#processing differences

Sure no problem. I don’t think I actually covered this topic yet.

Personally, I have been doing oral motor exercises to strengthen and re-coordinate all the muscles in my mouth and jaw to be used properly for speech, as they apparently never developed correctly in the first place and I went to the land of “pretend disabilities and other related issues don’t exist” for K-12.

I’ve also been working on word retrieval strategies as I often get stuck both physically (oral motor issues) and mentally (processing issues). I tend to lean on retrieval strategies that I use with students (phonemic cues, categories, synonyms/antonyms) so we’re really focusing on using them to help myself retrieve words I can’t remember.

Not having my brain running a thousand miles a second and being able to focus for the first time in my life (didn’t expect it to work on the first day as my psychiatrist was rambling about needing a build up period).

But I keep trying to tell my doctors that my autistic self processes things (especially meds) differently.

Psych meds I’ve been lucky to get to 90% on the lowest possible dose or somewhere relatively low.

Asthma and allergy meds I am on what feels like horse med doses and I’m still having issues. Same with acid reflux.

There is literally no middle ground with how my body works. It works on the extremes.

And with the processing things differently comes medication side effects. I either get no side effects or severe adverse reaction/allergy. I can eat right after anesthesia with no problems. Never had side effects from anesthesia. I can’t take morphine or codeine without vomiting anything I injest all over the place.

“People with autism have a greater than normal capacity for processing information even from rapid presentations and are better able to detect information defined as 'critical'”

“Our results suggest that autistic children are not interested in social interactions because their brains generate more information at rest, which we interpret as more introspection in line with early descriptions of the disorder.” 

“A new study has found that the brains of autistic children produce, on average, 42% more information than non-autistic children when in a resting state (Velázquez & Galán, 2013).”

some reading:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120322100313.htm#:~:text=FULL%20STORY-,People%20with%20autism%20have%20a%20greater%20than%20normal%20capacity%20for,than%20normal%20information%20processing%20capacity.

https://autismunderstood.co.uk/autistic-differences/information-processing-differences/#:~:text=The%20majority%20brain%20takes%20in,bits%20of%20information%20coming%20in.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6041130/#:~:text=Abstract,social%20communication%20abilities%20in%20ASD.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10291371/#:~:text=The%20Dual%20Process%20Theory%20of,reduced%20(faster)%20intuitive%20processing.

Where allistics tend to see the “bigger picture”, autistics seem to have a tendency to notice the details and take in the separate aspects of a whole first.

We may also take in and process information differently in general, including being unable to filter out information. Being unable to filter or block out sounds, music or conversations are all examples of this.