Autistic people are bottom up thinkers

"Autistic people are bottom-up thinkers" 

I've seen a lot of people saying this on social media recently, and I think what this actually means is getting lost in translation. 

Mainly because most explanations say something like "autistic people need all the details about something before they can understand it." 

But I think explanations like this miss some of the key reasons bottom-up processing happens in the first place. 

So I'm going to explain what bottom-up processing is by explaining what's actually happening in the brain and why. I think it will make the concept more concrete and easier to understand.

So... bottom-up processing has to do with the way the brain takes in information. 

Specifically, what the brain decides to do with the information it's taking in.

To explain bottom up, I'll first start with what top down looks like. 

Top-down processing brains make a lot of very quick (unconscious) assumptions about what the information it's taking in means, usually based on a loose understanding of the context.

These brains don't worry too much about getting it wrong. They're mainly focused on efficiency. 

So when top-down brains are exposed to new information, they are quick to assume what's important and to discard what isn't. 

They're perfectly comfortable making adjustments later if the initial assumptions they made turn out to be incorrect. 

This is a tradeoff the top-down processing brain considers worthwhile. Efficiency over accuracy. 

(Particularly in early information gathering, which it sees as adjustable later.)

But bottom-up processing brains often don't consider this tradeoff worthwhile. 

Mainly because our brains see the potential risk of getting it wrong, and therefore applying the information incorrectly, as too high of a cost.

So, we need to first understand the bigger picture before we can make judgements on whether or not to discard information or hold onto it because it's critically important. 

So, without understanding the bigger picture, in other words, how the pieces of information fit (or don't fit) inside of it, we get stuck in information overload. 

It's essentially a form of analysis paralysis. 

But show us the bigger picture first and watch how quickly we process new information. 

It'll happen at light speed.

Here's a personal example so you can see how bottom-up processing might show up in real life.

All my life I have struggled to enjoy watching new movies. 

Sometimes I've been pleasantly surprised, but most of the time, I've left a new movie feeling like it was a giant (and extremely unenjoyable) waste of my time.

At some point, I discovered that reading the premise and plot ahead of time significantly improved my experience. 

But not always.

Here's where bottom-up processing comes in.

There were actually two things going on at the same time for me in these instances. 

1. If I didn't know what the premise/plot was, I had no idea what to do with the information being shared for at least the first quarter of the movie. 

That’s like 30 minutes of new information my brain is trying to hold onto "just in case." 

Which is both exhausting and extremely NOT enjoyable. 

(Even if I ended up enjoying the movie when it was over, the experience as a whole did not feel good to me.)

2. At least half (if not way more) of the time, the movie just wasn't for me. But I had to sit through 2 hours of information overload (and don't even get me started on the sensory experience of it all) to figure that out.

So, best case scenario, I ended up enjoying the movie as a whole, but not the experience of getting to the end of it.

And worst case, I ended up feeling (mildly) tortured, mentally and physically, for absolutely no worthwhile payoff. 

(And please don't come at me for using the word tortured. That's an accurate word for my personal lived experience.)

By the way, the need for autistic people to see the bigger picture first is actually a well known learning "difference" called "whole to part" learning. 

Think of it like needing to see the picture on the puzzle box before knowing what to do with the pieces. 

And I put "difference" in quotes because I actually believe this is not a difference in learning needs at all. 

Based on everything I know about how adults learn (as an adult learning expert with over 20 years in the field) and what I know about how children learn, I think all humans would learn better this way if given the option. 

(Unfortunately, early childhood education is not structured this way. And I do think this needs to change. But I digress.)

I think the "difference" is actually more about tolerance levels to lack of context than an actual difference in how we learn.

And that nonautistic people just tolerate lack of context better than autistic people. 

But that's a topic for a whole other post.