Autistic thinking is often described, by non-Autistic people, in the negative. Difficulty with generalisation. Difficulty with abstraction. Difficulty with executive function. It is a strange literature, because it treats the Autistic mind the way a physicist might treat a cloud. A thing whose edges can only be measured by where its influence fails.
We prefer to describe our thinking in its own terms.
Bottom-up and associative
Many of us think from the bottom up. We notice the detail, then assemble it into the pattern. The reverse of the usual direction of travel. It is not slower. It is a different route to the same place, and sometimes to a better one, because we catch things a top-down process skates over.
Many of us think associatively. We see a connection between two things that most people do not treat as connected, because they are separated by a discipline, a domain, a culture, an era, or a convention. This is the thinking that produces insight. It is also the thinking that makes a room go quiet when we say what we just noticed.
Many of us think in deep focus. When something matters to us, the rest of the world can fall away. In that state we can do weeks of ordinary work in a day. We can also forget to eat. We can also find it almost impossible to start, or to stop. The hyperfocus is not a switch. It is a current.
Deep focus and literal thinking
Many of us think literally. When someone says a thing, we believe they mean that thing. This has caused us to be called gullible, naive, difficult, pedantic, or obtuse. It has also caused us to be the first person in the room to say that the emperor is in fact not wearing any clothes, which the room sometimes appreciated and sometimes did not.
Many of us have what is called a special interest, or a SPIN. A subject, or a handful of them, that we know in extraordinary depth, for years or decades, because the topic gives us joy, order, identity, and a way in. These are not distractions. They are often where our best work comes from.
Co-occurring cognitive differences
Some of us have alexithymia. The feelings arrive, often strongly, but the words for them do not. Some of us have aphantasia. No mental images. Some of us have dyscalculia. Numbers without anchor. Some of us have hyperphantasia. Images so vivid the line between memory and hallucination is thin. These are cognitive differences that sit alongside autism, not inside it, and they vary widely between individuals.
There is no one Autistic way of thinking. There are a thousand of them. What they have in common is that they have been, collectively, mostly misdescribed. The system misses the pattern-noticer who could have made the policy better. It misses the strategist who could have seen the risk coming. It misses the writer taking notes in the corner. It misses the engineer who was already halfway through the problem.
The work goes uncounted because the counting was set up wrong.
