How Autism is Made 16: Oh No—Another Social Blunder! Do I have AUTISM?

An adult's guide to autism self-diagnosis using revolutionary cutting-edge neuroscience.

This Article is for Folks Who Wonder, Why am I so different?

Do you feel like other people seem to operate on a different wavelength than you? Do friends and opponents declare that you march to the beat of your own snare drum? Is your past chock full of social blunders, awkward confrontations, and a long litany of regrets from saying the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing, or acting the wrong way?

Do others tell you that you have an “Asperger’s Personality” or may be “on the spectrum”? Do colleagues and lovers tell you that you are weird, strange, freaky, robotic, aloof, arrogant, awkward, insensitive, callous, self-absorbed?

Do you want to find out if you’re autistic but don’t know how to go about it or who to trust? Pilgrim, you’ve come to the right pagoda!

Perhaps one reason you’ve never seriously considered the possibility that you were autistic before was because you’re doing just fine in your career, thank you—and it isn’t the sort of career you imagine autistic folks enjoying. Maybe you’re a great salesperson. An effective business executive. Maybe you’re a successful painter, plumber, paramedic, pastry chef, pickleball player, private investigator, personal trainer.

Guess what. You can be any of these things and still have autism! There’s a reason we call autism the dark gift: though it certainly has its darkness, it also endows us with special abilities, including unique talents at a nearly unlimited range of vocations.

But let’s find out if you are truly fitted with the dark gift. This article uses state-of-the-art ground-shaking neuroscience to help you determine once and for all whether you are an autistic soul.

There’s Been a Paradigm Shift in Neuroscience that has Revealed the Biological Source of Autism

Over the past decade there’s been revolutionary developments in science’s basic understanding of the operation of attention and consciousness in the human brain. A momentous paradigm shift in mindscience on the same order as Copernicus declaring the Earth goes round the sun.

These breakthroughs have finally revealed the neural dynamics that embody the autistic experience

These breakthroughs involve sophisticated and challenging and new mathematics, which is why this advanced knowledge has not yet filtered down to most clinicians and academics. But you’re in luck, pilgrim, because in this article we’ll use these fresh and deeply-rooted insights to empower you to self-diagnose your own brain—and reveal a beautiful new world of opportunity if you are indeed endowed with the dark gift.

First, Let’s Review What Autism Is Not

Adults who long ignored the possibility they might be autistic often hold misconceptions about the condition. Let’s dispel these fallacies so that you can focus on the authentic nature of the dark gift.

1. Autism is not a type of personality. There is no “autistic personality.”

Autistic folks usually end up feeling disconnected, alienated, and marginalized at some point in their life—or all their life. Others often label us as detached or wacky or pompous, but that’s just other folks’ reactions to our autistic behavior and doesn’t (necessarily!) reflect any sort of underlying character trait.

Autistic folks possess personalities that are cheerful or morose, ambitious or lazy, stingy or generous, athletic or couch-potato (or iPad-potato), extremes-loving or moderation-preferring. Perhaps surprisingly, autists can even be extroverted and outgoing—it’s just that extroverted autists run into many more social complications than folks who are extroverted and not autistic.

Examining your character traits will not reveal whether you are autistic. Every human, autistic and non-autistic, possesses their own unique, complex, everchanging personality.

2. Your choice of career does not indicate whether you might be autistic. Autists don’t all come wired with talents for any particular profession.

For decades, a common and wholly misbegotten stereotype of the autist was someone exhibiting exceptional talent in math, physics, or feats of memory. There are certainly talented autistic mathematicians and physicists—I know plenty of ‘em!—but I also know plenty of autists who are awful at math and physics. You don’t have to look too hard to find autistic men and women with scintillating memories, but there’s crowds of us with ordinary or shoddy memory, too.

There’s no one professional talent the dark gift tends to cultivate in autistic souls. Rather, the specific talent autism may cultivate in you depends entirely on the totality of your one-of-a-kind brain. You’ll find autistic men and women at the pinnacle of an astonishing diversity of occupations: marketing, social work, graphic design, dentistry, fashion, French literature, surfing. So don’t look to your choice of job or college major for clues to autism.

3. There are no specific moral or spiritual values—or absence of values—indicative of autism. Possessing unique or idiosyncratic values can be indicative.

We feel a sense of right and wrong, same as every Homo sapiens. We feel outrage when things violate our expectation of what is just and feel guilt when we realize we’ve violated our own values.

