Greetings Earthlings! 🙂

This week I’d like to talk about a topic that’s often been an issue for me- closure. Autists crave closure and resolution in all situations, that black and white mindset where a beginning must have an ending. When we can’t get that closure, it’s like an itch you can’t scratch in your brain, always niggling away, sometimes for years.

I can’t keep track of the amount of incomplete tasks and unanswered questions that have haunted me over the years. For example, I could never just lose a game of solitaire, I would feel compelled to keep playing until I finished on a win. Similarly, I could never seem to abandon a TV series that was starting to go south, I would need to stick with it until it got the closure I needed (I stuck with Glee right til the end🙈)! The frustrated niggling can even go on for years.

As a teenager, I nearly drove myself demented trying to achieve 100% completion on Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone on PS2. I tried every single possible thing I could, played the game in different ways, doubled up on collectibles, tried cheat discs, had several meltdowns in frustration, but nothing could ever move the needle beyond 88%. Nine years later, a post on an EA thread revealed there was a bug in the software and that there was a glitch you had to manipulate to get around it and my brain could finally rest 😌.

Luckily, it’s gotten a lot easier to let these things go as I’ve gotten older, but many autists struggle will be much greater. So is there any scientific reason why we crave closure?

I haven’t been able to find that much information on the subject (as shutdowns keeps coming up when I try to investigate for some reason🤷‍♀️), but one study has correlated the need for closure to cognitive flexibility, something that autists have great difficulty with.

Cognitive what now?

Cognitive flexibility is the ability to adjust your thinking and adapt to change in unexpected challenges and situations. Imaging studies of the brain have shown that people who have a strong need for closure tend to be cognitively inflexible caused by reduced connectivity between the brain regions involved in adaptation to behavioural conflict during tasks that need cognitive flexibility. In other words- we’re hard wired to need closure! 🧠

Hope you enjoyed this post dear Earthlings!

Have a lovely weekend! 🙂

Aoife