This is the second post in a series leading up to the 16th annual International Forum on Consciousness, taking place in Madison this May, hosted by the BTC Institute, Promega and Usona Institute. The Forum gathers scientists, philosophers, and practitioners from dozens of different fields to investigate the nature of the mind. This year’s theme, “Unspoken Intelligence,” explores forms of perception and knowing that fall outside conventional cognition.
When she thought about a dog, she saw a dog, more specifically, every dog she had ever encountered, cycling through her mind like a card catalog with pictures attached. She assumed everyone did this. When she discovered they didn’t, that most people access something more like an abstract concept hovering somewhere between language and image, she was genuinely surprised. Temple Grandin had always known her mind didn’t work the way people expected. What she didn’t know, until she was an adult, was the specific shape of the difference.
Most of us know this story, or one like it. We understand that some minds filter experience differently, but the science on this doesn’t stop where the conversation usually does.
For most of its history, the field that mapped minds like Grandin’s looked at those that didn’t fit the available systems and concluded the minds were broken. (It didn’t ask whether the systems were.) More recently, the conversation has been reframing those minds not as deficient but as different.
For many people, that reframing has been transformative, changing how educators teach, how clinicians diagnose, and how workplaces are designed. We are now more familiar with alternative cognitive profiles such as autistic pattern recognition (like that experienced by Grandin), ADHD-associated divergent thinking, and the hyper-focused depth of what researchers call monotropic attention. These are not broken versions of normal cognition. They are different architectures, each with genuine capabilities that other minds aren’t built to produce.
The terms most commonly used to describe these differences, neurotypical and neurdivergent, are useful shorthand but they describe a binary the underlying biology doesn’t support. Cognitive traits distribute across a population the way most biological traits do. “Neurotypical” minds are simply closer to the statistical center. What we call “neurodivergent” can be better understood as the part of that population that differs visibly enough from the statistical center to make the variation impossible to ignore.
Through her own experience, Grandin points toward what a different cognitive architecture looks like in practice. In her book Thinking in Pictures, she describes her thinking as words functioning as a second language, concepts stored as images rather than abstractions. Through conversations with other autistic thinkers, she identified multiple distinct ways of organizing thought. Her visual architecture is one of many.
Monotropism is a theory of autistic cognition developed by autistic researchers from their own experience. A monotropic mind concentrates available attention deeply into a narrow channel, sometimes a single one, with intense engagement and a corresponding reduction in peripheral awareness. The classic image is a tunnel: what’s inside it is experienced with unusual depth and clarity. What’s outside it simply doesn’t register.
This is the mechanism behind what gets called “special interests” in clinical language, a term that has always undersold what’s actually happening. It announces that someone has an interest of note, but it says nothing about the depth and quality they’re capable of reaching. When a monotropic mind locks onto something, it doesn’t skim the surface the way broader attention tends to. It goes somewhere most minds can’t reach. Researchers have connected this to “flow states,” the experience of deep immersion that psychologists identify as one of the most productive and satisfying states a mind can enter. For monotropic thinkers, flow tends to be more accessible than it is for most.
ADHD adds another dimension. Where monotropic attention goes deep and narrow, ADHD-associated attention is more loosely bounded, what researchers describe using the somewhat unfortunate term “leaky.” These minds are resistant to the filters that keep more centrally-distributed cognition on task. From the outside, this looks like distraction. Research continually suggests that it also looks like divergent thinking. A mind that can’t stay on task is also a mind that won’t stay in the expected lane. It follows associations the statistical center would have cut off before they could form. The same mechanism that makes it hard to sit through a meeting is the one that produces the unexpected association, the lateral solution, the idea nobody else had because nobody else’s attention wandered far enough to find it.
These different architectures are not flaws. They are features of minds built for something other than breadth, in a world that was designed for exactly that. Shifting attention is hard. Multitasking is costly. Social environments, which demand constant rapid reallocation of attention across multiple simultaneous channels, are genuinely exhausting in a way they simply aren’t for minds built to move freely across many inputs. The majority built the world. The world rewards the majority.
What can be labeled as social difficulty from the outside is, from the inside, simply a byproduct of different resource allocation. The attention was otherwise engaged. Two opposite calibrations of the same attentional resource, both creating experiences the statistical center (optimized for breadth with moderate engagement) is specifically not built to produce.
Neuroscientist Anil Seth describes perception itself as a “controlled hallucination,” the brain’s best guess about what’s out there, shaped by expectation and prior experience as much as by incoming sensory data. What we experience as reality is already a construction, not a direct feed. Theoretical neuroscientist Karl Friston’s predictive processing framework goes further: the brain doesn’t passively receive sensory information, it actively generates predictions about what it expects to encounter and filters incoming data through those predictions. What doesn’t fit the model gets suppressed. What confirms it gets through.