It’s true that autistic folks often nurse idiosyncratic values at odds with our community, but autists don’t tend to all converge on the same set of values. There are ultra-conservative autists and ultra-liberal autists and ultra-moderate autists. There are deeply religious autists and profoundly atheistic autists. Autists who believe in free love and polyamory and autists who believe no sex before marriage.

The main difference between values in autistic folks and non-autistic folks is that non-autistic folks’ values are much more heavily influenced by their tribe. But an autistic brain won’t naturally drive you toward any particular set of beliefs and ethics.

Your personality, values, ambitions, and faith are yours and yours alone.

4. Autism does not inhibit, impair, or warp our capacity for experiencing emotions. Autism does influence when and how we express emotions.

Autistic folks feel the same feels as everyone: hot anger, hollowing melancholy, radiant joy, ardent lust, incisive bitterness, grandiose egotism, honest compassion.

Consider love.

Autistic folks love with as much passion and exuberance as any soul. The dark gift does not impede our heart. Our heart can get broken and bruised, it can turn cold and unforgiving, it can swell with affection and tenderness for all of life and Nature and even our grumpy aunt Hazel who likes to pinch our earlobes.

Having said that, it’s true that autistic folks are often told that we are cold, insensitive, and unfeeling. There’s justification in such accusations, but not because we are actually cold, insensitive, and unfeeling. Our brain processes situations differently, so that the events that trigger our emotions can often be different from those that trigger the same feelings in non-autistic folks. Frequently the reason we get accused of heartlessness is because the way we express our emotions can be different than the way non-autistic folks do.

For an autistic soul, the problem isn’t our ability to feel love. The problem is our ability to express love in a manner that others find loving.

Diagnosing Yourself for Autism Using the Paradigm Shift of Dynamic Mind

The revolutionary new framework for understanding thought and consciousness is known as the Dynamic Mind framework.

This new understanding of the human brain has revealed that autism is caused by a specific attention deficit. (Technically, an attention deficit in the Why module that profoundly alters the dynamics of consciousness.)

Here’s the kicker: the Dynamic Mind perspective suggests that autism is not a disorder or illness.

The dark gift needs no cure!

Autism is an alternate way of living as a sentient being in the universe. An evolutionarily new way. Autism comes with as many benefits and advantages as problems once you get the hang of it. (Though please read this footnote¹ for a very important caveat.)

Here’s the surprise. A rather astonishing and—for better or worse—an anti-institutional surprise, and one sure to be controversial though I can assure you that controversy is not at all the aim or interest here on the Dark Gift. The surprise:

Only you can truly diagnose whether you have autism.

How can this be, you quite reasonably ask? Surely, there must be a genetic test or an MRI scan or a biomarker or some objective consensus set of observational criteria (such as those found in the DSM²) that trained professionals can use to properly diagnose the presence of autism in someone’s brain?

Well, no. Here’s why: The source of autism involves an alteration of the dynamics of attention within a human brain.

And at the end of the day, only you know what you’re paying attention to. Only you know what you’re conscious of.

Here’s a simple example that visually illustrates the challenge of diagnosing autism and why only you can decisively evaluate whether your brain is autistic: The classic optical illusion known as the Necker Cube.

Take a look: Which face of the cube do you think is in front?

The Necker cube reveals your conscious awareness and control of your personal attention: at any moment, you can consciously and deliberately switch between which face you perceive as “in front.” Maybe you see the upper face in front one moment and the lower face in front the next moment, even though the image your brain is processing has not changed at all.

If we mark one of the faces in color, then our brain can no longer “choose” which face to perceive as the front—we perceive the colored face in front.

Here’s why the Necker Cube is relevant for diagnosing autism: how can someone else—such as your highly-trained psychiatrist—figure out which face of the cube you are perceiving as in front at any given moment? It’s your own private conscious experience!

The only diagnostic methodology available to a clinician hoping to determine what you are perceiving is the ancient Socratic art of asking questions: “Uh, which side of the cube do you see in front?”

It’s the same situation with autism.

Autism alters the evolution-designed operation of attention in your brain and causes you to naturally focus on different objects, people, events, ideas, and goals than folks who lack our neural quirk. Diagnosing autism, then, is a question of determining what your brain is naturally choosing to focus on.

To determine whether you have the dark gift, you must consider the everyday flow and focus of your mind. In particular, you should look for differences between the way you pay attention to people and the way you pay attention to everything else, including ideas in your mind.

