Neurodivergent Mind: When Your Common Sense Is Not Common

"A common experience among neurodivergent, high IQ, and gifted people, though rarely discussed, involves the unconscious assumption made early in life that others think in essentially the same way you do. You have likely believed, at least during the earlier parts of your life, that what you know and how you process information represents something close to universal common sense."

"We are all, to varying degrees, limited by our singular subjective experience. You only have your own phenomenology. You have no direct access to the interior landscape of another mind, no matter how intimately you know the person. As a child developing an understanding of the world, your natural assumption was one of sameness. You naturally moved through early life with the unexamined belief that everyone around you saw what you saw, made the connections you made, and understood with the same ease and speed."

"When your mind can intuitively grasp complex systems, rapidly synthesize information from multiple sources, and identify patterns others miss, it becomes genuinely difficult to understand why others cannot do the same. The neurodivergent brain may absorb vast quantities of information and knowledge effortlessly through peripheral exposure, without conscious effort or deliberate study. You did not work for such understanding. It simply arrived, often unbidden, often while you were paying attention to something else entirely."

Many neurodivergent and gifted individuals assume early on that others think and perceive the world as they do, treating their insights as common sense. Subjective experience limits direct access to another person’s interior mind, producing an unexamined belief in sameness during development. Rapid pattern recognition and effortless peripheral learning can create large differences between intellectual ability and social understanding. Asynchronous development leads to mismatches between cognitive speed and social awareness. Intellectual intimacy cannot be assumed even in close relationships, and surprising misunderstandings often arise when others do not share the same cognitive processes or information uptake.

Read at Psychology Today