I’m An Autistic Professor. Here’s How I Maximize My Rational Inattention

I’m An Autistic Professor. Here’s How I Maximize My Rational Inattention

BY S. MAREK MULLER

One of my favorite terms in Dungeons & Dragons is “min-maxed.” It’s when someone dumps all their skill points into 1 category, like Charisma, at the expense of other stats like Strength. The result is a Level 3 Elven Bard who can charm their way into a rogue’s den but can barely wield their enchanted dagger. She’s pretty amusing as a character concept, but to survive the game, the player needs to strategize accordingly.

This concept perfectly describes my autistic information-seeking and processing skills — a “spiky” profile that is both a blessing and a curse to my life as a university professor.

I’m so ridiculously good at some things in academia. When I really sit down to focus on a task pertinent to my special interests, I don’t just do it — I do it fast and I do it really well. Some days I hyperfocus so hard that I leave the office after an hour and go right home — and after being given, supposedly, a full day’s work of grading essays and researching new topics. Heck, I’ll brag a little: I graduated from my 4-year-long PhD program in 3 years. Give me an hour to learn everything I can about a special interest, like policy communication about lab-grown meat, and I’ll come back to you with 10 pages of notes pulled from the most important scholarly research I didn’t even realize existed until an hour ago. I can grade a 10-page essay in 5 minutes because I immediately recognize students’ key points, overarching writing patterns, and areas for improvement. 

And yet, I’m so ridiculously behind my peers in other areas of work. For instance, I can’t remember names and faces to save my life. After an entire semester, I still couldn’t tell you what my students’ names are — despite knowing everything about their work and genuinely caring about their success. If they say “hi” to me outside of school, I often don’t even recognize their faces (face-blindness and autistic brains are close friends). As teaching is a care-based profession, I am utterly embarrassed that one of the quickest signs of caring for someone — learning their names and faces — is often my Everest. 

I used to think my min-maxed attention style made me a bad colleague and professor. Now, I realize I am a self-directed learner who needs a certain amount of control over when, why, and in what capacity I consume complex material. But my brain doesn’t start or stop at the school door.

Neurodivergent processes of seeking, receiving, and processing new information are complex enough that, if we fail to understand them, we fail to understand ourselves. Recognizing alternative ways of knowing, being, and doing reframes neurodiversity not as a deficit, but as a resource — one that, when harnessed, makes us creative problem-solvers, valuable collaborators, and generally awesome people.

While many people struggle with dense content, it’s attention that trips up neurodivergent minds. One study identified that neurodivergent classmates were more likely to struggle with focus and attention in class compared to their peers who, interestingly, were more concerned with learning the new content. This tracks with my experience. For me, my biggest obstacle to learning new things isn’t the complexity of content — it’s the delivery environment. I’m all gas, no breaks when it comes to learning new, dense theories about rhetoric and environmental ethics. But try to get me to pay attention when someone is giving a conference talk? I don’t care how interested I am in the subject — my brain is not going to stick around for 15 minutes of bad public speaking and crowded PowerPoints. 

A more precise way of understanding my min-maxed brain is what scholars call rational inattention. In layman’s terms, this means our neurodivergent brains intentionally (yet unconsciously) ignore certain information that neurotypical brains might deem valuable (e.g., my students’ names and faces) — not because we don’t care, but because such information is more difficult for our brains to process quickly. Because we struggle processing some stimuli more than others, and because our brains value cognitive efficiency, we simply deem such information as less essential.

Instead, our brains optimize for our skillsets, focusing on what gives us the clearest, quickest, most useful information (like the content of my students’ essays). Not knowing a student’s name after 15 weeks might come across as disrespectful or disinterested, and I get that. But when that student asks me for a letter of recommendation for law school? I write about their work in great and enthusiastic detail, because that’s what I remember and, frankly, because that’s what I need to remember to do my job effectively and get students where they want to go.

My brain’s unconscious decision-making about “expected information gain” — predictions about how much new and reliable knowledge will come from a particular information source — min-maxes my skillsets without me even realizing it.

Rational inattention takes the phrase “this meeting could have been an email” seriously.

If it’s not an efficient source of intel for my immediate career needs (e.g., getting the book written) or my neurodivergent processing strengths (e.g., the pattern recognition and system-based thinking that leads to a great research paper), it’s not being retained. 

Atypical as my productivity is compared to coworkers, and as many student eyebrows as I may raise, my information-seeking and processing skills represent what some neuroscientists now call resource rationality. This concept suggests that, in general, people are doing the best they can to process information subject to their own unique differences — natural differences — in cognition. And people are hardwired as to how they process information based on those differences. Regardless of neurotype, our brains optimize information by design. 

That’s not to say I shouldn’t bother learning my students’ names because it’s particularly hard for me. Rather, resource rationality offers me a way to see my min-maxed brain as even more of a game character’s “stat sheet.” I can’t max out all of my different attention stats, but I can “level up” some of my lower-level attention categories over time through purposeful practice. And my “character build” will lean towards my neurodivergent skillsets that allow me to parse dense theories with ease and grade at seeming hyperspeed. 

The spiky profiles so often associated with neurodivergent brains is not a matter of having a cognitive deficit, but an unconscious neurological strategy designed to optimize performance.

Sometimes I’m insecure about my brain’s drive to maximize informational efficiency at the expense of social graces. I really do want to know people’s names. 

But at the same time? I’m really, really good at what I do — and that makes me a pretty cool character to play.

BIO: S. Marek Muller is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Texas State University.