Emotional expression should be seen as a human experience, not defined by disability.

Read Full Article at

 https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/giving-voice/202409/caught-between-tears-and-stoicism

 

When AI Can’t Hear You, It’s Not Neutral — It’s Designed That Way

I’ve been thinking a lot about who gets heard by AI—and who doesn’t. We tend to talk about artificial intelligence as if it’s neutral. Objective. Just math and data. But for many autistic people—especially those who are minimally speaking or nonspeaking—AI systems don’t just fail sometimes. They quietly shut people out. That’s what my paper (currently under peer review) is about: something I call engineered exclusion

Link to the preprint:  https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/eahjb_v1

What do I mean by “engineered exclusion”?

Engineered exclusion is when technology predictably leaves certain people out—not because of a bug, but because of how the system was designed from the start.
Most AI communication tools assume a very specific kind of user:

About That Autism Barbie and the Headphones

A few weeks ago, there was a lot of social media posts on something that was being widely celebrated online: a new Barbie meant to represent autism.

It had noise-canceling headphones. It had an AAC device. It had flexible hands for stimming.

And I felt… conflicted.

That moment is what eventually became my new Psychology Today .

My TedX Talk

  My Ted X talk titled "Pebbles in the Pond of Change

Hari Srinivasan, shares a powerful message about the power of small actions in creating ever-widening ripples in the pond of change. Drawing from personal experiences and the legacy of disability rights leaders, he redefines progress as a journey that starts with simple, accessible steps. His inspiring message encourages everyone to identify and act on their own "small pebbles" to drive societal transformation.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e87-3xydg58

"Incorporating well-being into daily routines can reduce the dependency on inaccessible therapies." - Hari Srinivasan

Read on... https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/aut.2024.38246.pw

Why Sensory Relief Isn’t About Quiet.

Psychology Today published my piece “Why Sensory Relief Isn’t About Quiet.”

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/giving-voice/202601/why-sensory-relief-isnt-just-about-quiet

It’s about something that has quietly bothered me for years: the assumption that sensory discomfort is mainly a volume problem.

Too loud.
Too bright.
Too busy.

If we could just turn things down, the thinking goes, people—especially autistic people or those with ADHD—would feel better.

But that hasn’t matched my experience. And it hasn’t matched what neuroscience tells us either.

Quiet Isn’t Always Comfortable

Some of the hardest sensory moments I know happen in places that are nearly silent.

Waiting rooms.
Open offices during off-hours.

These spaces aren’t intense. They’re ambiguous.

In the PT article, I open with a waiting room because it captures this perfectly. Nothing is happening—but nothing is resolving either. The nervous system stays on standby, tuned for change. Time stretches. Small sounds take on disproportionate weight.

By contrast, walking down a busy sidewalk can feel easier. There’s noise, movement, and unpredictability, but there’s also direction. Flow. A sense of what’s coming next.

That contrast is the heart of the piece.

The Neuroscience Thread

The article leans on a simple idea from neuroscience, even though it doesn’t use much jargon:

The brain isn’t just reacting to stimulation.
It’s constantly trying to stay oriented in time.

At every moment, it’s asking a quiet question:

What’s happening next?

When environments answer that question—through clear timing, transitions, and structure—perception feels smoother, even if the environment is busy. When they don’t, attention stays suspended, even if the environment is quiet.

This isn’t about preference or personality. It’s about coherence.

Neuroscience gives us language for this—predictive processing, multisensory integration, expectation—but what matters most to me is what those ideas explain in real life.

Predictability ≠ Sameness

One thing I was careful about in this piece was predictability.

Predictability is often misunderstood, especially when autism is involved. It gets flattened into a stereotype: rigidity, sameness, control.

That’s not what I mean.

Predictability doesn’t require repetition. It doesn’t require things to stay the same. It only requires that changes make sense—timing is consistent, signals match their sources, events unfold in context.

In the article, I describe predictability less as a preference and more as a stabilizer. Something that helps the nervous system keep its footing in time and space.

