Monotropism is a theory of autism that posits that the main functional characteristic of autism is a cognitive configuration that prefers to have less channels of attention. Despite the fact that there’s very little discussion about it, it is incredibly consistent regarding what we know about autism, and it might help us understand ourselves a little better.

According to this theory, autistic brains are better wired to pour as many resources as possible in fewer tasks to focus of attention on, in contrast to allistic brains that would prefer to distribute resources among more different tasks at the same time.¹

How well does this theory in more concrete aspects of life? Let’s use communication as an example. People typically use plenty of tools to communicate: verbal language, tonality, hand and facial gestures, etc. If you were to define these as physical problems, this is, tasks that must be approached and worked through by a cognitive mechanism through material means, working according to algorithms of some sort, each of these tasks would have to be separated into individual problems, along with other functions such as coordinating the information gained through each of these processes to build a somewhat coherent whole that allows you to communicate back. If your brain works faster through individual tasks, but cannot handle as many tasks at the same time, it will have a tendency towards ignoring the least useful ones.²

If you’d prefer a more down-to-earth metaphor, imagine communication is a card game where polytropic players are receiving one card of each category (verbal language, hand gestures, facial expression, etc.) each round, while monotropic players receive as many cards each round, but they can only belong to one category. Naturally, the monotropic player is heavily incentivized to choose verbal language, because that’s the main pillar of communication for contemporary human beings. If you were to give this player the form of a human child, you’d get a kid that uses language with a lot of precision and is probably using more technical words than you’d expect at their age, but doesn’t look at your face and often has a very unchanging tone. You can even link this with the double empathy problem, and argue that, since communication is a cooperative two-way problem (problem understood as a task to solve), information flows better when both players are using the same channels of communication in similar intensities (this is: using more technical language isn’t that useful if the other person doesn’t understand it; using facial gestures isn’t useful if the other person isn’t looking at your face).

Let’s get more practical. If the theory is correct, it would likely follow that the very first thing you have to do in order to prevent cognitive delays in autistic babies and children would be to reduce the sensory complexity of the environment. Choosing where to focus your attention is a cognitive task, which is easily understood when you compare how capable of reading you are in your living room in comparison to a disco, where your brain has to work on filtering the music, the conversations, and the lights. If someone’s brain prefers to focus on as few tasks as possible, putting them at a place with plenty of noise and lights will collapse the resources of the brain, hindering their development in an optimistic scenario or even provoking trauma in one of the worst ones.

Note that these previous paragraphs of mine are built as narratives. The site https://monotropism.org/ explains the theory at a divulgative level, references the researchers behind it and some relevant papers, and proposes some practical avenues to improve the lives of autistic people by respecting these different cognitive needs and preferences from the experience of people who have worked with the theory at a scientific level - but it should also be mentioned that monotropism has, unfortunately, received very little attention in comparison to previous theories ( mind-blindness , extreme male brain ) that had very little evidence and have since been proven as bullshit, and therefore there’s relatively little research on it despite its apparent solid predictive capacity.³

Does any of this ring a bell to you? Can you recall experiences that could be explained through monotropism?

1: Because virtually no person focuses all their attention in one single cognitive process at the same time, and no single person places infinitesimally small amounts of attention into an infinite number of tasks, so I think it’d be more appropriate to talk about monotropism-leaning and polytropism-leaning minds.

2: While the human brain is not a computer, the physical infrastructure of the human mind is the brain, and in order to fulfill specific tasks, it must be able to compute the solution to problems in a material way, even if that material way is immensely different from how contemporary computers work.

3: It might also be noted that, as far as I’m aware, the theory of monotropism would explain autism at a functional level, but not yet at a physical one. This is, while monotropism could serve as a central piece to explain fundamental practical aspects of the lives of autistic people, there would yet not be an explanation on what’s the specific neurological difference between the brains of autistic and allistic people.