Aldous Huxley called it a reducing valve. Writing in The Doors of Perception (a book best known for his account of a mescaline experience), he argued that the brain doesn’t give us unfiltered access to experience. It narrows the full range of possible experience down to something manageable. Crucially, he wasn’t only describing the psychedelic state. He was describing ordinary waking consciousness. The full spectrum of what a mind might perceive is too much, and the valve keeps us functional by keeping us limited.
The implication is the same whether you’re reading Seth or Friston or Huxley. A filter isn’t something some people have and others don’t. Every brain is running one. “Typical” is just what we call the ones we’ve agreed not to examine. The neurodiversity conversation, even at its most nuanced, has a way of staying safely in the third person. Different minds. Their experiences. What they can teach us. What it rarely does is turn the lens around. The mind doing the reading has a filter too. The architecture most of us are running starts to look less like the natural shape of a mind and more like one option among several.
If the mind is a filter and not a window, if it is an editorial system with preferences and blind spots running below conscious awareness, shaping what reaches you before you have a chance to evaluate it, it’s not that others are missing something. You are missing something. Right now. In the reading of this sentence. What your particular cognitive architecture, with its particular history and its particular optimizations, has already decided is noise.
Your own filter is the hardest one to see. Psychedelic research has found one way in: observe what gets through when it briefly loosens.
Huxley’s reducing valve was a philosophical argument. What psychedelic research has since added is a mechanism. Robin Carhart-Harris’s work on consciousness and altered states has reshaped how neuroscientists think about psychedelics. His entropic brain hypothesis proposes that psychedelic states increase the neural entropy (meaning the brain operates with more varied, less predictable activity) loosening the rigid, self-reinforcing patterns that normally constrain perception. His REBUS model goes further: the brain normally filters incoming experience through a strong layer of prior expectations, and psychedelics temporarily loosen that layer, allowing more raw sensory and associative information through.
What psychedelic research keeps finding is that when the filter loosens, something becomes visible that was always there. The experience of encountering an alternate version of perception—more associative, less edited, arriving without the usual hierarchy of what counts as signal—tends to produce one persistent insight: the version you’d been calling normal was a version, not the thing itself. One perspective among many that were always possible.
The therapeutic implications of temporarily loosening the filter are still emerging. Reducing habitual perceptual filtering appears to relieve certain forms of suffering, including depression, trauma and rigid patterns of self-perception, an effect researchers are linking to neuroplastic changes across multiple neurotransmitter systems. That relief suggests the filter shapes not only what we think but what we feel and what we can access about ourselves. The filter isn’t only a perceptual phenomenon. It shapes the boundaries of emotional experience itself.
Grandin assumed for years that everyone thought in pictures. Finding out they didn’t was finding out she had a filter. That knowledge didn’t change what she saw. It changed what she knew about the seeing, and that turned out to be the difference between a partial relationship with the world and a more honest one.
Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at UC Santa Barbara who will be presenting at the Forum, studies meta-awareness and mind-wandering. His research suggests that noticing your own mind in the act of filtering, catching it before it finishes editing, is both possible and trainable.
What felt like the absence of a filter was always just an unexamined one. The question is whether you know it, and whether you’re doing anything deliberate with that knowledge.
Every mind in the room will be running a different filter. Bring yours. The 16th annual International Forum on Consciousness takes place May 21-22, 2026, in Madison, WI. Register here.
Sources and Further Reading
Temple Grandin, Thinking in Pictures
Her own account of a mind that processes the world differently, written from the inside.
Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception
The reducing valve argument, made in 1954, still worth reading in full.
Robin Carhart-Harris, “The entropic brain: a theory of conscious states informed by neuroimaging research with psychedelic drugs”
The paper behind the REBUS model, freely available online. Carhart-Harris Lab researcher Kieran Fox will be presenting at the Forum.
Jonathan Schooler’s research on meta-awareness and mind-wandering at UC Santa Barbara is among the most direct empirical work on noticing your own cognitive processes. He will be presenting at the Forum.
Christof Koch, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist
Accessible and serious in equal measure. Koch will also be presenting.
Cassandra Vieten, Imagine That: Transform How You Think, Feel, and Live with the Science of Imagination (forthcoming August 2026)
On imagination as the operating system behind how we all think and perceive, with a particular focus on imagination neurodiversity. Vieten will be presenting at the Forum.
Andrew Holecek, Dream Yoga
On using lucid dreaming and Tibetan contemplative practice to examine the nature of waking consciousness. If the filter shapes what we perceive while awake, Holecek is interested in what happens when we notice it from the inside. He will also be presenting.
Elise Johnson
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