignore the error,
integrate the information into our current conceptualization, or
try to change something.
The benefits of autistic processing are that we often notice things that non-autistic people might disregard. Sometimes that gives us important information that would be otherwise overlooked and allows us to make better-informed decisions and have more creative or unique perspectives.
The difficulties arise because of the extra energy we expend in doing so. Having to do this in every new environment (or when anything changes in our known environments) can more easily lead to overwhelm and, eventually, burnout. In addition, AuDHDers run the risk of taking in all the information that their autistic cousins do but then acting on it more impulsively, before weighing the options... which could create an added level of difficulty.
Bottom-Up Processing
Finally, I think it’s important to mention another significant aspect of autistic learning and processing: a natural tendency toward inductive or bottom-up thinking. Simply put, autistic folks and AuDHDers are more likely to cast a wide net, pulling in as much information and sensory data as possible, before creating the framework with which to organize and analyze it (for example, the way this handbook was developed).
This differs from the deductive or top-down thinking that many allistic folks are more inclined to excel at. I’ve created the final graphic for this subsection using specific examples to tie together the predictive processing framework and bottom-up thinking, as they seem to go hand-in-hand. When you consider these aspects of the autistic neurotype together, one of the diagnostic criteria (“insistence on sameness, inflexible adherence to routines, or ritualized patterns of verbal or nonverbal behavior”) can be seen as more than just a symptom, but a fundamental need.
Allistics tend to more naturally favor top-down processing, meaning they take in the big picture, first, before beginning to notice and consider the smaller details. They more often employ deductive resoning, in which they start with a general premise and then gather the information they need to either support or disprove it. Seeing the forest first, then trees.
Autistics tend to do more bottom-up processing, meaning we start by taking in the details (via our oft-overworked senses) before starting to draw conclusions on what the big picture could be. This is also known as inductive reasoning and makes us good at formulating questions and, gradually but precisely, drawing conclusions. It might be why we tend to ask more questions and gather more information before feeling like we understand something. People may say we “can’t see the forest for the trees” but we just tend to see and want to understand the trees first. So we can see the forest for the trees, it just takes a little more work.
How the Predictive Processing Framework and Bottom-Up Processing might play out
In school:
Your teacher tells you to read and highlight a section of text- you highlight ¾ of the page because without knowing what you’re expected to do with them, any of the details could be important.
You’re assigned a paper to write, but you have to hand in an outline and a first draft- you end up having to write most of the finished paper first and then use that to create an outline and first draft after the fact.
At work:
Your boss schedules a meeting with you- like many people, you may worry that it’s bad news or that you’re in trouble but you then spend the next hour thinking about any of the potential topics for the meeting and prepare responses for each of them.
You might be known as the one who asks the most questions at meetings, actually reads the employee handbook and points out the things that have changed since the newest version, or is told by their manager to “stay in your lane.” (Yes, that actually happened.)
At home:
Someone rearranges the furniture in your living room while you’re not home- it’s immediately jarring when you walk in and you get really mad at them (even if it ends up being a good configuration or a needed change).
To sum it up, an allistic, an autistic, and an AuDHDer walk into a bar...
The allistic person sees that there’s a fire, turns around, and runs out.
The autistic person sees the fire, notices a broken bottle on the floor, wonders what happened, then turns around and runs out.
The AuDHDer sees that there’s a fire, sees the bottle, runs in to grab it in case it’s evidence or doesn’t notice the fire at all and walks right over to the juke box to pick a song.