Even decades into large shifts in how culture understands neurodiversity, we’ve still — in our research, in our textbooks, in our own predictive minds — defined autism first as a disorder. A social communication disorder, a neurodevelopmental disorder, a disorder of restricted and repetitive interests. It’s not that the challenges those describe aren’t real — many autistic people do face significant disability — but as a definition they are drastically incomplete.
It goes back to the old parable of the elephant: one hand on the trunk, another on the ear, another on a leg, each certain it has the whole animal. Defining autism through a deficit-based lens is like feeling the trunk, noticing it’s like a snake, and running off to prove how snake-like it is. And more than that, to reduce what is human in that way isolates and harms autistic people. For many of us, our simple error was that somewhere along the way, we forgot we were using a lens in the first place.
It’s time for a new lens.
Autism is a neurotype. A different way of attending (noticing, processing and responding) to the world that, from the very beginning, shapes how the senses integrate and how development unfolds. It carries certain strengths and certain challenges, and for some, significant disability.
This lens is built by weaving together three strands of theoretical work: monotropism, predictive processing and allostasis. I bring years of deep scientific research, lived experience and a mind that can turn a web of chaos into something that resembles a line.
Or at least I try to.
Autism and ADHD as neurotypes
What’s a neurotype?
A neurotype is a kind of mind: a stable pattern in how a nervous system notices, processes and responds. We all have one. Autism and ADHD are two of them. A neurotype isn’t a diagnosis and isn’t a deficit, though it can come with both. It’s the shape of the mind that everything else happens inside of.
Wait, are you talking about ADHD too?
Yes, because the science already does. The diagnostic manual doesn’t define autism or ADHD by what’s happening in the brain. Each is a cluster of observed behaviors that tend to travel together, drawn up by committee and revised every edition. The boundaries between clusters are decisions, not discoveries. Until 2013, the manual didn’t allow a person to be diagnosed with both; the overlap was so obvious that the rule was dropped. Today, somewhere between a third and two-thirds of autistic people also meet criteria for ADHD, depending on the study, and ADHD is the most common co-occurring diagnosis in autism. Twin and family studies show the two share a large part of their genetic risk, and they share many of the same features: differences in attention regulation, executive function, sensory processing and emotional regulation. Clinicians increasingly describe them as overlapping presentations rather than separate conditions, and the people who first described monotropism noted from the start that ADHD attention looks monotropic too.
Imagine we each explore the world with a beam — a flashlight. Whatever falls inside the beam gets noticed, processed, and responded to. Whatever falls outside it goes unnoticed.
That beam is attention. We can focus it narrow and bright, or spread it dim and wide, but the lumens — the energy available — stay the same. And the quality of the light — steady or flickering, calm or driven by fear — shapes how we feel about what we see.
For all of us, how attention is shaped, where it goes, and how long it stays is first an instinct: shaped by the pull toward what matters to us, and the push away from what we don’t yet have the capacity to face.
Change how you pay attention and you change everything that follows.
How layers of memory, context and meaning are added.
How emotion, empathy and awareness are constructed.
How we understand ourselves, our world and those around us.
How learning and development unfold.
The theory of monotropism
“A way of thinking about autism not as a set of deficits, but as a different, more focused strategy for using attention.” — monotropism.org
Monotropism is often reduced to “autistic people can’t multitask.” That misses the idea. It’s more like one web, one experience, one channel at a time. The foundation of monotropic theory is the relationship: the gravitational pull between what the nervous system flags as important or interesting and the processing resources that follow. In autism, that pull is stronger.
Monotropic attention is pulled into a narrow, bright beam
Details and connections inside the beam are fully processed, and attention stays there until that processing is complete. Outside the beam, the world goes quiet.
Polytropic attention spreads into a wide, soft light
Many things are held in view at once, each a little lit, and attention flows easily between them. Small details blend into the whole.
Monotropic processing brings certain strengths, like deep focus, pattern-finding and noticing what others miss. And certain challenges, like overwhelm, burnout and inflammation, especially when autistic thinkers exist in environments and systems that weren’t built for their processing style.
Polytropic processing brings its own strengths, like flexibility, breadth and the ability to track many things at once. And its own challenges, like jumping to conclusions, overly broad assumptions, and a tendency to see what it expects to see rather than what is actually there.
The world needs both types of thinkers.
The developmental lens
If monotropism describes a neurotype, a difference in how sensory information is processed from the very beginning, then are autism and ADHD two of its shapes?
Our neurobiology (our neurotype) changes how we pay attention, and how we pay attention shapes and builds our neurobiology. That’s neuroplasticity. Tell me more.
Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to change its own structure in response to what it does. Connections that are used repeatedly get stronger and faster; connections that go unused are pruned away. The pattern is often summed up as “neurons that fire together, wire together.” It happens throughout life, but it is fastest in early childhood, when the brain is forming and trimming connections at an enormous rate. So what a young mind attends to, over and over, is quite literally what it builds.
And differences in the brain’s attention networks can be seen early. Long before any traits develop. See the research.
