 Hello guys! Today marks the third in the series I am doing all this month on explaining lesser talked-about parts autism. As I said yesterday, what I want to be talking about is on perceptions in general. I mentioned more specifically how speech gets processed and for a bridal junction dive into that. Fundamentally, this winds up covering perceptions in general. If you're not familiar, it does get talked about a decent amount by other creators, but there are quite a bit of perceptual or sensory differences that are seen quite often with autism. Some people will describe it as like sensory integration disorder or sensory modulation differences. I'm going to be ignoring that specific language just because we're really not sure how best to describe it, but I am going to be delving into the neurology behind why this happens. So we have a very good understanding of why there are sensory differences and even perceptual differences that manifest into the behavioral differences, but we're just still trying to figure out how best to describe how they present. Very unusual. Usually it's the other way around. Usually we understand how to characterize them, but not why. But backwards this time, which is neat. So unlike previous videos and many future videos I'm going to be doing, I'm not going to be talking too much about the sources. There are a ton of them. I'm going to have several down in the video description, but there's there's a lot out there. I don't want to be really dry and analyzing all this stuff. Being like oh hey there was a specific abnormality in this type found in this very specific location in the brain. And I'm gonna bore you guys with that kind of stuff. Instead, how we're going to be doing this is looking at just sort of the general anatomy and then how some stuff varies with autism because there's a huge amount of variance even in the autistic in how the underlying stuff seems to actually happen. So general anatomy, this isn't this isn't neurology levels of explaining things. I'm going to be very vague. You have the cerebrum. This is the large largest part of the brain. When you think of like what the brain looks like, you're going to be thinking of the cerebrum. There are other parts like cerebellum, not going to get in explaining additional parts that don't really matter. But the cerebrum can be broken down into several lobes or texas. You have the frontal, which here. This is responsible for action and movement, although all their parts of the brain deal with these things. The brain is very vague, very abstract, but it generally speaking that's what deals with. You then have the parietal lobe, which is more like here. This deals primarily with sensory integration, although again, there's variancy. The occipital lobe, which is more like back here, deals more specifically with vision and brain doesn't have clear boundaries. But typically speaking, most sensory processing, especially having to do it like touch or where things are located, is done in the parietal lobe. Then as I said, the occipital lobe deals almost exclusively with vision in the back. Then the temporal lobe, which is more so like here. That deals with semantics, what things mean. After processing your sensory information, you see something that gets processed. It's like, oh hey, those are words. The temporal, general temporal region is going to be dealing with what that means. Unsurprisingly, memory is also located there for the most part. Again, it's very vague. Certain memories are located in different areas. Then the limbic system, which is more so inside. I can't really point to it because it's not as obvious, but it's wrapped around inside, connecting to multiple of those regions. This deals more with emotion. It used to be thought to deal primarily with smell, olfactory, and we're moving away from that. It seems to be much more related to emotion, although, again, with the brain being vague, the frontal lobe deals with that as well. I have to explain all of that in very general terms because with autism, you see a higher degree of variance in the temporal parietal junction, which is the area between the parietal lobe senses and the temporal lobe semantics in memory. I have to say variance here because, depending on the specific group of autistic people you're looking at, you see entirely different reasons for why this is the case at all. In some cases, it's under development of that region. In some cases, it's lesions to that part of the brain. In some cases, it's size differences in both directions, so it's not just that it's underdeveloped, but certain parts are overdeveloped, which I hate that terminology because... That seems to be the result of genetic CNV, which is copy number variations, so the gene isn't mutated, but there's more or less of it than there would normally be, causing the differences in proteins, which then differences in the size of the brain. If you didn't understand most of what I just said, that's fine. The key part is you've got different parts of the brain. There's this very particular region that deviates from autism, and it's specifically dealing with the point at which sensory information gets interpreted and more memories get that specific boundary. So the senses get processed fine, memories get stored fine, meaning is determined fine, the boundary between them is different, though. What this winds up leading to, and I'll have some examples in a second, but what this winds up leading to is that the same experience gets perceived differently depending on whether you're autistic or not, and so this leads to differences in perception and perspective. More particularly to what I mentioned last time with Bernice's area, this is part of the temporal parietal juncture and deals specifically with the processing of speech. Or at least that's how it's usually described. In typical brain fashion it's a little more abstract. It'd be more correct to say it deals with processing of language. For example, despite everything you hear from another person getting sent through Bernice's area, this also happens when you read text. It's