4E Cognition and Neurodiversity: Different Bodies, Different Minds

Series: 4E Cognition | Part: 8 of 9

The medical model says autism is a disorder of social cognition. The deficit is in the brain—impaired theory of mind, broken mirror neurons, under-connectivity in social networks.

The 4E perspective asks: what if autism isn't a broken brain but a different body-environment coupling? What if autistic cognition emerges from different sensory precision, different proprioceptive integration, different affordance landscapes—not from missing neural modules?

This isn't just reframing to be nice. It's taking embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended cognition seriously and asking what they reveal about neurodivergent experience.

The answer: neurodiversity isn't deficit—it's different embodiment enacting different worlds.

And once you see it, the whole deficit paradigm collapses.

Autism as Sensorimotor Difference

Autistic people consistently report sensory differences: hypersensitivity to sound, light, touch; difficulty filtering sensory input; sensory seeking behaviors. The medical model treats these as peripheral symptoms. 4E cognition says they're central.

If cognition is enacted through sensorimotor coupling, then different sensory processing creates different enacted worlds. An autistic person doesn't perceive the "same" environment differently—they enact a fundamentally different perceptual world through different sensorimotor contingencies.

Precision Weighting Differences

In active inference terms, autistic cognition might involve different precision weighting—different confidence assignments to predictions versus prediction errors.

Higher sensory precision means sensory signals are trusted more, predictions less. This creates rich, detailed perception but makes prediction difficult in noisy environments. Every sound, texture, flicker demands attention because it generates high-precision prediction error.

Lower proprioceptive precision might explain motor coordination differences—if proprioceptive predictions have low confidence, motor control becomes effortful rather than automatic.

These aren't deficits. They're different precision landscapes creating different cognitive affordances.

Stimming as Coherence Maintenance

Repetitive behaviors—hand flapping, rocking, spinning—are pathologized as "restricted and repetitive behaviors" in diagnostic criteria. The 4E lens sees something else: active inference for coherence maintenance.

If sensory environments are unpredictably overwhelming, creating predictable sensory input through repetitive movement reduces surprise. Stimming generates reliable sensorimotor contingencies in an otherwise overwhelming sensory landscape.

It's not pathological—it's adaptive. An embodied strategy for maintaining coherence through self-generated predictability.

ADHD as Embedded Mismatch

ADHD is framed as executive dysfunction—problems with attention, inhibition, working memory. But 4E cognition suggests it's not dysfunction but environment mismatch.

ADHD cognition appears "disordered" in environments designed for different cognitive styles: long sustained focus, delayed rewards, minimal novelty. Change the environment, and the "disorder" often disappears.

Environmental Scaffolding Needs

People with ADHD often excel at:

• High-novelty environments (startups, emergency medicine, journalism)
• Immediate-feedback contexts (gaming, performance, crisis response)
• Externally structured settings (military, competitive sports)

The commonality: these environments provide the scaffolding ADHD cognition needs. Clear external structure, immediate feedback, high engagement—these compensate for what neuronormative people maintain internally.

This isn't compensation for deficit—it's embedded cognition requiring different embedding. The "disorder" emerges from person-environment mismatch, not from broken internal processes.

Hyperfocus as Epistemic Foraging

ADHD includes apparent paradox: difficulty sustaining attention generally, but intense hyperfocus in high-interest contexts. The medical model treats this as inconsistent. 4E cognition makes it sensible.

If ADHD involves higher precision on novelty/salience signals, then attention naturally follows information gradients. In low-information environments, attention scatters seeking richer epistemic landscapes. In high-information environments, it locks onto dense information streams.

Hyperfocus isn't the exception—it's what happens when environmental information density matches cognitive foraging strategy.

Dyslexia as Different Perceptual Affordances

Dyslexia is a reading disorder, right? Difficulty mapping letters to sounds, slow decoding, spelling problems.

But reading is a culturally specific skill requiring extremely fine visual discrimination of arbitrary symbols. It's not natural—it's a learned skill requiring specific sensorimotor coupling (fine saccadic control, rapid visual-phonological mapping, sustained visual attention to small high-contrast forms).

Visual-Spatial Strengths

Dyslexic individuals often show enhanced:

• 3D spatial reasoning
• Holistic pattern perception
• Creative problem-solving
• Visual imagination

These aren't consolation prizes for broken reading ability. They might reflect different perceptual affordance landscapes—different ways of coupling with visual information that advantage big-picture spatial relations over fine-grained sequential symbols.

Reading is an unnatural task humans invented recently. Dyslexia might be normal variation in how visual systems couple with the world, which happens to mismatch the arbitrary demands of alphabetic literacy.

Enacting Different Visual Worlds

If cognition is enactive, then different sensorimotor contingencies bring forth different worlds. A dyslexic person might enact visual environments through different scanning patterns, different feature attention, different pattern grouping.

For natural scenes (forests, faces, spatial layouts), this works well. For artificial symbol systems optimized for different visual strategies, it creates difficulty.

The deficit isn't in the person—it's in the fit between their enacted perceptual world and culturally imposed symbol systems.

Synesthesia as Extended Sensory Coupling

Synesthesia—experiencing cross-modal sensory associations like seeing colors for sounds or tasting shapes—was long treated as a curiosity or disorder. 4E cognition makes it unremarkable: it's just tighter cross-modal coupling than typical.

All perception involves cross-modal integration. You perceive size through vision and touch, space through vision and proprioception. Synesthetes just have richer cross-modal coupling, creating enacted perceptual worlds where color and sound are more tightly linked.

