Today's episode is about autism and intuition.
With the high rates of sensory information, sensory
processing, that data is coming in fast and processed
fast. Remember the outside world is chaotic.
Autism is an interesting conundrum, a confusing
paradox of socialness balancing on the self,
our intense internal world. meeting the complex
and ever -changing social world. Keep in mind
as we explore autism and intuition episode, keep
in mind autist or autistic means autos, which
means self. Before we begin, I want to take a
moment to mention Daylight Computer Company and
the future of tech. The future of tech is already
here. and it's Daylight Computer Company. It
is too easy and too frequent that our society
and culture are seeing the vast harms of tech
on humans. This is not a good situation. Daylight
Computer Company's DC1 offers the solution. See
the link and use autism for a $50 discount. With
that, The most exciting news of late is Daylight
Kids. Daylight Kids offers kid -friendly devices.
We cannot likely outrun or avoid the tech world.
But we can understand how to use tech and how
these devices should be built. Human life depends
on it. Use autism for $50 discount at Daylight
Kids. So that's autism at Daylight Computer Company
and at Daylight Kids. The future of tech is already
here. Also see chroma light devices, lights designed
for humans. Humans were created from sunlight
and modern life, our modern environments are
neglecting what gives life on earth. Sunlight.
All light have wavelengths. Isolated light wavelengths,
especially shorter wavelengths like blue light,
LED, fluorescent light, and tech light are destruction
to our biology. Dementias and Alzheimer's, obesity,
heart disease, cancers, neurodevelopmental problems,
autoimmune conditions, and so forth are all tied
to this story. With Chromalites, their products
are designed for human biology and their engineering
are foremost with their devices. Use autism for
10 % discount. So let's start autism. and intuition.
Intuition is not some sort of mystical and not
merely emotional. Intuition is a biological process,
and its rapid prediction under uncertainty arises
from the integration from sensory input, interoceptive
signals, emotional salience and memory, and learned
values. We've discussed every one of those components,
every dynamic just mentioned in previous episodes.
Rather than originating from a single gut filling,
intuition emerges from neural loops involving
sensory cortex and some regions such as the posterior
parietal cortex, the anterior insula, the orbital
frontal, and the ventral medial prefrontal cortexes,
anterior cingulate cortex or the ACC, and broader
prefrontal networks and the basal ganglia. We've
discussed each of these regions in pretty good
detail. Now I will admit the orbital frontal
cortex OFC hasn't been discussed that much. We've
discussed it a little bit in the whiteboard series.
but not too much. There's a lot of value here.
Value in decision making. So, for the episode,
I reluctantly will compare and use neurotypical
brains. So, others versus the autistic brain.
In the neurotypical brains, this loop tends to
compress uncertainty into affective impressions.
and it produces fast, socially -tuned judgments.
In autism, altered sensory weighting, a persistent
prediction error, an atypical interoception,
in other words, a mismatch, a balance, a shift,
weighted heavily on the inside versus the outside.
And excitation inhibition imbalance reorganizes
this loop. Intuition becomes less effectively
compressed and more analytically iterative, relying
on explicit internal modeling and repeated prediction
error refinement. Now, if you've paid attention
to the recent whiteboard series episodes, we've
discussed diffusion versus refinement. This is
going to be in play because we're already talking
about the sensory cortexes. These three main
sensory cortexes, cortices such as the visual
cortex, the auditory cortex, and the somatosensory
cortex are big major regions of interest here.
The autistic intuition is not diminished. It's
just weighted differently. It's reconstructed.
Intuition begins in the sensory cortex. But sensory
cortex is not just passive. The visual, auditory,
and somatosensory regions continuously compare
incoming input with predicted input. Remember,
the brain is a prediction machine. It does not
like to work. It only wants to respond. Every
moment the brain is asking, does reality match
expectation? When it does not, this error happens.
Sensory cortex generates prediction errors that
propagate forward through association networks.
