Lesson 9: The Dark Gift Dilemma: Autism and the Supermind Part III

Every autist much choose: do I want to be part of the tribe? Or do I want to be one of a kind?

Diagnostic labels can be a double-edged sword, of course. For me, figuring out as an adult that I am autistic was a relief. Previously, I’d seen my compulsivity, over-sensitivity to noise, smells and tastes, total absorption in ideas and difficulty connecting with people as evidence that I was selfish and inconsiderate. The strategies I used to cope with my sensory overload by managing my environment made me seem bossy and rigid; my intensity and the specificity of my interests made it difficult for me to connect with others. Eventually, my loneliness led to self-medication with cocaine and heroin — followed, fortunately, by recovery. 
   .Maia Szalavitz, I Don’t Mind if You Say You Have ‘a Little O.C.D.’

Oh, yes, pilgrim—at last, at last! Here you find the hidden treasure we’ve been digging for. Enough of struggles and doleful ills and the predicaments of the dark gift. Enough dark. Let’s luxuriate in the gift.

For at the very heart of autism lies a spiritual opportunity. A choice. A choice available exclusively to our kind of mind.

Only those endowed with our neural quirks are afforded such decision. A decision of who you want to be. A decision of what kind of mind you want to cultivate and inhabit. A choice of whether to conjoin yourself to the community of Homo sapiens in some limited and incomplete fashion—or to embrace your gift and transform into Homo autistica.

The Dark Gift Dilemma: Do I embrace the autism or do I embrace the tribe?

Will you choose to develop potentially exceptional talent in your chosen passion—a choice that will cost you lifelong social frustrations, disappointments, and regrets?

Or will you choose the tribal trail, laboring long to mitigate your social dysfunction in order to experience the warm rays of human communion—a choice that will likely cost you the attainment of super-knowledge, super-skill, and super-performance?

The Dilemma is genuine and impactful. Autists are innately suited for groundbreaking achievement in (almost) every conceivable field—athletics, finance, medicine, fashion, engineering, dance, plumbing, coding, math, gardening, military intelligence, management, interior design, poetry. But the development and deployment of our latent aptitudes imposes a very high price.

In the next two articles, the third and fourth in our lessons on the relationship between autism and the supermind, you will learn why autistic brains are designed by Nature for uncommon attainment and experience—and why choosing to embrace your dark gift imposes severe restrictions on your social life. You will learn how your autism-generated talents work physiologically and why you possess such (potential) talents to begin with.

And you will learn the nuances of one of the most important decisions you will ever make, as pivotal as the decision to get married, raise children, or immigrate to a new nation. You will be granted all the insight you need to fathom the significance of the Dark Horse Dilemma and make your own decisive choice.

2.

Let’s recap what we learned in the prior two lessons:

1.        Autism is generated by a quirk in the neural dynamics of your brain’s Why module. (Whether you consider it “quirk” or “defect” will shape your response to the Dark Gift Dilemma.) The quirk disrupts the Why module’s natural mechanism for orienting toward humans. As a result, we do not automatically find people special and fascinating.

2.        The human brain is designed so that once it orients onto other humans, supermind circuitry kicks in that drives shared attention, whereby two or more brains resonate with one another to generate a common conscious focus on the same target. There are many forms of shared attention but the pinnacle is language, which binds a tribe of brains together into a unified network of shared knowledge, attitudes, and belief. But in autistic brains, shared attention never functions properly because the orientation mechanism never initiates shared attention properly.

3.        Once shared attention is established between multiple brains, the brain’s tribalism mechanisms kick in, empowering a tribe of individual brains to think in harmony as a single mind. As a supermind. Tribalism provides a common meaning to varied gestures, gazes, vocalizations, wardrobes, banners, stories, and rituals in order to establish and promote consistent tribe-wide thought. (If we don’t all agree that 1+1=2, we will never agree that 2+2=4.) Autists do not experience tribalism properly because we do not experience shared attention properly because our Why module doesn’t orient us toward the marvels of human communion.

