Lesson 0: An Overview of How Autism is Made in the Brain
At last, a clear, plainspoken explanation of how the dark gift works.
The ultimate understanding of autism may demand both technical advances and conceptual ones beyond anything we can now even dream of.
.Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars, 1995Let me explain how autism is made in the brain. This is a plain language overview, one that anyone can understand without medical, science, or math backgrounds.
I will provide the science, math, and evidence in future articles here on The Dark Gift. But right now, let’s cut to the quick.
Autism is an attention disorder. An attention disorder rooted in a specific disruption of the neural activity of consciousness.
The nature of this attention disorder is straightforward. Indeed, autism itself is a narrow and specific disorder, in terms of its physical cause and neural manifestation. It is not in any sense a “spectrum” disorder. Once we understand how autism is made, it will help us fathom why so many non-autistic folks insist the dark gift lies on a (non-existent) spectrum.
Here’s the difference between autistic brains and non-autistic brains:
If a non-autistic person walks into a room and sees a book, a bell, a candle, and a stranger, they will automatically focus on the stranger.
If an autistic person walks into a room and sees a book, bell, candle, and stranger, they might focus on any of those items—especially if the book looks very interesting.
The source of this distinction lies in a neural module in our brain called the Why module. This consciousness-generating brain module is found in all vertebrates and is responsible for generating feelings. The Why module provides the reason Why we should do something: I should eat a sandwich because I am hungry. I should break up with my romantic partner because I am angry. I should go to the Taylor Swift concert because I love her music.
One essential role of the Why module is to help us select a choice or goal from multiple options. I will eat a ham sandwich and not a Vegemite sandwich because I can’t stand Vegemite. I will break up with my romantic partner because I am very angry at them and because I want to date that attractive person I met yesterday. I will go to the Taylor Swift concert instead of the Britney Spears concert because I like Taylor’s music more.
The Why module is an essential component of the brain’s attention management system. The Why module plays a crucial role in determining what I should focus on next. I’m focusing on this ham sandwich instead of that Vegemite sandwich. I’m focusing on the person I want to date rather than the person I’m dumping. I’m focusing on Taylor Swift not Britney Spears.
The Why module performs this attentional role in all creatures with brains and backbones. However, in humans and humans only, the Why module plays an additional role. The human Why module is “enhanced.” It comes endowed with a powerful bias, perhaps the single most important and defining bias of the human brain:
The Why module is designed to make other human beings seem like the most interesting things in the universe.
The human Why module “paints” other people with an enchanted emotional glow, which makes them “pop out” in a viewer’s awareness. In the awareness of non-autistic viewers, that is.
That’s why when a non-autistic person walks into a room, they will reliably ogle the stranger rather than the book, bell, or candle. Their Why module is telling them, That unknown mystery Homo sapien is the most important thing in the room!
This distinctly human function of the Why module is broken in autistic brains. Our Why module does not illuminate other human souls with a magical light. We don’t experience the same emotive jolt from encountering Homo sapiens that non-autistic folks do.
When we walk into a room, what we look at is not automatically dominated by social considerations, as it is with non-autistic brains with their functioning Why module. Instead, OUR ENTIRE BRAIN works as one to decide the most interesting thing in the room.
And because each person’s brain is different—including every autistic person’s brain!!—that means each autistic person may pay attention to something different. One autist might look at the book (it’s about rhinoceroses!) Another might look at the candle (just observe the fascinating flicker of flame!). Another might favor the bell. (Oh, how I want to hear it ring!) And, yes, we might still peer at the stranger. (Look! They’re wearing a nose ring that resembles the state of West Virginia!)
It really is that simple. But why does this simple neural deficit lead to such complex and dramatic and life-destroying problems? Why does this simple neural deficit lead to such chaos and confusion among clinicians, who insist that autism is a “spectrum disorder,” that it’s a “developmental disorder,” that it’s a “theory of mind” disorder, that it’s a “masculinization of the brain” disorder, that it's a “genetic disorder” when it is none of these things?
Because every brain is different, including every autistic brain. There is a spectrum of human brains, but not a spectrum of autism. All autistic brains share the same defining feature: a deficit in our Why module. But the other strengths and deficits in our brain dictate how we experience the world as an individual. It’s the non-autistic parts of our brain that determine our own “personal flavor” of autism.