Remember the recent episode about the corollary
discharge as well. This is all happening. This
is all connected. All of these previous episodes
are connected. We're just building a grand story
about the autistic phenotype. And so -called
neurotypical brains, these prediction errors
are rapidly filtered. Inhibitory interneurons,
remember the parv albium interneuron, the most
abundant inhibition or GABA, same thing. cells
that we have, inhibitory interneurons suppress
redundant detail and alpha oscillations gate
irrelevant input. We've talked a lot about the
waves, alpha waves, sometimes called oscillations
or sometimes called frequencies. So inhibition
and these oscillations are working to surround
and inhibit uncertainty, unpredictability. and
fit into the social world, the social norm, if
you will. Redundant features are averaged away.
The system compresses detail into just -like
representations so that only the most behaviorally
relevant information survives long enough to
influence intuition. In the Autistic Phenotype,
This compression is reduced. Local inhibitory
tone is weak and excitation is often increased.
Remember this is a seesaw. Remember this is a
push -pull tactic. Our default as humans is go.
Our default is excitation. We use the inhibitory
side inhibition side to kind of balance out so
that excitation being increased, gamma synchrony
within circuitry is stronger and alpha gating
is diminished. Sensory cortex therefore preserves
far more raw information. Subtle timing shifts
and micro -expressions, tonal fluctuations and
environmental problems remain available. to higher
cortical regions. The spotlight of attention.
This is what higher signal fidelity means. Higher
signal fidelity refers to the perseveration of
fine -grained sensory information across cortical
layers. Remember the many columns. Instead of
collapsing input into simplified representations,
docistic phenotypes, sensory systems maintain
high resolution detail. Remember visual thinking
and thinking in pictures and that intense internal
world. Seeing movies at high rates of speed.
These features from the sensory input would normally
be discarded but instead they are processed.
They are encoded and forwarded downstream. to
the cortical processes, sensory processing, sensations
to perceptions. This produces extraordinary perceptual
precision, but it also increases cognitive load
because the system must process more information
simultaneously. This bottom -up precision forms
the foundation of Autistic Intuition, the Autistic
Phenotype. From the sensory cortex, information
flows into the posterior parietal cortex, which
integrates across modalities and constructs salience
maps. Posterior parietal regions determine what
deserves attention and how sensory information
is organized spatially and contextually. Remember,
signal to noise. In the so -called neurotypical
brains, The normal brain, salience is stronger,
biased towards social cues such as faces and
gaze direction, emotional tone and group dynamics.
Prior expectations about people heavily influence
what is noticed. In the autistic phenotype, those
priors are weakened. Incoming sensory likelihoods
carry more weight than social expectation. Parietal
cortex becomes tuned toward anomalies and patterns
and structural inconsistencies. Attention is
pulled toward what does not fit versus what is
socially relevant, what is important for the
social context. This explains why autistic individuals
often notice system errors and logical gaps and
subtle inconsistencies long. before others do.
Our parietal cortex is weighting reality more
heavily than narrative. Truth versus social goals.
The autistic phenotype's intuition therefore
begins not with social impression, but with anomaly
detection. Deep things that is difficult to see.
Next comes the anterior insula, which integrates
bodily signals like heart rate variability, breathing
rhythm, both rate and depth, gut sensations,
autonomic arousal, into subjective feeling states.
Remember the frontal insula, sometimes called
FI, frontal insula and anterior insula or the
same thing. And the insula is very unique, where
it receives brain states, information coming
in from the brain, what's happening in the brain,
and bodily states, bodily signals, and environmental
signals. Those three are the main sources of
data. So the insula is very privileged. And the
neurotypical... Intuition uncertainty is rapidly
converted into visceral experience. A bad vibe
is literally a change in interoceptive mapping.
In the autistic phenotype interoception is frequently
atypical. Internal bodily signals may be muted
delayed or noisy and often overwhelming. This
does not mean that these so -called bodily signals,
these gut feelings, doesn't happen. They're just
processed and have different meaning. Emotional
arousal does not always map cleanly onto conscious
awareness. Because the insula cannot reliably
compress uncertainty into bodily sensation, intuition
processing shifts upward. into cortical networks.
