@mgorny@social.treehouse.systems2024-05-05 18:13:42
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Predictive processing also sheds considerable light on a wide range of typical and atypical forms of human experience. A good starting point is to notice that there are two very broad ways for such processing to go wrong. The first is for the brain to underweight predictions and expectations. This will make it hard to detect faint but predictable patterns in a noisy or ambiguous environment. But the second general way to go wrong is for the brain to overweight expectations. In extreme cases, overweighting results in hallucinations. You seem to see and hear things that aren't there, just because […] they are at some level strongly expected.
Autism spectrum condition was initially thought to reflect a specific imbalance of the first kind — a systematic underweighting of prior expectations. […] Underweighting prior knowledge would make weak or elusive patterns hard to detect, and hard to learn too. Such patterns would include things like facial expressions, intonation, or body language, things that delicately hint, in context, at other people's mental states and attitudes. An imbalance of that kind would also make it very hard to learn these patterns in the first place, and even harder to recognize them in situations that are complicated or ambiguous. Recent evidence casts subtle doubt, however, on this bald initial hypothesis. Rather than weakened predictions, intriguing evidence is emerging that suggests that the core issue involves (not underweighting knowledge-based predictions but) actively overweighting the incoming sensory evidence.
[…]
She doesn't just feel "hunger," instead the more fine-grained specifics of the bodily signals dominate. You are feeling a whole lot of something — but what is it? According to the overweighted sensory information theory, autism spectrum condition individuals constantly encounter an excess of highly detailed and apparently very salient sensory information of this kind, coming from both inside their own body and the outside world. This sensory excess impedes the moment-by-moment identification of the broader context or scenario (in this case, hunger). In other words, the emphasis on every aspect of sensory detail effectively makes it impossible to spot the larger forest for the trees.
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(Andy Clark, The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality)
#ActuallyAutistic