That framing matters. It shifts the conversation away from “why are you so sensitive?” toward “what structure is missing here?”

Why “Just Wear Headphones” Falls Short

Another reason I wrote this piece is frustration with well-meaning but incomplete advice.

“Just wear noise-canceling headphones.”
“Just reduce stimulation.”

Sometimes that helps. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Turning the volume down doesn’t automatically make a situation feel settled. In some cases, it removes cues the brain relies on to stay oriented, making the world quieter but no more legible.

What helps more often are small changes that increase clarity:

• Clear transitions

• Consistent timing

• Advance notice

• Signals that match what’s happening

These don’t quiet the world. They organize it.

From Accommodation to Design

One subtle shift I wanted to make in this article is how we talk about solutions.

I don’t frame these ideas as accommodations alone. I think of them as design choices—ways of supporting perception so it doesn’t have to stay suspended.

When sensory strain is framed only as a personal limitation, the solution is always to cope more: tolerate longer, adapt faster, endure quietly.

A focus on predictability and coherence asks something different of environments instead.

What I Hope Readers Take Away

If there’s one thing I hope readers notice after reading the PT piece, it’s this:

Pay attention not just to what feels loud or busy—but to what feels unfinished.

Where does perception settle into rhythm?
Where does it stay waiting?

Sometimes what the nervous system needs most isn’t quiet.

It’s coherence.

Neurodiversity 2.0: Contemporary Research, Evolving Frameworks, and Practice Implications

Next month, I’ll be speaking at NIEPID (National Institute for the Empowerment of Persons with Intellectual Disabilities) on a topic I’ve been thinking and writing about for some time: what it means to take neurodiversity seriously without flattening disability.

This is a training-focused talk, aimed at educators, clinicians, and rehabilitation professionals who want research-grounded tools for understanding communication differences and nervous system responses to unpredictability.

Rather than framing autism only through strengths or only through deficits, the session draws on contemporary neuroscience to show how difference, disability, and context interact in real life.

I’ll be offering a plain-language overview of research relevant to education and rehabilitation, including:

• sensory processing and sensory–motor integration
• interoception and regulation
• motor planning and coordination
• nervous system responses to unpredictability and stress

The goal is not to provide a single “correct” model of autism, but to offer a research-informed lens that helps professionals better understand distress, communication differences, and participation across diverse support needs.

 Date: 7th February 2025
 Time: 7:00 PM (Indian Standard Time)
 Platform: Google Meet. Link(https://meet.google.com/ocp-mozi-vrf)

Talk Abstract: This talk introduces Neurodiversity 2.0 as a way to move beyond polarized debates about autism (medical vs. social, strengths vs. challenges, independence vs. dependence) and focus on a more realistic “both–and” understanding. Alongside this framing, I present a plain-language overview of contemporary neuroscience that is relevant to education and rehabilitation contexts, including sensory processing, interoception and emotion labeling, motor planning, and nervous system responses to unpredictability. The goal is not clinical instruction, but a research-informed lens that can help trainees think more clearly about distress, communication differences, and participation across a wide range of support needs.

New preprint: AI, Autism, and the Architecture of Voice

New preprint: AI, Autism, and the Architecture of Voice

I’m sharing a new preprint exploring how AI systems shape whose voices are heard, whose are filtered out, and what it would mean to design AI around dignity rather than accommodation after the fact.

The paper examines how current AI architectures—especially those governing speech, communication, and interaction—often reproduce forms of engineered exclusion for autistic and minimal/nonspeaking people. It then proposes a shift toward designed dignity: building voice, agency, and access into systems from the outset rather than retrofitting accessibility later.

📄 Preprint available on SocArXiv
🔗 https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/eahjb_v1

This work is intended as a bridge between AI ethics, disability studies, and lived experience.

