Autism is still widely seen as mysterious – so much so that the most widely recognised symbol of it (unpopular in the autistic community) is a puzzle piece. Various psychological theories of autism haven’t helped all that much, largely because all of the most established ones leave vast swathes of autistic experience completely untouched, and tend to leave people with harmful misconceptions. The one theory I think comes anywhere close to explaining the whole shebang – monotropism – has been largely overlooked by psychologists. A lot of processing power goes into modelling other minds, something that can seem effortless but is never trivial. It becomes much harder when the minds in question are very different from your own. When autistic people fail to do this, it’s not so much that we’re unable – the idea of ‘mind-blindness’ is deeply misleading – but that we don’t always have the processing power left over to do it effectively, when our attention is being pulled strongly in another direction.

Lawson, W. (2011). The passionate mind: How individuals with autism learn. Jessica Kingsley Publishers. The bulk of what’s usually referred to as ‘executive dysfunction’ in autism – difficulties getting going with things, executing plans, and tearing ourselves away from things once we’ve started – are more informatively talked about as ‘autistic inertia’. That is, resistance to a change in state: difficulty starting, stopping or changing direction. This is central to many of the difficulties autistic people face in life, but it is also part of what makes autistic thinking distinctive and valuable.

Legal

Different experiences in youth and throughout life, and particularly the different choices we make about where to focus our attention, are likely to account for a good chunk of the diversity of ways that autism can present. Growing up in a household where eccentricity was embraced and hyperfocus understood probably helped me to grow into a relatively confident adult, and not an especially anxious one. Neither myself nor my mother grew up thinking of ourselves as autistic, but we were allowed to be weird, and that makes a big difference. Personalised each bead with a single initial on the reverse or wear plain with each bead representing someone special. It is easier for autistic people to process one channel at a time. Distributing our attention between multiple streams takes effort, and sometimes just doesn’t work at all. Again, monotropism is characterised by intensity wherever our focus is, at the cost of processing resources that might otherwise be used to deal with other input or interests. This is often a problem in social situations. Autism is occasionally mistaken for deafness, especially in small children: if our attention is elsewhere, auditory input might register as an unwelcome interruption we would much rather ignore, or it might not register at all.

Interests are at the heart of the monotropism account, and have been present in characterisations of autism right from the start. Their near-absence from the more established theories of autism, and indeed the entire psychological literature on autism, is glaring. The diagnostic criteria talk about ‘restricted’ and ‘repetitive’ interests, but the main characteristic feature of autistic ‘special interests’ is really how much we focus on them (or they focus us), not how restricted or repetitive they are. The developmental perspective is particularly crucial because we go on learning throughout our lives, and some of the things that are impossibly difficult when we are young get much easier over time once we start focusing on them and practising. This does not mean we stop being autistic – all signs are that a monotropic brain is for life – but it does mean that many of the traits which are considered telltale signs of autism in children are only sometimes seen in autistic adults. Why then is monotropism not already better known, despite a flourishing of attention in recent years? I believe the reasons are more sociological than psychological. When ‘Attention, Monotropism…’ was published in 2005, none of the three authors were professional psychologists, although one has a PhD in psycholinguistics, and had worked extensively with people on the autistic spectrum; another, Wenn Lawson, received a PhD later for further work on this theory, with their thesis on ‘Single Attention and Cognition in Autism’ since turned into the book A Passionate Mind. Lawson had an official diagnosis of autism, which should be an asset for anyone working in autism, but is still seen by some to undermine credibility instead. The other two were undiagnosed. Stability is a basic human need, and life as a monotropic person in a polytropic world is often unstable. It is deeply destabilising to be pulled out of an attention tunnel, to be regularly surprised by people’s actions, or to feel you are not being understood. Much of autistic behaviour can be seen as attempts to restore some kind of equilibrium.This could be about to change. More researchers in recent years have started listening seriously to autistic perspectives on our own experiences and the theories used to describe us, and this is undoubtedly part of the reason monotropism has been gaining more attention. As psychologists dig deeper into aspects of autistic experience they have tended to overlook, including perceptual processing and the nature of autistic interests, there is great appeal in a framework that ties together these seemingly disparate strands (while deepening explanations of things like executive function and social problems). Perhaps it can also provide some helpful hints for neuroscientists. Meanwhile, insight into the monotropic mind is already helpful for anyone living and working with autistic people; I would love to see more practice-based research, looking at the impact of being able to make better sense of autistic behaviour and perspectives. Despite their dinky appearance these beads are solid gold/ sterling silver, so we recommend up to 3 beads to maintain a comfortable weight when worn. If, as I’ve argued, monotropism provides a common underlying explanation for all the main features of autistic psychology, then autism is not nearly as mysterious as people tend to think. We do not need to rely on theories which explain only a few aspects of autistic cognition, with no convincing explanation for sensory hyper- and hypo-sensitivity, or the intensity of autistic interests.

