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Context Thinking
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Sensory overload and coping

With low-contextual thinking, stimuli arrive more directly and intensely because the brain filters less automatically based on context. This leads to sensory overload. This page explains how that works and which coping strategies help.
A person in a busy station where all stimuli arrive with equal force
In sensory overload, there is no automatic hierarchy between signals: light, sound, movement, and detail all push forward at once.

Our senses directly perceive only a limited part of reality. Only 20–30% of what we experience comes from direct sensory input. The remaining 70–80% is supplemented by our brain based on context, expectations, and memory.

In people with high-contextual thinking, the brain filters out many irrelevant stimuli. People with low-contextual thinking contextualize less. As a result, stimuli come in much more directly and intensely. This often leads to sensory overload.

Consequences

Where does sensory overload come from? Three explanations

Science has produced several models to explain sensory overload. Three of them complement each other. They all revolve around the same idea: our brain is a prediction machine that compares incoming stimuli with what it expects.

1. The brain that relies too little on expectation

Van de Cruys and colleagues (2014) describe how the brain constantly weighs stimuli against expectations.1 In autism, the raw sensory signals inflexibly weigh too heavily, at the expense of what the context predicts. Every difference between expectation and perception then receives too much weight.

2. The world feels "too real"

Pellicano and Burr (2012) put it this way: the world feels too real because expectations carry insufficient weight against the direct sensory input.2 Expectations would normally dampen stimuli; when this happens too little, everything comes in unfiltered.

3. A formal variant

Lawson, Rees and Friston (2014) cast the same idea in a mathematical framework, the so-called free-energy principle of the predictive brain.3 The message is similar: the brain assigns the wrong weight to signals.

The connection to context blindness is direct. When the brain uses context too little to filter stimuli, sensory overload is the logical consequence. This connects a subjective complaint — "it's too much" — to a mechanism in the brain.

What about the Intense World Theory?

A well-known explanation is the Intense World Theory (Markram & Markram, 2010): autism as a world that comes in too intensely.4 It is influential, but cannot be taken over one-to-one. It is empirically less broadly confirmed and is strongly linked to a single animal model (a rat model).

Finnemann and colleagues (2021) found no disruption in the most basic prediction processing in adult autistic participants.5 That undermines the theory at that lowest level. We therefore present the Intense World Theory as an influential hypothesis, not as established science. More on this on the page Intense World Theory and context sensitivity.

High sensitivity: related, but not the same

Many people recognise themselves in the word "highly sensitive". In research this is called Sensory Processing Sensitivity (SPS); Greven and colleagues (2019) wrote the most important review about it.6 It is a character trait on a sliding scale, not a recognized diagnosis — not in the DSM-5-TR, not in the ICD-11.

High sensitivity looks like sensory overload, but is not the same as it. Beneath that one word hide at least three different patterns, which stand partly apart from one another. One of them works just as described here: a filtering problem, where stimuli come in unchecked. The other two call for a different approach.

The word is not a test. A high score on a high-sensitivity questionnaire proves no autism, ADHD, or other disorder — and does not rule those out either.

Want to read the three patterns and the pitfalls in full? See High sensitivity: one word, three stories.

Coping strategies

Many low-contextual individuals develop strategies to cope with this sensory overload:

Case

A low-contextual student always uses noise-cancelling headphones on the train. While others automatically filter out background noises, for him all conversations, beeps, and sounds come in at once. The headphones help to reduce the stimulus load and make the situation manageable.

These strategies work for a reason. Environmental adaptation and predictability help the brain precisely with the contextual processing it finds difficult on its own. Limiting the bustle takes over the work that the automatic filter normally performs.

References

  1. 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. doi:10.1037/a0037665 — PubMed 25347312
  2. 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. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2012.08.009 — PubMed 22959875
  3. Lawson, R. P., Rees, G., & Friston, K. J. (2014). An aberrant precision account of autism. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, 302. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2014.00302 — PubMed 24860482
  4. Markram, K., & Markram, H. (2010). The Intense World Theory — A unifying theory of the neurobiology of autism. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 4, 224. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2010.00224 — PubMed 21191475
  5. Finnemann, J. J. S., Plaisted-Grant, K., Moore, J., Teufel, C., & Fletcher, P. C. (2021). Low-level, prediction-based sensory and motor processes are unimpaired in autism. Neuropsychologia, 156, 107835. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2021.107835 — PubMed 33794277
  6. Greven, C. U., Lionetti, F., Booth, C., Aron, E. N., Fox, E., Schendan, H. E., et al. (2019). Sensory Processing Sensitivity in the context of Environmental Sensitivity: A critical review and development of research agenda. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 98, 287–305. doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2019.01.009