Umwelten is a synthesis of what is known about neurodiversity and what is known from it. The science of how brains differ, and the lived experience of inhabiting a different brain. Research and testimony, woven together. The name comes from biologist Jakob von Uexküll's concept of the perceptual world unique to each organism: we do not all inhabit the same world. Read more →

This wiki is a work in progress. New pages are being added regularly, existing pages are being refined, and some links may point to content that hasn't been written yet. If you'd like to contribute an idea, a correction, or a reference, you can do that here.

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👁️ The Sensory World The eight sensory systems, how they differ in autism and intellectual disability, and how mismatch with the environment becomes distress. 🧬 Brain & Body How neurodivergent brains differ and why. Conditions, cognition, genetics, neurobiology, and the connection between brain and body. 🌊 Lived Experience Diagnosis, burnout, masking, healthcare, intersectionality. What it is actually like to navigate a neurotypical world. 🤝 The Social World Double empathy, Theory of Mind, autistic social experience, and why social difficulty is better understood as mismatch than deficit. 🌿 Practice & Support Frameworks, interventions, assessment tools, and environment design. What to actually do — with honest evidence assessment. ⚖️ Contested Territory ABA, PBS, polyvagal theory. Where the evidence disagrees with practice, and why the arguments matter. 🤖 AI & Neurodiversity The intersection of AI systems and neurodivergent minds. Tools, risks, and open questions. 💡 People & Ideas Key figures and organisations. Their contributions, their critics, their contested territories. 📥 Contribute Submit an idea, a reference, a correction, or an observation. Every submission is reviewed by the curator.

Where to start

• Models of disability · the philosophical foundations: how you think about disability shapes everything else
• The double empathy problem · the idea that changed the field: social difficulty between autistic and neurotypical people goes both ways
• Autistic burnout · what happens when masking and environmental mismatch accumulate over years
• Diagnostic pathways · the system in crisis: who gets assessed, how long it takes, and what the experience is like
• Sensory processing in autism and intellectual disability · the deepest area of the wiki: how sensory experience differs and why it matters
• About Umwelten · why this wiki exists, how it’s made, and what umwelten means