Why You Can’t Say That People With Autism Process Stimuli More Slowly

Imagine two people looking at the same photo. That photo represents reality — complete with smells, sounds, and images.

One person takes in the image completely. The other just glances at it quickly.

Who do you think is faster? The latter, of course. But they’ve also looked at it more superficially.

The first person is someone with what we now call autism. The second is someone without.

The reason people with autism process stimuli differently is not because they process it slower, but because they see more depth in a single frame — they look with more detail. So they also perceive more detail. That has nothing to do with speed.

The issue is that looking with this much detail takes a lot more energy. That can lead to overstimulation, meaning you’ve spent a great deal of energy analyzing reality in extreme detail — while others may have just glanced at it briefly.

So the “problem” of autism doesn’t really have to do with autism itself. It’s more about overloading yourself by staying in the same gear for too long.

What helps people with autism far more
We have a lot of “autism” in the family. I don’t take all these diagnoses that seriously anymore — but that’s what we call it now: autism.
What actually helps is having someone around who occasionally helps you shift gears — for example, through a short chat or by distracting you with something else.
Even better is to train yourself to switch tasks more often. For instance, by doing a sport with lots of variation. That gives you a kind of mental flexibility you can apply to all areas of your life.

I've noticed that many people struggle to understand how the brain works. That's why I wrote this short explanation.

 

Level 1

A brain works just like real life: you shouldn't ignore things that are unpleasant. You need both "positive" and "negative" thoughts. Things you like and things you don't.

The brain is a network. Pleasant and unpleasant experiences are all interconnected. Positive and negative thoughts, feelings, and emotions happen simultaneously.

You experience thoughts one by one when you observe them. But they actually occur at the same time, because the entire network of impulses is firing together. All the little “bubbles” light up at once.

So everything is happening right now — both good and bad.

What you should never do:

  • Block things you don’t like — like unpleasant memories or feelings — and they will keep chasing you. Relive them, and they lose their power over you. Your body isn’t trying to mess with you; it wants you to learn from past experiences. And for that, you need negative experiences. If all you had were good ones, you wouldn’t have truly experienced anything.
  • Try to think positively. Because trying to think positively usually means something negative is going on (otherwise, why would you try to be positive?). Face the negative directly and solve it. Resilience is important, of course, but that's something else entirely.
  • Be afraid of "negative" thoughts. You can't get sick from your thoughts. Thoughts are just bursts of electricity — they aren’t good or bad. You assign meaning to them.
  • Become a Buddhist. Buddhists tend to believe that thoughts are worthless because they "distort" your observation of reality. But thoughts are part of reality — just like a coffee mug.

Level 2

All these thoughts, feelings, and memories together form a collective sound in your head—like one voice.

This is how you communicate with your inner world.

The pros do it like this: they send out a collective sound within themselves, feedback comes back, and then you get that inner voice (which is literal sound).

This is how you ‘path’ your own future and see what you have to do to get there. This process is what you call cratation.

Hint: use the vibration.

"The claim of Buddhism is that there is no separate thing that thinks, apart from your thoughts. But the point is that there actually is: you think with all your thoughts at once — only one of them happens to stand out.

The reason one thought stands out is because a neural network works by constantly readjusting relative importance."

The Manual Car

Your brain works like the gears in a manual car.

  • Someone with ADHD keeps switching gears all the time.

  • Someone with autism stays in the same gear for too long (sometimes way too long).

How to switch gears
An easy way is through sports. Choose a sport that constantly forces you to shift gears.
By literally practicing it, switching becomes easier in daily life too.

 

Why the Here and Now Is for People Who Find Life Hard

You have 100 energy points to spend.

You want to spend a tiny bit on the future, because you need to know where you’ll be in half an hour.
You have to spend a little bit on the past, because you need memories — to know where your house is, for instance.
But it's smart to spend the majority on this moment. This step.

If you are you. Like everybody else.

I spend my energy however the f*** I want, so I spend 95 percent on daydreaming and 1 percent on the here and now — that’s how easy life is for me.
But you? You should take it one step at a time, here and now.
It’s already hard enough for you.

World's Best-Kept Secret
The center and the command center in the body is absolutely not the brain. It’s the center.

A brain is an energy distribution device. Or the nervous system is. Or both. It’s the distribution of hundreds of points.