Ever since, Anne has chosen to finish her Christmas shopping by September to avoid being around festive smells in shopping. It also means she is often forced to turn down invites to Christmas parties, which she finds difficult. She told PA Real Life: “It can be quite isolating – if friends want to go out around Christmas, I have to ask them to go to different places where I know are safe. I can’t eat or be anywhere near things that smell like Christmas, or eat anything Christmassy like mince pies and stollen cake – I don’t touch them with a 10-foot barge pole. Just smelling a mince pie could kill me. So many things have Christmassy spices that you wouldn’t normally think of too.” Conversely, if we can’t tune an input out, it is often experienced as horribly intrusive. I think this is from a combination of discomfort at our attention being constantly pulled away from where we want it to be, with the tendency to feel something strongly if it’s present in our awareness at all. Our brains throw a lot of resources at whatever our focus is on, which accounts for both the intensity of conscious awareness and the pain of distracting stimuli we can’t filter out. There is likely a developmental aspect to this: neural pathways that receive a lot of stimulation grow stronger, so perhaps autistic people are prone to long-term hyper-sensitivity in senses receiving intense attention, and under-sensitivity in channels we regularly tune out.Restricted, repetitive behaviours’ are a natural response to feelings of instability. They allow you to assert control over what is happening, and feel safer. This is probably a useful general rule, not something that’s only true in autism – we see restricted, repetitive behaviours in all sorts of contexts, it’s mostly just that autistic people’s ones stand out as particularly odd, to most people. Part of the variation in autism is also likely to be due to different degrees of monotropism: it has been suggested that the trait might follow a normal distribution, with some people being very monotropic, while others (perhaps the world’s natural multitaskers and people-wranglers) are unusually polytropic. However the trait is distributed, the implication is that some people are closer to having autistic minds than others without qualifying as autistic themselves, and some autistic people have more atypical minds than others in terms of monotropism. This doesn’t make the spectrum linear: there are so many different ways for autism to manifest, and so many co-occurring conditions, that no one variable can come close to capturing them all. McDonnell, A., & Milton, D. (2014). Going with the flow: reconsidering ‘repetitive behaviour’ through the concept of ‘flow states’. Fergus Murray (aka Oolong) is a science teacher and writer based in Edinburgh; formally assessed as autistic in 2010, at the age of 32. Monotropism provides a far more comprehensive explanation for autistic cognition than any of its competitors, so it has been good to see it finally starting to get more recognition among psychologists (as in Sue Fletcher-Watson’s keynote talk at the 2018 Autistica conference). In a nutshell, monotropism is the tendency for our interests to pull us in more strongly than most people. It rests on a model of the mind as an ‘interest system’: we are all interested in many things, and our interests help direct our attention. Different interests are salient at different times. In a monotropic mind, fewer interests tend to be aroused at any time, and they attract more of our processing resources, making it harder to deal with things outside of our current attention tunnel.

MurrayandMe's personalised pieces are all handprinted, which means each letter, number, punctuation and symbol is individually handprinted into your jewellery. Due to the nature of this technique, spacing, depth and alignment will vary. This is the beauty of handprints as each piece is completely unique and distinctive. If you prefer a uniform look, chances are you prefer engraved jewelry.

Help and support

My mum Dinah started thinking about the mind as an interest system when I was a kid, with her PhD on Language and Interests submitted when I was eight. A few years later she read about autism in Uta Frith’s book Explaining the Enigma, and I remember her excitement as she started to realise her model could easily be modified to explain rather more of this enigma than Frith or anybody seemed to have managed up to then. Milton, D. E. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: the ‘double empathy problem’. Disability & Society, 27(6), 883–887. Please note that the personalisation is handstamped rather than machine engraved. Each letter and number is individually stamped into the metal by hand with a hammer and steel stamp, variations between spacing and depth will occur which gives each piece its truly unique character. Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156.