Playing With 5 Whole Decks: An Autism Metaphor

At times, I have heard the term, "not playing with a full deck." It is often used when a person doesn't understand why someone is acting a certain way and makes assumptions about them. I've found it to be dehumanizing, ableist and flat-out wrong.

Neurodivergent people often report being misunderstood (Finke et al., 2023). Unfortunately some have been called unkind names and phrases such as this.

For autistic people who may find themselves misunderstood in this way, nothing could be further from the truth.

Let me explain.

Imagine you have a deck of cards. Each card represents a thought or word you might say. The joker represents the word you want to say.

If you have 10 cards and are asked to find a joker, it’s easy enough, right? You can find your words well. When we are stressed, we have more on our minds. So imagine having a deck of 50 cards (words/thoughts) to find the joker. It’s a little more difficult but doable.

Now, imagine that someone gives you five or 10 decks of cards. Find the joker. It's not easy at all.

Research suggests that autistic people may have a tendency toward bottom-up processing (Alho et al., 2023). This forms some of the basis of the 'intense world theory,' a construct that autistic people do not filter out information in the same way as neurotypical individuals. Instead information—be it sensory, social or otherwise—is processed more complexly (Markram and Markram, 2010).

Details are not always filtered out, and one might process a lot of information at once. This, combined with sensory processing differences, creates an intense world—sort of like playing with 10 decks of cards at once.

People often come up with fantastic ways to adapt to a world set up for people playing with just one deck. At the same time, extra time might be necessary to answer a question. The words might not come together as smoothly at first. Overwhelming detail can mean a strong need for clarity. The question might need to be asked more than once. Some are non-speaking.

Is it because they are “not playing with a full deck” or don’t have the capacity to understand? Absolutely not. Patience goes a long way. So does giving time for a response, offering other means of communication, and being aware that they might be in an even better place to draw connections than most.

Playing with 10 cards or a deck of cards is cool. You can do some pretty cool things with five or 10 decks as well. Celebrating neurodiversity is about suspending assumptions are highlighting strengths.

I hope that through examining figures of speech such as this and confronting them, we can appreciate each others' differences and decrease misunderstandings.