A couple of weeks ago I found myself at a study day for work. We went to some sort of location where we had a guest speaker and then participated in a bunch of workshops. As is normal for work study days, everything took longer than it should have and although there was definitely a point to it all, I think it was mostly lost on me. It was nice to catch up with some coworkers though.
But one thing from this study day stuck with me. The guest speaker we had gave some tips about teaching and being a cohesive team instead of a bunch of people working in each other’s vague vicinity. He was honestly a pretty good speaker, used humor and had a very clear speaking voice. Then at some point during the talk, he was talking about how we retain information and how our memory works, and he said something interesting.
He said that we save a lot of information without ever actually processing it. So when someone says a sentence in our vicinity and then says our name at the end, we’ll be able to still “hear” this sentence even though we weren’t originally paying attention to it. Of course this has its limits, but this was something he told us. But that experience didn’t resonate with me at all, so I started thinking about it.
And I think that perhaps this is less true for (some) people with autism. One thing that is made very clear when we talk about the issues that come with autism is the way we process incoming information. To be more specific (and I am generalizing here, it’s a spectrum for a reason after all), people with autism have brains that will often try to process every little bit of information. My theory is that this causes that filter that the speaker talked about to not work as well. Let me give you an example from my own experience.
In the Netherlands we celebrate birthdays by sitting in a circle and drinking coffee and eating cake. That may be very normal to most people, but I’ve also heard some people from other countries call it weird. Either way, one thing that I really struggle with is when someone asks me a question on one of these birthday parties. I notice that a lot of other people are able to answer the questions they’re asked, but it feels as if my brain only kicks in at the point where it hears my name and then the question has been asked already and I need to ask people to repeat it. That’s something I end up doing a lot in general, asking people to repeat themselves. I feel like I have to do this a lot more often than other people, and your memory not filtering those questions correctly could be a good explanation for it.
I brought this topic up with my social worker. He’s not a psychologist or anything, but he does have experience working with people with autism, so I asked him if it’s something he’d heard before. He didn’t think it was something that someone had specifically mentioned to him before, but he agreed that what I said sounded logical. My theory is that our brains try to squeeze everything that happens around us directly into our actual memory instead of filtering it out before that point, which would mean that sometimes we can catch what someone is saying to us, but other times we were instead using that part of our brain to understand what color the feathers on the bird in the tree across the street was, because clearly that’s more important to process.
Now mind you, I’m an expert at living with autism, but I have no real studies done on the subject, so all of this is just me trying to explain what I’m experiencing. Perhaps the way our brains work is very different from what I just described, but I thought it was at least a little bit interesting that my lived experience was so different from what this guest speaker talked to us about. If any of you have any experiences surrounding this or perhaps you have thoughts about this subject, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment down below and as always, thanks for reading.
Opal Kaharis 
As someone who was just diagnosed in adulthood, I’ve been reflecting a lot on this very topic over the past few days. I’ve also started to wonder how much something as simple as watching the feathers of a bird in a tree across the street might serve a protective function. If our brains really do take in all the sensory information around us, then maybe—especially when things get overwhelming—they latch onto something soothing, something that creates a buffer between us and the outside chaos.
I recently found myself thinking back to a horrific car accident I witnessed before I even turned 10. While I clearly remember the general outcome, what’s always stood out most in that memory is the fabric of the pants worn by one of the individuals who lost his life. That detail felt strange to focus on—but now that the memory has resurfaced (after being tucked away behind dissociative barriers for at least three decades), I’m starting to see it differently. Since learning I’m on the spectrum (in addition to having a dissociative disorder), that hyperfocus on a seemingly random detail is beginning to make more sense—at least to me. I could be wrong, of course—it’s only been two days since the diagnosis—but somehow, it feels like a piece of the puzzle is finally clicking into place.
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