[0:00]
A strong indicator of autism is bottom up processing. Bottom up thinking is the way that autistics primarily see the world when compared to neurotypicals. Now everybody has a little bit of top down, a little bit of bottom up, otherwise the world wouldn't make a lot of sense. But the bottom up thinking of autistics is unique and I wanna explain it in a way that even neurotypicals can understand. My name is Sol Smith when I autistic and ADHD life coach and I wrote The Autistics Guide to Self Discovery, The Adhders Guide to Self Discovery and I run an online support community that you should check out. 
[0:30]
Bottom up processing is seeing all of the parts and with those parts making a cohesive whole. This is contrary to top down processing which is seeing the big picture, seeing an umbrella concept in from that concept, using previous knowledge to build understanding. Autistics build coherence from all of the little parts. This is different. This is more cognitively exhausting. Why they run out of bandwidth, why they can burn out so quickly. Now a way that a neurotypical could understand bottom up processing 
[1:01]
is to think about a time that they might have been in a foreign country and in this country they are very present to all of the new things that are around them. They are seeing all of the little parts, maybe they're understanding bits and pieces of the language and from that piecing together Oh, that's what that sign means. Oh, that's what those directions are. And everything is very present, very alive. They're seeing things as if for the first time. That novelty makes one day feel like it's three or four days long because everything feels very new. 
[1:32]
This is how an autistic moves through the world. This is why we try to create very predictable routines and routine predictable places because that reduces that amount of processing and piecing things together. I have a really good example of top down versus bottom of processing. I used to teach a class. It was a media literacy class and we would do this section where we were analyzing advertisements. In this section, I would say, I want you to look at three different levels of meaning in each ad. I want you to see literally what is in this picture. 
[2:04]
No.2, what is the intended message? What's the message this picture is getting across to basically everybody? And number three, what are the cultural stereotypes that they are using to build this message? Now this is a great way to analyze things. So I'd show them a picture and I would say, okay, tell me level 1. What do you see in this picture? And the students would say, Coke is delicious and refreshing. And I go, no, no, no, no, level 1, not the intended meaning, level 1. And they'd say, Coke makes you happy. And I'd say, no, no, No, no, not level 2, 
[2:35]
level 1. What do you literally see in this picture? And they go, Coke is what pretty people like. And I say, no, what you see is a woman sitting on the beach with a bottle of Coke smiling. And they'd go, oh, this is how we see the world. We see the picture before we see the message.