Monotropism is a theory of autism that posits that the main functional characteristic of autism is a cognitive configuration that prefers to have less channels of attention. Despite the fact that there’s very little discussion about it, it is incredibly consistent regarding what we know about autism, and it might help us understand ourselves a little better.
According to this theory, autistic brains are better wired to pour as many resources as possible in fewer tasks to focus of attention on, in contrast to allistic brains that would prefer to distribute resources among more different tasks at the same time.1
How well does this theory in more concrete aspects of life? Let’s use communication as an example. People typically use plenty of tools to communicate: verbal language, tonality, hand and facial gestures, etc. If you were to define these as physical problems, this is, tasks that must be approached and worked through by a cognitive mechanism through material means, working according to algorithms of some sort, each of these tasks would have to be separated into individual problems, along with other functions such as coordinating the information gained through each of these processes to build a somewhat coherent whole that allows you to communicate back. If your brain works faster through individual tasks, but cannot handle as many tasks at the same time, it will have a tendency towards ignoring the least useful ones.2
If you’d prefer a more down-to-earth metaphor, imagine communication is a card game where polytropic players are receiving one card of each category (verbal language, hand gestures, facial expression, etc.) each round, while monotropic players receive as many cards each round, but they can only belong to one category. Naturally, the monotropic player is heavily incentivized to choose verbal language, because that’s the main pillar of communication for contemporary human beings. If you were to give this player the form of a human child, you’d get a kid that uses language with a lot of precision and is probably using more technical words than you’d expect at their age, but doesn’t look at your face and often has a very unchanging tone. You can even link this with the double empathy problem, and argue that, since communication is a cooperative two-way problem (problem understood as a task to solve), information flows better when both players are using the same channels of communication in similar intensities (this is: using more technical language isn’t that useful if the other person doesn’t understand it; using facial gestures isn’t useful if the other person isn’t looking at your face).
Let’s get more practical. If the theory is correct, it would likely follow that the very first thing you have to do in order to prevent cognitive delays in autistic babies and children would be to reduce the sensory complexity of the environment. Choosing where to focus your attention is a cognitive task, which is easily understood when you compare how capable of reading you are in your living room in comparison to a disco, where your brain has to work on filtering the music, the conversations, and the lights. If someone’s brain prefers to focus on as few tasks as possible, putting them at a place with plenty of noise and lights will collapse the resources of the brain, hindering their development in an optimistic scenario or even provoking trauma in one of the worst ones.
Note that these previous paragraphs of mine are built as narratives. The site https://monotropism.org/ explains the theory at a divulgative level, references the researchers behind it and some relevant papers, and proposes some practical avenues to improve the lives of autistic people by respecting these different cognitive needs and preferences from the experience of people who have worked with the theory at a scientific level - but it should also be mentioned that monotropism has, unfortunately, received very little attention in comparison to previous theories ( mind-blindness , extreme male brain ) that had very little evidence and have since been proven as bullshit, and therefore there’s relatively little research on it despite its apparent solid predictive capacity.3
Does any of this ring a bell to you? Can you recall experiences that could be explained through monotropism?
1: Because virtually no person focuses all their attention in one single cognitive process at the same time, and no single person places infinitesimally small amounts of attention into an infinite number of tasks, so I think it’d be more appropriate to talk about monotropism-leaning and polytropism-leaning minds.
2: While the human brain is not a computer, the physical infrastructure of the human mind is the brain, and in order to fulfill specific tasks, it must be able to compute the solution to problems in a material way, even if that material way is immensely different from how contemporary computers work.
3: It might also be noted that, as far as I’m aware, the theory of monotropism would explain autism at a functional level, but not yet at a physical one. This is, while monotropism could serve as a central piece to explain fundamental practical aspects of the lives of autistic people, there would yet not be an explanation on what’s the specific neurological difference between the brains of autistic and allistic people.
Yes!! I have that I never could make sense of until I heard about monotropism. I took salsa and bachata dance classes 3-4 days/week for about a year, even joining two teams that performed a choreographed routine on stage in front of hundreds if not thousands. I did great in the classes, often getting compliments from my dance partners, and quickly progressed through the levels. However, I could not dance a whole song during a social event without having to stop in the middle of the song to reset. I would forget moves that I practiced literally just minutes before or have been practicing for months, lose the beat, and it’s almost like my mind would become overwhelmed and shut down.
