I Think, Therefore I Am

Multi-Stranded Thinking With A Perceptual-Window In Wider & Narrower Sizes (Image Credit: Liz Hunt)

Upon learning I was autistic, one of my friends asked me how I think. It wasn’t something I’d thought much about before, but I was immediately intrigued by how challenging the question was to answer. I don’t know if anyone can gain the perspective needed to catalog how their mind works accurately, but below is what I’ve come up with so far.

Multi-Stranded

The best way to start is by describing how I think as multi-stranded. At any given point, multiple strands of thought are happening simultaneously.

I don’t know exactly how many strands there are, but if I had to estimate, I’d say somewhere between 6–18. Each strand runs at its own pace, and most strands’ speeds are variable. Many aspects of the way I think, including the number and velocity of strands, change depending on what I’m doing and feeling. I believe these aspects have also changed somewhat as I’ve aged (not year-by-year, but more on a stage-of-life basis).

Entertaining

There’s always a song, or a snippet of a song, playing on repeat in the background of my thoughts. I hear it very clearly in my head, exactly as it would sound if it were being played aloud (it never plays slower or faster than real-time and is always in full stereo). This song strand is omnipresent. It’s essentially impossible to mute. The first time I can remember it stopping, along with pretty much every other strand of thought in my head, was in my 20s, for however many seconds I was in free-fall during my first bungee jump. On good days I can quiet most strands if I meditate, but seldom this one. It’s critical for the song that’s playing to be one I enjoy. That’s why I do everything I can to avoid situations where I have to listen to jingles or my least favorite genres of music. When an undesirable song gets stuck in my head, I can drown it out and replace it by playing my head-clearing song. Out loud is the fastest and most efficient way, but if that’s not possible for some reason, I can do it in my head via a temporary second song strand. I didn’t figure out how to do either of those things until my 30s.

Masking

Unless I’m alone in a private safe space, a significant amount of attention and energy is always devoted to strands masking my autism. I’ve been doing it since I was a child, but I only recently learned it had a label. One strand is for input — observing and analyzing. I continually watch and listen to what others say and do, then examine how those things work or don’t work in various groups and situations. This strand exists even when I’m relaxing, as I also learn from characters/people in books, tv shows, movies, and podcasts. A second is for output — monitoring and refining. I continually pay attention to what I do/say: compensating for my “resting bitch face” with a slight smile; displaying appropriate facial expressions and body language if they don’t occur naturally; following social niceties plus whatever conventions an environment or group might have (for things such as small talk, meals, and participation); foregrounding the interests of mine that are most relevant and resonant with an event and community (while backgrounding those that aren’t); and repressing most of my natural behaviors and reactions (the ones that make people uncomfortable such as flicking my fingers, flinching at loud sounds/lights/smells, and remaining at the edges of an activity).

For most of my life, these masking strands ran algorithmically in the background at a faster than real-time speed, enabling me to pass as neurotypical. Unfortunately, they’re now running at a comparative crawl due to autistic burnout, long-covid, pandemic isolation, and perimenopause. That has shifted them into the foreground of my awareness, further reducing their effectiveness. Thus, for the moment, my ability to mask is essentially broken (even though its strands still consume a great deal of energy).

Scripting

Since childhood, one strand has been reserved for mentally scripting what I plan to say and do in an upcoming situation. Unlike the output strand I just described, it’s verbal. I mentally hear/say the words of all people in the imagined conversation) and it’s more repetitive (I’ll rehearse the talk numerous times to cover all the likely possibilities I can imagine or a seemingly infinite number of times if, for some reason, I’m feeling exceedingly anxious about it). This strand isn’t always running, but it consumes most of my attention when it is.

Guiding

There’s also been a guiding strand for as long as I can remember. It began as a verbal inner critic — I mentally heard its comments, and nearly everything I said to myself was negative. I eventually learned how to transform the critical voice into a much more supportive guide, and now my feedback to myself comes as a flash of instantaneous understanding, reminding me of whatever I need to know or do.