Here’s what I mean. Some people are born with a predilection for music. Some are born with a penchant for prose. Some a hankering for athletics. Some love science, some love fashion, some love comedy. These inborn predilections are not dictated by autism. They’re dictated by neural circuitry in other parts of our brain.
If you happen to be born with autism and a predilection for music, when you walk into the room you’re probably going to pay attention to the bell. If you’re born autistic and loving language, you’ll focus on the book. If born autistic and adoring fashion, you might automatically look at what the stranger’s wearing.
What your autistic brain naturally focuses on depends wholly on the constitution of the rest of your brain. This also influences our “special interests.”
Our autistic brain’s unorthodox way of processing reality (the lack of human-centered bias in our attention) prompts us to develop intense interests in particularly beguiling subjects. These can become a special interest. Autists spend endless hours absorbed in our special interest. We learn every cryptic detail, every arcane nuance. Autistic interests include cruise liners, unicorns, true crime, roller coasters, Stranger Things, funk music, highland cows, the architecture of skyscrapers, Pride and Prejudice, Formula One racing, hair dye, Zendaya, marbles, and coins. (My own special interest, which manifested at age 10, is the fundamental nature of reality.)
But now we can understand why we develop special interests and how our own particular interests are determined. Autfolk develop special interests instead of social interests because our Why module assigns greater emotional relevance to non-human subjects. Because the people-painting properties of our Why module are broken, it naturally prompts us to pay attention to non-social subjects with the same intensity that unbroken brains pay attention to social stimuli, like behavioral norms, social status, dominance hierarchies, popular trends, flirting, politicking, compromising, and just plain caring what people around us are doing.
The human brain possesses a tangle of sophisticated and evolutionarily recent circuitry designed for socializing, particularly circuitry specializing in language and communication. Most relevantly, non-autistic brains are fundamentally designed to support tribalism: thinking the same as other folks in your tribe.
Non-autistic people care very much what other people think, because their brains instinctively and automatically attempt to align their own thoughts and opinions with those of others in their community. This is human nature, though not autistic nature. All of this tribal circuitry is initiated and dependent upon a single neural process: the Why module orienting a mind’s consciousness to focus on other human beings and their activities. The human brain’s social circuitry then uses this broad focus on humans to then direct the mind’s attention to more specific social details needed for tribal thinking, such as social norms, spoken language, tribal values.
But we autfolk possess a broken Why module. Our tribal circuitry will never function correctly. How can it, if we don’t pay attention to other people in the first place! That’s why autistic people don’t feel part of a tribe and have such difficulty fitting into tribes. It’s not that our tribal circuitry itself is damaged. The “inputs” our tribal circuitry needs to do its job never arrive properly, so our own tribal circuitry—the distinctly human ability to automatically align one’s thoughts, feelings, and opinions with the community—doesn’t operate correctly.
We can also understand, now, why non-autistic clinicians and scientists instinctively accept that autism is a spectrum disorder. Yeah, sure—from the outside, every autistic person seems different. But so does every person with COVID or arthritis or diabetes, and we don’t call them spectrum disorders. Scientists only call autism a spectrum disorder when they don’t have a clue how it works and want to convert their ignorance into a science-y sounding excuse.
Whether we autists end up loving calculus or coins or comedy isn’t because autism is a spectrum disorder, it’s just a reflection of the natural variation of all human brains. The underlying disorder is always the same: a deficit in the people-painting powers of the Why module.
What about the other “symptoms” so often associated with or attributed to autism, like motor control issues or physical coordination issues or shyness issues or non-verbal issues or behavioral regulation issues? Once again, none of this is directly due to autism. Autism is a broken Why module that causes our brain to naturally focus on environmental stimuli other than people. Many other unrelated neural deficits are often swept into the autism dustbin by medicos and scientists who don’t understand the condition.
Whether an autist is physically clumsy or an athletic superstar—and there are plenty of athletically gifted autistic folks—isn’t due to the “severity” of the autism or where the autism lies “on a spectrum,” but is instead entirely due to the rest of the brain. Whether an autist is verbal or non-verbal isn’t due to autism, it’s due to the rest of their brain. Whether an autist is shy or outgoing isn’t a consequence of the autism. It’s a consequence of the rest of the brain (and the specific social experiences the autist may undergo). There are certainly gregarious autfolk who like being around other people! They may run into embarrassing social problems and often get rejected by others, but they still want to be around other people all the time. And there are a great many autistic folks who prefer being alone as often as possible.
