Understanding the neurodivergent experience

Bottom up processing

As children, we see the world through brand new eyes. And when seen for the first time, anything you witness could take on a near miraculous form. Imagine looking at every sunset you perceive as if you were seeing it for the very first time, you would continuously be in awe. As we mature and create memories, we gradually stop perceiving the world as directly, and subconsciously compare and overlay new experiences with a mental library of concepts developed from our memories. In other words, we subconsciously create mental maps and models of the world which we interact with, akin to a desktop interface on a computer, rather than having to deal directly with all the programming underneath it.

While it would be incredible to always see from this gods eye view, we would naturally be bombarded by beauty and wonder in every direction, making even the simplest of daily tasks very difficult to manage. This may be an extreme example, but is somewhat closer to the reality that many neurodivergent individuals face. They are flooded with sensory information that neurotypical people do not take in, and rather than filtering this information through these conceptual overlays created from our past experiences (top down processing), are having to make sense of this sensory information on the fly, otherwise known as bottom up processing. This means that neurodivergent people are often overloaded, and can appear to struggle in areas which other people do not.

Accessibility vs depth and complexity

Essentially, neurodivergent individuals are drowning in complexity, whereas neutrotypical minds excel at simplifying the world into something much more manageable. Rather than purely being a negative thing, neurodivergent individuals are likely to notice patterns and intricate details that others readily miss. They are less likely to perceive the world as being solid, but as a fluctuating process. Rather than seeing everything as separate and discrete, they are able to more readily see the relationships between things that connect them.

Neurodivergent people, particularly autistic individuals, are said to lack social abilities, but the reality is they are navigating congruence between multiple levels of communication: what a person is saying versus what their body language and tone of voice are conveying, what their own meaning-making capacity (which is working on overdrive) and past experiences are telling them, while simultaneously charting the social and cultural contexts this communication is taking place in. Neurotypical people are subconsciously cutting out these excessive details, and are honing in on what they regard as the most essential aspects of communication. But neurodivergent individuals are taking in the entire picture at once, and are flooded with details that are hard to make sense of in a short time frame.