Monitoring

Another strand that always exists is the one monitoring my energy levels. I was diagnosed with Type 2 Narcolepsy in my early 20s. Though I never unexpectedly lose muscle control or fall asleep, I always feel tired (no matter how much I sleep). It took years of trial and error with my doctor to find an effective regimen of sleep hygiene plus medication. Once I did, I could optimize this strand to run in the background without much effort. When I realized I was autistic, I changed a few of its parameters (so to speak) to accommodate my new understanding of my needs. I set the thresholds a bit lower to give myself more of a buffer, and I’m now monitoring for signs of emotional exhaustion in addition to those of physical exhaustion.

Filtering

One of the courses I took in college was on signal processing. Since then, I’ve dedicated at least one background strand to filtering my perception of the world around me. Like many autistics, I have heightened senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. Mental filtering enables me to take that down a notch or two and ignore some of the more annoying or unpleasant things I sense. For example, when walking somewhere, I try to enhance my awareness of beautiful things such as flora and fauna or unusual things in shop windows (and simultaneously try to tune out things such as traffic noise and exhaust fumes). If I’m in a coworking space, I take a quick mental inventory of the primary things I sense in the environment and then do something similar to focus on whichever ones I find most neutral to pleasant.

Filtering requires a fair amount of energy. It takes more effort to maintain when I’m overwhelmed, exhausted, or ill. Whenever a light, noise, odor, flavor, or sensation becomes overwhelming or painful (like tinnitus, which became incessant a few years ago), I give it its own foreground strand and try to filter it individually. Once that happens, filtering takes ever-increasing amounts of energy and effort to manage (which, in turn, soon requires additional strands and can quickly become a negative feedback loop). I now better understand when to employ one or more of my other autism management techniques or remove myself from an environment.

Everything Else

The remaining strands, most of my conscious attention, are devoted to whatever I’m contemplating and doing. So there’s one or more in the foreground, plus potentially one or more in the background.

Thankfully, my mind has a perceptual window of sorts. Most of the time, I can control its size to focus in different ways on distinct tasks (narrowing it to fewer strands for some and widening it to more strands for others). That control weakens when I’m overwhelmed, exhausted, or ill.

Aphantasic

My whole life, though I’ve always been and felt markedly different, I assumed my mind worked more or less like everyone else’s. The first time I suspected that might not be true was at the beginning of the pandemic in my late 40s when I read an article about a guy who thinks without images. He and I, plus 1–3% of people, have what’s called aphantasia. Scientists who study this inability to visualize imagery say it can include all the senses. On a survey I took at the time, which no longer seems available, I scored 16 out of 80 (the midpoint of the 0–32 aphantasia range).

I don’t see anything in my mind’s eye when I imagine or think, except perhaps occasionally a subliminal flash of a static image that’s so brief and dim it provides an impression more than details (as though a photo of it was on a layer with 30% opacity over a black background). When I close my eyes, it’s almost always dark (though sometimes I see lovely amorphous intertwining blobs of color). My senses of sight, touch, and smell in mental imagery are essentially absent. Within hours or days of an experience, I’m unable to recreate anything about its appearance, sensation, or odor other than perhaps recalling a general label or short description. If asked to visualize a sunset, I don’t experience or see again one of the glorious sunsets I’ve watched during my life. Instead, I’ll contemplate what I recall seeing (how beautiful I thought it was, its color palette of oranges and indigos, how it illuminated the clouds and reflected off the water, the boats in the foreground, and the mountains in the background).

On the other hand, I can easily imagine most familiar noises and flavors vividly in realistic detail. If I read or hear the title of an overplayed song I was forced to listen to in the past, it’ll begin to play in my head. If someone’s notification or alarm goes off, it’ll mentally reverberate for hours afterward. Those are scenarios in which when my head-clearing song comes in most handy. I don’t often cook, but when I do, it’s incredibly beneficial that I’m able to mentally taste how a spice or ingredient will affect the flavor and texture of a dish before adding it.

My experiences aren’t lost or forgotten. Instead, they’re transposed and incorporated into a deep knowing that’s woven throughout the innumerable patterns, algorithms, and filters I’ve been using and iteratively refining since I was a child.

Unlike real life, however, my dreams are hyperphantasic — all of my senses are extraordinarily detailed and realistic. That might be why my memories of dreams are much more vivid and dynamic. They often last much longer than my autobiographical memories.

