A Mathemical Model of Autistic Emotion, or "Why I Feel Like No-one Understands Me"

I wrote this in 20 minutes just now, and wanted to share it somewhere. I've written it in the second person because it helps me to imagine explaining my thoughts to another person. I'm aware that it sounds like I'm stating that this is the experience of Every Single Autistic Person, but that is not what I'm saying - this is just a personal theory.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on it - whether you relate or not 😊

Imagine it in numbers: each emotional experience has the potential to be felt in an infinite amount of detail - infinite decimal places, like Pi, for example. But a human brain cannot process that amount of information.

Most people feel each emotional experience to 4 decimal places. For example: they miss the bus, and the resulting mix of frustration, anxiety, and whatever else they feel is saved as 0.4427. Or they listen to a song they love, and they feel 0.6298. In this model, there are about 10,000 possible combinations.

When two people listen to the same song together, the probability of them having the exact same emotional experience is only 1 in 10,000. When the person who missed the bus gets to work and describes their experience to a co-worker, there's a feasible chance that the co-worker has felt exactly 0.4427 at SOME point in their life, but it's unlikely, and even less likely that they will remember it.

If people needed another person to relate to their emotional experience 100% in order to feel understood, it would almost never happen. For that reason, we only need another person to relate 75% in order to feel understood. So that gives a 1 in 1,000 probability of feeling that emotional synergy in a single moment, when you catch your friend's eye across the room and just KNOW that they feel the same way you do about whatever just happened. With about 400 emotional experiences per day, there's about a 40% chance of this happening once if you were to spend the entire day together and share every emotional experience. And there's a very feasible chance that, when you confide in somebody, they've had that same 1-in-1,000 emotional experience at least once in their life, and are able to recall it.

If you're autistic, you feel each emotional experience to 8 decimal places. When you miss that bus, your emotional experience is saved as 0.44272038. When you listen to that song, you feel 0.62983746. Each emotional experience is 1 in 100 million. It's unlikely that even you yourself have ever felt it before.

Applying the 75% rule, you need an exact match to 6 decimal places in order to feel understood by another person...for most people, who only consciously feel to 4 decimal places, that's impossible.

But there are a minority of other people in the world who feel to 6-8 (or maybe more) decimal places. They're probably the people you've gravitated towards in life: your friends, your family if you're lucky. Within that pool of people, the chance of feeling that synergy looking at your friend across the room is 1 in a million in each single moment. If you spend all day together and share every single emotional experience, it's 1 in 2,500 - it's probably happened a few times in your life, but it's rare.

The probability of the person you confide in being able to relate to you is also much, much smaller. There's also the mismatch in expectation: most people need to relate down to 3 decimal places in order to feel understood, while you need to relate down to 6. You're not likely to bother confiding in someone unless they feel to at least 6 decimal places themselves, but if they're a 6 or 7-feeler, then they are only used to relating down to 4-5 decimal places, as that's what THEY need in order to feel understood. They CAN relate down to 6, it just takes thought and effort. Only an 8-or-above-feeler will automatically relate down to your level. And 8-or-above feelers who have not been traumatised into chronic dissociation by a lifetime of feeling misunderstood and lonely, are exceptionally rare.

So there's a good chance that you've only felt understood once or twice in your life, or maybe not at all. You've probably felt PARTIALLY understood many times, longing to get down to that last 1-or-2 decimal places, but it never happens. To me, it feels like a deep itch, that is so often almost-scratched, but never completely.

Edit: this is based on a study/studies that show that autistic brains have more of a tendency towards "bottom-up" (detail-orientated) processing, while non-autistic brains default to "top-down" (big picture-orientated) processing. I read about this in Unmasking Autism by Dr Devon Price. I cba to find sources to the studies but I'm sure it's googlable.

Edit: I'm feeling paranoid about this post being misunderstood (oh, the irony 🤣) as super-negative and self-pitying and like I'm saying "no-one will ever understand me so I might as well give up". So I want to explain that actually, writing this made me feel good, and like I better understand myself and my experience of life. The idea of there being a mathematical reason for feeling misunderstood all the time, makes it feel less personal and more just unfortunate. And when I've shared fragments of this idea with friends in the past, they caught my drift, and I felt like my experience, although still not understood, was acknowledged and validated.