Published for World Quantum Day, 14th April 2026
Today is World Quantum Day. The date itself carries meaning: April 14th is a reference to 4.14, the rounded first digits of Planck’s constant, a precise measure of energy and time that governs how reality behaves at its most fundamental level. Quantum physics tells us that particles can exist in multiple states at once, that reality at its most fundamental level is not fixed, singular, or predictable in the ways we were taught to expect.
I am not a physicist by any means (!), but I have spent my whole life as an Autistic ADHD person living something that feels, may be able to be better explained by quantum physics than any textbook or psychology book about Autism. What follows is my attempt to use the language of physics as metaphor and resonance – not a literal claim, to describe what neuronormative frameworks about Autistic experiences have never quite been able to hold for me.
I have never experienced life as a single, stable or consistent reality. People talk about “being present” as though there is one shared world everyone occupies in the same way, with the same attentional depth, the same clarity, the same sensory experiences, and the same time perception. For me, my presence has never been singular; my reality is layered, permeable, and sensorily multidimensional. Memories, dreams, and the present moment all overlap and bleed into one another. ( I wrote more about dreams and exploring threshold consciousness, temporal ecology, and the porous boundaries between dreaming and waking in my blog about hypnagogic and hypnagogic experiences.)
I am realising I am constantly navigating worlds that coexist rather than worlds that take turns or operate in any linear, easily explained way that even the most neuro-affirming of Autistic spaces seem not to quite get all the time.
There are thin surface layers where language, rules, and social expectations dominate, brittle spaces that take enormous effort for me to maintain, even more so as I’ve grown older and more aware of my own needs. This is more than just masking at a surface social level to fit in, it goes far deeper and is more expansive. I have spent most of my life translating myself into legible, acceptable versions, until I found spaces like the CASY Physics Group, where other people seem to just get it too, where I do not have to translate at all and where all these weird experiences are beginning to make a bit more sense as I learn from and listen to others.
Beneath that surface of masking is what I can only describe as caverns and rivers of thought, ideas, and feelings, flowing like underground water, finding their own paths. Sometimes that current sweeps me into deep burnout, sometimes I can ride it, working prolifically, losing track of sleep entirely, pulled into a tunnel of meaning that feels more real than anything on the surface.
In quantum terms, this feels like it is may be closer to superposition, a holding of multiple states, multiple layers of reality being simultaneously open. The problem I have begun to realise is not just being neurodivergent, it is being in a world calibrated to expect only one state at a time – often based on neuronormative values and perceptions.
Holotropism and Neuroholographic Ways of Being
My understanding of these experiences became clearer when I encountered two ideas that finally gave me the language to describe my ways of being. The first is monotropism, the theory that many Autistic and ADHD people channel attention deeply into a single tunnel of interest at a time (Murray et al., 2005). I recognise this in myself and have written about monotropism extensively on my Autistic Realms website and also support Fergus Murray with Monotropism.org. However, Hendl H Mirra’s (2023) concept of holotropism expanded this considerably, describing something that feels closer to the actual space and time I live in.
Holotropism describes a way of being in which sensory gates are wide open, where self and world do not have sharp edges, and where experience is not additive — this thing, then that thing — but multiplicative: intensely rich, layered, and sometimes overwhelming all at once. In this framing, monotropism is not the root of our being but a salve, a way the holotropic mind protects itself, flooding one pathway to quiet the noise of all the others. I often find myself entering or seeking deep flow when the fullness of my openness becomes too much, as a way to help balance my bodymind. Being holotropic is not something I switch into occasionally, it is who I am, when I am safe enough to be myself.
The second idea is neuroholographic ways of being. This is something we are actively exploring in the CASY Autistic Physics Group.
“Neuro-Holographic” is an emergent idea that our group has embraced. Neuro-Holographic, as a concept here, refers to the idea that every small bit of energy and information, whether an atom or the universe, reflects every other part of itself in a seamless and meaningful way.This has led to the awareness that, despite common misconceptions, we are very much empathetically connected to the things around us. Because our sensing mechanisms are super sensitive and often synesthetic (cross-sensing — for example, tasting colors or seeing sound) we often feel a part of the things around us. We don’t tend to see in hierarchies, but rather in “holograms,” as described. Always looking for connecting patterns in an overwhelming ocean of sensory, emotional, and energetic information, our relational culture focuses on how things go together and function. Because of these innate talents, insights, and a tendency toward invention, out of the box thinking, and an enthusiasm for combining patterns, autistic/Neuro-Holographic people have been responsible for many important developments in the larger cultures in which they find themselves. Being extraordinarily sensitive and seeing things in new ways is foundational to autistic culture.
https://culturalautismstudiesatyale.space/
The hologram draws on David Bohm’s implicate order, the idea that beneath observable reality lies a deeper enfolded order from which visible patterns emerge (Bohm, 1980). This is contested within some physics discussions and is not mainstream quantum theory. I am not claiming that quantum mechanics literally explains Autistic cognition, I am suggesting that this language describes my lived experience in ways that other frameworks never have. For those of us whose bodyminds work this way, finding that language is not a small thing; it can be life-changing and an opportunity to connect with others.
