Compression planes of cognition Autism, ADHD, AuDHD and Neurotypical cognition without the moral nonsense MAY 25 This is not a diagnostic tool. It is not a ranking system. It is not a personality quiz with better vocabulary. It is a model for thinking about Autism, ADHD, AuDHD and neurotypical cognition as different ways of compressing the world. That word matters: compression. The world is too big to process directly. Too much light, sound, meaning, memory, social information, body-state, expectation, consequence and possible interpretation arrives at once. No brain receives all of reality and handles it raw. Every mind has to reduce the world into something usable. The question is not whether compression happens. The question is: what does a system preserve when it compresses? Some systems preserve social flow. Some preserve structure. Some preserve salience, novelty and momentum. Some try to preserve structure and novelty at the same time, which is powerful when it works and expensive when it does not. That is the basic idea behind the Compression Planes model. The longer internal paper frames Autism, ADHD, AuDHD and neurotypical cognition as “dominant compression tendencies” rather than personality categories or moral hierarchies. It also introduces two central costs: holding cost, the energy required to keep a model stable, and movement cost, the energy required to transition between models. I want to make that readable here. Not flatten it. Readable. The problem with “types” Most public explanations of Autism and ADHD still get trapped in trait lists. Autism is described as routine, sensory sensitivity, social difficulty, special interests. ADHD is described as distractibility, impulsivity, hyperactivity, poor organisation. AuDHD becomes “both.” Neurotypical becomes “normal. ” That is useful up to a point, but it misses the deeper structure. A trait list tells you what something can look like. It does not tell you what it costs, what it preserves, what destabilises it, or why the same person can look brilliant in one context and completely non-functional in another. That is why “high functioning” is such a bad phrase. It tells you that output looked intact. It tells you almost nothing about the internal cost of producing it. Someone can appear socially fluent while manually calculating every exchange. Someone can produce excellent work while destroying their recovery window. Someone can seem inconsistent because their ability depends heavily on salience, sensory load, transition pressure or evaluation threat. Someone can look calm because their collapse happens later, privately, when the system finally stops performing. So instead of asking, “Which type is this person?”, t h i s m o d e l a s k s : what kind of compression is this system using, and what happens when that compression is placed under load? Neurotypical cognition: social continuity as compression Neurotypical cognition is often treated as the absence of a pattern. I do not think that is right. It is a pattern. It just happens to be the pattern most environments are built around. In this model, neurotypical cognition tends to compress through shared context, social continuity and narrative alignment. That does not mean every neurotypical person is shallow, conformist or socially effortless. It means the system often stabilises information through what is collectively understood. What is the expected meaning? What is the socially appropriate level of detail? What is th