Tsang, Green, Liu et al. (2024), Communications Biology. Scanned 53 sleeping six-week-olds. Infants with an autistic older sibling already showed a different pattern of salience-network connectivity (the network that flags what matters and directs resources toward it) than infants with no family history. Read the study →
Emerson, Adams, Nishino et al. (2017), Science Translational Medicine. Scanned six-month-olds with a family history of autism and used their connectivity patterns to predict, with high accuracy, which of them would be diagnosed autistic at age two. Read the study →
Hazlett, Gu, Munsell et al. (2017), Nature. Followed 106 infants with an autistic older sibling. Those later diagnosed showed faster growth of the brain’s surface area between 6 and 12 months, before any behavioural signs, and a model built on those scans predicted diagnosis at 24 months with high accuracy. Read the study →
Wolff, Gu, Gerig et al. (2012), American Journal of Psychiatry. Scanned 92 infants with a family history at 6, 12 and 24 months. The white-matter pathways connecting brain regions were already developing differently at 6 months in those later diagnosed. Read the study →
- 6 weeksattention-network differences visible on imaging
- 6 monthsconnectivity patterns predict a later diagnosis
- 2 yearstraits emerge
- 4+ yearstypical age of diagnosis
Experience is constructed from bottom-up sensory processing and top-down predictive processing.
(The precursor for understanding why autistic thinkers rely more heavily on bottom-up processing, and what that means for the energy budget.)
Concept 1: Constructing experience from the sensory system up is bottom-up processing.
Think of it like this: your mind lives inside a black box (we call that box a skull). It doesn’t see images like a camera; it constructs them. Light hits sensory receptors in the eye, the receptors convert it into electrical impulses, nerve cells carry those impulses to the brain, and the brain assembles them into an image. But construction doesn’t stop there. Our mind adds layers of context and significance to not just construct an image, but also tell us what that image means and how we feel about it.
Construction like this happens in all our senses: the senses that deliver information from the outside world (exteroception) and the senses that deliver information about the inside world (interoception). What’s interoception?
Interoception is the sense of the body’s inside: heartbeat, breath, hunger, temperature, the stretch of the gut, the tension in a muscle. It is the raw material the mind uses to build feelings.
Concept 2: Bottom-up processing is expensive.
Bottom-up processing requires a massive amount of cellular energy, and not only because of the processing energy required to build the layers of meaning. Because the work of that processing doesn’t just happen in the mind, it also happens in the body. The mind doesn’t just construct an image, it constructs a whole-body response to it: a new set of motor and visceromotor commands to tighten these muscles, speed the heart, release glucose, ready the immune system.
And the body’s new state (the faster heart, the tightened gut) arrives back at the brain as interoception, the raw material for the next round. Mind and body are one loop, and every turn of the loop draws on the same energy budget.
Concept 3: Top-down (predictive) processing is an energy-saving strategy.
The mind’s first job is to ensure we have enough resources available to find threats and respond to them. And predictive processing is one of its best resource-conserving (allostasis-protecting) strategies. What is allostasis?
Allostasis is the body’s way of staying stable by changing ahead of time. Instead of waiting to drift out of balance and then correcting, the brain predicts what the body will need next (glucose, oxygen, heart rate, attention) and arranges it in advance, so there is always something in reserve for the next demand.
It works like this: the mind doesn’t only sense, process and respond to the world. It predicts. In every moment, before the light waves hit the retina or the sound waves hit the eardrum, the brain has already made its best guess at what will land next and sent that guess, that prediction, down to the cells of the body. Before the sensory information even hits the receptor, the body has already done the visceromotor and deep cellular work to prepare for it. Let that settle a moment.
When your mind anticipates the next word of a written sentence, that guess doesn’t just live in the mind. It actually creates that experience in the cells at the back of your eyes, and if the sentence carries emotional significance, it shifts the visceromotor experience in the body to generate the felt experience. And it does all that in the instant before the sensory experience lands.
You hear your name across a noisy room. Your ears received the same sound as everyone else’s; your prediction picked it out. You reach the bottom of the stairs and your foot drops through a step that isn’t there: the lurch is your body meeting a prediction, not a stair. The smell of a hospital corridor tightens your stomach before you have thought a single thought. Your phone buzzes in your pocket and it hasn’t.
Try this. Look at this picture and, just at a glance, try to make meaning of it:
Once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it. That’s your mind relying on the prediction (top-down processing) rather than repeating the energy-consumptive work of building it from scratch: sorting through every possibility (what could this be? what could it mean? how should I feel about it?) and trying to find one that fits.
Top-down (predictive) processing is cheap: it conserves processing energy for other tasks. If you already know what to expect, the work has already been done. There is nothing more to learn. Bottom-up processing, constructing from the sensory system up, requires far more processing energy.
How does that save energy? Only sensory information that is significantly different from the prediction makes it through.
Concept 4: Prediction error demands bottom-up sensory processing.
When what arrives doesn’t match what the mind predicted, that mismatch is prediction error. It’s the mind’s signal that something is new or different than expected, and it needs a closer look. That’s when the mind switches to expensive, bottom-up processing. Why can’t you just ignore prediction error?
If only it were that simple. To a sensitive nervous system, every mismatch between what we expected and what arrived signals potential threat. Tuning it out isn’t a choice. It has to be processed until safety is assured. And each one draws down the body’s resources.
That mismatch isn’t just psychological; it’s physiological. It’s a signal to the whole body to be ready to respond: the mind to process it, the body to prepare a physical response.
How I put it together
Monotropism × Predictive Processing × Allostasis
Building the lens
Applying the lens
To how we understand emotion, interpret meltdowns and shutdowns, support people through overwhelm, and make decisions about therapy and education.Coming soon