In this episode of Autism & the Structure of Reality (Pt. 3), we go deeper into one of the biggest questions in neuroscience, philosophy, and human experience: What is reality from the perspective of the mind? Building from Jung, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky, this episode connects phenomenology and modern neuroscience to show how perception is not passive. The brain filters, predicts, suppresses, and constructs experience long before we consciously recognize it. Topics include the thalamus as a sensory gatekeeper, predictive processing, salience networks, attention, filtering, compression, and why different minds can inhabit fundamentally different experienced realities.

This episode also explores how the autistic phenotype may process the world with less compression, stronger bottom-up sensory detail, and different s ...