A Different Sensory World

Imagine walking into a supermarket. For most people, this is a simple task. You hear background music, see rows of food, smell the bakery, and think about what you need to buy. For an autistic person, this same trip can feel like being hit by a wave. The fluorescent lights might flicker so painfully that they seem to strobe like a disco. The music is not background at all - it is as loud as a drill. The perfume from the cleaner spraying the vegetables smells so strong it makes you gag. The different temperature zones - cold by the freezers, warm by the doors - change so sharply that it feels like stepping in and out of ice baths.

This is not imagination. This is how the world arrives for many autistic people. Their senses take in much more detail than other people’s do. The world is turned up too loud, too bright, too strong. A tag in a shirt can feel like a cactus spine. A loved one’s aftershave can be unbearable, even though they can barely smell it themselves. The phenomenologist would say: the autistic person’s “lifeworld” is one of sensory intensity that others do not share.

Making Sense of People

Now think about conversation. When you chat with a friend, you do not just hear words. You watch their face, notice their tone, see how they stand, and put all this together without thinking. You just “know” they are joking or sad or bored.

Autistic people often have to do all this work deliberately, step by step. It is like trying to understand a foreign language by using a grammar book. Simon Baron-Cohen, a psychologist at Cambridge University, has spent years studying this difference. He says that most people have a strong “drive to identify another person’s emotions and thoughts, and to respond to these with appropriate emotion.” He calls this “empathising.” Autistic people, he suggests, have less of this natural drive - not because they do not care, but because their brains work differently.

Instead, many autistic people have what Baron-Cohen calls a strong drive for “systemising” - “the drive to analyse or construct systems” that “follow rules.” A system could be a timetable, a computer programme, a collection of stamps, or the way traffic lights work. Systems have clear rules and patterns. People do not. This is why an autistic person might be brilliant at coding or remembering every train time, but find a casual coffee morning completely exhausting.

Hans Asperger, the Austrian doctor who first wrote about the condition that now carries his name, saw this back in the 1940s. He called it an “extreme variant of male intelligence.” He noticed that the boys he studied were often clever with facts and patterns but struggled with the unwritten rules of playground games and small talk. He wrote about a mind that was “the essence of subjectivity” yet struggled to understand other people’s inner worlds.

The Experience of Being Different

Frantz Fanon was a psychiatrist and writer from Martinique who wrote about what it feels like to be treated as “other” in a world made by and for people unlike yourself. Though he wrote about racism, not autism, his words help us understand the autistic experience of living in a “neurotypical” world—a world built for non-autistic minds.

Fanon wrote: “I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.” This captures something important. Many autistic people report feeling like they are a thing being studied by others, rather than a person who is understood. They sense that their way of being is seen as a problem to fix, not a way of being to accept.

Fanon also wrote: “Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted.” This helps explain the difficulty of getting non-autistic people to accept that autistic ways of thinking are not wrong, just different. The “core belief” is that there is one normal way to be human. Evidence that autistic people are whole and valuable as they are can be hard for society to accept, because it challenges this deep assumption.

Details and Patterns

Let us return to how autistic people think. The world is full of patterns, and autistic minds are often brilliant at spotting them. While others see the forest, autistic people see every tree, every leaf, every vein on every leaf. Baron-Cohen has said: “In the social world, there is no great benefit to a precise eye for detail, but in the worlds of maths, computing, cataloguing, music, linguistics, engineering, and science, such an eye for detail can lead to success rather than failure.”

This attention to detail is not a choice. It is how perception works for autistic people. They cannot easily filter out the background and focus only on what society says is important. Everything comes through at similar volume. This is why they might notice that you have moved the sofa three inches to the left, or that a shop has changed the brand of coffee it sells, when you have not noticed at all.

But this same trait means they might not notice that you are upset because you have dropped your voice and turned away. The social signal is too subtle. It is lost in the other data flooding in. The problem is not that they lack feeling. It is that they are receiving too much information from everywhere, and the social channel is not automatically prioritised.

The Double Empathy Problem

For many years, psychologists said autistic people had a “theory of mind” problem—they could not understand that others have thoughts. But more recently, researchers have realised the problem goes both ways. Non-autistic people also struggle to understand autistic minds. This is called the “double empathy problem.”

When an autistic person is quiet in a group, others might think they are rude or do not care. But perhaps they are quiet because they are overwhelmed by the sound of five people talking at once, the brightness of the overhead lights, and the scratch of the chair against their back. They are working so hard just to stay present that they have no energy left to speak.

Meanwhile, the non-autistic people are misreading the autistic person’s stillness. They are using their own rules—rules about eye contact, turn-taking, tone of voice—and the autistic person is not following these rules, not because they are broken, but because they are playing a different game with different rules.

Routines and Predictability

Because the world is so intense and unpredictable, many autistic people build routines to create order. They might eat the same food every day, wear the same clothes, or travel the same route. To outsiders, this looks like “rigid insistence on certain seemingly pointless routines or rituals,” as the old textbooks say.