When the Senses Argue - Why Neuroscientists love sensory illusions

 When the Senses Argue

Why neuroscientists love sensory illusions

The first time most people encounter a sensory illusion, the reaction is laughter—followed quickly by disbelief. Wait, that can’t be right. You rewind the clip. You try again. Your eyes insist on one thing, your ears on another, and your brain calmly delivers a third answer you never asked for.

That moment—when confidence gives way to curiosity—is exactly why neuroscientists keep coming back to sensory illusions. They aren’t parlor tricks. They’re controlled disagreements between the senses, designed to reveal how the brain decides what counts as reality.

Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: perception isn’t a recording. It’s a verdict.

Masking is Evolution at Work — With a Cost.

Masking is often described as “pretending to be neurotypical,” as if autistic people are performing or being inauthentic.

That framing misses what masking really is.

In my Psychology Today article “Masking as an Evolutionary Advantage,” I approach masking as adaptation — what happens when a nervous system learns that being visibly different carries social risk.

Humans evolved in small, interdependent groups. Belonging meant access to food, protection, shared knowledge, and safety. Being excluded meant vulnerability. In that world, standing out was never neutral. It attracted attention. And attention could mean danger.

For autistic people — whose movements, speech, timing, and sensory responses naturally diverge from social norms — that creates powerful selection pressure. Over time, the brain learns:
If I reduce how different I appear, I am more likely to stay in the group.

That is the evolutionary advantage of masking.
It increases the probability of acceptance, inclusion, and survival — and, in many contexts, reduces the risk of harm.

Masking isn’t just hiding stimming or forcing eye contact. It includes mirroring tone, copying social rhythms, suppressing natural movements, and constantly scanning for signs of disapproval. From the outside, this can look like social fluency. From the inside, it feels more like vigilance — an ongoing effort to stay safe.

This pressure is not evenly distributed.

Autistic women often live inside what researchers describe as a triple bind:
they are expected to be socially attuned, emotionally responsive, and compliant — while also navigating the penalties attached to disability and difference. The cost of not masking is often higher for them: social rejection, misinterpretation, or being labeled difficult, rude, or unstable. Masking becomes a way to survive gendered social expectations layered on top of neurodivergence.

People with higher support needs face a different but equally powerful bind. Their differences are more visible, and visibility increases vulnerability — to punishment, restraint, exclusion, or loss of autonomy. For them, masking is often less about fitting in and more about reducing the likelihood of being harmed.

Evolution doesn’t select for comfort. It selects for what keeps you in the group. Masking, in many environments, does exactly that. It helps autistic people remain in classrooms, workplaces, medical systems, and families that might otherwise push them out.

But survival strategies come with costs.

Maintaining two versions of yourself — who you are and who you must appear to be — consumes enormous energy. Over time, that split leads to exhaustion, anxiety, and autistic burnout. What looks like competence from the outside can feel like never being allowed to rest on the inside.

Seeing masking as an evolutionary response shifts the frame. The issue isn’t that autistic people mask. It’s that so many environments still require it.

When people don’t have to camouflage their nervous system just to stay safe, they don’t burn out trying to survive.

Why Sensory Overload Isn’t About “Too Much”

Why Sensory Overload Isn’t About “Too Much”

A neuroscientist's view of sensory effort in Autism & ADHD

I’m starting a new series of articles in Psychology Today focused on demystifying sensorimotor issues in autism and ADHD—translating the science into plain speak without losing what actually matters.

In the first piece [link to article], I take on one of the most common misunderstandings: that sensory overload is about too much sound, light, or movement. What I argue instead is that overload is really about effort—the effort the brain has to put in when the world becomes hard to interpret.

Your brain is constantly trying to answer a simple question: What is happening right now, and does it matter? To do that, it has to stitch together sight, sound, touch, motion, and timing into a single coherent picture. When those signals line up, the brain relaxes. When they don’t, it has to work harder.

As I write in the article, “the brain works harder when information is unclear, and it eases off when things are easy to interpret.”

