I know none of this has been in a text book before, the picture thoughts that make autism work and when figured out make normal thought possible. BUT if Psychology knew of our human thought process, If humans themselves knew of their underlying process selective hearing would be not be called that, but rather  something along the lines of "hold on were thinking".  Man is not privileged to know his internal thoughts the deep daydream type thoughts that really make his mind work. When man thinks there is a deep intense system of picture thoughts going on. I (we) learned them by default growing up autistic. We discovered our OPTIC nerve was used as a flipper valve and displayed to us normal optic vision like you use AND it lets us see the brain generated vision thoughts we all use but don't know we use.  These picture thoughts play below the surface all the time and we never know it. Evolution of the brain is such our shortcut thoughts we know as 'normal' just glean simple little tidbits from our complicated picture thoughts talk of those and use the very basic of human thoughts to communicate with. 

If Psychology knew of our thought process it would know while we were learning the autism thoughts we are often DEAF and BLIND as our mind plays picture thoughts threw our optic nerve. It seems the mind is not as smart as we hoped for.  As Autism calls this the lack of eye contact and scratches their head thinking were more off than normal all we are supposed to be doing is THINKING during that time with the invisible to you picture thoughts. If Man could hook monitors to his brain and see the hundreds upon thousands of thoughts that operate just below the surface he would see he only uses and talks about a small amount of them. IF he knew those thought like we do- he would know Savants , Einstein, and the detail of the mind like we do. One obvious point would be when People are accused of selective hearing it would be proven most of the time we are thinking in the sub level thoughts while we display lack of hearing.  I predict out hearing would be just fine as it tests out to be BUT , psychology doesn't know our brain turns OFF the hearing while it is too busy thinking with those invisible below the surface thoughts we don't know we use. 

Until some Psychology guru's know what we know or learns what we have figured out the mind will remain hidden in plain sight and in plain view and we  (all humans) all will be accused of not listening and in reality we are indeed thinking and don't know it.  

Rich Shull on the Blog Pre Rain Man Autism