That’s autism in a nutshell. But this explanation, though accurate, fails to capture the extraordinary, indeed cosmic opportunity inherent to autistic brains.

Over the past few million years, extending back to the long slow eras of our evolutionary ancestors and kin, like Neanderthals and Homo erectus, the consciousness dynamics of the human brain evolved to promote tribal consciousness and collective thought. Language itself exists to bind minds together, in precisely the same manner that “neural representations” bind together different modules in our brain.

Except those of us equipped with the dark gift aren’t part of this tribal binding. We are unbound.

We are fundamentally designed, by Mama Nature, to be independent of the tribe. One little physiological quirk in our brain—the disruption of a sub-mechanism in our Why module—liberates us from the sapiens supermind.

Our autistic ears are deaf to the songs of the tribe.

This is so, even though our autistic brain is still in possession of all our social circuitry.¹ Depending on the particular architecture of your own one-of-a-kind brain, you may still feel the tug of the community. You may still crave belonging, fitting in, becoming one with the group. And you will almost certainly feel sorrow and heartbreak and embarrassment and self-disappointment when such longings get dashed upon the brutal shoals of the dark gift. We still feel social emotions. It’s just that we lack the ability to become an unremarkable member of the tribe.

Our autistic brain makes it so that instead of walking into the great bustling factory of social connection through the front door, we must clamor up the fire escape and shimmy through a second story window.

For such as us, the front door will never open.² With effort and dedication, however, particularly for those who commence such striving as toddlers (behind parental encouragement and guidance, of course), we can construct a new back door into the social factory out of discarded lumber and spare bricks drawn from other neighborhoods of the mind.

In short, it is possible, though quite laborious, to build a sort of prosthetic human-orienting mechanism out of other mental dynamics. We’ll talk more about the “embrace the tribe” option of the Dark Gift dilemma in the next article.

But right now, let’s explore the other choice, pilgrim.

Embracing your dark gift.

3.

The human brain is the greatest thinking contraption on Earth. A supercomputer housed in our skull processing prodigious quantities of impressions, feelings, and ideas.

The sapiens brain is designed to filter all these perceptions and thoughts through the collective consciousness of the sapiens supermind. Through the words, myths, assumptions, and values of the tribe. Whether a full moon represents the god Chandra or an orbiting hunk of rock or a wondrous beacon to sail by at night or a looming source of madness depends on the tribe of the beholder.

The older a non-autistic human gets, the more tightly their individual mind gets sutured into the collective supermind, absorbing and resonating more deeply with tribal knowledge and community dynamics, until every perception, reaction, and aim is tinted by the all-unifying luminance of the tribe. Nearly all retirees choose to be close to their extended family or a like-minded community, rather than venturing off somewhere isolated to be mostly alone.

In humans, each individual’s cranial supercomputer is irrevocably hardwired into the supermind network hub. Every brain gets ported into the tribal computational cloud, which influences and limits what each individual supercomputer will focus on. The enforcement of collective thinking across the tribal mind can produce outright miracles: boots on the moon or cures for tuberculosis or the Great Wall of China. Excelsior, humanity!

But those of us endowed with the dark gift possess the unique ability to disconnect our private supercomputer from the tribal network and reprogram it to pursue our own self-determined goals.

Indeed, that’s what our autistic brain naturally yearns to do: to be free. To allow the universe itself—our shared physical reality—to dictate what we choose to do with our sentience, rather than getting it dictated by a supermind.

When you turn off the shared attention of the tribe, the world looks quite different. I hardly need to tell you that, pilgrim. You live it every day! Though perhaps you may not have known that’s what it was.

