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Allistic folks, in contrast, make sense of the world in a very top-down fashion. They’ll enter a new environment, such as an unfamiliar restaurant, take a quick look around, and jump to reasonable conclusions about how to order, where to sit, what kind of service to expect, and even how loudly they should talk. Their brains will immediately begin to filter through sounds, lights, and other stimuli, and adjust accordingly. They might notice a clanging pinball machine in the corner for a moment, for instance, but soon habituate to it, and become able to ignore it. When the waiter approaches, they probably can chat without much difficulty, even if something unexpected gets said or the item they planned to order is sold out. They don’t rely on memorized conversational scripts, and they don’t have to carefully parse every single piece of data they encounter to make sense of it. They can wing it.

Autistic people, on the flip side, don’t rely on knee-jerk assumptions or quick mental shortcuts to make our decisions. We process each element of our environment separately, and intentionally, taking very little for granted. If we’ve never been in a particular restaurant before, we may be slow to make sense of its layout or figure out how ordering works. We’ll need really clear-cut indications of whether it’s the kind of place where you sit down and get table service, or if you’re supposed to go to a counter to ask for what you like. (Many of us try to camouflage this fact by doing extensive research on a restaurant before setting foot inside.) Every single light, laugh, and smell in the place is taken in individually by our sensory system, rather than blended into a cohesive whole. To cope with unpredictability, we analyze our experiences for patterns, and memorize rule sets: if the waiter says X, I reply with Y. When something unexpected happens, we have to carefully sort out how to respond. Too much change may cause us to become really exhausted, or to freak out.

— Unmasking Autism by Devon Price (Page 25 - 26)

In Autistic brains, however, researchers have found that some regions remain hyperconnected throughout the life span, whereas other regions may be underconnected (relatively speaking). It is difficult to sum up these connectivity patterns because, as neurobiologists at the Weizmann Institute of Science have found, every Autistic brain exhibits a different connectivity pattern. Our brain wiring appears to actually be more diverse than the wiring of neurotypical brains, which researchers believe have a consistent pruning pattern.

— Unmasking Autism by Devon Price (Page 22)

Autistic people have differences in the development of their anterior cingulate cortex,[14] a part of the brain that helps regulate attention, decision making, impulse control, and emotional processing. Throughout our brains, Autistic people have delayed and reduced development of Von Economo neurons (or VENs), brain cells that help with rapid, intuitive processing of complex situations.[15] Similarly, Autistic brains differ from allistic brains in how excitable our neurons are.[16] To put it in very simple terms, our neurons activate easily, and don’t discriminate as readily between a “nuisance variable” that our brains might wish to ignore (for example, a dripping faucet in another room) and a crucial piece of data that deserves a ton of our attention (for example, a loved one beginning to quietly cry in the other room). This means we can both be easily distracted by a small stimulus and miss a large meaningful one.

— Unmasking Autism by Devon Price (Page 22)

One of the coaches and disability advocates whose work has helped to inform this book, Heather R. Morgan, stressed to me that before we examine our masks and learn to take them off, we must first recognize that the version of ourselves we’ve been hiding from the world is somebody we can trust.

“I think it can be risky for people to try to think about where their mask comes from and think about taking the mask off before they first know that there’s somebody safe underneath of it,” she says. “Even talking about unmasking if we don’t have a safe place to land can be terrifying."

— Unmasking Autism by Devon Price (Page 15)

Refusing to perform neurotypicality is a revolutionary act of disability justice. It’s also a radical act of self-love. But in order for Autistic people to take our masks off and show our real, authentically disabled selves to the world, we first have to feel safe enough to get reacquainted with who we really are. Developing self-trust and self-compassion is a whole journey unto itself.

— Unmasking Autism by Devon Price (Page 13)

When an Autistic person is not given resources or access to self-knowledge, and when they’re told their stigmatized traits are just signs that they’re a disruptive, overly sensitive, or annoying kid, they have no choice but to develop a neurotypical façade. Maintaining that neurotypical mask feels deeply inauthentic and it’s extremely exhausting to maintain.[5] It’s also not necessarily a conscious choice. Masking is a state of exclusion forced onto us from the outside.

— Unmasking Autism by Devon Price (Page 10)