The Dark Gift Blog: An Overview

Get introduced to the Dark Gift website—and secret facts about your autism.

Everything has its wonders, even darkness.     
    .Helen Keller, The Story of My Life.

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This Dark Gift website is designed with a particular purpose in mind. To enlighten you. To share deep-down cutting-edge science with you explaining how autism is made in your brain, and why.

Once you understand how the natural melodies of your cranial jukebox get modulated by your dark gift, you will be empowered to live a life of peace, joy, and human communion.

That is the Dark Gift website’s ultimate objective:

To help you understand who you truly are and why you are this way—and open your eyes to the vast landscape of autistic opportunity available to you.

This article serves as a brief introduction to the Dark Gift website—and to autism itself. For me, autism has always been a dark gift. Why? There’s undeniable darkness associated with our condition: incessant social fails. The dark and isolating feeling that we don’t fit in with the crowd.

But autism, too, is a gift.

A gift of learning and growth. We can acquire knowledge, insight, and skill more rapidly and to deeper strata than non-autistic folks.

A gift of perspective. We see the world in a fresh and unprecedented light. We are not beholden to convention and orthodoxy.

A gift of freedom. For those of us who learn to tend our darkness, the resulting choices and lifestyles available to us can be richer, more personalized, more uplifting and more transcendent than those enjoyed by most non-autistic folks.

This quick introduction is designed to orient you to the content here on the Dark Gift, sharing links to articles that discuss topics in greater detail. The present article contains:

A super-brief account of how autism is made in your brain.

A brief discussion of why you subjectively experience autism the way you do—full of endless social frustration, but also confidence in your abilities and joy engaging in immersive activities that don’t necessarily thrill other folks so much. We’ll also touch upon why you develop special interests.

A quick chat about potential sources of autism and why the notion of autism being a spectrum disorder (or an example of “neurodiversity”) is misguided.

A succinct consideration of the Dark Gift Dilemma, a crucial life decision that all of us afflicted with the dark gift eventually confront.

Finally, a fast survey of the science, math, and evidence that produced this remarkable new understanding of our dark gift.

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There are two mental structures you need to know about in order to understand just about everything regarding your personal experience of autism. These structures answer questions like:

• How is autism made in your brain?

• Why do you feel you’re on a different wavelength than everyone else? Why do you have such trouble “going with the flow of the group”?

• Why do you nurture special interests—beguiling subjects you immerse yourself in or compulsively obsess over?

• Why is your life natural and easy when you’re alone, but tricky and frictiony the moment other people step in?

• Why do you seem to have more questions about gender than other folks?

• Why do you seem smarter and more capable at certain activities than your peers—even though your projects and abilities are often neglected, dismissed, or mocked by those same peers?

• Why do therapists, mental health professionals, and scientists seem unable to answer the most basic and pressing questions regarding your dark gift?

To answer such questions, we must learn about two mental structures:

The consciousness cartel [link coming soon!].

And the sapiens supermind.

The consciousness cartel is a collection of neural modules in your brain. A module is a tightly integrated set of neural circuits that collaboratively perform a specific mental function, such as the visual What module which recognizes objects you see. Each module in the cartel is capable of generating a conscious experience on its own, such as the conscious experience of knowing, “That orange, round thing is a basketball!”

The consciousness cartel governs your global attention—what you are consciously focused on at any given moment. (Right now, for instance, you’re consciously focused on reading these words.) The cartel also governs global learning—what your brain stores in memory at any given moment. (Right now you’re consciously learning how autism is made.)

To decide what you should focus on next, the modules in your consciousness cartel battle one another in constant competition. Each module tries to take control of your cartel and thereby take control of your conscious attention. If a module wins the competition for global attention, then you—yes, you, you autistic soul!—become aware of whatever the winning module is paying attention to. (If you are reading this parenthetical, your reading modules won the competition and are now governing your consciousness cartel—and dictating what you are presently focusing on and learning about.)

For those of us fitted with the dark gift, one of these conscious cartel modules matters most. It holds the origin of our story. And it just so happens to be, ahem, the most sophisticated neural module on Earth. The module responsible for generating your emotions. Your conscious feelings.

It is known as the Why module.

Whenever a module attempts to take control of your consciousness cartel and command your attention, the Why module assigns a feeling to the subject of the module’s focus. Let’s say your visual What module is focused on a basketball. The Why module might endow the basketball with an “exciting” feeling, if you love to play basketball. Or it may assign the basketball a “fearful” vibe if it’s the hands of someone who enjoys throwing it at your face. Or it might grant the basketball an “intriguing” sense if someone wrote on the basketball in permanent marker, “Please do not eat this ball!”

