[ebjaas_2022]

> I can "literally" see how people think about software when reading source code and pull requests (I say literally because these things are... objects I can manipulate in my mind? it's hard to describe, and it took me a while to realize not everybody sees it this way).

I think you're right.

The impression I get when I talk to an autistic person, or when I cooperate with him on a problem, is that he sees my thoughts and my ideas as "entities" within his own mind. This rhymes with what you say, that you perceive it as if other people's thought patterns are "objects that you can manipulate in your mind".

My subjective experience is that the autistic person will "dive into himself" to find the answer to who I am, in a given situation, while the non-autistic person will look outwards. It's as if the non-autistic person processes me in real time, using a massive parallel social GPU in his head, while the autistic person, instead, consults massive internal lookup tables to try and derive the same information.

I think the difference is fundamental. It has to do with the very "shelf system" in our brains; the way that we have stored information about the world, and made sense of it, since we were small kids. It's not something that we can change as adults, I think.