Autism has generally been defined based external observations of behavioral patterns, but I recently had some thoughts about what autism is on a fundamental level. That is, I believe it is a biologically evolved neurological specialization, a trait that makes individuals predisposed to being good at some kinds of task, and worse at others, like how your graphics card is better than your CPU at drawing games.
It is easy to observe specialization in nature, like in the physical appearances of animals, and some animals being adapted to eating some kinds of food. I can see no reason why neurological specializations would not also manifest in a species that forms complex social societies.
Society works because different people have vastly different skills, and when working together, different people can cover each other's weaknesses, resulting in a strong 'whole'. This pattern is clear within the job market, where co-operation of different skills enables the group as a whole to be considerably more resilient than any individual alone.
Mental specialization then assumes that neurological differences will manifest that make some individuals better at some kinds of job within this system. Autism being one such specialization, ADHD is another, and there are surely a great many more of them.
So what exactly are the mental specializations of autism?
Autism seems to be characterized by the following 3 points, which are loosely drawn from ideas in the article Discovering a trauma-informed positive autistic identity, as well as my own lived experience.
Neurotypical people tend to have an innate drive to copy and be like the people around them, for example feeling happy when mirroring what other neurotypicals are doing.
Autistic people by comparison often function 'as their own unit'. Speaking for myself, I have never felt any innate drive or need to pay attention to anything 'the masses' are doing. It is something I'm able to choose to do voluntarily, but by and large my innate drive is to work things out for myself and follow my own path.
I have the ability to ask 'why' to everything, and direct what I learn based on weather it makes logical sense. This has some notable advantages in that it is often easy for me to see things that society in is doing which make no sense / are illogical. I can also explain how I do things, because learning for me is a very conscious process.
However it would also follow that this would create social challenges as we may not see value in social interaction and opt not to engage with it. Because we don't intuitively copy things that others are doing, we won't replicate other peoples communication patterns from a young age. For example, it would explain why we may not learn to use body language in the same way as other people.
There are studies that have demonstrated reduced mirror-neuron activation in neurodivergent people, and I am proposing that this is not a 'defect', but exists for a reason.
Autistic people often exhibit something called 'Alexithymia', which is a disconnect between one's senses and emotions, and their ability to consciously notice them. For example if its hot in a room, we may not notice and keep wearing a coat, or if we are getting upset, we may not notice until panic has set in.
Also we often have hypersensitivity / hyposensitivity, which are increased or decreased sensitivity to stimulus. Some may find any kind of physical touch overwhelming, for instance.
Exactly why these traits exist is unclear, and it may be related in part to the trauma issues mentioned below. They could also be adaptations to an environment notably different to the one we are living in today.
People can have different styles of attention: we can be 'monotropic', which is a tendency to focus on one thing at a time for extended periods of time, or 'polytropic', a tendency to focus on multiple things and switch quickly between them. Autistic people tend to be monotropc, and this deep focuses are often called 'special interests'.
From an evolutionary standpoint this makes sense, because some roles in society benefit strongly from one style or the other. Someone working in a restaurant needs to keep track of multiple customers, whereas academic research often demands deep singular focus for extended stretches of time.
A few people have asked how I think the above relates to higher support needs autism. Generally I suspect that these factors if they were increased in intensity could produce such symptoms.
I do not wish to comment further as I have no experience with anyone with higher support needs, and the intention of this article is to share some thoughts which have been helpful in understanding myself.
When thinking about where these differences originated, it's important to consider that humans did not evolve to live in the environment we now do. It is believed that people used to live in tribes of at most 100 individuals, and until recently have lived in much smaller and tight-knit communities generally.
I have two thoughts on the situations in which the neurological specializations emerged:
As far as I can see, the difficulties faced by neurodivergant people are caused by society holding and enforcing narrow-minded attitudes about how humans should behave, for example:
These things are often incompatible with the ways that neurodivergent individuals operate, which makes perfect sense as people are animals that have evolved from largely random biological process, and this process has no opinions about how a given individual 'should' behave, evolution simply creates mutations, throws them into the world, and sees what is able to reproduce.
Humans seem to have a tendency to assume that every other human thinks and perceives the world in the same way they do, and the current situation may have arisen from neurotypical people, being the dominant neurotype, projecting that everyone else must be the same as them.
