Find a therapist to help with autism

The brain doesn’t always work best by combining everything it senses.

Sometimes, clarity comes from letting one signal lead while others fall back.

For many autistic and ADHD people, this isn’t avoidance—it’s a way of staying oriented.

Sometimes things become clearer when I stop trying to take everything in. Not quieter. Not simpler. Just cleaner.

In a noisy café, I find that if I close my eyes, I can hear the person across from me more clearly. I can even speak better. Not because my hearing improves, but because vision stops competing for the same interpretive space. The sound doesn’t get stronger. It just gets room to matter.

We tend to assume that the brain works best when it combines everything it senses, layering sight, sound, movement, and context into a single stream. In neuroscience, this process is called multisensory integration, and under the right conditions, it can be remarkably effective. But integration isn’t the brain’s default goal. It’s a strategy, one the brain uses selectively.

When Integration Helps—and When It Doesn’t

In research lab studies, multisensory integration can improve performance on tasks like detection (Is something there? ) or localization (Where is it?). These benefits tend to show up when multiple sensory signals are redundant—when they point to the same answer and arrive in a way the brain can easily coordinate. In neuroscience, this is often described as reliability-based integration or cue weighting: the brain gives more influence to the signal that’s most useful for the task at hand. When cues agree, combining them reduces uncertainty. When they don’t, integration can backfire. Adding extra sensory information doesn’t always sharpen perception. Sometimes it softens it—making experience feel fuller or more confident without making it more precise.

Sensory Competition and Cognitive Effort

This distinction matters for understanding autism, ADHD, and AuDHD. In many autistic and ADHD individuals, perception appears to rely less on automatic fusion and more on active selection. Instead of quickly blending signals into a single stream, the brain may keep inputs more distinct, weighing them carefully before deciding what belongs together. In neuroscience, this is often described as sensory competition: multiple signals vying for the same interpretive space. When signals arrive together but don’t align cleanly, the brain has to coordinate them in real time.

The issue isn’t confusion. It’s interpretive load.

This helps explain why environments with many simultaneous cues—overlapping conversations, visual motion, competing sounds—can feel effortful even when no single input is intense. Each signal is clear on its own. What’s demanding is deciding how they relate.

Why Timing Matters More Than Intensity

Timing plays a role here as well. The brain uses a brief window of time to decide which sensory events belong together. Neuroscience calls this the temporal binding window. When sights and sounds fall within that window, they’re likely to be treated as part of the same event. Research suggests that, on average, autistic individuals may operate with different temporal binding dynamics, meaning that signals are not automatically bound unless their relationship is especially clear. This doesn’t make perception worse, but it can make it more effortful in fast-moving or poorly coordinated environments.

Again, the challenge isn’t noise. It’s deciding what belongs together.

Selection as a Legitimate Strategy

From this perspective, multisensory “benefit” doesn’t always come from combining signals. Sometimes it comes from selection—allowing one sensory stream to guide action while others recede into the background. That choice can stabilize perception rather than fragment it. For autistic, ADHD, and AuDHD individuals, what looks from the outside like “tuning things out” or “needing less input” is often a way of managing sensory competition. It’s a strategy for preserving clarity when integration would demand constant negotiation.

Find a therapist to help with autism

Sometimes, the most effective way to work with the world isn’t to take everything in—but to let one thing stand out long enough to matter.

Stein, B. E., & Stanford, T. R. (2008). Multisensory integration: Current issues from the perspective of the single neuron. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 9(4), 255–266. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2331

Ernst, M. O., & Bülthoff, H. H. (2004). Merging the senses into a robust percept. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8(4), 162–169. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2004.02.002

Pellicano, E., & Burr, D. (2012). When the world becomes “too real”: A Bayesian explanation of autistic perception. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16(10), 504–510. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2012.08.009

Top-down modulation: Bridging selective attention and working memory. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16(2), 129–135. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2011.11.014

© Psychology Today