Last month, I wrote a series on autism from the inside. The response surprised me — several people said it helped them understand someone in their life, or themselves. This is a follow-up on something I've been thinking about since.
Autistic people who talk at length about their interests are easy to misread. They seem oblivious to whether you're engaged. They circle back to the same subject even after the conversation has moved on. From the outside, it looks like self-centeredness: I want to talk about this, so I will.
I suggest the mechanism is almost the opposite.
For an autistic brain, information isn't incidental. It's closer to what navigation instruments are to a pilot: not nice to have, but required to function. I've written before about the constant background scan — the nervous system collecting data continuously, because any gap in the map is a potential trapdoor. That's the context this runs in.
If information has that level of value — survival-level value, not intellectual curiosity — then sharing information is the most generous thing you can do. When I've spent weeks or months going deep on a subject, and I find something that genuinely matters, the instinct to share it isn't "let me talk about myself." It's closer to "I found something you need to know."
It's "I found water."
The social form looks like monologue. The underlying intent is contribution, especially when this knowledge contributes to lowering anxiety, consciously or not.
This also explains the other side of the equation: small talk. The common framing is that autistic people find it boring, or that we prefer "meaningful" conversation. That's not quite it either. The information channel runs in survival mode. Low-signal input — the weather, a filler comment, a pleasantry that carries no new information — doesn't just fail to help. It occupies bandwidth that the system is trying to keep clear. It's not boredom. It's closer to noise pollution in a critical instrument.
The frustration when no one seems interested in what you're sharing, and the discomfort with small talk, come from the same place: a brain that has assigned extreme functional value to information, operating in a world where most social exchange treats information as incidental.
None of this makes the social friction disappear. Knowing the mechanism doesn't mean the other person stops feeling talked over. But it changes the question. The question isn't "why are they so self-absorbed?" The question is: what does it mean to be generous when your native currency isn't attention, but knowledge?
For a lot of autistic people, sharing is genuinely how we care. We're just not always aware that the gift doesn't always land the way it was meant.