It may be the case that these different neurotypes were not recognized until recently because there have been rapid changes to how people live in the past few hundred years, brought about by the industrial revolution and development of mechanized transport:
Weather neurodiverse individuals used to exist in separate 'tribes', or as variations within tribes mixed with other neurotypes, probably there was far less societal expectation around how individuals 'should' behave.
I also expect that because people knew each other better, there was much more tight-knit collaboration within individual groups than is common today. This would allow individuals to work to their own strengths, with weaknesses mitigated by interdependancy with other members of the group.
Today, misunderstandings are very common because people with of different neurotypes have certain predispositions to how they communicate, assume that the other side will respond in one way, and become confused when they don't. Add to this different worldviews and learned communication patterns from cultural differances, and things get very messy. This is called the 'double empathy problem'.
I think that if we were to take the time to individually analyze how we think, and communicate that with other people, then it would become apparent that everyone perceives things differently, and there would be fewer miscommunications. The following video is a good example of what that may look like.
Unfortunately humans also have a general tendency to reject anything that they don't understand, and this leads to neurodivergent individuals being subjected to an enormous amount of trauma from a very young age.
Due to various societal factors, neurodivergent individuals often get subjected to outright torture from almost the moment they are born.
Humans in general tend to be disrespectful, if not outright aggressive towards other individuals who are different to themselves. So within schools, neurodivergent individuals often get 'othered', bullied and emotionally / physically attacked by other children almost immediately.
Schools are designed in a way that everyone is exposed to everyone, because everyone is forced to be in the same playground or same classrooms. Natural self-protection instincts of distancing from harmful individuals are thus thwarted, and people get attacked without recourse.
This problem then continues with the teachers as well, who expect all students to act, learn and behave in exactly the same way. Neurodivergent children in many cases CAN NOT learn in the way being presented, and struggle, get punished, sent to the headmaster etc, over and over again, which leads to struggle, frustration, and mental heath issues like self doubt and low self-esteem due to things that are entirely beyond their control.
And feelings of brokenness can arise in relation to classmates who appear to be getting things just fine, when the neurodivergent individual(s) are deeply struggling.
Then it is not surprising that such individuals are pushed beyond the limits of what stress they can handle, and things like meltdowns and shutdowns result. In effect a meltdown is an attempt to communicate "the environment / teaching approach you are forcing on me does not work for me". Having a meltdown is often the only way they can communicate this, as schools in their current form do not give students facility to say 'no'.
A problem we have today is that because this systemic torturing of neurodiverse individuals is so pervasive, it is probable that many 'traits of autism' are are actually symptoms and manifestations of chronic trauma, making it very hard to separate what are characteristics of autism, and what is trauma.
As noted earlier, society enforces a huge number of things that people 'should be able to do', but these rules carry no direct correlation to what individuals actually can do, because humans are biologically evolved animals with individual differences.
Traits can be advantageous or disadvantageous depending on the environment within which a given person is in. To draw an analogy, would you consider your toaster broken because it can't boil water like your kettle? Obviously not, because that's not what it's for!
Neurodiverse people often have very spiky skill sets, being exceptionally good at a very specific set of things, which could be of immense value to society, and If we understand autism and other neurodivergances not as 'disorders', but as mental specialization resulting from normal biological processes, we can make changes that enable these individuals to thrive.
The first step is to take note of what an individual is great at, and what they find very difficult. Make a list of them.
If you're working through this yourself it's very important that this focuses on what you're actual strengths / weaknesses and not things that society implies you should be able to do. It may be helpful to talk with a friend / partner to identify these.
If one takes a moment to think, what one is weak at doesn't actually matter very much - in the real world everyone has weaknesses, but those weaknesses are covered by other people for who those skills are strong,
The idea here is called interdependancy, and we can make use of it by building connections with understanding people.
Due to modern technology it is increasingly possible to achieve the same thing using software tools, but lets focus on building a social network to start with.
It is important for neurodivergant individuals to build communities around them that understand each other's needs, and can provide mutual support, and this can be done in a few ways:
Once these connections start to develop it then becomes possible to start looking for ways of supporting each other. For example, one may ask:
Hi everyone, I struggle with X, but am good at Y, is there anyone good at X, so we can work together to support each other on this ?
It is important for everyone to feel that their contributions balance with what they are receiving from others and this will need to be worked out within individual groups.