One of the examples I use is deliberately ordinary. A faint sound by itself is easy to ignore. A tiny flicker in your peripheral vision is easy to ignore. But when they happen together, your brain snaps to attention. “The world doesn’t just suddenly get loud. Instead, uncertainty skyrockets.”

That uncertainty is what creates overload.

What looks like hypersensitivity from the outside is often relentless problem-solving on the inside. The brain is constantly checking: Was that important? Was that a person? A threat? A mistake? In everyday environments—overlapping conversations, out-of-sync audio and visuals, visual clutter, subtle vibrations—those micro-decisions never really stop.

As I put it in the piece, “From the outside, this appears to be oversensitivity. From the inside, it often feels like work that never quite lets up.” For autistics and ADHDers, that work doesn’t fade quickly. It accumulates into fatigue, shutdown, or distress.

That’s why the solution isn’t just “make things quieter” or “reduce stimulation.” What really helps is making environments more predictable, more legible, and easier to parse. When the brain can quickly tell what’s happening and what matters, it doesn’t have to stay in high-alert mode.

Sensory overload isn’t about too much.
It’s about too much uncertainty for too long.

The Race Model: Two Runners, One Decision

 I want to start with a moment most of us recognize, even if we’ve never named it.

You’re waiting to cross the street. Your eyes are fixed on the signal. Somewhere in the background, there’s a faint beeping sound. You’re not consciously deciding which one to trust. You’re just waiting—and the instant something tells you it’s time, you move.

Now imagine the light changes and the beep happens at the same time. You step forward a little faster than usual.

At first glance, it feels obvious why. Two senses together must be “working better,” right? Vision and hearing combine, reinforce each other, and speed things up.

But neuroscience has a habit of questioning things that feel obvious.

This is where the idea known as the race effect comes in, and it quietly complicates how we think about multisensory processing—especially in autism.

The race effect starts with a surprisingly modest claim. What if your senses aren’t collaborating at all? What if they’re competing?

Instead of vision and hearing merging into a single unified signal, imagine them running in parallel, like two runners heading toward the same finish line. Whichever one gets there first triggers your response. When both are present, you’re faster not because your brain fused them, but because you gave it two chances to succeed.

This isn’t a metaphor neuroscientists use casually. It’s formalized in what’s called the race model, which acts as a kind of skeptic inside multisensory research. It asks whether the benefits of seeing and hearing something together can be explained by simple probability alone. Two independent processes, racing side by side, will naturally produce faster responses some of the time. No communication required.

Why does this matter? Because for years, faster responses to multisensory input were often taken as automatic evidence of integration. The race model forces a pause. It draws a line in the sand and says: up to this point, speed can be explained without the senses ever talking to each other. Only when responses are faster than that line allows do we have strong evidence that the brain is truly integrating information across senses.

This distinction turns out to be especially important when we talk about autism.

Autistic sensory processing is often described using blunt language. Too sensitive. Not sensitive enough. Overwhelmed. Delayed. But the race effect invites a more careful question: when autistic people respond differently to multisensory input, is that because integration is impaired—or because the brain is doing something else entirely?

In many studies, autistic participants don’t always show strong violations of the race model. Sometimes multisensory cues don’t speed things up as much as expected. Sometimes they help only under specific timing conditions. Sometimes they don’t help at all.

It’s tempting to interpret this as a deficit. But that interpretation assumes that faster is always better, and that automatic integration is always the goal.

What if it isn’t?

If your brain is less inclined to fuse sensory signals automatically, you may rely more on each sense independently. That can mean slower responses in simple lab tasks—but it can also mean greater precision, reduced susceptibility to misleading cues, and more control over when and how information is combined.

From this perspective, autistic sensory processing isn’t broken integration. It’s selective integration.

And selective integration comes with a cost that doesn’t show up neatly in reaction-time graphs: effort.

Many everyday environments are designed around the assumption that multisensory integration happens effortlessly. Classrooms, offices, restaurants, and public spaces bombard us with overlapping sounds, lights, movements, and social signals. If your nervous system doesn’t automatically collapse all of that into a single, coherent stream, you’re left doing continuous sensory arbitration—deciding, moment by moment, what to trust, what to ignore, and what to act on.