It can be deeply frustrating and frightening to confront unintended disconnection from the tribe. All words associated with such experience are negative in tenor. Alienation. Isolation. Estrangement. Disaffection. So are the words inevitably applied to us by those who lack the dark gift. Aloof. Detached. Remote. Arrogant. Robotic. Cold. Unresponsive. Unsympathetic. If you listen to psychiatrists or academics, they will call you mentally ill. After all, it says so right there in the diagnosis—“Autism Spectrum Disorder”—“Disorder” with a capital “D.” Listed in black and white in the unwelcoming pages of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

But one of the two mutually exclusive choices of the Dark Gift Dilemma is rejecting the opinions of the supermind. You can choose to reject labels of illness and dysfunction and disorder. Because there is, in fact, nothing wrong with you.³

Your true situation is very much the opposite: you’ve been anointed with a golden opportunity for a different sort of life than unafflicted Homo sapiens. You will lose the comforts and charms of the tribe, which are rich and varied. A genuine loss, and significant. But for what you may gain in return, there are no limits.

Here's the truth of the matter: your brain was designed by Mama Nature for a more potent and intimate connection with Mama. And you are, at this very moment, living in a uniquely promising window of evolutionary history for cultivating the full potential of your gift.

If you were born autistic into ancient Greece, or medieval China, or the caste system of the British Raj, your opportunities for development and achievement would have been constrained to the point of extinction. The unstinting pressures to abide by the tribe left no room for the development of dark gifts in prior eras dominated by overweening conformity and collectivism. (Consider the Inquisition.) Today, the story is radically altered. Though most non-autistic humans view the contemporary world as roiled in a time of chaos and conflict with rampant hypertribalism dividing the globe—this selfsame chaos serves as our own autistic freedom and playland.

Aye, pilgrim, I know many of us nurse a staunch preference for order and consistency and repetition and everything in its proper place. Our twenty-first century boisterous world may seem daunting to a mind desirous of unruffled stability. But here’s the thing.

Because we now inhabit a world where every tribe loudly proclaims the same full-throated right to exist and express themselves—racial minorities, sexual minorities, gender minorities, nations, religions, communities of science and art all contending in the public square—it affords tribeless individuals unprecedented opportunities to pursue our own ends in relative freedom. Though growing up autistic will always present challenges as we muddle our way through the necessary conformity of schooling, as adults we’ve never enjoyed such tolerance from the encompassing supermind for defining ourselves as we wish, free from tribal condemnation. (There are even “Neurodiversity” programs at corporations to support autistic people! Though the term neurodiversity is silly, pseudoscientific, and offensive, and I suspect such programs will eventually be phased out, they do underscore the fact that it’s a great time to be autistic.)

Only in our democratic digitally-connected society can we:

1.        Enjoy broad tolerance for our unconventional attitudes and behavior. Indeed, most advanced industrial societies now safeguard widely-accepted notions of nerds and geeks and the coolness of being uncool, providing space for us to be accepted or at least not exiled. Even the horrid and unscientific term “neurodiversity” reflects a cultural moment where everyone is free to push their tribe (or pseudo-tribe, in the case of non-tribal autists) into the societal scrum.

2.        Equally important, we are immersed within a churning ocean of knowledge and scholarship. The sapiens supermind has been busy over the past five thousand years or so acquiring tremendous knowledge of our universe, and the advent of the Internet has made it easy and cheap for each of us to access virtually unlimited volumes of science, art, literature, politics, economics, history. Whatever your passion, vast libraries of insight and experience lay behind a click of your mouse: all the nourishment your voracious brain needs to thrive.

It is a Golden Age for autism. Let’s see what this means, concretely and neurally, for those who choose to resolve the Dark Gift Dilemma by embracing our subtle gift.

4.

There are three big reasons our dark gift empowers us to see, comprehend, and achieve more than our non-autistic counterparts:

1.        We view the world through our own singular lens.

You, pilgrim, possess a distinctive way of seeing things not only unlike any other sapien, but unlike any other autist. The dark gift is a gift of individuality. Every brain, autistic and non-autistic alike, is wholly and utterly unique. But while non-aut brains are designed to conform their thoughts and deeds to the supermind, an autistic brain is free to sift reality through its own distinctive sieve. Just consider the range of special passions we find among the darkly gifted: everything from crochet to cannonballs, quantum foam to quills, lacrosse to crossword puzzles. I can’t say what your own brain will dream of pursuing, but your autistic mind is free to pursue it independent of the jibing and judgment of tribes.