like you've got closed captions on, like you're reading video description or anything else. What winds up happening is it goes to the occipital lobe because you're looking at it, winds up going through the angular gyrus and then into Bernice's area where it still gets processed. Same way because it's language. Essentially, Bernice's area winds up taking that information as well as pulling from your memories, going like, hey, this semantic unit, what does this mean? Word, symbol, whatever it is. At that point your brain's already recognized its language. It's just where's the memory for this? Who pulls that and interprets it? Again, as I had stated, the formation of memories still winds up being fine. This is why autistic people are typically not forgettable. Distractable, yes. But typically have quite good memories. It's not a memory problem. But the same kind of stimulus will yield different memories. Essentially, what I'm trying to describe without getting like crazy heavy into neurology and completely losing the majority of the audience is this is why the differences that were described with the double empathy problem exist. It's not behavioral, it's neurological. Then differences in the brain cause you to perceive the world in a different way, cause you to experience the world in a different way. And so as a result, you get different and sometimes incompatible perspectives on things, that's been difficult. This isn't the result of being defiant anything else. The result of experiencing the world in a way that other people don't experience. And how can you possibly explain that to another person? It's hard, because it's an issue on both sides. If I perceive the same thing different from you, I don't really understand how you're perceiving it any better than how you understand how I'm perceiving it. We can try to communicate that and hopefully wind up getting those perspectives through to the other person. But that doesn't always work. Even if it's autism isn't part of the equation at all. You've got somebody of low economic status and somebody of very high economic status inherited wealth. They're trying to describe their personal daily difficulties. They're not going to understand each other and think each other to be dates. Sort of that kind of thing. These sensory and perceptual differences wind up explaining most of the condition. As many other autistic creators have commented on, there tends to be a lot of hyper or hyposensitivity to like certain fabrics or smells or foods, whether it's taste or texture or whatever it is. And this is a large part of why it's getting perceived in a different way. And that way happens to be either problematic or more pleasant than it would normally be. It's not that there's anything wrong with the perception. It's not a hallucination or it's not like it. It's just different. I personally quite unfavorable to cotton. I really don't like cotton fabrics. Others really do. But what would normally be like a minor, oh yeah, it's kind of better. But if it's not cotton, it's not a big deal or whatever, I have almost discerval reactions to it because essentially because of this. If things are particularly bad enough, this can lead to great difficulty interpreting other speech and may explain why certain responses from the autistic when you're talking to them doesn't quite match up what you said. It's not that they don't know what to respond appropriately, but that it's not being processed right. So it's more of like a voice specific deafness, which is really hard to get across to other people. You're hearing other things fine, the ears work fine, the parts of the brain that deal with processing sound in general works fine. But processing speech or language itself is where it breaks down. So what's understood as deafness doesn't norm doesn't get across to other people. And left with this sort of frustration over, Hey, how do you explain this? It's not too bad in my case, but I went up occasionally with some problems. Like having to have somebody repeat something three or five times more times, because I'm just not getting it. And it's obvious to even me that I'm hearing it fine. It's not like there were clarity issues with person mumbling or whatever. It's just, I'm hearing it, but it's not clicking. It's likely you've had that happen. It just, it's a lot more common in the autistic. One thing that is particularly interesting and kind of gets us away from Oh, this is like malfunctioning or dysfunctioning of these areas. And more towards this is just a difference. Is that there's a huge amount of shared perspective in this that the way it deviates and autism seems to be rather consistent. I have a specific example. There will be a link down in the video description, but it's to a autistic TikToker, Isaac Wolfe. And the specific video is on a little skit of her receiving a gift, pretending to be her older or younger, six year old self in a rather typical autistic reaction. I'll let you watch for yourself. But one thing to also pay attention to while you're watching that looks through the comments. And it's interesting how many other autistic individuals report the exact same kind of response. And the reasons for that response, that's a huge giveaway on how the situation is being perceived differently. If you can give a full rationale for your why you're doing something that you're doing. It's not misbehaving. It's just having a different perspective. The fact that it's so consistent between the autistic is interesting. Essentially, the double empathy problem just explained through the neurological underpinnings. I don't know what I want to do for a video next time. I was thinking maybe the neurological reasons for decreased facial affect, but I'm not sure. There's a lot of options. And I, you know, first three days, kind of, there was a logical progression from one to the other. But I can't really take this anywhere else. So something else, I'll figure out something for tomorrow, but it'll have to be a surprise. So hopefully, this has been insightful, learned useful things. Until then, have a good one, guys.