How Autism is Made 2: How Autism is Made in the Brain: Introducing the Consciousness Cartel

This article lays out the road map for what's ahead in our exploration of the dark gift.

This article uses diagrams to provide a brief high-level introduction to how autism works in the human brain.

Because this overview is designed to be quick and broad, the article will likely generate as many questions as answers. That’s okay. Autism’s tricky business. It will take time to explain everything. Articles ahead will flesh out details in gentle, non-technical prose and friendly graphics. If you’d rather dig deep into the science and math, check out my book Journey of the Mind, which I co-authored with mathematical neuroscientist Sai Gaddam. (It’s loaded with academic references and detailed diagrams of the operation of brains and consciousness.)

Each term below in BOLD will be the subject of a future article. Eventually I’ll replace all boldface with links. Enough preamble. Let’s go!

Autism disrupts the operation of the consciousness cartel.

The consciousness cartel is the single most important neural system in your human brain. Your consciousness cartel governs:

• What you pay attention to.

• What you perceive and know.

• What you learn and remember.

More simply, the cartel governs:

• What you are consciously experiencing.

Because whatever you are consciously experiencing is what you are paying attention to, what you are perceiving and knowing, and what you are learning.

The consciousness cartel consists of several consciousness-generating modules. Each module is a highly evolved collection of neuron networks jointly pursuing a single purpose. Each module can generate a conscious experience all by its lonesome.

Some modules in your consciousness cartel and their roles:

Visual What module: What is this thing I see?

Auditory Where module: Where is this thing I hear?

Why module: How do I feel about this thing? (The Why module determines why you should take a particular action.)

Crucially, all modules in your consciousness cartel are interconnected. Each module communicates with all the other modules, continuously and in rich detail. The modules in the cartel need to be promiscuous because each module strives to persuade all other modules to focus on what I’m focusing on!

The modules in the consciousness cartel are like musicians. Every cartel musician plays its own melody at the same time. Maybe your visual What module plays the melody “I see a toy monkey!” Maybe your auditory What module plays the melody “I hear a chirping sparrow!” Each musician then decides whether to keep playing its own melody—or switch to another module’s melody. When all the modules in the cartel join in playing the same melody, you become conscious of whatever tune they are playing so harmoniously.

If your visual What module “wins” control of the consciousness cartel, your auditory Where module will smoothly abandon the chirping sparrow and switch its attention to the clanging monkey.

What, exactly, determines whether the monkey or the sparrow will win control of your consciousness cartel? The single biggest influence is your Why module.

If your Why module tags the monkey as very interesting, then your visual What module (I see a monkey!) will win out over your auditory What module (I hear a sparrow!) and you experience conscious attention: That’s a very interesting cymbal-clanging monkey!

And now you can act on this conscious experience—perhaps by reaching for that fascinating toy!

The human Why module is the most sophisticated neural module to be found in any brain on Earth. Why? Because it is the only module designed to hold and compare multiple options all by itself.

The Why module holds both the thing (“toy monkey”) and the feeling toward the thing (“fascinating!”). The synthesis of object and attitude within a single neural module is extraordinary. But the human Why module is even more extraordinary, because it can hold multiple object-attitude options simultaneously and compare them.

The Why module can hold two distinct things “in mind”, such as a book and a stranger. It can also hold two distinct feelings simultaneously, such as “fascinating book” and “boring stranger.” These two options then compete with each other within the Why module to determine which option has the greater “emotional intensity.” Which option provokes the stronger reason why you should choose it? (“That book is more likely to satisfy my voracious curiosity than that stranger.”)

Once the Why module decides which option elicits the greater emotional intensity, the Why module biases the attention of the entire consciousness cartel. The Why module’s emotional stamp influences the entire cartel—all the consciousness-generating modules—to focus on the same big-emotion option.

As a result, the winning object “pops out” in your subjective attention: “Look at that fascinating clanging monkey!”

In non-autistic brains, the Why module adds extra zip to options involving human beings (or any purposeful entities, like puppies, angels, or Spongebob Squarepants). This innate prejudice for sentient beings biases the attention of the consciousness cartel to preferentially focus on children, women, men, and gods.

But in our brains, our autism-ravaged Why module does not tilt our feels towards folks. In our darkly gifted consciousness cartel, human beings must compete on a level playing field with every other object in our perception. (It’s not quite that straightforward; other brain mechanisms also bias brains to focus on people, including a general desire for human fellowship, but the Why module is the most dominant and fundamental influence on our moment-to-moment attention in real-time.)

Let’s quickly trace out how a faulty Why module disrupts the consciousness cartel and makes autism in the brain of Dagny, a girl with the dark gift.

Dagny walks into a room and sees two things: a book and a stranger. Her visual What module recognizes the book and sends “book” to the Why module for emotional processing. The Why module declares, “That book looks interesting!”

But Dagny also spies the stranger. Her visual What module recognizes the stranger and sends “unknown woman” to the Why module. In a non-autistic brain, the Why module would boost the emotional reaction to the stranger: “Hey, that’s a person and all people are very interesting!” But Dagny’s Why module gives no special preference to people. Instead, her module declares, “That person looks uninteresting.”

Dagny ends up focusing on the book. She becomes conscious of the book and can take actions on it, such as picking it up and reading it.

This Why-module-generated disruption of social attention is the core dynamic of the autistic brain.

The reason this deficit is so massively impactful is because the human brain is chock full of highly-developed social circuitry designed to learn about language, flirting, aggression, sexuality, gender, social hierarchies, politics, teamwork, romance, and above all, tribes. The proper functioning of all this specialized circuitry depends entirely upon the consciousness cartel naturally focusing on people rather than stuff.

But your darkly gifted brain is perfectly content to focus on stuff over people.

A mind is like a house. A house is designed for visitors to enter through the front door. Then they naturally walk past the Welcome mat and coat rack and shoe tray and umbrella stand, into the foyer with its pictures and portraits, and then into the living room with a sofa to sit on and a bowl of mints on the coffee table. But the autistic brain removes the front door and instead asks all visitors to walk in through the garage, past the spare tires, propane tanks, and old hatchets.

This might sound horrible, and indeed, the worst part of the dark gift is when you can’t stop thinking about all the ways you’re different and all the behaviors you need to try to do in order to connect with other people and end up feeling anxiety when you consider these behaviors will likely fail. If you define yourself by what you aren’t rather than what you are, it can lead to bitterness and glum.

That’s no way to live, pilgrim!

Time to switch your attitude through self-knowledge. Because of a biological accident, you acquired a brain with a very different interface onto physical reality than the interface enjoyed by our non-autistic cousins. A brain that works quite differently in many, many respects than what evolution intended.

And once you stop thinking about all the things you’ve lost because of autism—and I know, pilgrim, it’s a long list!—you can start to realize you’ve been bequeathed something wholly new in the universe:

A mind with a more intimate, direct, and potent connection to our world.

And this is the first Great and Marvelous Truth of the dark gift:

Non-autistic humans live entirely within a social world. Their brains are designed top-to-bottom to think collectively and tribally. To experience the world exclusively through a social lens.

But we are liberated from this constrained mindset. We have been granted the golden opportunity to experience the universe not as humans wish it was, but as it truly is.

Our minds are not designed for tribal thinking. Our minds are designed to devour the cosmos.

Previous Autism Lesson: 1: The Dark Gift Blog: An Overview

Next Autism lesson: 3: The Dynamic Mind

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