What is true is that our interests pull us in very strongly and persistently, compared with most people. It can be hard to think about anything else when we’re particularly invested in a topic, and hard to imagine how little other people might care about it. That can be a huge asset in many fields – intense focus is indispensible in science, maths, technology, music, art and philosophy, among others. Obviously autistic people are not the only ones capable of hyperfocus and persistent interests, but it is a common feature of the autistic psyche, and one that is too often squandered when workplaces and schools are not set up to allow it. It is easier for autistic people to process one channel at a time. Distributing our attention between multiple streams takes effort, and sometimes just doesn’t work at all. Again, monotropism is characterised by intensity wherever our focus is, at the cost of processing resources that might otherwise be used to deal with other input or interests. This is often a problem in social situations. Autism is occasionally mistaken for deafness, especially in small children: if our attention is elsewhere, auditory input might register as an unwelcome interruption we would much rather ignore, or it might not register at all. Conversely, if we can’t tune an input out, it is often experienced as horribly intrusive. I think this is from a combination of discomfort at our attention being constantly pulled away from where we want it to be, with the tendency to feel something strongly if it’s present in our awareness at all. Our brains throw a lot of resources at whatever our focus is on, which accounts for both the intensity of conscious awareness and the pain of distracting stimuli we can’t filter out. There is likely a developmental aspect to this: neural pathways that receive a lot of stimulation grow stronger, so perhaps autistic people are prone to long-term hyper-sensitivity in senses receiving intense attention, and under-sensitivity in channels we regularly tune out. Stability is a basic human need, and life as a monotropic person in a polytropic world is often unstable. It is deeply destabilising to be pulled out of an attention tunnel, to be regularly surprised by people’s actions, or to feel you are not being understood. Much of autistic behaviour can be seen as attempts to restore some kind of equilibrium. A lot of processing power goes into modelling other minds, something that can seem effortless but is never trivial. It becomes much harder when the minds in question are very different from your own. When autistic people fail to do this, it’s not so much that we’re unable – the idea of ‘mind-blindness’ is deeply misleading – but that we don’t always have the processing power left over to do it effectively, when our attention is being pulled strongly in another direction.

The developmental perspective is particularly crucial because we go on learning throughout our lives, and some of the things that are impossibly difficult when we are young get much easier over time once we start focusing on them and practising. This does not mean we stop being autistic – all signs are that a monotropic brain is for life – but it does mean that many of the traits which are considered telltale signs of autism in children are only sometimes seen in autistic adults. Restricted, repetitive behaviours’ are a natural response to feelings of instability. They allow you to assert control over what is happening, and feel safer. This is probably a useful general rule, not something that’s only true in autism – we see restricted, repetitive behaviours in all sorts of contexts, it’s mostly just that autistic people’s ones stand out as particularly odd, to most people.

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Ever since, Anne has chosen to finish her Christmas shopping by September to avoid being around festive smells in shopping. It also means she is often forced to turn down invites to Christmas parties, which she finds difficult. She told PA Real Life: “It can be quite isolating – if friends want to go out around Christmas, I have to ask them to go to different places where I know are safe. I can’t eat or be anywhere near things that smell like Christmas, or eat anything Christmassy like mince pies and stollen cake – I don’t touch them with a 10-foot barge pole. Just smelling a mince pie could kill me. So many things have Christmassy spices that you wouldn’t normally think of too.”

According to the NHS, severe asthma means the condition is uncontrolled even when sufferers are taking medication, and people with it can see their symptoms suddenly triggered when exposed to an allergen. Anne explained how she had a near-death experience in November 2016 when she smelt “pine cones impregnated with citrus” in a garden centre, ending up in her being to hospital and given steroids to ease her condition. She was told it was a “close call”.None were enmeshed in the world of professional psychology, and despite Lawson’s book pointing to several possible tests, they do not seem to have known which strings to pull to make sure psychologists conducted the empirical work needed to rigorously test monotropism. Autism deserves good, well-evidenced theories, and while it is easy to point out major flaws in autism theories that psychologists have largely accepted, it makes sense that they would be reluctant to accept a newer theory from relative outsiders, however much it explains. Sue Fletcher-Watson, a psychologist in the field, points out that ‘often in psychology a new theory is built on top of an empirical finding — this is what happened certainly with Theory of Mind which was rooted in a 1985 experimental study by Simon Baron-Cohen, Alan Leslie and Uta Frith. For non-autistic psychologists, there is no lived experience of autism out of which to build a theoretical model and so experimental data have to come first. This could be another reason why autistic-led theories, drawn at least in part from internal observations, struggle to make a big impact in mainstream research.’

Personalised each bead with a single initial on the reverse or wear plain with each bead representing someone special. Milton, D. E. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: the ‘double empathy problem’. Disability & Society, 27(6), 883–887. Everyone’s passions are repetitive; that’s just in the nature of strong interests. When people talk about ‘restricted interests’ what they mostly seem to mean is that they can’t fathom our failure to be interested in things that seem important to them. It is true that we’re often powerfully interested in a few things for a relatively long time, but they do change over the years, and sometimes over much shorter time periods. For my part, I have many interests, some of them fascinations since childhood, most of them all-consuming when I get into them. Chatting with autistic adults about the things that interest them often makes the idea that their interests are ‘restricted’ seem preposterous. Part of the variation in autism is also likely to be due to different degrees of monotropism: it has been suggested that the trait might follow a normal distribution, with some people being very monotropic, while others (perhaps the world’s natural multitaskers and people-wranglers) are unusually polytropic. However the trait is distributed, the implication is that some people are closer to having autistic minds than others without qualifying as autistic themselves, and some autistic people have more atypical minds than others in terms of monotropism. This doesn’t make the spectrum linear: there are so many different ways for autism to manifest, and so many co-occurring conditions, that no one variable can come close to capturing them all. 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.

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Different experiences in youth and throughout life, and particularly the different choices we make about where to focus our attention, are likely to account for a good chunk of the diversity of ways that autism can present. Growing up in a household where eccentricity was embraced and hyperfocus understood probably helped me to grow into a relatively confident adult, and not an especially anxious one. Neither myself nor my mother grew up thinking of ourselves as autistic, but we were allowed to be weird, and that makes a big difference.

So I grew up knowing about monotropism, and we have discussed it extensively since. I always knew that my way of thinking tended that way, but it took years for either of us to fully identify with it. In many ways, our autism is atypical — we are not introverted, nor socially unskilled, and our interests are wide-ranging (if sometimes all-consuming). We fit the profile sometimes misleadingly labelled ‘female autism’ rather well, but this was even less understood then that it is now. It took spending a lot of time around autistic people to recognise that our easy understanding of their way of thinking came not just thanks to the valuable lens of monotropism, but also because it often resembled our own." McDonnell, A., & Milton, D. (2014). Going with the flow: reconsidering ‘repetitive behaviour’ through the concept of ‘flow states’.

Fergus Murray (aka Oolong) is a science teacher and writer based in Edinburgh; formally assessed as autistic in 2010, at the age of 32. Lawson, W. (2011). The passionate mind: How individuals with autism learn. Jessica Kingsley Publishers. 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. If, as I’ve argued, monotropism provides a common underlying explanation for all the main features of autistic psychology, then autism is not nearly as mysterious as people tend to think. We do not need to rely on theories which explain only a few aspects of autistic cognition, with no convincing explanation for sensory hyper- and hypo-sensitivity, or the intensity of autistic interests.