The race effect helps explain why this can be exhausting. When senses are racing rather than fusing, the brain stays on high alert. It doesn’t take shortcuts. It doesn’t assume redundancy is helpful. It waits.

Slower responses, in that light, aren’t signs of disengagement. They’re signs of caution.

This reframing matters because it challenges a quiet moral judgment that often sneaks into discussions of autism: that efficiency equals health, and speed equals competence. The race model reminds us that nervous systems are not optimizing for speed alone. They are optimizing for survival in specific contexts.

In uncertain or overwhelming environments, automatic integration can backfire. Ignoring redundant cues, delaying decisions, or keeping sensory channels separate may actually be protective. Sometimes, letting senses race instead of forcing them to merge is the safer strategy.

Autism makes this tradeoff visible. It reveals the hidden labor that most brains perform invisibly—and reminds us that what looks like delay from the outside may reflect careful computation on the inside.

Once you see the race effect this way, the question shifts. It’s no longer “Why don’t autistic people integrate senses automatically?” It becomes “What kinds of environments assume automatic integration—and who do those environments leave behind?”

That’s not just a neuroscience question. It’s a design question. A social question. And, ultimately, an ethical one.

Star Stuff

 Carl Sagan's declaration, "We are all made of star stuff," is more than just a poetic observation; it is a statement about our origins and our connection to the cosmos, an idea invites us to contemplate our place in the universe, our shared humanity, and the intricate web of existence that binds us all.

The Cosmic Connection

At its core, Sagan's statement is rooted in scientific fact. The elements that make up our bodies—carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and more—were forged in the nuclear furnaces of ancient stars. When these stars exploded in supernovae, they scattered these elements across the universe, eventually coalescing into new stars, planets, and life forms. This means that the atoms in our bodies were once part of distant stars, connecting us to the cosmos in a tangible and intimate way.
 

A Sense of Wonder and Awe

Reflecting on our stellar origins can evoke a profound sense of wonder and awe. It reminds us that we are not merely isolated beings on a small planet but are intrinsically linked to the vast, ever-changing universe. This perspective can inspire a sense of humility and reverence for the natural world, encouraging us to look beyond our immediate surroundings and appreciate the grandeur of the cosmos.
 

Shared Humanity

Sagan's quote also underscores our shared humanity. Regardless of our differences—whether cultural, racial, ideological, or (dis)ability —we all share the same cosmic heritage. We are all made of the same star stuff, which can serve as a powerful reminder of our commonality. This realization can foster a sense of unity and solidarity, encouraging us to transcend divisions and work together for the greater good.

The Fragility and Preciousness of Life

Understanding that we are made of star stuff can also deepen our appreciation for the fragility and preciousness of life. The processes that led to our existence are incredibly complex and improbable, making life a rare and precious gift. This awareness can motivate us to cherish and protect life in all its forms, nurturing a sense of responsibility towards our planet and each other.
 

The Search for Meaning

Sagan's insight invites us to ponder the larger questions of existence: Why are we here? What is our purpose? While science provides us with an understanding of our physical origins, the quest for meaning is a deeply personal and philosophical journey. Recognizing our cosmic roots can serve as a foundation for exploring these questions, prompting us to seek out purpose and significance in our lives and relationships.

Interconnectedness and Interdependence

The notion that we are made of star stuff highlights the interconnectedness and interdependence of all things. Just as the elements in our bodies were forged in the hearts of stars, so too are our lives intertwined with those of others. Our actions have ripple effects that extend far beyond ourselves, impacting the world and the cosmos. This understanding can inspire us to live more mindfully, with greater awareness of our impact on the environment and the well-being of others.
 

In acknowledging our stellar heritage, we are reminded that we are not just inhabitants of Earth but participants in the grand, unfolding story of the universe.