It wasn’t that the volume was too loud so much as that in the grip of an adrenaline rush everything was sensorily too much. The intense ‘pain’ was that the personal, individual, me-ness in it was unbearable. I was allergic to the experience of my own existence and the experience of hearing my own voice speaking from connected expression as me could, at times, be far worse than the terrible feeling you get hearing your own voice on an audio tape or answerphone.
I was a social kid: social with the dirt, the trees, the grass, the birds in the aviary, the rolls of carpet at the hardware store, the tinkling of pins, the books of wallpaper samples and the smell and lickable surface of patent leather. I felt the world deeply and passionately. I was cheerful in my own world and I had a fascination with anything that was not directly-confrontational and which would allow me to ‘simply be’. People too often failed the criteria. They were looking for concepts such as ‘together’, ‘with’ and ‘us’. They were not worlds unto themselves within the world, as I was. They needed to be taken account of, to interact in a directly-confrontational way that they called ‘normality’.
Neurodiversity may be every bit as crucial for the human race as biodiversity is for life in general. Who can say what form of wiring will prove best at any given moment?
Source: On the neurological underpinnings of geekdom – The Atlantic
For me, the key significance of the “Autistic Spectrum” lies in its call for and anticipation of a politics of Neurological Diversity, or “Neurodiversity”. The “Neurologically Different” represent a new addition to the familiar political categories of class / gender / race and will augment the insights of the social model of disability.
Autistics particularly resent the hypothesis that they have no “theory of mind”. They argue that what they lack is a theory of NT minds, no different from the way that NTs lack a theory of AS minds.
Source: NeuroDiversity: The Birth of an Idea by Judy Singer
See also: The Double Empathy Problem: Developing Empathy and Reciprocity in Neurotypical Adults
Computers as the essential prosthetic device for autistics?
Despite a common history of what can, with the wisdom of hindsight, be termed “oppression”, the limited social, networking, and organisational skills of people with AS together with their aversion to direct human contact, had prevented them joining together to form an effective movement to address their specific issues. All this changed however with the advent of the Internet. Computers are the communications medium par excellence for autistics. A significant number of autistics claim that computers mirror the way their minds work (Grandin, with Blume, 1997). By filtering out all the sensory overwhelm caused by actual physical presence, computers free up autistics’ communicative abilities.
InLv members regularly sing the praises of the new medium that allows them to have the form of communication they desire, while protecting them from the overwhelming sensory overload and rapid processing demands of human presence. For many, email lists are their first experience of community. Jane Meyerding, a member of InLv makes clear just how much autistics owe to computer technology:
Like a lot of ACs (autistics and cousins), I find myself able to enjoy “community” for the first time through the internet. The style of communication suits me just fine because it is one-on-one, entirely under my control in terms of when and how long I engage in it, and, unlike real-life encounters, allows me enough time to figure out and formulate my responses. In real-world encounters with groups—even very small groups—of people, I am freighted with disadvantages. I am distracted by my struggle to identify who is who (not being able to recognise faces), worn out by the effort to understand what is being said (because if there is more than one conversation going on in the room, or more than one voice speaking at a time, all the words become meaningless noise to me), and stressed by a great desire to escape from a confusing flood of sensation coming at me much too fast. (Jane Meyerding – Thoughts on Finding Myself Differently Brained, 1998)
As this statement shows, for autistics, computers are the essential prosthetic device, one which turns them from withdrawn, isolated individuals, to networked social beings, the prerequisite to effective social action, and a voice in the public arena.
Autistics compare the importance to them of computers with the importance of seeing-eye dogs to the blind. Martijn Dekker, who is the ‘owner’ of the InLv email forum, and a prominent autistic activist foreshadows puts it plainly:
For reasons obvious to our HFA/AS community, I consider a computer to be an essential disability provision for a person with Asperger’s. (8 Nov 1998)
Source: NeuroDiversity: The Birth of an Idea by Judy Singer
See also: Bring the backchannel forward. Written communication is the great social equalizer.
Whether we align our interests with others as in polytropism or follow the dictation of our dominant interest, as in monotropism, it’s all about ‘interest’.
The term monotropic describes single attention and single channels for accessing and processing information (mono: single; tropism: direction/channel). NT developing individuals, although able to be single-minded at times, can respond to another interest or situation and shift their attention whether interested or not. This means they can use polytropic attention, which necessitates dividing their attention between a number of differing concerns simultaneously (poly: many) and accommodating many channels of information at any one time. Polytropism in typical individuals is argued to be their default learning style. This concept will be explored in more detail in this chapter.
I know that for many of us, shifting attention from an aspect of interest to one that we are not interested or invested in is very difficult. However, in AS this is often the reason we prefer sameness and routine, and why we may even appear to have one sense that dominates another. I suggest we use single attention connecting with and processing information one step at a time, which is the monotropic disposition, as our default setting. Therefore, attention and the interest system will work hand in hand to create an attention, interest, sensory-motor loop leading to a cognitive style.
Monotropism, or having the ability to home in on one aspect of communication or on one interest at one time, can happen to NT and AS individuals. However, rigid monotropism often occurs in an AS individual’s world, and we are said to have ‘tunnel vision’ (Attwood 2007) or, as parents often say, ‘my child seems only to be interested in his or her interests’. Monotropism will mean, for most of us, difficulties coping with change because we are single-minded. For many, this is demonstrated in our difficulties with change in routine, expectation, instruction, daily schedule, movement of attention or incorporating another set of demands into the present scenario. For example, coping with change can involve listening and then being required to participate in decision making without due time to process information; thus, being forced to move from one channel to another (Kluth and Chandler-Olcott 2008).
For many of us the discomfort at encountering change is one consequence of being attention-tunnelled or monotropic (e.g. Bogdashina 2006; Greenaway and Plaisted 2005; Murray et al. 2005).
In a monotropic interest system connectivity is more streamlined but less diffuse than that of the typical population. This might be due to an interest system that is more ‘pure’ in the sense that it hasn’t been modified or contaminated by other people’s expectations (D.K.C. Murray, personal communication, 10 March 2005).
In AS, monotropic attention is not seen as a choice but as integral to our learning style.
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