The view from inside our minds

In their hands: Most theories of autism are developed by neurotypical ‘experts’. Picture: Hainguyenrp

At last a theory of autism that makes sense – and it was developed by people who actually know what they’re talking about. There’s a good chance you’ve never heard of monotropism, but it offers a compelling explanation of what’s really going on for us.

We autistics spend a lot of time being subjected to others’ opinions about our condition. Neurotypical acquaintances confidently tell us, ‘We’re all a little bit autistic’ or ‘Everyone’s somewhere on the spectrum’. (Answers: no, and no. Autistic people are the only ones on the autistic spectrum, the clue’s in the name.)

Meanwhile, neurotypical experts come up with theories to explain what’s going on in our heads. One of the best known is Professor Simon Baron-Cohen’s idea that autistic people, girls and women included, have ‘extreme male’ brains. Tests he carried out in the 1990s seemed to show autistics were less empathetic and better at understanding systems, spotting patterns and following rules than the neurotypical population, traits he viewed as particularly masculine. To explain this, he decided our brains had been altered by elevated levels of testosterone in the womb.

Misinterpreting the data

Despite experts such as Catherine Lord, professor of psychiatry and education at the University of California, dismissing extreme male brain theory as ‘based on really gross misinterpretations of developmental data of typical kids and fairly shaky biological data’, many people still subscribe to it.

I don’t claim to be a scientist, but looking back on six decades of lived experience, I don’t see anything especially male about my thinking. I’m highly empathetic, and although I have an affinity for systems and rules, this stems from a desire to impose order on and reduce uncertainty in a world that frequently baffles and terrifies me.

So I was thrilled when I came across the idea of monotropism – and discovered it was developed by actual autistic people. The word comes from the Greek for one, monos, and a turning, tropikos, so means turning, or focusing, in a single direction. The theory isn’t new: it was proposed by Dr Dinah Murray and Dr Wenn Lawson around the time Professor Baron-Cohen came up with his male brain argument, but it’s had a lot less attention.

Drs Murray and Lawson suggested that autistic people have monotropic brains. Unlike polytropic ones, which are more common among neurotypical people, they naturally lean towards a single area of focus. This means we tend to concentrate more strongly and on a more limited number of things at a time, leaving us with fewer resources for other processing.

Monotropism makes sense

It’s a simple idea that explains so much, ranging from why we frequently become absorbed in special interests, and why many of us have such a sharp eye for detail, to why the unpredictability of day-to-day life – including other people’s behaviour – feels so stressful, and why we so often suffer from sensory overload in bright, busy, noisy places.

Dr Murray’s son, Fergus, sums up the theory in an article called Me and Monotropism: A unified theory of autism, published a few years ago by the British Psychological Society. Monotropism, he writes, makes ‘it harder to deal with things outside of our current attention tunnel’. This even accounts for why we can be hypersensitive to some stimuli and hyposensitive to others, why the wide variety of input involved in socialising makes it so exhausting, and why stimming may help us focus on and filter input.

If you want to know how far monotropism applies to you, take the MQ, a self-scoring questionnaire based on Dr Murray and Dr Lawson’s work. I scored 180 out of 235, which apparently means I’m more monotropic than about 18 per cent of autistic people and about 87 per cent of non-autistics. That feels about right to me.