a really fascinating look into it can be found in the rare case of
carly fleischmann, who hasn't so much as fixed her extreme autism as managed to find a crack through it with which to communicate with the world from the confines of her own body. it's honestly sad to hear her as a teenager and an adult women-- there's clearly what would be a painfully normal woman in there if she wasn't trapped in a cage of live wires and blown fuses.
(the ongoing story of fleischmann is also an interesting tale and fraught with further drama, but it's not the fun, milky kind, just the really gddamned sad kind.)
a very fitting example of the kind of breaker-flipping a less afflicted autistic might do is the avoidance of eye contact. it's because they get
an overload of stimulus (that can be almost painful) from meeting eyes that for people without the heightened sensitivity is a mechanism we've specifically evolved for reading people. so they breaker-flip and shut down the sensitivity by avoiding eyes as a defensive reflex.
then you have the blown fuse autistics, who have no trouble meeting eyes but no fucking clue how to process what they see from it, because their mechanism would so overload them it's shut down forever as the body's own defense from it.
so you have what's a strange mix of two qualities that seem completely at odds-- understimulation and overstimulation-- but are in fact right next to each other for autistics, the only question being if they're breaker-flipping at high sensitivity or blown fuses at no sensitivity.
then there's the interwoven comorbodity of adhd (a terrible name for it) also juggling understimulation and hyperfocus we really need to divorce from our previous understanding of it because it does nothing to explain the manifestation of recurrent symptoms like justice sensitivity and rejection dysphoria.
anyway, i've never taken a psych class or read up beyond skimming on autism in my life but i've found my live wire/flipped breakers/blown fuse metaphor helpful to
me and you know i like nothing better than expounding at length on my own theories.