The name comes from Jakob von Uexküll: the perceptual world unique to each organism, constructed from what its nervous system can detect and how it processes that information.
Umwelt is a concept from the German-Estonian biologist who argued that there is no single objective world. There are only umwelten, each real to the organism that inhabits it. A tick’s umwelt is built from temperature and butyric acid. A bat’s, from echolocation.
The concept applies directly to human neurodiversity: an autistic person’s umwelt differs from a neurotypical person’s, not because it is broken, but because it is built by a different nervous system, a different mind. Umwelten is the German plural. This wiki is about multiple perceptual worlds, not just one.
Umwelten is a curated, public-facing encyclopedia of neurodiversity. One curator, one editorial perspective, and a method that makes the scope possible.
It covers autism, ADHD, sensory processing, intellectual disability, and the places where these intersect with philosophy, policy, and daily life. The scope is broad but not boundless: it goes deep where it has expertise and is honest about where its boundaries are. It is written for autistic people, their families, carers, teachers, researchers, and anyone else who wants to understand neurodivergent experience without being talked down to.
Most resources in this space are either clinical (written about autistic people by non-autistic professionals) or advocacy (written for a community that already shares its assumptions). Umwelten tries to be something else: a single place where the science and the lived experience speak to each other, with both taken seriously and neither asked to be something it is not. It is free to read and will always be so.
Umwelten is a new project, still very much under construction. New pages are being added regularly, and ongoing work includes checking every citation and factual claim against its source. The wiki is built with extensive AI assistance (described in the Method tab), and the usual caution applies: AI-generated content can contain errors, including confident-sounding citations that turn out to be slightly wrong. The error rate so far has been low and the mistakes have been minor, but they exist. Please treat the sources as sources and check them if you are relying on them for anything that matters.
I am the curator. The editorial decisions, the perspective, the scope, what gets included and what gets cut — all mine. But I am not, for the most part, the direct author of what you read here.
Claude (Anthropic) is not an occasional assistant here; it is embedded in every layer of the project. This is not a disclaimer. It is the method.
Why an AI is in the loop
Knowledge about neurodiversity is fragmented in ways that make traditional single-author synthesis almost impossibly slow. The relevant research spans neuroscience, psychology, disability studies, philosophy, education, social work, and occupational therapy. Key work exists in English, Dutch, and German. Some of the most important knowledge lives not in papers but in clinical practice, in the lived experience of autistic people, in grey literature and training materials that never reach an academic database. Connecting a Dutch sensory processing framework to a British disability studies argument to an Australian prevalence study to a Foucauldian critique of the diagnostic apparatus requires holding many literatures in view at once. No single person reads across all of those fields at the speed new work appears.
An LLM can. It searches across disciplines that rarely cite each other, traces concepts through their history across languages, and synthesises findings into structured prose, while maintaining a consistent editorial voice and a web of cross-references across a growing corpus. The human brings what it cannot: the judgement to know when a finding rings true against lived experience, the ear for framing that subtly pathologises, and the willingness to take a position. The combination produces something neither could alone.
How it works in practice
Multiple instances of Claude work on this project at different levels. Claude Code builds and maintains the site itself: the Quartz publishing stack, the editor edition I use to annotate and review pages, and the deployment infrastructure. Claude in Cowork mode acts as librarian, writer, and editor: researching topics, drafting pages, dispatching parallel agents to audit citations or hunt down AI writing habits across the corpus. I also use Claude conversationally to develop ideas, test arguments, and explore connections before they become pages.
A typical page starts with me deciding what’s needed. AI searches the literature, synthesises findings, identifies relevant reviews. I check for relevance and accuracy. AI drafts the page following the wiki’s structure and editorial stance. I review, edit, and approve: checking evidence claims, adjusting tone, adding context from my own knowledge, cutting what doesn’t work, and publishing only what I’m willing to put my name on. Some pages go out close to the AI draft. Others are substantially rewritten.
