"The difference in autistic social cognition is best described in terms of a heightened level of conscious processing of raw information signals from the environment, and an absence or a significantly reduced level of subconscious filtering of social information."

Above quote from here: https://autcollab.org/projects/a-communal-definition-of-autism/

I think this neatly describes the core of autistic cognition, at least according to my own experience.

Conscious processing of raw information from the environment.

It explains quite a lot of autistic experience logically and from the inside, instead of what non-autistic people see as "irrational behaviour" or "symptoms".

Examples:
- Social status is quite irrelevant to me (yours, or mine)
- Difficult to understand speech when there's background noise or another speech going on
- Difficult to learn only by looking at someone show something, if they don't explain what I should be looking at.

There's so much sensory information coming in all the time. I have to make a conscious effort to really concentrate on one signal, and even then I can't shut off the other signals. It's very exhausting. It can make learning very draining and unnecessarily difficult.

This can be easily fixed by simple adjustments in the learning environment. Clear rules, one person speaks at a time, reducing noise (think of room acoustics), giving a few different options for learning: written and spoken language, visual input, notes you can go back to.

I school I excelled in languages, but "understanding spoken language" (kuullun ymmärtäminen) was difficult for me. Now I realise it was because listening to a stuffy tape from speakers in an echoey room is a completely different thing than listening to a person speaking near.

The background noise on the tapes was artificially amplified many times. First, bad quality recording, and then the speakers, and then the room echo. Acoustically totally different when you listen to a person speaking in front of you in a quiet space.

My challenges had nothing to do with understanding language. They were sensory issues.

I could lecture for hours about all sorts of "tests" and their problems, how they don't actually measure the thing they are supposed to measure, because they are so far away from the actual real life situation.