What I think
This is the theory behind the overwhelm thread on my home page: why I think autistic minds lean on costly, body-up processing.
Monotropism × Predictive Processing
Monotropism
describes how attention is shaped. In monotropic minds, attention narrows into a deep beam rather than stretching broad.
Predictive processing
describes how the brain builds experience. It is always predicting what comes next. When what arrives matches the prediction, its meaning is already there. That top-down processing is cheap. When it doesn’t match, the prediction error has to be processed from the body up. Body-up processing is expensive.
*Monotropic attention is a flashlight, not a floodlight
Do monotropic thinkers build monotropic predictions? Narrow and deep?
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Where monotropic attention goes
The beam is narrow and deep, and so are the predictions it builds. That makes patterns easy to see and small changes hard to miss. A small change can feel big, but it has a detailed model to land on.
Where monotropic attention goes less
Prediction models are rough or imprecise. So what arrives comes in raw, with little to soften it.
How would deep, narrow and detailed predictions change processing?
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When a monotropic mind can’t keep its beam narrow, prediction error is everywhere
Stretched wide, attention lands where predictions are rough. Almost everything arrives as a mismatch.
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Every prediction error demands energy-costly, bottom-up processing
Experience, understanding, significance and emotion are all constructed piece by piece, with little to fill in the gaps. Because threat lives in the unexpected, none of it can be ignored. And that costs energy. Cellular energy.
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With limited energy, the mind is caught between two safety needs
- Process prediction error to find threats now.
- Conserve energy to detect threats later.
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When the budget is stretched, the body cuts back elsewhere
Energy spent on processing has to come from somewhere. Often it comes from cellular clean-up, the quiet work of clearing metabolic debris. When that work falls behind, debris builds up and the immune system responds. The result? Inflammation.*
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When processing demands exceed processing capacity, that’s overwhelm.Day after day, it’s burnout.
The biochemistry of autistic burnout →
When the sensory and emotional environment is safe and monotropic attention can narrow, everything outside disappears. Within those bounds, every prediction error has a model to meet it, and there’s enough capacity to meet each one safely.That’s recovery.It’s also where learning, memory and flow happen.
Narrow attention builds deep predictions, and deep predictions pull attention back.
That loop isn’t the problem. It’s a more focused strategy for using attention.
This is a theory I’m still thinking through. It builds on three predictive theories of autism: weak priors (Pellicano & Burr, 2012), HIPPEA (Van de Cruys et al., 2014) and aberrant precision (Lawson, Rees & Friston, 2014). I’d love your help shaping it. If something here doesn’t fit your experience, or you know research that pushes on it, tell me. Share your thoughts →