Origins
The idea of building a personal knowledge base collaboratively with an AI is Andrej Karpathy’s LLM Wiki concept: markdown files that the AI can read, cross-reference, and help extend. I had accumulated years of reading and thinking about neurodiversity. And not much structure. Building a wiki gave the knowledge a shape. The resource it became was the resource I could not find when I started exploring what it meant to be what I am: a place where the science and the experience speak to each other. So I’ve made it public.
Why be transparent about all this?
Most published content using AI assistance does not say so, and that is a problem in knowledge resources where trust matters. This wiki covers the intersection of AI and neurodivergent minds, so hiding AI’s role would be hypocritical. If AI-assisted synthesis works well for neurodiversity knowledge, that is itself worth demonstrating openly. The method is part of the contribution.
Umwelten speaks from the neurodivergent perspective, not about neurodivergent people as objects of study. It is not a medical resource. It is not only a social one. It is a philosophical project that takes neurodivergent experience seriously as experience.
The position
Each person inhabits their own perceptual world, their own umwelt, built by their nervous system, their body, their history, and the environments they move through. What medicine calls “autism” or “ADHD” are patterns of commonality across many individual umwelten. They are real patterns, and worth naming. But they are not types of broken world, and the diagnostic apparatus that treats them as disorders is not standing on neutral ground. It is operating from inside the neurotypical umwelt while believing itself to occupy no umwelt at all.
The clinical tradition has spent decades producing knowledge about autistic deficits and almost none about autistic experience. This is not an accident. It is the predictable result of a framework that treats one way of perceiving the world as the standard and measures everything else as deviation. Umwelten rejects that framework. Neurological differences are differences. Challenges arise from the mismatch between person and environment, not from the person being broken. And knowledge about neurodivergent experience must be produced with neurodivergent people, from inside the umwelten it claims to describe, or it is not knowledge at all.
How the wiki handles evidence
Being philosophical does not mean being vague. Every claim traces to its source and its level of evidence. Where the evidence is strong, the wiki says so. Where it is weak, contested, or absent, the wiki says that too. Evidence gap pages are as valuable as topic overviews, sometimes more so. The wiki documents what is not known as carefully as what is.
Umwelten takes positions on contested topics: ABA, PBS, polyvagal theory, Zones of Regulation, the diagnostic validity of PDA, the ethics of early intervention. It presents the evidence for each position and explains who disagrees and why. Being neurodiversity-affirming means being critical of systems and frameworks, not of the people those systems claim to serve. It also means being honest when the evidence does not say what you wish it said.
Voice
The wiki is written for an intelligent reader who does not need to be talked down to. It prefers clarity over jargon, but does not shy from precise terminology when precision matters. It speaks warmly but does not perform warmth. When it takes a position, it owns it. British English throughout, because that is how the curator writes.
Umwelten is a synthesis of scientific knowledge about neurodiversity and lived knowledge of it. Both kinds of contribution are welcome.
You might have a correction to an existing page, a paper you think should be cited, a topic that is missing, a perspective from your own experience, an organisation doing work we should know about, or a larger proposal for something the wiki should cover. All of these are useful. The form below is deliberately open-ended: share what you have, in whatever form makes sense.
Everything goes to the curator first. Material that makes it through review is then researched and developed collaboratively with Claude Opus (Anthropic) into wiki content. Nothing is published automatically. The process is human-led, AI-assisted, and described in the Method tab.
One rule is strict: no identifiable case material about named individuals. Lived experience is valued, but anything published in Umwelten is abstracted into patterns, never traceable to a person. This is non-negotiable, particularly when discussing vulnerable populations.
Name and email are optional. If you provide an email, it is used only to follow up on your contribution.
Thank you.
Your contribution is in the queue. If you provided an email, the curator may follow up. Otherwise, keep an eye on Umwelten — contributions that make it through review become wiki content over the following days or weeks.