A hologram has a remarkable property: if you break it into pieces, each fragment still contains the whole image, not a portion of it, but the entire picture, seen from a different angle. The smaller the fragment, the less resolution it holds, but the whole is still there. This is how I feel my mind works, where a single sensation, such as a tone of voice, a shift in relational energy, or the light through my window, can activate entire networks of memory, imagery, emotion, and meaning simultaneously. When my thinking seems to wander off in all directions, it is not getting lost, even if that is how it can appear to others, it is doing what a hologram does, where every fragment still holds the whole picture and every thought connects back to everything else, to a greater or lesser degree. It can be exhausting to live like this at times, but it is also where my most creative ideas and sensory experiences happen, with connections and ideas spiralling up that surprise even me, that don’t make immediate sense until I have had time to sit with them and let them settle into something new.
Quantum Physics and Being Autistic
In quantum physics, a particle in superposition holds multiple possibilities at once — fluid, open, unforced — until something forces it to collapse into a single fixed state. When I first encountered this idea, something in me recognised it, not as a scientific concept I was learning (although I have tried!), but more as a description of something I had been living my whole life without having the words for.
When I am safe, I feel I am in superposition, and I am able to move between two natural rhythms: deep absorption and flow, that bright tunnel where the world narrows to what matters most and a quieter open awareness, where everything settles and connects without effort.
Collapse happens when the world demands linearity: one pace, one channel, one way of being, when I am always on someone else’s time and terms and expectations. When collapse is sustained long enough, it becomes burnout, which is not just exhaustion in the neuronormative sense, but something closer to what I would describe as a dimensional compression, where I am being forced into a single layer until all the others become inaccessible.
Recovery from burnout, for me, is not just about rest; it is about having enough unstructured time for flow and safety to slowly unfold back into the full dimensionality of who I am and find my bearings in whatever new configuration of self and world has emerged in the meantime. It is kind of like being a living portal where the door just closes off sometimes, and I need to find ways to re-open the door to discover whatever new ways of being await.
CASY Autistic Physics Community
Things have begun to shift since I found the CASY Community, where our Autistic ways of knowing and being are all unconditionally accepted. Dawn Prince-Hughes has described CASY gatherings as places “where dense, three-dimensional planes mesh with synesthetic and holographic perceptions”. It felt like Dawn and others were finally naming my internal geography. Our CASY Declaration states that, “there is no separation of mind in a conscious, holographic system — that the Autistic universe is more than the sum of its parts”.
This is what we and other member of CASY are calling Autistic Physics: the understanding that Autistic ways of being is not a broken version of neuronormativity but an entirely different relationship with reality. Liam McDermott’s research names this structurally, arguing that neuronormativity silently governs what counts as scientific knowledge, and that the rigidity of neurotypical-normative learning actively disables those of us who create knowledge non-normatively (McDermott, 2023).
Embracing Neuroholographic Ways of Being
World Quantum Day celebrates the fact that reality, at its most fundamental level, does not behave the way we may have been taught to expect. Particles hold multiple truths simultaneously, and connection happens across distances and time frames that conventional and neuronormative logic would say should make it impossible.
In the CASY Physics group, we have been sitting with these ideas in our online community, and we are finding that when we as Autistic and neurodivergent people share how we actually experience the world, through conversation, writing, art, and all the layered, neuroholographic ways we naturally think and express ourselves, something becomes visible that no outside account of us could ever quite reach. We share synchronicities, different temporalities, and so many experiences that many people find hard to empathise with or understand.
Living in layers has always been how I move through the world, holographically, relationally, in ways that neuronormative frameworks were never built to hold. What I have found in the CASY Physics group is that I am far from alone in this. When people who experience reality in many different and unique ways come together and share their experiences in their own language (through words, text or other creative media), on their own terms, something opens up that no outside account of Autistic people can ever quite reach. The universe, it turns out, works in ways that may feel rather familiar to those of us who have always lived this way, and finding each other, it turns out, is part of how the picture becomes whole and make a bit more sense.
Author’s note: This piece is written from my own Autistic experience. Autistic lives span an enormous range, this is just my perspective.
References:
Bohm, D. (1980). Wholeness and the Implicate Order. Routledge.
http://www.gci.org.uk/Documents/DavidBohm-WholenessAndTheImplicateOrder.pdf
Bruno, G., Lindblom, A., Masternes, J.-A., Tupou, J., Waisman, T., Toby, S., Vining, C., & Magiati, I. (2025). Global Indigenous perspectives on autism and autism research: Colonialism, cultural insights and ways forward. Autism, 29(2), 275-283.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13623613251318399
McDermott, L. (2024). Introducing Neurodiversity to the Physics Education Community, The Physics Teacher 62(6):472-475 DOI:10.1119/5.0135030
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/383641554_Introducing_Neurodiversity_to_the_Physics_Education_Community
Milton, D. E. M. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: the ‘double empathy problem.’ Disability & Society, 27(6), 883–887. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2012.710008
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09687599.2012.710008
Mirra, H.H. (2023). Holotropism: a multi-dimensional, spacious, edgeless terrain. Medium.
https://hmirra.medium.com/holotropism-1cdf99c00b74
Murray D, Lesser M, Lawson W. Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism. 2005 May;9(2):139-56. doi: 10.1177/1362361305051398. PMID: 15857859.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15857859/