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June 4, 2025My daughter is 22. Smart, sensitive, intuitive in ways that don’t always translate into the everyday language of the world. And yesterday, she said something that stopped me in my tracks:
“I’m more aware of the input into my consciousness than I am of my own thoughts. I can’t control all that input—so I struggle to know what to respond to, or how. It’s like I’m more sensitive to the mind than the brain.”
I sat with that.
As someone who’s spent decades exploring philosophy, psychology, and the slipperiness of consciousness, I recognized what she was saying—not just as poetic or profound—but as something approaching a neurological truth, and perhaps a metaphysical one.
Consciousness as a Floodgate
Many adults on the autism spectrum describe their experience as being “flooded” with input. Unlike the neurotypical brain, which filters, suppresses, and organizes stimuli before it reaches conscious awareness, the autistic brain may lack that filtering mechanism—or at least, use it differently (Robertson & Baron-Cohen, 2017).
This means the world doesn’t fade into the background. Instead, it arrives all at once, uninvited and uninterpreted: every hum, every flicker of light, every passing emotion from another human being—front and center.
For my daughter, this isn’t just noise. It’s data that demands a response. But how do you respond when everything is calling your name at once?
The Brain Filters. The Mind Watches.
Her phrasing—that she’s more attuned to the mind than the brain—touched on something I’ve wrestled with for years in my own philosophical work.
The brain is the organ, the circuitry. It’s reactive, pattern-seeking, protective. The mind, though, may be something else entirely: an observer, a field, a spacious awareness that exists beyond or alongside the neural meat of the skull (Chalmers, 1996).
Many of us are trained to trust the brain—its categories, its survival instincts. But what if your brain doesn’t serve you as a clear channel? What if, like my daughter, your awareness is stuck upstream in the torrent of unfiltered data?
What results is not a lack of intelligence, but perhaps the opposite: a surplus of awareness without an efficient processing system.
Autistic Consciousness: A Different Integration?
Modern neuroscience offers theories that resonate with what she’s experiencing.
Predictive Coding
Karl Friston’s predictive coding model suggests the brain is always making guesses about what’s coming next. It tries to predict incoming sensory input, and it filters out anything unexpected to reduce error signals (Friston, 2005).
In autism, this top-down prediction appears weaker or altered, meaning more unexpected or raw information is allowed into awareness (Van de Cruys et al., 2014). This can create sensory overload—but also a heightened vigilance or receptivity to reality.
Integrated Information Theory (IIT)
Giulio Tononi’s IIT proposes that consciousness arises from how much information is both integrated and differentiated in a system (Tononi, 2008). Some thinkers suggest that autistic individuals may have different integration structures, leading to more fragmented but more vivid conscious states (Boly et al., 2015).
To the neurotypical world, this can look like distraction, confusion, even dysfunction. But I wonder: what if it’s a more accurate experience of what consciousness really is?
The Mystic Parallel
Oddly enough, what she described also aligns with what mystics, meditators, and psychedelic explorers have long described: a dissolving of filters, a surrender to presence, an awareness of input unmediated by thought (James, 1902/2002).
When the brain steps aside, the mind becomes vast—and a little terrifying.
The difference is, my daughter didn’t take mushrooms or go to a monastery. She lives here, all the time. Her neurodivergence puts her directly in contact with a level of awareness most people actively avoid.
So what happens when the thing we call “disorder” is actually a doorway?
From Overwhelm to Wisdom
Here’s what I’ve learned from watching her: the issue isn’t too much consciousness. The issue is that our world isn’t designed for people who experience consciousness this way.
Our schools, jobs, and even our therapies prioritize focus, filtering, and executive function. We don’t yet know how to support people whose experience of mind is more sensitive, less defined, more alive.
But we should. Because people like my daughter may be closer to something important—something we’ve lost in our hustle to narrow the mind and control the world.
What We Can Do
If you or someone you love resonates with this experience, here are a few tools that may help:
- Mindfulness practices, not as a self-help trend, but as an active training in choosing where attention lands (Kabat-Zinn, 1990).
- Journaling or creative expression, to track and make sense of the stream of input.
- Somatic grounding techniques, like deep pressure, breathwork, or movement, to regulate the nervous system (Porges, 2011).
- Therapies tailored to neurodivergence, such as Internal Family Systems (IFS) or somatic therapies that honor complexity without pathologizing it.
And maybe most importantly: a new cultural narrative that doesn’t pathologize heightened consciousness but reveres it—teaches how to work with it, build wisdom from it, and share it.
Final Thought: The Watcher on the Edge
When my daughter said she was more sensitive to the mind than the brain, I heard echoes of philosophers, poets, and prophets. But I also heard the truth of a young woman trying to survive in a world that doesn’t yet speak her language.
She is a watcher at the edge of the veil. And maybe, just maybe, that’s where the next understanding of consciousness will come from—not the labs, not the TED Talks, but the quiet, daily reckonings of those born into the mystery a little too wide open.
References
- Boly, M., Massimini, M., Tsuchiya, N., Postle, B. R., Koch, C., & Tononi, G. (2015). Are the neural correlates of consciousness in the front or in the back of the cerebral cortex? Clinical and neuroimaging evidence. The Journal of Neuroscience, 35(26), 10341–10348.
- Chalmers, D. J. (1996). The conscious mind: In search of a fundamental theory. Oxford University Press.
- Friston, K. (2005). A theory of cortical responses. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 360(1456), 815–836.
- James, W. (2002). The varieties of religious experience: A study in human nature (original work published 1902). Routledge.
- Kabat-Zinn, J. (1990). Full catastrophe living: Using the wisdom of your body and mind to face stress, pain, and illness. Delta.
- Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.
- Robertson, C. E., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2017). Sensory perception in autism. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 18(11), 671–684.
- Tononi, G. (2008). Consciousness as integrated information: a provisional manifesto. The Biological Bulletin, 215(3), 216–242.
- Van de Cruys, S., Evers, K., Van der Hallen, R., Van Eylen, L., Boets, B., de-Wit, L., & Wagemans, J. (2014). Precise minds in uncertain worlds: Predictive coding in autism. Psychological Review, 121(4), 649–675.