Instead of intuition arriving as a feeling, it
arrives as a thought. This is one of the central
reorganizations of the autistic phenotype's intuition.
Remember, the insula is involved in the salience
network, and it also has the von Economo, sometimes
called spindle neurons, those rapid. cells that
are very unique for social situations. We'll
talk more about them momentarily. The amygdala
operates in parallel, tagging emotional salience,
especially threat, distress, motivation, and
incongruencies, within a few hundred milliseconds.
In many autistic individuals, the amygdala reactivity
is heightened here. Subtle negative cues are
amplified. Tone shifts and posture changes or
inconsistencies in behavior trigger emotional
resonance even when they cannot yet be articulated.
Remember, we are way past the era of this brain
region is responsible for this thing like the
amygdala is responsible for fear. We're way past
that. The amygdala is responsible for all sorts
of emotional salience and motivation, not just
aversive and fear. This produces strong, effective
empathy, particularly for negative emotional
states, but without automatic narrative interpretation.
Autistic individuals often feel something is
wrong. before they know why. Before the social
cue or the social environment, the social tone
even knows why. It's a great air detection method.
So valuation, attaching some value and meaning
and kind of hitting on the orbital frontal cortex.
The orbital frontal cortex assigns value and
meaning to this sensory emotional information.
It computes reward expectancies and evaluates
outcomes and updates predictions. The OFC, the
orbital frontal cortex, receives fast sensory
information. Not raw sensory information, but
very fast early on in the sensory processing
procedure. It receives information fast. In the
neurotypical brain's orbital frontal, valuation
is strongly shaped by social reward, such as
harmony and approval, and affiliation influence
what feels important. Most people are social,
but not all people are social. In autism, valuation
shifts toward internal coherence. and the orbital
frontal cortex prioritizes consistency and evidence
and structural truth over interpersonal smoothing,
over interpersonal relationships, or this so
-called errors, making meaning just to fit into
this social narrative. No, thank you. This supports
accuracy but can appear blunt or rigid externally.
For the people that's evaluating this or experiencing
this from the outside, if this is not you, you
think this is kind of rude or straightforward.
But this is actually just reality. Conflict monitoring
and control and the ACC, the anterior cingulate
cortex. We've talked a lot about the ACC. We
have an episode, early episode, about autism
and adaptive responses and the medial prefrontal
cortex and the ACC. Remember, those two lead
the way for adaptive responses. I just want to
make mention though that the ACC is often paired.
It's often accepted and thought to be as a part
of the medial prefrontal cortex. So the ACC is
often described simply as an air detector. We
have a pretty good whiteboard on this about the
complex and detailed roles, lots of roles with
the ACC. We have that episode with the spindle
neurons. where we map that out, the ACC and the
insula. So see the whiteboard episode about spindle
neurons. The ACC integrates prediction error,
emotional salience, and effort estimation, and
risk reward evaluation, amongst other things.
It answers the question such as, is this outcome
worse than expected? Is continued effort worth
it? Is this uncertainty tolerable and should
control be increased? Remember about leading
the way. Sometimes this area can be hijacked
with those subcortical areas, those emotional
areas. The ACC monitors conflict between competing
interpretations and evaluates whether actions
are producing expected rewards. and signals when
cognitive resources need to be recruited. It
is deeply involved in motivation, persistence,
and adaptive responses, adaptive learning. In
electrophysiological studies, the ACC activity
appears as error -related negativity and sustained
beta oscillations during conflict. It recruits
dorsolateral prefrontal cortex when models need
updating and influences dopaminergic signaling
when reward expectancies are violated. So the
basal ganglia, the dorsal striatum I should say,
and the ventral striatum and the brain stem areas
such as the VTA, ventral tegmental area. are
all involved here. In the normal brain, the ACC
signals attenuate once emotional or social coherence
is restored. Ambiguity is tolerated and the system
moves on. In the autistic phenotype, ACC signals
tends to persist. Prediction error does not resolve
simply because something feels acceptable The
autistic phenotype does not work that way. Risk
-reward evaluation remains active until structural
coherence is achieved. Effort continues until
the model actually makes sense. This is an underrated
aspect of learning. This will never be understood
and the listener of the podcast will likely not
catch this. It's no shot to you. and the professionals,
people in professional roles, PhDs, MDs, and
so forth, the people that study this, people
that study autism, they won't catch this. But
this is a huge part that allows us to enter in
the gate of a learning bout. You must overcome
this before you can learn. Don't miss that. I
want you to understand that the Autistic Phenotype
learns at accelerated rates. The Autistic Intelligence,
Asperger's Little Professors, and so forth is
all in this story. That B3 restricted fixated
interests that are abnormal in intensity or focus
entering into that gate of learning. This is
all happening here. The autistic phenotype's
brain, our brain does not accept, now that's
close enough type of thing. We'll just make sense
of this. This makes sense to us. We'll just fit
this and move on. The autistic brain waits for
a closure, a certainty, an explanation, making
sense of things. Whenever the ACC refuses this
closure, The system enters iterative learning.