And it is also useful to observe that when working closely with others, they are modeling how to do some task, and this may allow the less-skilled individual to learn the same skill over time as well.
Needing support is nothing to be ashamed off and EVERYONE requires a support network - for neurotypical people, it exists in the form of their friend network. The problem is that society has been enforcing a set definition of what such a support network should look like, and stigmatizing anything that's different.
When people were living in smaller communities this kind of practice was almost certainly a great deal more commonplace than it has been recently, because people would have largely known each other, and information would be passed down within the group. This person / family is good at X, while this one is good at Y.
As noted previously, society has been extremely externally controlling, with schools and workplaces dictating exactly how people should behave, narrow minded ideals about what one's romantic relationships should look like, how people should dress, how people of each gender should behave, and countless others.
If one were to draw an analogy to romantic relationships, what we currently have looks a lot like the kind where one partner is manipulative and dictates everything the other partner does, and most people are already aware of why that is bad.
Good partnerships are mutual agreements, and I think we need to make this the norm for the majority of inter-human interactions..
In a mutual agreement both parties can express their wants and needs, and in doing so, the needs of everyone can be accommodated. If one is to focus on WHAT they are trying to achieve, instead of how, when, or where - this would open the door for neurodivrgent individuals to thrive.
It is possible to reach the same result in many different ways, and people seem to have finally started to realize and accept this due to the increased freedom people have gained since the covid19 pandemic normalized remote working.
For many neurodivergent individuals, the freedom gained in running their own business seems to be highly advantageous, and it is not difficult to find examples of people who had been struggling, now absolutely thriving running businesses on YouTube, Etsy and elsewhere.
I do wander though if more neurodivergent people could also thrive within other business if the external control was relaxed. It would enable neurodivergent people to adapt things as they need to function. I strongly believe that allowing people more freedom would improve the environment for EVERYONE, not only neurodivergent individuals.
The way that I see it, the vast majority of the difficulty diverseness people face is directly caused by the absurdly narrow-minded attitude and approach of the public school system.
One of the things taught pretty early in school is that everyone is different, they point out examples of eye and hair color, but neurodiversity also exits, and schools are blind to it in their teaching approaches.
All students are force-fed the same lessons, presented in the same way, and for many people this just does not work. Many neurodivergent people who would be perfectly capable of learning things using different approaches, are left feeling broken.
Adults by comparison have tremendous freedom in how they learn, they can use the myriad resources on the internet, go to a college or university, read books, find private tutors, etc. In doing so, they will naturally try different things, and find approaches that work for them.
There's this idea within school-level education that teaching is something that is 'done to you', but it really needs to be opened up into a collaborative process where both sides have input:
In principle there is a spectrum between learning being fully in the control of the teacher, and learning being fully in control of the student. As things are, this dial is slammed hard towards the teacher being in control, and this needs to become more flexible.
Yes, this would require a great deal of restructuring and societal change, but the result would be a system that actually serves the needs of individuals, instead of wasting time pushing people to learn in ways that they are incapable of learning.
As things stand the system is ultimately serving nobody, because it is designed to target a hypothetical average that doesn't exist, instead of working to support the innate skills and strengths and weaknesses of the individuals.
I believe that neurodivergance is an example of evolved specialization, and feel that it is natural that biology is going to experiment with and create differences in neurological wiring. Actually I would find it highly anomalous if this were not the case, and believe that neurological specializations are enormously more common and diverse than anyone is aware today.
As far as I can see, most of the challenge faced by neurodivergant people is caused by:
Having an idea of what neurodivergance objectively is, it becomes possible to start addressing these challenges.
We desperately need to study and increase awareness of the myriad of ways that different people perceive the world around them, how different neurotypes communicate, and develop means of communicating these differences with others to reduce misunderstanding.
And I think we desperately need to start opening up freedom in society to allow individuals to operate in their own way, not just as a 'accommodation' for people with a diagnosis, but across the board.
Humans ARE NOT equally good at everything and ARE NOT all the same. It really doesn't matter what we are bad at, as long as we can find ways of maximizing our strengths, and address our downsides by cooperating with other people and tools.
People, when given the ability to, will naturally make changes to do things in ways that work for them, and form connections with people they get along with.
As far as I can see, all of these problems are solvable, and I may share thoughts on how to address them in the future.