About twenty years ago, while studying Gestion Mentale, a pedagogy framework developed by French educator Antoine de la Garanderie, our group was asked to do a simple mental calculation. Something like 47+35. Then explain what happened in our heads.
The results were staggering.
One person talked to themselves through it. Another wrote the numbers on an imaginary blackboard, in their own handwriting. Someone else saw their primary school teacher's handwriting instead. One person had visual bars and immediate access to the result, with no intermediate steps they could describe. Ten people, ten different internal processes, one correct answer.
Nobody had assumed everyone else did it the same way. But nobody had ever questioned it either, because there had never been a reason to ask.
That exercise made something visible that is almost always invisible: the internal process and the expected output are two separate things, and they don't have to map onto each other in any particular way.
I saw this confirmed during an internship with a Gestion Mentale practitioner working with a child struggling with long divisions. Over several sessions they had found a method that worked for the child, that he understood and could use reliably. Then the teacher called him to the board, he used his method, and she dismissed it. She hadn't taught it, she didn't recognize it, so as far as she was concerned it wasn't valid.
The practitioner spent the next session reframing things. There are two layers, he told the child: how you perform a task, and what the world expects as output. Those are separate problems. Let's find a way to convert your method into the expected format.
I've recently been writing about autism, following my own diagnosis at 43. Autism adds a cost to this picture. When your internal process doesn't map naturally onto what the social world expects as output, there is a translation layer running constantly — reading faces, calibrating tone, tracking when to speak and when to stop. For most people this is automatic, effectively free. For an autistic person it runs consciously, alongside every interaction.
The result looks the same. The cost doesn't show. Which is why late diagnosis is so common: the output passes inspection, so nobody looks at the process.
Happy to hear how this lands — particularly from those of you who recognize the translation cost from your own experience, whether or not you have a diagnosis.