For most, these spindle neurons, or sometimes
called Von Economo neurons, are in play here
because of the social aspect, the social influence,
the social dynamics of most people. Spindle neurons
are large and fast, conducting projection neurons
located primarily in the ACC and the anterior
insula. These regions sit at the center of uncertainty
monitoring, interoception, emotional salience,
and value computation, the salience network.
Spindle neurons are recent, are evolutionary
specialized cells found mainly in humans, great
apes, and seditions such as whales and dolphins.
some elephants, more primitive and social creatures.
And they develop largely after birth, reaching
adult levels by early childhood. Their simplified
dendritic structure and large axons suggest that
they function as rapid relays and transmit condensed
outputs from ACC and insula to the frontal and
temporal regions. involved in higher order modeling
and social inference. These are linked to reward
expectancies and punishment anticipation and
social bonding and are positioned to integrate
bodily signals and emotional value and probabilistic
outcomes into fast intuitive judgments. The spindle
neurons, the system develops atypically in autism,
with structural and connectivity differences
observed in the ACC and fronto -insula regions,
along with disrupted white matter pathways that
normally carry spindle neuron projections. Remember
we drew this out in the mini -columns. When this
fast intuition relay is weakened, uncertainty
is no longer efficiently compressed into those
visceral gut signals. And instead prediction
errors remain active in the ACC and force greater
reliance on the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex
modeling and iterative cortical refinement. And
in this framework the autistic phenotype does
not eliminate intuition. Intuition is rerouted
and the loss of rapid spindle neuron mediated
compression shifts intuition processes away from
effective immediacy and toward explicit analyst
helping explain why autistic individuals often
rely on deliberate reasoning and internal stimulation
in situations where neurotypical intuition would
arrive automatically. The spindle neuron disruption
therefore provides a cellular bridge between
altered interoception, persistent ACC signaling,
and the structural driven iterative form of intuition
described throughout this model. The iterative
learning is a recursive loop through which the
autistic phenotype and intuition is constructed.
Sensory cortex provides detailed prediction errors.
The posterior parietal cortex highlights anomalies.
The ACC flags unresolved mismatches. The prefrontal
cortex updates internal models. The basal ganglia
reinforce improvements via dopaminergic learning.
And this system predicts again. This loop repeats
continuously. Remember the episodes on the basal
ganglia. In the so -called normal typical processing,
learning often stops when emotional coherence
is achieved. In the autistic phenotype, learning
stops when structural coherence is achieved.
Insight arrives late. because many little micro
adjustments occur silently. When clarity finally
appears it feels sudden but it represents convergence
after prolonged refinement. This refinement here
does not necessarily mean it doesn't mean those
sensory maps with the norophil it just means
making sense of prediction and running models.
storing databases, and so forth. The prefrontal
cortex plays a central role here, especially
the dorsolateral regions that support working
memory, abstraction, and simulation. The autistic
intuition relies heavily on prefrontal modeling
and individuals mentally test scenarios, track
inconsistencies across time, and build explicit
representations of cause. and effect. The basal
ganglia will consolidate successful predictions
through those dopaminergic reinforcements. Remember
the substantia nigra pars compacta is dopamine.