Perhaps you’re already aware that your attention seems to be somewhat unusual compared to other folks. Maybe you frequently “zone out” or “space out” or get “lost in your thoughts.” Maybe you find that, compared to other folks, you need more “down time” or “alone time” where you don’t need to pay attention to any other people. In fact, maybe you know that there’s only a certain amount of time that you can be in intense social situations before you can no longer stay focused and your mind inevitably wanders to other things. Or you consistently experience difficulty staying engaged when someone is talking for an extended period of time, such as a classroom lecture. These attentional quirks can also work the other way: maybe you’ve noticed that you can focus on school and career tasks more intensely and for longer periods than other folk.

None of these examples guarantee you have autism, however. They’re merely intended to jump-start your thinking about what to investigate inside your own awareness.

The attention quirk that defines autism is a specific deficit in paying attention to other people. (The underlying neural nature of this deficit is explained here.) Autistic brains are much more likely to pay attention to non-human objects, events, and activities compared to non-autistic brains. What causes this? It’s not that we’re born with a natural bias for focusing on stuff rather than folks. Rather, we are born without an inborn social bias that every other human brain possesses:

A powerful bias to always pay attention to people.

Autistic brains are born without the human species’ evolution-engineered attentional preference for focusing on other humans.

This is the biological origin of all autistic experience: our autistic brain is born equally likely to focus on apples, axes, ambulances, animals, and alarm clocks as on Auntie Anika. Because there are far more things in the world than people, without a neural people-prejudice autistic brains inevitably end up focusing on non-human stimuli. Over time, the design of the human brain’s learning and attention systems naturally guides us to focus on the same interesting stuff we focused on previously. (Ambulances makes such interesting noises! The apple is so shiny and smooth! Agnosticism is so fascinating to think about!) By adulthood, our brain has in fact developed a bias to focus on non-human stuff rather than humans.

It’s important to understand what this means and doesn’t mean in order to diagnose yourself correctly.

It doesn’t mean you don’t care about other people. You can feel love, fury, admiration, fear, veneration, pity or any other emotion toward people. You just have difficulty sustaining attention on other people, particularly when there’s more compelling stuff to pay attention to.

It doesn’t mean you don’t fantasize about being famous, attractive, powerful, talented, or beloved by all and sundry.

It doesn’t mean you don’t feel the pain of rejection, neglect, betrayal, inadequacy, jealousy, humiliation.

It doesn’t mean that you don’t long to fit in, to be part of the group, to have friends, or to be acclaimed by your colleagues. All our social feelings are intact.

You might even be married and have children or grandchildren you dote on. Perhaps you’ve been in a stable marriage for fifty years (congratulations!) This is in no way incompatible with autism or evidence against you being autistic. Though in truth most autistic folks have a history of relationship problems—broken friendships, failed romances, unwanted unemployment, community ostracism.

You’re not evaluating how you feel about other people or how often you think about people you love or hate. You’re evaluating what you automatically and unthinkingly pay attention to in everyday living moments when there’s a lot going on. If you’re processing a busy complex situation—different activities, different sounds, different things to look at, different people—do you automatically focus on the people? Or anything, everything else?

Even our social cognition—how we think and reason and make decisions about people and groups—is intact.

Rather, it’s our social skills and social experiences that are fundamentally altered by the attention deficit of autism. The entire reason we experience so many social fails—so many embarrassing faux pas; so many clashes with bosses, friends, partners; so much unwanted isolation and rejection—is because our brain’s social circuitry doesn’t get activated correctly.

Our brain is crammed full of mechanisms that guide us to share attention with other humans, a form of mind-to-mind neural resonance that empowers us to learn social norms, communication, body language, tribal values. But these shared attention mechanisms are activated by the process of our own brain first focusing on other people. Because our brain doesn’t naturally focus on other people, our brains don’t perform shared attention effectively, which prevents our social skills and social awareness from developing effectively.

Even though a history of social problems is strongly associated with autism, just because you have a lot of social problems isn’t enough evidence to justify a diagnosis of autism. It needs to be that you have lots of social problems because your brain tends to focus on things, events, work, and ideas rather than people.

The fact of the matter is that the social lives of autistic souls are highly diverse and don’t conform to a specific pattern. Autistic comedians perform live in front of huge audiences. Autistic businesspeople competently interact with clients, vendors, employees, and peers. Autistic charity directors hold fundraising galas and aggressively network with potential givers.

Which is why it will always be difficult for someone else to diagnose you, unless they’re around you for extended periods of time in different circumstances and can observe that your attention is consistently drawn to non-human stimuli in a variety of contexts. You must evaluate what your own mind naturally focuses on as you experience your day.

