Autistic people process the world from the bottom up. If you want to understand Autism as a disability and a source of human difference at a glance, it’s best summed up this way: we process in a careful, systematic, bottom-up way. Allistic folks, in contrast, make sense of the world in a very top-down fashion. They’ll enter a new environment, such as an unfamiliar restaurant, take a quick look around, and jump to reasonable conclusions about how to order, where to sit, what kind of service to expect, and even how loudly they should talk.