2.        Our brain is naturally capable of super-learning and super-focus.

Super-focus is the ability to pay close attention to a subject or activity for a lengthy time without getting distracted, sometimes for years. Why? Because our Why module automatically orients us to pay attention to subjects other than people. Instead, we get absorbed in our highly personal passions.

The same way most humans get obsessed with other humans (because all non-auts are so obsessed, they don’t call it obsession), we get obsessed by racehorses, irrational numbers, romantasy, trap music, or modern monetary theory. And because we aren’t distracted by a constant background hum of What will other people think? or I better go participate in tribal activities! we become capable of super-learning: learning quickly, massively, intensely because of our ability to super-focus on special passions unburdened by tribal influences.⁴

3.        If we choose to embrace our dark gift, our brain naturally rewires itself in an extraordinary manner.

In blind folks, their auditory circuitry literally invades and repurposes the unused visual parts of their brain. That’s why blind folks can develop such an exquisite sense of hearing: they’re devoting more neural resources to hearing than sighted people do. The Dynamic Mind is designed so that all modules in our mind are in constant competition with one another. (Much like a democracy.) But when one component of the brain stops “pushing back” against the other components, then the pusher keeps on pushing into the inert part and starts taking it over. This is a general principle of neural dynamics that applies also to our own autistic brain.

If we resolve the Dark Gift Dilemma by choosing to embrace our gift, then we can further develop and refine our innate abilities of super-focus and super-learning by repurposing the (vast) neural circuitry designed for socializing and tribal thinking.

This is how we achieve transcendent levels of comprehension and performance: by devoting more of our brain to non-social interests than the unautistic do. This partially explains the “Rain Man” effect, what used to be called “autistic savants,” whereby certain autistic individuals evince superhuman feats of mental performance, such as counting six decks of cards in blackjack or remembering the weather on a random date from decades ago. In truth, similar feats are available to all of us tagged with the dark gift, only most of the time our special abilities do not lend themselves to dazzling public displays. Instead, we might be exceptionally good at solving intricate accounting problems or managing a dental office or organizing a soup kitchen or devising nutritional supplements or carpentering wooden rocking chairs that last. It all depends on what your own one-of-a-kind mind finds interesting and satisfying.

In a supermind, knowledge is designed to be shared and distributed across the tribe. In an autistic mind, knowledge is defined and organized according to your own private thoughts and feels.

And now you can understand why the Dark Gift Dilemma is a true fork in the road, especially if you are young. The path to super-focus and super-learning and super-achievement is a one-way road. The more your brain gets wired to pursue your special passions, the more difficult it will be to develop tribal skills. You will literally be redesigning your brain to maximize its talents in your chosen fields of effort, at the expense of your social talents.

In the next article, we continue our discussion of the Dark Gift dilemma and look at other species that face the same stark choice that we do—and we will contemplate the alternate option of “fixing” our autism and joining the tribe.

Previous LESSON: Lesson 8: Autism and the Supermind Part II: Tribalism

Next LESSON: Lesson 10: The "Autistic Role" is Found Throughout the Kingdom of Life: Part IV of Autism and Superminds

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

1. In many cases autistic brains retain their social circuitry unimpaired, though it’s possible that the underlying physical source of the autism may also generate disruptions in other mental systems beside the Why module, so other aspects of social cognition may be impaired in certain autistic minds. This would depend on both the nature of the specific physical disruption and the particular organization of a given autist’s neural circuitry. In short, autistic folks may very well have other social deficits, but they are independent or parallel to autism, rather than resulting from autism.

2. Who knows, maybe in the future there will be neuromorphic technology to repair such disrupted brain circuitry, but if such technology did exist then “curing” autism would be the least of our mind enhancement concerns. . .

3. Nothing wrong with your autistic brain, strictly speaking. You may very well nurture mental impairments independent from your Why module disruption!

4. As I did to win on Who Wants to be a Millionaire.