Fergus Murray, autistic science teacher and writer, shares his thoughs on the monotropism theory of autism, partly developed by his mother:
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.
This rankles with me as an autistic adult, as a science teacher and (full disclosure) as the offspring of the theory’s originator, Dinah Murray. As someone on the spectrum myself, I dislike the pathologising, deficit-based framing of the best-known theories of autism, and I hate the mistakes they lead to in practice: assuming we lack empathy and have no idea what’s going on in anyone else’s head; painting autistic cognition as inherently more ‘male’; expecting skills we’re slow to pick up as kids to be lacking throughout our lives.
It bothers me as a science teacher, almost as much as it troubles me as an autist, that psychologists settled for theories of autism which simply fail to provide any explanation for so much of autistic thinking. Granted, my background is in physics and philosophy rather than psychology, but I’ve always understood that when your theory only partially explains the phenomena being examined, you should keep looking for a better theory. When there are persistent threads left unexplained – such as the sensory differences so common among autistic people – you really need a more complete framework. Partial theories can be useful, but it’s all too easy to stretch them beyond their domain of applicability, and it can cause real problems, like assuming autistic adults have no theory of mind. Maybe it’s my autistic perfectionism, but I don’t like theories to leave too many loose ends.
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.
The classic paper on this, ‘Attention, Monotropism and the Diagnostic Criteria for Autism’ largely focuses on how the theory provides convincing accounts of all the features of autism listed in diagnostic manuals, and ties them together in a way other theories fail to. The authors do a persuasive job of this, but I find the diagnostic criteria so lacking when it comes to accounting for the experience of autism that I’m not going to use that framing. Instead I will focus on some key features of autism as seen from the inside: autistic inertia; sensory differences; social differences; and focused interests. I close with some thoughts on implications for practice, the role of developmental perspectives, and potential research directions.
Read more of this fascinating article here.