This Friday (tomorrow) at 4pm, AMASE Chair @ferrous will be talking with Pete Wharmby, autistic author, about #autism, #writing, #education, #monotropism and all that sort of thing.
Tickets are free and open to anyone. This event will be recorded.
Generally I am on the small details side. But I saw a post about systems thinking today. When it comes to technical problems like software, data flow or a scientific hypothesis, I have the feeling I have everything simultaneously in my mind. All the small details, but all at once.
I'm not just talking about its usefulness in clearing up #Monotropism theory quite a bit but also giving me something I can absolutely relate to personally.
I felt a need to stop and make this post because of the comment about demand avoidance.
Just a couple days ago when I was trying to assess my mental states through the lens of monotropism, the first thing I thought about was my demand avoidance, and a general reluctance to start attention-demanding or stressful tasks because of my fear of potentially being interrupted or distracted by environmental factors.
The mechanism I proposed for this was the countless times I was pulled out of my flow states (or simply the good and enjoyable times I've had, engaging with something that meant a lot to me) by some external, parental or societal demand, and how this recurring trauma (because it indeed is traumatic) taught me to avoid all kinds of behaviors which would decrease my alertness to the outside world.
Hearing the same thing on your discussion helped a lot for putting things into perspective. Thanks for the recommendation.
I want to write a bit more about the issue of "tech" being used as a catch all term for the computer and software industries and their specific products from my own point of view as an #ActuallyAutistic person.
I won't talk here for very autistic person but only through my own experience, so anyone with a different experience which mine doesn't seem to articulate, please chime in and give us your perspective if you can.
My autistic brain works in a near 100% conscious mode. I engage with things intellectually and with vivid awareness, or I can't engage at all.
This means that if I hear or read a term, everything I know about that term (or more precisely all of the neural structure of my brain referring to that term) starts firing in some kind of a "ready" mode. When I hear the word "tech", since its a very broad term, my brain starts recalling every possible connotation of that word that I know of, until the context it's used in becomes clear so it can disregard the unused portion of the entirety of possible paths from "tech".
This uses an enormous amount of energy, both to load and to unload, and I kind of feel it happen. My blood pressure changes, sugar levels fluctuate, stress hormones and their inhibitors get released.
And all of the effects of these physiological processes create their own vivid emotions and feelings.
When someone is talking about pieces of software, within the actual context of software, using the term software, this isn't jarring to me as the amount of activity triggered in my brain perfectly coincides with the actual usage I get out of it. There's still an enormous amount of information potentially useless for that specific conversation, but there's time, and the extras are still close to the useful context so thinking out of the box solutions and new ideas become easy, which is at least satisfactory, if exhausting.
When someone says "tech" but talks about specific programming languages, my brain first gets ready to talk about any possible piece about the anthropological phenomenon of technology, then immediately is forced to switch to the "programming languages" category, which also triggers the software category because in order for my brain to do the conscious translation from "technology" to "programming language" it has to go through the "software technologies" category which sits between "tech" and "programming languages".
As I said earlier, this is jarring, exhausting and very uncomfortable.
This is what NT psychologists mean when they say "autistic people take things literally."
What that remark doesn't reveal is the mechanism that manifests this result.
I don't "take" things literally. I just consciously engage with every possible literal or non-literal connotation of a word until the context is apparent and my brain can settle itself into the needed part and filter out the rest.
I went in blind and didn't think I'd score too high because as far as I understand what monotropism proposes, I didn't think it fit my profile very well. I tried to answer the questions as accurately as I could, without overthinking.
Well...
The result says I'm more monotropic than 73% of autistic people and 98% of allistic people.
I guess I was misunderstanding what monotropism would feel like, if these results are anywhere near accurate, because I'm quite surprised, to say the least.
Would anyone else like to chime in and discuss this with me a bit? This result was not at all what I was expecting.
@cynaq@actuallyautistic been diagnosed for years now and this is my first time coming across the term #monotropism or #monotropic which is always so exciting to me, I love learning new #actuallyautistic stuff 😄
This one really hits home for me bc I thoroughly do not understand the concept of not being actively interested in a task or topic, but also not being bothered or drained by it. I can’t believe that’s a real thing people experience🤪
But I guess this explains that hahaha
What other people might perceive as obsessed with a topic or a person concerning #ActuallyAutistic people is the result of our #monotropism. We focus on one thing strongly and thoroughly to get the whole picture. It's also known as bottom up thinking and it takes time but I imo it is also a talent and gives us practice in analysing things. One reason why many therapists don't really understand what is going on in front of them. @actuallyautistic
A curious thing has happened, where the #Monotropism Questionnaire that @scrappapertiger and I worked on (with a bunch of other people) has gone viral, with millions of people hearing about it while the validation study on the measure is still waiting for peer review.
I wrote about it for the Monotropism site, and made a #TikTok video, since that's where it's mostly exploded.
What's frustrating is that all the videos that have been watched by hundreds of thousands of people have called it an "autism assessment". That's not what it is! But it should be of interest to everyone who's interested in #autism assessments...