Flashes Of Instantaneous Understanding

The strands of thought dedicated to whatever I’m actually contemplating and doing are almost always non-verbal and non-visual. I don’t hear/say descriptive words or see images in my head when I’m reading or thinking. Ideas usually come to me as a flash of instantaneous understanding (perhaps, if there were an associated visual, it might appear as a complex node diagram or mind map). These flashes seem shaped by a combination of analytical thinking (based on logically-consistent reasoning), associative thinking (based on patterns and relationships), and constellation thinking (based on interconnected webs of related and more loosely-associated concepts). The only exception is writing. When I compose a post or article, I experiment with phrasing verbally in my head and then mentally say the words as I type. I often speak a final draft aloud to proofread.

I believe I also remember things through these kinds of flashes. My autobiographical memory is relatively poor, but I often seem to have an excellent recall of other knowledge. As far as I can determine, when I read or learn something, I automatically incorporate it into my patterns, algorithms, and filters. Things I’m likely to need in the short- to mid-term are also retained somehow in a more intact form so that they’re more readily accessible and can more easily be shared with others. Depending on what I’m trying to remember, it feels like my recall uses a permutation of analytical, associative, and constellation thought. Like most people these days, I’ve also outsourced a non-trivial amount of my memory to my digital files and the internet. Sometimes the flash I get will be keywords and a location so I can quickly find what I need in my email/drive or online.

Being aphantasic doesn’t mean I have prosopagnosia. My ability to recognize faces and voices is quite strong. Upon seeing someone, if I don’t already remember who they are, I’ll first get a flash of whether my recollection of them is positive or negative. Then, I’ll usually recall a random detail about them (something I found particularly interesting or knew to be of particular importance to them). Remembering a person’s name and where we met takes longer, sometimes much longer. If I’m exhausted or stressed, it might not come back to me until after our interaction has ended. I don’t know why, but I find names exceedingly difficult to remember (when I do, it’s only a first name, I rarely remember anyone’s last name). Once, at a particularly stressful office holiday party, I forgot my partner’s name and had to introduce him with just that label (even though, by that point, we had been living together for years).

Though I call these flashes instantaneous, they aren’t. I believe almost all of them are on strands of thought flowing at paces much faster than real-time. Their speeds vary depending on my energy level and state of being. Occasionally, when I’m exhausted, I get an inkling of how they work. It’s similar, but not nearly as clear, to how one’s perception of time can change during an accident (when something that generally occurs in an instant instead happens step-by-step in exquisite slow motion).

Associative & Constellation Thinking (Image Credit: Liz Hunt)

Multidimensional

I frequently think of things in a multidimensional way. In case an analogy would be helpful… I imagine a tree, but I also simultaneously imagine its branches, leaves, and roots as well as its place in the grove, its grove’s place in the forest, its forest’s place in the world, and the tree’s/grove’s/forest’s impact on one another and the world. Despite not mentally seeing anything, I can easily and quickly reorient myself to observe things from a multitude of spatial perspectives as well as the imagined perspectives of whatever other flora and fauna might be present. The general shape of something and a decent amount of its micro + macro detail comes in the initial flash. As needed, I can repeat the process multiple times — swooping and diving between perspectives as well as into the depths and across the breadths of different aspects of whatever I’m contemplating. When ideating, I release myself from the capabilities and constraints of earth-based biology and physics (so to speak) and let my imagination fly free. That’s why some of my thoughts might seem orthogonal or fanciful. Then, when it’s time to propose potential solutions, not only do I ensure my ideas adhere to all applicable scientific laws (so to speak), but I also infuse my ideas with any and all data and lessons that seem relevant from everything I’ve experienced, learned about, and imagined during my life (negative, neutral, and positive). This multidimensional approach enables me to estimate how something might play out in the short-, mid-, and long-term, the impact it might have on the people or environment within or outside it, and how it might interact with other known or anticipated things happening in parallel or in sequence.

Bespoke

I only recently realized the way I think isn’t typical. I don’t know if it’s unusual only when compared to the general population or if it’s also unique for autistics. I’ve read that there might be more commonalities of brain structures and thought styles among neurotypicals than among autistics. In other words, my understanding is that not only are autistics different from neurotypicals, but each individual autistic person may also be just as different from other autistics. That’s probably one of the reasons they say… If you’ve met one autistic, you’ve met one autistic.

Thanks for reading! Would you like recommendations for what to do when someone tells you they’re autistic? Or to read about my 33 autism management techniques?