The fact that so many of these “symptoms” have been linked to formal psychiatric diagnoses of autism, especially in the DSM, is merely a consequence of bad science and the ignorance of non-autistic scientists.
There’s a very good reason that some cognitive and behavioral limitations seem to appear with autism with a frequency greater than chance, like non-verbalism or physical clumsiness. It’s the same reason that scientists who attempt to locate the genetic basis of autism have been so ineffectual and unproductive:
There are many different ways to disrupt the Why module.
You can have too little of an enzyme, too much of an enzyme. Too little of a neural receptor, too much of a neural receptor. Not enough wiring, too much wiring. There’s a great variety of physiological quirks that end up causing the Why module to not paint other humans with an enchanted emotional light. That means there are many different “medical” ways to produce autism.
How does this help us understand why non-verbalism and autism sometimes (though seldomly!) appear together in the same brain? A missing neural receptor in the Why module may cause autism. But that same exact neural receptor may have a role in the language circuitry, too. In that case, a condition that disrupts that particular neural receptor across the entire brain will disrupt both the Why module and the language circuitry. As a result, the person will be both autistic and non-verbal. But it would be scientifically and medically wrong to suggest that non-verbal autism is an extreme version of autism. It’s autism + an independent neural deficit, occurring together because they both happen to employ the same (broken) receptors.
A breakdown in our Why module leads to the broad range of problems and opportunities befalling those of us endowed with the dark gift. We can become “savants” or geniuses much more easily than non-autistic folks because we naturally focus our most intense emotional attention on subjects other than socializing with people and are naturally motivated to spend endless passionate hours exploring those subjects.
And that’s not all.
There’s another reason why those of us with the dark gift often develop superior talents in non-social subjects (like math, business, art, athletics, music, coding, neuroscience) than non-autistic folks attain. The non-social parts of our brain begin to invade and annex and repurpose the social parts of our brain.
In short, because we aren’t using our tribalism circuitry—which happens to be some of the most extensive circuitry in our brain—we repurpose that dormant social circuitry for use in pursuing our special interests. If an autistic person loves math, over time their brain will convert their social circuitry into math circuitry. If an autistic person loves filmmaking, their social circuitry get converted into filmmaking circuitry. This is what happens to blind people: their auditory circuitry colonizes their non-functional visual circuitry and repurposes it for greater auditory sensitivity. Our autistic Why module indirectly guides this “deep-thought brain renovation.”
But though the dark gift bestows us with precious gifts, it also bestows darkness upon us.
We experience tremendous difficulty handling many everyday social processes that non-autistic folks handle effortlessly. Gender is a great example.
Autistic folks generally suffer greater “struggles” with gender than non-autistic folks, though it’s usually only a “struggle” in contexts involving non-autistic folks.
Like all human social constructs, gender—our deep-seated notion of what men properly do and women properly do—is generated by our social circuitry. But because our autistic-brain social circuitry never gets activated correctly, we don’t naturally learn about or experience gender the same way as non-autistic folks. Our “gender construction circuitry” doesn’t get the social inputs it needs to function correctly, because our Why module isn’t focusing our attention on the social details our brain needs to figure out gender.
Autists are therefore far more likely than non-autfolk to feel gender confusion—or, putting a more positive spin on it, we’re more likely to explore gender issues, or interrogate them, or deal with them in an idiosyncratic manner.
Now you can understand why: our autistic brain harnesses its non-social circuitry to process conceptions of gender, which can endow us with alternate and socially anomalous perspectives on maleness and femaleness. Or yet another disconnect.
In the articles ahead, I’ll share the story of my life with the dark gift and narrate how I dedicated myself to cracking the mystery of autism, how I discovered how autism is made in the brain, and how this knowledge is the key to living a more fulfilling, joyful, and connected life on your own terms.
Previous Autism Article: A Blog About Living the Good Life with the Dark Gift
Next Autism LESSON: Lesson 1: How Autism is Made in the Brain: Introduction to the Consciousness Cartel
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