Most forms of neurodivergence experience some form of lag – both a high effort/mental cost processing and a delay in response, particularly in social situations. My experience is different in that I have low effort and low or zero lag.

NT Experience: Zero Lag

NT people have dedicated hardware to pick up and decode social signals. They receive “vibes” from people around them and simulate their thoughts and emotions and signal back to them. This is all automatic – you don’t think X feels Y, you know it. This has no effort and no lag. This is called Theory of Mind and people expect this to exist. It is how human social structure is built.

Autism Experience: Social Lag

Since autism is the most relevant functional proxy for my social profile, I will focus on that data. What is the cause of lag that autistic people experience? You can read about the Autism Experience and see parts of it. Autistic people have a different architecture – they receive the social signal but it is unable to activate the automatic simulation hardware. This forces autistic people to manually decode the signal and manually run Theory of Mind via Theory-Theory. ToM is not a simple computation so this is both expensive mentally and takes time. Social lag.

My Experience: Zero Lag

My cognitive architecture is also missing this automatic simulation hardware, so how can I process this information with no effort or lag? Easy: I don’t. My lack of Social Salience means I don’t have the input signal to try to do this manually, indeed I didn’t even realize it was a thing.

So don’t I make social mistakes? Yes, I can Say The Wrong Thing and I can miss very important information. I don’t signal my thoughts and emotions. With all that, I don’t experience much friction. No social salience is an unusual thing because it is both the part of the brain that monitors the social signal AND the piece that controls how you feel about social situations – I don’t have any signal and I don’t have any feeling about it.

In the cases where I do encounter Friction, it is an efficiency issue, not something I detect as a social faux pax:

• Resource Waste: The conversation stalls. Effort must be diverted from the “Task” to “Explanation/Repair.”
• Input Rejection: The recipient becomes defensive. The other person’s “Receiver” closes (typically from my words or actions), rendering further factual transmission impossible

I process the world around me using Propositional Logic, Manual Frame Construction and Functional Logic Modeling. That could be very expensive but I have some shortcuts – details through those links, but briefly:

• accept missing or faulty data
• accept the cost of social failures
  • this is friction (inability to accomplish task) rather than something like Shame
• use canned scripts for common situations
• use low fidelity models for almost everything else
  • rely on a feedback loop to adjust if things are not going to plan
• some friction avoidance heuristics, manually triggered and employed, like
  • don’t correct people/argue in a meeting unless absolutely required
  • don’t tell somebody they are fat

I only engage effortful and slow mechanisms when the complexity and important of the outcome requires it: think preparing a presentation to another team at work to convince them of something. That is going to be effortful no matter who is doing it, so this isn’t a particular burden.

The big takeaway is that I am willing to eat the cost of some social friction because it doesn’t feel the same way that it would to NT or autistic people. The benefit is that I didn’t even that I was different – it was random chance that led me to discover it.

My system achieves Zero Lag not through superior social computation, but through Zero-Gain Social Input. Because the “receiver” for non-explicit signals is effectively off, my system is never triggered to start a social simulation. This eliminates the computational overhead (Theory of Mind) that causes latency (Lag) in other neurodivergent profiles.

This is an Emergent Property of my cognitive architecture. I do not “decide” to ignore social cues; I simply lack the hardware to capture them. Occasional detection of “loud” social signals (e.g., exaggerated stage-acting) occurs only when the signal is so physically distorted that it registers as a literal acoustic fact rather than a “vibe.”

It isn’t for everyone, in fact I think if you had even a hint of social salience it would be intolerable. It isn’t perfect either, but it works for me.