This can be advantageous: synesthetic musicians often have perfect pitch, synesthetic calculators use color patterns for arithmetic, synesthetic artists access richer aesthetic dimensions.

Different sensory coupling enacts different perceptual worlds with different affordances.

The Social Affordance Landscape

Autism is fundamentally a "social disorder," conventional wisdom says. But what if social interaction itself is embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended?

Mutual Coordination Challenges

Hanne De Jaegher's research on social interaction shows that autism involves difficulties with participatory sense-making—the mutual coordination through which people create shared meaning.

But coordination requires matching sensorimotor contingencies. If autistic and neurotypical people have different precision landscapes, different proprioceptive integration, different timing—then mutual coordination becomes difficult for both parties, not just the autistic person.

The "deficit" is in the coupling, not in either individual. Mixed neurotype interactions often fail not because one party lacks social cognition but because their embodied rhythms don't naturally entrain.

Different Social Worlds

If social cognition is enacted, then different bodies enact different social worlds. An autistic person doesn't fail to perceive the "real" social situation—they enact a different social world through different sensorimotor engagement.

What neurotypical people experience as "obvious" social signals (subtle facial cues, vocal prosody, implicit norms) might not be obvious at all from different sensory precision landscapes. The autistic person isn't missing information—they're coupling with social environments differently.

This predicts what research finds: autistic people often coordinate smoothly with other autistic people. The difficulty isn't social cognition per se—it's cross-neurotype coordination.

Extended Cognition and Neurodivergent Strategies

Neurodivergent people often develop sophisticated external scaffolding: detailed schedules, visual organization systems, sensory regulation tools, social scripts.

The medical model sees these as compensations for deficit. 4E cognition sees them as skillful extended cognition—building cognitive systems that extend into artifacts to maintain coherence.

ADHD External Structures

People with ADHD often rely heavily on:

• Timers and alarms for time management
• Color-coding and spatial organization for memory
• Body-doubling (working alongside others) for sustained focus
• External accountability systems

These aren't crutches—they're extended cognitive systems as sophisticated as any neurotypical person's extended mind.

The difference: neurotypical people can maintain more internally (though they extend too—calendars, phones, etc.). Neurodivergent people extend more extensively because different embodiment requires different embedding.

Autism Environmental Engineering

Autistic people often carefully structure environments:

• Reducing sensory unpredictability (noise-canceling, consistent lighting)
• Establishing routines (predictable schedules, familiar routes)
• Creating clear communication protocols

This is embedded cognition optimization. If your sensory precision makes environments overwhelming, structure the environment to be more predictable. It's not avoidance—it's adaptive niche construction.

The Geometry of Neurodivergent Coherence

In AToM terms, neurodiversity reflects different coherence architectures—different ways of maintaining integrated organization through brain-body-world coupling.

The manifold on which coherence exists has different geometry for different nervous systems:

• Different sensory dimensions (higher/lower precision in various modalities)
• Different temporal dynamics (faster/slower integration timescales)
• Different coupling patterns (tighter/looser cross-modal integration)

These aren't better or worse—they're different solutions to the problem of maintaining coherence over time. Each creates different strengths and different environmental fits.

Mismatch Suffering

Suffering emerges not from neurodivergence itself but from person-environment mismatch. When environments are designed for different coherence architectures, maintaining coherence becomes effortful, unstable, or impossible.

Fluorescent lighting is fine for people with low visual sensory precision. It's overwhelming for people with high precision. The lighting isn't objectively bad—it's mismatched.

Open-plan offices work for people whose auditory filtering handles background noise. They're cognitively disabling for people without that filtering. The office isn't poorly designed in general—it's designed for a different neurotype.

Most "disorder" is mismatch—coherence architectures colliding with environments optimized for different architectures.

Implications: Designing for Neurodiversity

If neurodivergence is different embodiment rather than deficit, then accommodations aren't special treatment—they're design for actual human variation.

Universal Design: Build environments that support multiple coherence architectures. Variable lighting, quiet spaces, flexible schedules, multiple communication modes.

Affirming Approaches: Stop pathologizing adaptive strategies. Stimming maintains coherence. External structure enables focus. Different sensory engagement enacts different worlds.

Match-Making: Recognize that environment fit matters more than absolute capacity. Don't ask "can this person focus?"—ask "in what environments does this person's cognition flourish?"

Social Coordination: When mixed-neurotype interactions struggle, the problem is coordination, not one party's deficit. Both need to adapt—which means neurotypical people learning neurodivergent communication styles, not just vice versa.

Further Reading

• De Jaegher, H. (2013). "Embodiment and Sense-Making in Autism." Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 7, 15.
• Pellicano, E., & Burr, D. (2012). "When the World Becomes 'Too Real': A Bayesian Explanation of Autistic Perception." Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16(10), 504-510.
• Robledo, J., Donnellan, A. M., & Strandt-Conroy, K. (2012). "An Exploration of Sensory and Movement Differences from the Perspective of Individuals with Autism." Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 6, 107.
• Milton, D. E. (2012). "On the Ontological Status of Autism: The 'Double Empathy Problem.'" Disability & Society, 27(6), 883-887.
• Chapman, R. (2020). "The Reality of Autism: On the Metaphysics of Disorder and Diversity." Philosophical Psychology, 33(6), 799-819.

This is Part 8 of the 4E Cognition series, exploring how cognitive science moved beyond the brain.

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