Here’s some useful diagnostic questions to ask yourself:

Do you experience a sharp contrast between the way you feel, think, and behave when you’re alone, compared to when you are compelled to pay attention to others?

Do you feel like it takes effort to pay attention to other people’s speech, troubles, and drama? So much so that paying attention to people can make you feel downright exhausted?

Which sounds more appealing: being all alone to get your work done -or- going to a formal cocktail party to socialize with strangers purely for fun?

All humans experience themselves differently in private than in public. But in autistic folks, this contrast can be extreme. Autistic folks tend to feel more competent, in control, and at ease when alone than in social settings, because of the unnatural effort required to pay attention to people.

Another way to evaluate whether you possess the autistic attention deficit: do you have special interests?

Do you tend to get deeply interested in certain subjects to the point of what others would consider obsession? Do you like to read or watch YouTube videos about information about a topic that thrills you, spending hours, weeks, perhaps years absorbing everything you can about it?

Special interests are a defining and ubiquitous consequence of the autistic attention deficit.

There’s infinite diversity to autistic interests. You might find yourself immersed in Art Deco antiques, Pokemon cards, Birkin handbags, Sumerian tablets, Negro League baseball, ballroom dancing, Hitchcock cinema, quantum entanglement, Banksy murals, leaf blowers, the Riemann Hypothesis, Taylor Swift. If you find it easy and absorbing to spend extreme attention on a special interest—especially compared to paying attention to people—this is a strong indication you are endowed with the dark gift.

Only you can truly know what your mind likes to focus on. The rest of us—including clinicians—can only guess by watching for the external shadows of our inner light. (Important: All of this only applies to self-diagnosis in adults. Diagnosing children with autism as early as possible is such an urgent necessity that we have no choice but to use observational criteria. Fortunately, it’s often very plain when a child is consistently choosing to focus on toys, fabrics, noises, or math rather than other kids.)

If you’ve read this far and feel a dawning certainty that you have autism. . . welcome to the society of autistic souls!

Welcome to the Dark Gift!

Know this: you are something new under the sun.

We are fundamentally different than other people. Our mind is different. Our consciousness is different. The way we engage and experience the world is different. A difference deeper than Democrat vs Republican, Western vs Asian, male vs female.

The whole reason we’re so different is because we’ve been afforded an unprecedented new perspective on the universe. We can harness all the knowledge and opportunities accumulated by the human species, but we are not as bound by the tribal conventions that constrain and influence the way non-autistic folks think.

The human brain is designed to think as one with the group. The human brain is designed to view tribe as truth. The powerful inborn bias to pay attention to other people is the neural launch pad for tribal thinking, which is what the human species evolved to excel at.

But we autists are terrible at tribal thinking. Our consciousness-altering attention deficit makes it difficult for us to think as one with the group. This can make us feel alienated, rejected, and alone. Or worse: that we’re broken, that we’re bad, that we’re unlovable. These are hard feelings to deal with, which is why so many autistic people can feel overwhelmed, angry, depressed, out of control, exhausted, even suicidal. But these feelings usually reach their worst when we fail to consider the positive side of being different.

Because our brains effortlessly get absorbed in aspects of reality we find personally intriguing and compelling—and because we are not as constrained by tribal influences as our peers—our minds can quite naturally develop fresher and deeper insights into the true nature of our world. We can think what the tribe cannot, we can go where the tribe dares not, we can contribute to society in ways nobody else can.

So please allow me to wish you a sincere and heartfelt welcome to your beautiful autistic life and invite you to explore the Dark Gift site, full of deep dives into every facet of our dark gift.

1. There are other neural deficits that can occur in parallel with autism that do require clinical attention and management and should be considered a disorder because of their negative impact, including non-verbalism (mutism) and motor dysfunctions and self-harming behaviors. These have often been mistakenly lumped together as “extreme autism” but it’s actually a constellation of simultaneously occurring neural conditions, rather than reflecting “the spectrum of autism.” Parents of non-verbal kids who cannot function without continuous supervision justifiably get angry when clinicians or activists tell them “oh, your child is simply neurodiverse! They’re just different and we should accept their differences!” I’m not preaching acceptance of disorders. Disorders need treatment. I’m preaching acceptance of the neurologically narrow condition of autism, defined by a quirky Why module.

2. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the “Bible of Psychiatry” which defines mental illness for schools, universities, the military, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, academic researchers, and clinical medicine throughout North America. Because of these massive institutional stakeholders (changes to the DSM can result in trillions of dollars of impact) the DSM has proven itself unable to adapt to scientific progress. As I wrote about in the book Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry.

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