Substantia pars reticulata is GABA. So we're
talking about the compacta here. And then the
VTA, the ventral tegmental area, and the nucleus
accumbens for those lower subcortical regions
of dopamine. Each improvement strengthens corticostriatal
pathways, and over time, deeply refined models
become automatic within domains of expertise.
This is how iterative learning crystallizes into
intuition. From the outside, this looks like
instinct. Internally, This is the product of
thousands of refinements that accelerate the
rates of information coming in and closing loops
and learning. In the autistic phenotype, diffusion
imaging DTI reveals altered white matter connectivity
patterns in autism. Long -range frontal parietal
and frontal insula tracks may be weaker or less
synchronized, while short -range tracks and local
connectivity within sensory and association cortices
is often stronger. Remember those distal connections
or a problem. The examples of driving on a highway
or an interstate versus a gravel road. This is
how you should look at this. And this creates
increased local processing density. Remember
the visual thinking episodes where there's a
high rates of visual inputs and it's hard to
kind of scan and move on. And reduced global
integration speed, stronger intra -regional coherence,
and weaker cross -network synchronization. Functionally,
this looks like for the autistic phenotype because
autistic cognition becomes internally coherent
before it becomes socially aligned. The outside
world is chaotic. So why would we go there? And
plus, the internal world is more interesting.
Excitation inhibition imbalance further shapes
this architecture. Increased excitation and reduced
inhibition amplify sensory and emotional signals
while prolonging neural activity. The neural
oscillations reflect this profile. Gamma rhythms
bind. Fine sensory detail. Reduced alpha gating
allows more information into awareness. Sustained
beta maintains conflict and cognitive control.
Theta supports emotional memory retrieval and
iterative updating. Together, This oscillatory
pattern favors precision, persistence, and modeling
over rapid compression. Effective empathy mediated
by insula and the amygdala is often intact or
heightened. Cognitive empathy, supported by medial
prefrontal and temporal parietal regions, is
frequently reduced. And this creates a two -stage
intuitive process. Emotional resonance first.
Cognitive interpretation second. Remember, effective
empathy is if you tell me what you're going through,
I will feel it. I will see it. I will live your
experiences. This is very much true. This is
very much a byproduct of the visual thinking
and seeing movies, seeing other people's lives.
There are two episodes. two episodes on supplementing
relationships through visual thinking. The autistic
phenotype will appear lonely, and sometimes that's
true, but most of the time it's not needed. There
are many relationships going on. There are many
experiences on the inside world. The Predictive
Equilibrium differs fundamentally between affective
empathy and cognitive empathy. Neurotypical intuition
compresses uncertainty into filling. The autistic
intuition resolves uncertainty through iteration.
Autistic brains preserve detail, sustain prediction
error, refine internal models, and wait for the
coherence. An uncertainty is constructed, not
assumed. Broader meaning and the architecture
of the self. Remember, the term autism derives
from the Greek autos, meaning self, not selfishness,
not isolation, self -referenced processing. The
biology that gives us autism allows us to be
comfortable within ourselves. The autistic cognition
builds meaning internally rather than inheriting
it socially. We will build our own maps. You
can have your maps built if you wish. We will
build our own maps. This inward architecture
resonates with Carl Jung's observations that
model individuals often search outward. for meaning
while avoiding descent into the inner self. This
is very much where intuition and self -growth,
self -understanding happens. Whether interpreted
psychologically or philosophically, the neurological
parallel is clear. Autistic minds are structured
to model inwardly. Autistic intuition is not
granted by social compression or social development.
It is earned through recursive modeling. Modeling
of the truth. Modeling of finding and discovery
and understanding. Socialness and the complications
can damage this system. When the autistic phenotype
are taught to override internal signals in favor
of external performance. We interrupt the iterative
learning loop that builds certainty and intuition
confidence erodes. Things like ABA, things like
forcing the autistic phenotype to fit in. Can
you fit in or not? The whole complex, the whole
definition of criteria A. People determining
who is socially awkward versus who isn't.