Many neurodivergent people are said to have slower processing speeds. When you take in way more information than the average person at rest…yeah, it might take you longer to process it all. After hearing a lovely coworker use similar wording, I’ve been referring to this kind of processing speed “slow-cooker brain.” I like it because when you use a slow-cooker (like a crock pot), the things you cook are usually really great! It just might take a little longer to simmer. Soak up the juices and whatnot.

By intake of information, I mean sensory input, but also things like social input. Any stimulus, really. Basically, our brains don’t just want to passively take in information- they also want to use that information to update their mental models. It’s a natural neurological need: for our brains to adapt to their changing environment. This is called our brain’s completion tendency. Unfulfilled completion tendencies are stressful; like the item that sits on your to-do list for days or weeks or months, but at a more visceral level. I suspect this is a big contributor to higher allostatic load in general among neurodivergent folks. (Pervasive ableism also being a big factor toward this.) When you’re always hitting bottlenecks, when there are always too many stimuli to process, you’re bound to end up with a lot of things unprocessed.

Side note, taking in more information at rest + slow processing speed + fast world = processing bottlenecks. This is meltdowns and shutdowns. It’s everyone else having printers in their brains and you have some little guys handwriting everything onto scrolls. Those guys will get overwhelmed with work a lot more quickly than a printer.