What this is
Umwelt is a personal encyclopedia of neurodiversity, maintained by Andrew Hopper. It focuses on sensory processing, autism, ADHD, and intellectual disability. It is public-facing, free to read, and will always be so.
Why “Umwelt”
The word comes from Jakob von Uexküll, an Estonian-German biologist who coined it in the early 20th century. Umwelt means “surrounding world,” but Uexküll used it to describe the perceptual world unique to each organism: what its particular nervous system can detect and how it processes that information.
A tick’s umwelt is built from temperature gradients and butyric acid. A bat’s from echolocation. A honeybee’s includes ultraviolet light humans cannot see. Each organism inhabits a different sensory reality, shaped by the architecture of its senses, not a degraded version of some objective world.
The concept applies to human neurodiversity with uncomfortable precision. An autistic person’s umwelt — the sensory world they actually inhabit — is genuinely different from a neurotypical person’s. Not worse. Not broken. Differently constructed, from different sensory weightings, different thresholds, different precision. The fluorescent light that a neurotypical person doesn’t notice is a strobing assault in another umwelt. The background noise of a café that one brain filters out is, in another, an unignorable wall of sound competing with every word spoken.
Understanding neurodiversity means understanding that we do not all inhabit the same sensory world. This wiki guides those different worlds: what the science shows about how they’re constructed, what helps people navigate them, what happens when the built environment assumes only one umwelt exists.
How it is made
This wiki is built with substantial AI assistance. That is a statement of method, not a disclaimer, and worth explaining in detail.
The tools
The wiki is written in markdown, managed in Obsidian, and published via Quartz as a static website. The source vault lives on a Mac Mini. AI assistance comes primarily from Claude (Anthropic), used through Claude Code and Cowork for research, drafting, connection-finding, and quality maintenance.
The process
A typical wiki page is produced roughly like this:
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I decide what’s needed. Whether it’s a gap in coverage, a topic I’ve encountered in my work, or a question someone has asked — the editorial judgement about what the wiki should contain is mine.
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AI does the initial research. Claude searches the academic literature, synthesises findings, identifies relevant systematic reviews and meta-analyses, and produces a research briefing. I review this for relevance, accuracy, and completeness.
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AI drafts the page. Based on the research and the wiki’s templates, voice, and principles, Claude produces a first draft. The draft follows the wiki’s structure and editorial stance (neurodiversity-affirming, evidence-transparent, honest about uncertainty).
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I review, edit, and approve. Every page is read by me before publication. I check the evidence claims, adjust the tone, add context from my own knowledge and experience, cut what doesn’t work, and approve only what I’m willing to put my name on. Some pages are published close to the AI draft; others are substantially rewritten.
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Cross-linking and integration. AI helps identify connections between new and existing pages — a new paper summary might relate to three topic overviews and a key figure. I verify these connections make sense.
Why I’m transparent about this
Three reasons.
Intellectual honesty. Most published content using AI assistance doesn’t say so. That’s a problem in knowledge resources where trust matters. You should know how content was produced to calibrate trust appropriately.
It’s relevant to the subject matter. This wiki covers the intersection of AI and neurodivergent minds. It would be hypocritical to discuss AI’s implications while hiding its use in writing the discussion. See AI and neurodivergent minds.
It works. The combination of AI research capability and human editorial judgement produces broader, more thoroughly sourced, more consistently structured content than either alone. This is the future of knowledge work, and it’s worth doing in the open.
What the AI does not do
The AI does not decide what topics the wiki covers. It does not set the editorial stance. It does not publish without review. It does not have access to personal data about real individuals. It does not override my judgement about what to include, how to frame it, or when to say “the evidence doesn’t support that.”
The wiki’s perspective (neurodiversity-affirming, evidence-transparent, critical of normalisation) is mine. The AI implements it rather than choosing it.
Principles
The full editorial principles are in the project documentation. The short version:
- Neurodivergent perspective first. The wiki speaks from the neurodivergent viewpoint, not about neurodivergent people as objects of study.
- Evidence-transparent. Every claim is traceable to its source and evidence level. Where evidence is weak, the wiki says so.
- No deficit framing. Sensory processing differences are differences, not deficits.
- Honest about uncertainty. Evidence gaps are documented explicitly.
- British English throughout. Because that’s how I write.
Origins
This wiki grew out of work with the Dutch sensory processing programme Sensonate, which originated from a four-year participatory action research project called De Sensatie van een Goed Leven (The Sensation of a Good Life) at UMCG, funded by ZonMw. Much of the foundational content, particularly the Dutch sensory processing frameworks (prikkelbalans, prikkeltaal, prikkelprofiel), draws on that project’s work. The wiki has grown beyond those origins into a broader, independent resource.
Contact
If you find an error, want to suggest a topic, or have relevant expertise to share, I’d like to hear from you. [Contact details to be added.]
Acknowledgements
This wiki draws heavily on the work of the SGL research project at UMCG, led by Jeanet Landsman-Dijkstra and Andrea Fokkens, and on the Sensonate programme under Stichting Bruggenmakers, led by Karol Henke. The Dutch sensory processing frameworks documented here were developed through that project’s participatory research process. I am grateful for the foundation they built.
The wiki also benefits from the work of every researcher, clinician, autistic self-advocate, and carer whose knowledge it attempts to synthesise. They are credited in the pages that draw on their work.