This Why-module-bestowed emotional valuation biases the competition for control of your consciousness cartel. It biases what your mind will pay attention to. Whichever module is paying attention to the thing we feel most strongly about at that moment, wins the competition. When a module wins control of global attention, you become consciously aware of that module’s focus and the feeling associated with that focal subject. You become aware of the odd message scrawled on the basketball and you become aware of your curiosity about the message.

All animals with backbones possess brains with a Why module. But in humans, the Why module plays an additional special role. The human Why module is designed to assign vibrant, attention-getting emotions to all Homo sapiens. To all people. (Actually, it’s broader than that. Any animate entity, such as puppies or puppets or Popeye cartoons get the same “it’s a very special sentient!” treatment.)

We’re now striking at the very heart of the biology of autism. In non-autistic brains, whenever a person is nearby, their Why module automatically labels the person as “important!” and “interesting!” That means that the consciousness cartel in non-autistic folks naturally orients towards any humans in their vicinity.

In short, most human attention suffers from a potent and relentless social bias that makes people seem exceedingly relevant and intriguing.

But not our brain. In our own autistic brain, our consciousness cartel does not naturally orient toward other humans. We are not guided through life by an invisible and everpresent social bias. The reason for this autism-defining discrepancy is our quirky Why module.

In our brains, the Why module does not paint other folks with an enchanted light. Though our own autism-stricken Why module assigns emotional value to every subject our modules pay attention to (“That cheesecake would deliciously satisfy our hunger!” “It’s too hot outside, we will sweat and get sunburned!”), our Why module does not put its finger on the scale and bias our global attention towards whispery giggly humans.

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This Fundamental Distinction between autistic and non-autistic brains can be summarized as follows:

If a non-autistic person walks into a room with a bell, a book, a candle—and a stranger—the non-autistic person will automatically focus on the stranger. Who IS that mysterious human?

If an autistic person walks into the same room, they might pay attention instead to the candle, bell, or book—particularly if it’s a very interesting book. Our Why module might assign the highest emotional value to any of these four objects (including the stranger, if there was something striking about the stranger that aroused our attention, such as a strong odor).

Autism is ultimately an attention altering condition generated by the physiological disruption of the human-biasing circuitry in our emotional valuation module. It’s accurate, too, to designate autism a consciousness altering condition, for the neural dynamics of our consciousness cartel are profoundly altered by autism to evoke fundamentally different experiences of our physical and social reality.

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The second autism-illuminating mental structure you need to know about is the sapiens supermind.

Your daily experience of autism emerges out of supermind thinking activity. A supermind is a community of like-minded brains. Homo sapiens brains. In a supermind, many brains think as one.

A large portion of the neural circuitry in the human brain is specialized for supermind thinking: for the synchronization and management of collective thought across multiple brains. It would not be possible to build roads, treat disease, produce television shows, grow crops, or land on the moon without harmonious and effective supermind thinking. Without effective mind-to-mind communication.

The neural circuitry in a human brain that controls mind-to-mind communication is activated by the natural activity of the consciousness cartel. Specifically, effective supermind thinking requires a consciousness cartel with a healthy Why module.

Here’s how supermind thinking works in non-autistic brains:

1. A healthy human walks into a room with a bell, book, candle, and stranger.

2. The human’s Why module automatically orients the attention of the human’s consciousness cartel onto the stranger. That is, the human looks at the stranger and becomes aware of and curious about their presence.

3. Next, shared attention mechanisms kick in. This is one of two primary forms of supermind thinking. Shared attention circuitry is responsible for guiding multiple brains to consciously focus on the same subject at the same time. Such as “We are both looking at the basketball!” Or in this case, “We are both looking at each other!”

4. Next, tribalism mechanisms kick in. This is the other primary form of supermind thinking. Tribalism circuitry is responsible for guiding multiple brains sharing the same focal subject to think the same way about that subject. The brain evaluates: is this stranger a member of my tribe? (A scientist? A Knicks fan? A Moroccan? A Swiftie? A Zoroastrian?) or a member of some other tribe? Next, the brain instinctively and unthinkingly adjusts its thoughts, opinions, and speech according to its evaluation of the stranger as “one of us” or “one of them.” The brain’s tribal circuitry automatically treats the situation as an opportunity to learn how to socialize effectively with the stranger.

Our own autistic brain possesses shared attention circuitry and tribalism circuitry that work just fine. Our tribal circuitry is not damaged by autism. (Though there is one big caveat to that, below.) Rather, our tribal circuitry never gets activated.

1. Because of our modified Why module, we don’t naturally orient toward other living people. But shared attention circuitry is designed to be triggered by the act of orienting onto another human. Thus, our own shared attention circuitry, designed to help us form resonant neural connections with other brains, never gets activated. We don’t naturally engage in all the forms of shared attention that the human brain was designed to engage in, such as shared gaze, gaze following, shared tutoring, pointing, gesturing, and most influentially of all, language.

