Autistic people usually learn a bunch of strategies for dealing with this immersive process, this periodic, cyclical, and neverending diving back into things.
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Some of them are probably very hard to explain to neurotypical people, and couldn't be followed even then. You need a lot of experience doing it, after all.
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Here's one: whatever your current strong interest is, it affects your mindset. It's a filter on the world, everything is cast into its metaphors and mechanics.
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You become acquainted with this filter. You see the world in terms of your strong interest, you translate the world into its terms.
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Suddenly, you begin getting interested in something that may be completely different. This new interest has its own filter, its own coherent language and dynamics.
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And importantly, you find yourself translating from your current language into the new one. Metaphors map to new ones.
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Suppose your current interest is epidemiology. In this iteration, you see the world in terms of epidemiological models. You begin to get strongly interested in the Racket programming language. Oh no.
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In order to transition interests, for your *sanity*, you have to find isomorphisms between the two interests, a way to map metaphors and superimpose those conflicting filters.
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You have to, on a very basic level, figure out how epidemiology is like a programming language.
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Neurotypicals apparently don't have to do stuff like this. They call it consilience, they have a word for when this happens because it's so rare and unexpected.
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I had no idea: "Neurotypicals apparently don't have to do stuff like this. They call it consilience, they have a word for when this happens because it's so rare and unexpected." I thought this is what everybody does! 
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