Autistic people of Reddit, what is autism really like?

19YO, Mild form of high functioning PDD-NOS here.

Information reaches my consciousness in a pure, untouched form. I become aware of my surroundings before my brain has the time to make something out of it, basically. I have to actively process all the unfiltered sounds, visuals and conversations in my head in order to understand the meaning of most of it. I've got a fine example from an everyday situation to illustrate what I mean:

I just had dinner with my family, and I found myself in the kitchen to grab something. There were some dishes left on the table, and my mother was cleaning the dishes, so she asked me the following question: "Can you please bring me what's left on the table?" My brain instantly imaged an empty table. Completely empty. While, as a matter of fact, there were many objects on the table that were not supposed to be taken away, such as candles, a plant and some magazines. Those objects were always laying around on the table. In less than a few milliseconds, my brain converted the raw input to: "Bring the plates to my mother, and leave the rest." My brain made sense out of the context, by quickly analyzing the situation and associating the context with the question. It's never the other way around.

This example is merely a snapshot of my brain. My brain constantly does this, in every waking second. I hardly even notice that it happens at all, because analyzing the situation and making assumptions to what the meaning of everything is, has almost become some kind of superhuman power that is constantly running in my head. I have subconsciously studied human emotions and behavior, and created some kind of intricate program in my head that almost algorithmically makes all kinds of associations with situations from my memory to make sense of what is happening in real time. Every word gets checked. My brain constantly connects the dots. It also means that I always make many associations that are out of context. A direct result from this, is that I can solve problems in a creative way, make the worst puns you can possibly imagine, and thinks many steps ahead in most situations. I have another example to illustrate this:

People tend to ask questions like 'you will never guess who I just met', or 'guess what I found yesterday', when they are excited to tell you something they personally find very interesting. These kind of questions are rhetoric. You are not supposed to guess the answer, let alone overestimate the answer. It takes away the excitement when somebody says 'you never guess how much I won in the lottery,' and you answer with 'ten million dollars,' while the actual answer is like ten grand. I know that the best thing to do is to say 'fifty bucks', or something like that, in order not to ruin the surprise. My brain however, always instantly tries to get it right subconsciously, and it is not uncommon for me to blurt out some joy-killing answer. I have had some encounters that are almost scary, where I guessed correct answers on very trivial questions without even hesitating for a second.

For example, a friend of mine had a conversation with me for the first time in several months, and he asked 'you will never guess what I'm currently doing'. Without even giving myself the time to contemplate what the consequences of giving a very specific answer would be, I just instantly typed the answer: it was a game we used to play more than three years ago. There was no possible way for me to know that this would be the correct answer, yet it was. For some reason, my brain made such wild associations that it guessed the answer to one of the most vague questions a human being could possibly ask, in a matter of mere milliseconds, with more confidence than my conscious mind would ever have. I understand that it sounds far-fetched, but ridiculous things like this happen almost on a weekly basis. I have got several more examples of similar cases I can't even explain myself.

To summarize: My brain is a computer and my body a bundle of sensors. My consciousness receives both the sensory input of my body and the output of my brain, constantly, and my conscious mind can then decide what to do with the data. It's almost like I'm looking at myself from a third person perspective. It feels like it sometimes, and it can be very frustrating in some situations. Especially when my algorithmic brain crashes due to overflow or a uncommon situations; my brain can only handle so much information, and if there is too much physical input, it just crashes.

/r/AskReddit Thread