At first, I thought that it was anxiety. To work on this, I exposed myself to the social dance events often by just being there. I did this several times, and if I wasn’t dancing, I felt acceptable. There was some anxiety, but it was completely manageable for a little bit. I also tried to find dance partners that I had a relatively good relationship with to see if that would help, but that wasn’t effective either. The weird thing is that these dance partners in the social events were also partners I danced with in the classes just minutes before. Regardless, the same thing would happen if I tried to dance at the social event: forget moves, lose the beat, mental shut down. I couldn’t think. I really couldn’t. I just kept looking everywhere, distracted by the flashing lights, the intense smell of everyone’s cologne/perfume, wondering what was going to happen, why the music was so loud, why people were dancing chaotically, is my partner going to run into another dancer, is my partner comfortable with my dance lead, did I misinterpret a cue somewhere, etc.
So, I reached out to one of the instructors and asked him about it in a private lesson. Coincidentally enough, he was the father of an autistic child and he recognized what I was saying. He gave me some tips on overcoming it. Basically, he helped me tune out everything besides my dance partner and the beat. I tried this with a few dance partners at the social events, and it helped a lot! However, the tips only worked well if I felt intimate enough with my partners, so I had to be extremely selective which was limiting and may give off the wrong social impression. Ohhh my goodness! And as I type this, I remember that there was one couple that I got along with great, and I was able to dance with the wife with no problems at the social events too. Now that I know what to look for, they were totally autistic!! Omg…OH.MY.GOODNESS!!
Moving on from my epiphany, applying the monotropism theory, what could have been happening was that there was way too much stimuli for my brain to process. I really just don’t have the mechanical mental capacity to process that much information at the same time. It was too chaotic for me. The dance classes were fine because all I had to do was perform the practiced dance moves and stay on beat. I didn’t have to worry about running into other dancers or shutting out the flashing lights and loud music. It was simple. The social event was too much. It’s like I have a processor with few threads but high capacity per thread. I can focus on whatever intensely and become quite proficient at it, but only very few things at the same time. The polytropic-leaning individuals have many threads with less capacity per thread. They can manage many apps all running as long as none of the apps require intense processing.
If we integrated this perspective on tropism into our society, what do you think would be the effect? How will it impact us, both allistics and autistics, in social, medical, and scientific arenas? Will my family finally accept that I’m autistic and that no matter how hard anyone tries, I will never stop being autistic? (jk on the last one. They never will, and I will be okay.)
Adding to the discussion on the theory, what about ADHD? I have that too, and unless I’m either body-doubling or medicated, I become a wreck of inattention. It doesn’t matter what I try, I really need another calm person around me that I trust or medications. Otherwise, my entire life will slowly become a disaster of neglect and regret. How would we view that using the computer analogy? Maybe there’s a part of the computer that decides what gets processed, but that part is running low on voltage, so it needs to borrow some from another machine or get a boost from a battery (stimulants lol) to allow the user to gain control over the processor?
This was so interesting. Thanks for sharing and starting a discussion on it.
I’m glad you found this useful!
Eh, that depends on the prevailing ethical principles.
On an optimistic scenario, if the commonly accepted goal is creating an inclusive society for everyone, it would be easier to push for comprehensive changes, such as letting social manners become more flexible to try and respect everyone’s needs depending on the specific context, or letting the educative curriculum have more variants to account for people whose learning would be more effective through different means.
In less optimistic scenarios, we could get a profit-driven society where AI is used to select job applicants, and monotropic-leaning people get locked out of some jobs and forced into others, regardless of their individual preferences or talents; or a fuck-you-got-mine society where people with divergent needs are just told to deal with things as they are.
I haven’t read that much on how monotropism is related to ADHD, so I prefer not to get deeper with the analogy in case I screw it up. There seems to be some correlation, but is it because the neurological mechanisms that make someone autistic also make ADHD more likely to occur, or because there are emergent social mechanisms that provoke people who inherit one trait be more likely to inherit the other? For instance, you could argue that neurodivergent people are more likely to establish meaningful relationships with other neurodivergent people because they’re more likely to be given the cold shoulder by neurotypicals, which would make autistic and ADHD populations be more likely to merge over time. But I’m not sure neurology is yet advanced enough to solve this question.
I remember when I got into my revolutionary phase that there was a post on a forum asking which political system would be the one in effect after a civil war. The consensus was that the it would be the system endorsed by those that were best organized. So if autistics, neurodivergent individuals in general, and allies become more organized, we would have more power to advocate for solutions that fit with our needs and values. I’m hoping that this community can be used as an avenue to push for helpful approaches like in the optimistic scenario.
Woah! Super interesting. I had never thought about that. Thanks for the engaging discussion, and I hope you get more participation. I look forward to your future posts.