Pete Twiddlfeet and the Heart on his Sleeve (Murray & Me Book 0)

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Personalised each bead with a single initial on the reverse or wear plain with each bead representing someone special. 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. 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. McDonnell, A., & Milton, D. (2014). Going with the flow: reconsidering ‘repetitive behaviour’ through the concept of ‘flow states’.

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." Please note that the personalisation is handstamped rather than machine engraved. Each letter and number is individually stamped into the metal by hand with a hammer and steel stamp, variations between spacing and depth will occur which gives each piece its truly unique character.

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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. 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.” 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.

Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156. Fergus Murray (aka Oolong) is a science teacher and writer based in Edinburgh; formally assessed as autistic in 2010, at the age of 32. My mum Dinah started thinking about the mind as an interest system when I was a kid, with her PhD on Language and Interests submitted when I was eight. A few years later she read about autism in Uta Frith’s book Explaining the Enigma, and I remember her excitement as she started to realise her model could easily be modified to explain rather more of this enigma than Frith or anybody seemed to have managed up to then. Why then is monotropism not already better known, despite a flourishing of attention in recent years? I believe the reasons are more sociological than psychological. When ‘Attention, Monotropism…’ was published in 2005, none of the three authors were professional psychologists, although one has a PhD in psycholinguistics, and had worked extensively with people on the autistic spectrum; another, Wenn Lawson, received a PhD later for further work on this theory, with their thesis on ‘Single Attention and Cognition in Autism’ since turned into the book A Passionate Mind. Lawson had an official diagnosis of autism, which should be an asset for anyone working in autism, but is still seen by some to undermine credibility instead. The other two were undiagnosed.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. Lawson, W. (2011). The passionate mind: How individuals with autism learn. Jessica Kingsley Publishers.