But from the inside, these routines are not pointless. They are a way of making a chaotic world manageable. When you cannot trust your senses to give you a stable picture, and you cannot trust social situations to follow logical rules, you create islands of certainty where you can breathe. The routine is a system you can control. It is a small predictable world inside the big unpredictable one.

Special Interests

Many autistic people have what psychologists call “abnormally intense preoccupation with any single interest, or preoccupation with an abnormally narrow interest.” This sounds negative, but the experience from the inside is often one of joy and expertise.

An autistic teenager might know everything about vacuum cleaners—not just the brands, but the motor types, the history of suction technology, the exact decibel levels of each model. To them, this is not boring. It is beautiful. The vacuum cleaner is a system with parts that fit together logically. It makes sense in a way that people often do not. Fanon wrote about “the will to find a meaning in things.” For autistic people, special interests are where that will finds its home.

Emotions and Empathy

There is a myth that autistic people do not feel emotions or care about others. This is not true. Many autistic people feel emotions very deeply. They might cry at the beauty of a sunset or the sadness of a song. They might care profoundly about justice and fairness.

What is different is expressing these feelings in ways that non-autistic people recognise. An autistic person might show they care by fixing your computer rather than by giving you a hug. They might express love by researching your favourite topic for hours to find the perfect fact to share with you. The feeling is there, but the language of expression is different.

Baron-Cohen’s early work linked autism to “reduced empathy,” but this idea has become more subtle over time. It is not that empathy is missing. It is that the automatic, fast-track to understanding others is not working in the usual way. The empathy might be there, but it takes a different route and arrives in a different form.

The Social World as a Foreign Land

Fanon wrote about language and culture: “To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.” For autistic people, learning to act non-autistic is like learning to speak a foreign language fluently. You can become very good at it, but it is never your mother tongue. You are always translating in your head, always a bit tired from the effort.

An autistic adult might have learned to make eye contact because they know it puts others at ease. But doing so might feel like staring into the sun. They might have learned to make small talk, but it feels like reciting lines in a play where everyone else knows the script by heart and you are still learning your part.

This acting is exhausting. It is called “masking” or “camouflaging.” Many autistic people, especially women, get so good at it that no one believes they are autistic. But the cost is high. Constantly pretending to be someone you are not leads to burnout, anxiety, and depression. Fanon understood this cost. He wrote about how the colonised person must wear a mask to survive in the coloniser’s world, and how this splitting of the self corrodes the soul.

Strengths and Contributions

If we look only at the problems, we miss the strengths. The same traits that make life difficult also bring gifts. The attention to detail that makes supermarkets painful also makes autistic people brilliant proofreaders, quality controllers, and scientists. The love of systems that makes social life hard makes them excellent programmers and engineers. The ability to focus deeply for hours on a single topic leads to expert knowledge.

Asperger himself noticed this. The boys he studied were not broken. They were different. They had what he called “the essence of subjectivity”—a rich inner world that did not easily translate to the outside. Baron-Cohen has argued that the genes for autistic traits have been part of human evolution for a long time and have made remarkable contributions to human history. Temple Grandin, an autistic professor of animal science, has said that without autistic minds, we would still be living in caves because no one would have invented the stone tools.

Towards Understanding

Understanding autism phenomenologically—understanding what it feels like—means moving away from seeing it as a list of deficits. It means recognising that autistic people are not failed neurotypicals. They are whole autistic people.

Fanon wrote: “Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity.” For autistic people, the mission is to live authentically in a world not built for them. For non-autistic people, the mission is to make room for this different way of being. This means accepting stimming (the repetitive movements that help regulate sensory input). It means not forcing eye contact. It means accepting that quiet is not rude, that different is not less.

It means building a world where autistic people do not have to spend all their energy pretending to be someone else. A world where they can use their energy to think, to create, to contribute, rather than to camouflage.

A Different Kind of Human

Autism is not a disease to be cured. It is a different way of being human. The phenomenology of autism reveals a world experienced in high definition, a mind that sees patterns others miss, a heart that cares deeply but expresses differently, a self that is whole but often misunderstood.

Asperger saw it as an extreme variant of intelligence. Baron-Cohen sees it as a different balance of systemising and empathising. Fanon helps us understand what it feels like to be the “other” in a world that demands conformity.

The goal is not to make autistic people more like everyone else. The goal is for everyone else to understand that there are many ways to be human. The autistic way is one of them. It comes with challenges, yes, but also with gifts. And most of all, it comes with people—people who are trying to breathe in a world that is too loud, trying to connect in a language they were never taught, and trying to be seen for who they are, not who they are expected to be.

When we stop trying to fix autistic people and start trying to understand them, we all benefit. We get to live in a world that is more varied, more honest, and more able to solve the complex problems we face. The autistic person who cannot chat at a party might be the one who can spot the pattern in climate data that everyone else missed. The person who needs routine might be the one who creates the system that keeps everyone safe.

The phenomenology of autism teaches us that difference is not deficit. It is simply difference. And in that difference lies human variety in its purest form.