2. These abilities are not disrupted. They are simply not deployed. Instead, our consciousness cartel tends to focus on non-human subjects. On bells, books, and candles.

3. Consequently, we don’t experience tribalism the same way as non-autistic folks, either. To function properly, tribalism circuitry—which causes a human mind to view the members of one’s tribe as smart, decent, and friendly, and members of the other tribe as ignorant, malevolent, and cruel—requires functioning shared attention circuitry. But shared attention doesn’t work right in our brains, because our Why module doesn’t work right. So tribalism doesn’t work right, either.

Thus, the entire cascade of social thinking and social feeling gets disrupted or straight up cancelled in our darkly gifted brain.

Put simply, our autistic mind does not plug into the supermind socket. Other folks’ brains naturally guide them to connect and sync with members of their community. Our brain is naturally designed to connect and sync with objects and topics other than chatty, breathy humankind.

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Autistic folks often nurture “special interests.” Subjects or activities enthralling us, driving us to spend endless hours delving into their nuances and depths. Now we can see the basis for our high-intensity interests: a consciousness cartel that focuses on non-human topics with the same all-encompassing intensity that non-autistic folks project onto tribal topics. In effect, non-autistic brains are designed to obsess over tribes and tribal behavior. Our brains are designed to obsess over just about anything else—even specific humans on occasion, such as Ariana Grande or Tom Brady.

Why do academics and psychiatrists call autism a “spectrum disorder?”

First, it’s no disorder. I don’t live my life around my dark gift. I live my life within and through my dark gift. I am full of joy, empathy, and daily delight not in spite of my autism but because of my autism.

Second, it’s no spectrum. The only reason scientists and medicos sheepishly label our condition a “spectrum” is because they don’t have a clue how autism works. They look at autistic people and say, “Wow! What a variety of personalities, interests, and abilities autistic folks seem to exhibit! <Ahem>, autism therefore appears to present itself to my scrutinizing eye as a spectrum!”

By the exact same reasoning, colon cancer, COVID, tuberculosis, Alzheimer’s disease, fractured patellas, and arthritis are spectrum disorders. The reason nobody formally uses “spectrum” to characterize these pathologies is because we understand what causes the variations in their presentation and so clinicians would feel silly to refer to COVID as a spectrum disorder—even though the variety of detectable symptoms associated with COVID is even more diverse than what we find in autism (COVID ranges from zero symptoms to death).

Autism is caused by one thing: disruption of the people-painting powers of the Why module, the part of our brain governing conscious feelings. And its consequences do not express themselves on a spectrum, but in a consistent fashion: we struggle to socialize with the tribe due to the impaired tribalism dynamics and shared attention dynamics that arise from our impaired Why module dynamics.

But it is worth looking at one of the truths about brains that motivated scientists to mistakenly label autism a spectrum: the fact that many of us living with the dark gift suffer from additional mental disruptions.

We might suffer memory problems. Speech problems. Motor control problems. We might smell things intensely, or not at all. Some of us are non-verbal, not talking at all. Others can’t stop monologuing. Some get diagnosed with additional labels, such as ADHD or learning disorders. (ADHD is a special and important situation we’ll discuss in another article.) We might have trouble pronouncing words, following directions, navigating through space, or telling left from right.

Are such deficits part of autism? A consequence of autism, perhaps?

Probably not. Rather, such deficits are most likely parallel conditions.

There are many potential ways to cause autism—many physiological ways to disrupt the human-orienting mechanism of your Why module. Your brain could produce too much of an enzyme—or too little. It could build too many neural receptors, or too few. It could produce too much of a neurotransmitter, or too little. It could stitch together too many neural wires—or too few. All these commonplace variations hold the potential to disrupt the people-painting powers of your conscious feelings module.

Answering What causes autism? is a lot like answering What causes an economic recession? Many different things. A pandemic. Promiscuous mortgage lending. High interest rates. High inflation. Trade wars. A reduction in government spending. But there’s a forthright way to unify all of these potential sources: whatever causes economic activity to decline will produce a recession. Same with autism. Whatever causes human-tagging activity in the Why module to decline, will produce the dark gift.

This is why there isn’t a “gene for autism.” Or any single all-important causal agent for autism, any more than there is a single all-important causal agent for economic recessions.

But just as pandemics and trade wars produce additional social consequences other than recession (such as a decline in public health from a pandemic or a possible shooting war from a trade war), the biological sources of autism produce additional mental consequences other than autism.

Maybe we inherited a genome that overproduces an enzyme in our Why module, generating autism. But that same enzyme might get overproduced in other parts of the brain, too, leading to parallel neural deficits, such as an inability to pronounce words correctly. In this case, autism didn’t cause our speech deficit. Nor is the speech deficit a symptom of autism. Rather, the autism and speech problem were both caused by the same underlying physiological quirk (too much enzyme).

