Post #3953588

One of the things I find interesting about neurodivergence is how the similarities of different neurologies also reveal their contrasts. I might say some things that don’t hit perfectly accurate for autistic folks, so feel free to clarify your experience below, just how it seems to me from outside having lots of autistic friends and lovers. Take tags on shirts for example. For mostly autistic folks, from what I understand, the irritation of the tags is something that contributes to overstimulation and is primarily a sensory sensitivity / overload experience. For many primarily ADHD brains like mine, while there can be some of the sensory overload elements, the bigger thing is it is repetitively distracting! It makes it hard to focus or keep my attention on things. It keeps yanking my brain to this sensation going “what’s that?!” I see a similar contrast with auditory processing challenges. For many autistic folks, it seems like it’s primarily a problem of not being able to filter out other sounds leading to overload and overstimulation, or being unable to even parse the noise coming in to get a signal of the voice you’re trying to listen to out of it. For many primarily ADHD brains, it’s more the struggle of keeping your brain focused on a single voice in a crowd. You can filter, but your brain keeps getting tugged away to filter into other noises or voices and dragging attention away. So I’ll often ask people to repeat themselves because I just need to focus back from my distraction, whereas I’ve seen for some autistic folks that repeating doesn’t help at all because there’s just no parsing the noise at that point, and you need to get to a quieter environment.