This helps us understand why clinicians and ivory tower scholars misconceived autism as a spectrum disorder (they misinterpreted parallel deficits as the symptoms of a single pathology) and why they’ve had such a hard time unriddling its neural dynamics (they’re searching on the wrong scale, hunting for evidence in all the wrong places).

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I call autism the dark gift. The dark side of our condition, the social frustration, is genuine and lifelong, as you surely experience every day. But autism is also an underappreciated gift. You are not broken. You are not an imperfectly constructed human being. You are something different. Something new under the sun.

Our minds operate different. Not broken. Different. Much different. And this different way of thinking—this different way of experiencing our shared reality—presents us with a hard choice. An unavoidable dilemma where we must choose one option or the other.

The Dark Gift Dilemma:

Embrace who you are and pursue great things on your own terms, while paying the very severe cost of isolation and possibly stark loneliness. Or try to find your way into a companionable tribe, enjoying some measure of social acceptance and easy camaraderie—while sacrificing some of your potential for mighty achievement.

Our darkly gifted brain is designed for learning. For super-learning, in fact. We can assimilate knowledge more effectively than non-autistic brains, as a result of tribalism losing its hold on us. But to make full use of this raw psychic power requires embracing our unique mind as it truly is: socially incompetent.

Or, we can take action to adjust our attention and join the human community. Though we will never be social butterflies, it’s possible with discipline and effort to forge a “prosthetic human orienting circuit” in our mind that will mitigate some of our inborn difficulties with supermind thinking. But no question: fully investing in the ‘join the community’ option will lower the ceiling of your potential achievements, by reducing the brain power available for your special interests.

There is no right or wrong choice when resolving the Dark Gift Dilemma. Only right or wrong for you. It’s a choice each of us must make based upon our own singular circumstances and identity. It’s your decision. But at some point we must all face squarely how Sweet Mama Nature made us. We were built to investigate alternate perspectives on reality. We are blessed with an innate ability to venture where the tribe cannot go. To think what the tribe cannot conceive.

Yet, fully embracing our dark gift potential comes with suffering. Alienation, depression, hopelessness, embarrassment, shame, regret—all common features of an autistic life. Suicide is not uncommon among our kind. Such dark feelings are most likely to emerge when we fail to understand what’s happening under our scalp.

Now you know. Or will know, after spending time here on the Dark Gift. Where you will discover you’ve been bequeathed a supercomputer in your skull that can set to work processing anything—fashion, cooking, tennis, poetry, plumbing. The whole reason your supercomputer is so super is because it don’t waste no time dealing with tribal politics!

So who are you going to be?

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I’m an autistic human who aimed my autism at my autism to unriddle its physical operation in my brain. The science undergirding all these insights into autism is predicated upon the most advanced, sophisticated, and continuously-running mindscience research in human history: the Dynamic Mind approach, initiated by Dr. Stephen Grossberg back in 1958 and who is still actively working as I write this.

In a nutshell, Grossberg worked out the mathematical equations governing most forms of mental activity in your brain, ranging from the microscopic (the biochemistry within neurons) to the macroscopic (the neural dynamics of spoken language). He also worked out the mathematics of consciousness and the consciousness cartel, which are resonant dynamics. Sadly, the mathematics of the mind are quite challenging. Grossberg’s math is more difficult conceptually than the math of quantum physics, for instance.

To simplify the super-difficult science of the mind, I employ consistent, plainspoken, self-explanatory language selected to make the big picture easy to see. My only goal is helping you understand how autism works in your brain and how this knowledge can help you live a satisfying life. That’s why I avoid jargon commonly found in academic papers. There’s no reason to torture folks with Latin terms for brain structures assigned long ago in the Sleepy Days of Ignorance before scientists discovered neurons, terms like “hippocampus” or “pallium.” Much of the careerist neuroscience lexicon is rooted in ideologies or conceptual frameworks that are outdated or misguided and always contentious, laden with unwanted baggage that won’t help you understand autism any faster or clearer.

If you want to explore more deeply the science behind the Dark Gift website, you might read Journey of the Mind (which I co-authored with fellow mathematical neuroscientist Dr. Sai Gaddam) or Consciousness: How It’s Made.

If you really, really want to shovel down into the mathematical and conceptual details of Mind at their rawest and deepest, set aside ten years of your life and start digging into Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain by Stephen Grossberg, his magnus opus detailing a mathematical Grand Unification Theory for the human brain.

Trust me, pilgrim. You’ll have an easier go of it here on the Dark Gift.

NEXT Lesson about Autism: Lesson 1: Introducing the Consciousness Cartel

Read FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS about Dr. Ogas and the Dark Gift