Untypical, page 10
Autistic special interests are almost as varied as the autistic people who spend every available moment thinking about them. There’s no limit to them. They can be quiet, individual, thoughtful in nature, or they can be physical activities involving other people. Special interests of autistic people I know in real life include topics as varied as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Beatles, building gaming PCs, submarines, street dancing, cows, Sonic the Hedgehog, and cooking desserts and pastries. Despite the vast diversity of interests, however, there are lots of commonalities that are shared by autistic people all over.
First, these special interests help us regulate our moods and manage our stress levels. This is an extremely important aspect that’s all too often overlooked.
Second, they help us find and maintain social groups to be a part of, whether in the form of clubs, fandoms or societies. For a group of people who can struggle to find ways to interact with others, this is an invaluable benefit.
Third, they frequently (though not always) form part of our way to support ourselves. Thanks to the almost inevitable fact that we will become pretty expert in whatever topic it is we focus on, being able to make a little money out of our interests is entirely possible, and some autistic people have managed to forge entire careers based on them.
My special interests are reasonably well documented, given that I’ve written a whole book about them (What I Want to Talk About – by all accounts it’s worth a read), and it’s not my intention to go over them again in detail here, despite the urge to share all my loves and passions being almost overwhelming. Instead, I want to discuss how these interests work, and how important they are to autistic people. Any references to LEGO or Minecraft will be entirely incidental and by no means a permanent written record, symbolic of autistic people’s absolute need to talk about our interests …
A calm port in a storm
Our lives of stress and anxiety can cause tremendous problems for our health. It’s sometimes asked what an autistic person without chronic trauma and its associated stress would be like, an autistic person who has somehow avoided experiencing a lengthy litany of stressful social miscommunications, and managed to negotiate school and family life without being bullied or ignored by person after person. I’m not sure I can imagine it, as it feels so alien, though I’m sure some people like this must exist.
There’s a very real likelihood that much of what we see as ‘autistic behaviour’ is simply a collection of ordinary responses to prolonged and repeated traumatic moments. It’s a harrowing thought, and one that has kept me up at night many times. But whatever the outcome, this continued trauma, brought about by serious communication difficulties and sensory sensitivity, can leave many autistic people prone to moments of very intense fear, anxiety and panic over the course of an average day. When this fog of stress descends, it’s vital to have some kind of safety net to collapse into. This is where special interests come in.
I had this happen frequently when I was teaching English at a secondary school. Every single lesson I would panic about the class about to be in front of me, worried time and time again that I was somehow incapable of doing my job, despite all the evidence to the contrary. In these moments I’d find myself resorting to what was probably my best tactic: opening Wikipedia and reading as quickly as I could some information about steam locomotives from the 1950s. Reflecting on this now, it’s incredible how effective this very simple technique was. Somehow, reading up on the wheel arrangements of various ancient, polluting, steel behemoths calmed me down much like I expect a lovely massage would calm down anybody else (personally, I can’t abide any kind of massage due to my absolute intolerance of having to lie on my front, prone and vulnerable, while a stranger pummels my spine). Even if pressed, I couldn’t truly explain why this particular subject helped so much. The only reasonable explanation I have is that these trains’ status as a special interest somehow did the job.
It would only take a few moments to calm down in this way, and afterwards I would be able to deliver a lesson perfectly well, to my usual pretty high standards. However, I was forever petrified that somebody in management would look into my internet history and wonder why on earth I was spending so much time reading about A4 Pacific locomotives, when I should have been teaching Year 8 about apostrophes. I suppose this is a big part of the problem: we autistic people find little workarounds, tricks and bespoke solutions to our personal difficulties. Yet these are often ever-so-slightly odd, meaning that when neurotypical people spot us in the act they may assume that we’re up to no good, in that peculiarly pessimistic way that they have.
My experience of reading about my interests in order to calm myself down is shared by many in the autistic community. Special interests seem to be both an inherent trait of autism, but also an excellent coping mechanism to help us handle the stress and anxiety that being autistic in this hostile environment generates. In the past I’ve compared it to various things, from taking a warm bath, to hiding inside your own brain or even hugging, to tickling your own brain. For me, at least, it’s a strangely physical sense of comfort and respite, like a contented yawn or feeling pleasantly full after a nice meal. In allowing myself to be absorbed in a topic I’m deeply invested in, I seem to purge my neurons of whatever fear was overcoming them. I honestly couldn’t do without what special interests give to me.
I use my special interests as a haven, a place I can go to when everything else seems too stressful. When I was a child my LEGO and video games were where I hid from a difficult home life. My parents had a bit of a rough time in the 1990s, mostly because of the recession that hit hard in 1991 or so. Lots of lost jobs later, we ended up staying with my grandfather in a living arrangement that wasn’t entirely conducive to calm and peaceful serenity. As a result, my bedroom was a haven where I could completely immerse my brain in whatever my newest obsession was. I had a lot of LEGO, usually all spread out on the floor in a kind of cityscape, with a police station, fire station, harbour and tropical pirate lagoon – you know, the standard urban sprawl. I would concoct detailed, intricate narratives that would allow me to disconnect entirely from the pressures that haunted the rest of the house, with jailbreaks and huge fires and pirate-related shenanigans. Whenever I exhausted this particular mental ‘panic room’, I’d switch on my Sega Mega Drive and inhabit some other fictional worlds for a while. Sonic the Hedgehog’s green, pleasant lands were a favourite, as was the strange, colourful world of Mickey Mouse in Castle of Illusion. Unlike a general, ordinary gaming hobby, where completing games and getting high scores are the aim, this was fixated on the worlds themselves. I would spend hours exploring them, even wondering what was beyond the playable levels, what lay beyond the trees in the background, what sights were hidden from view.
Obviously, even then my 11-year-old brain was well aware there was nothing else there – with video games all you get is what’s programmed, there’s no extra unseen element to the tracks on Super Mario Kart – but I didn’t care. I lived to imagine the wider worlds of these games, seeing them as a true refuge. This has never gone away. These days the game worlds are much more developed, open and free. You can wander to your hearts content on a game like Red Dead Redemption, and I do. Frequently. Similarly the world of Minecraft offers an amazingly varied and enjoyable safe place, to such an extent that I’ve quietly developed and built a whole world over the last decade or so, filled with cities, villages, castles and landscapes, all for my own enjoyment and as a place to go when the difficulties of real life get too much.
I think this type of escapism is a big part of why special interests are such a feature of so many autistic people’s lives. It would explain why fictional settings, in TV, film, literature and games, are so enormously popular as subjects. A good friend of mine tells me that she has a well-developed fictional world tucked away in her head where she can escape to when the stresses of life get too much, and that this is at least partly based on various fictional worlds. It’s certainly the case for me. These locations become something we deeply care about. Even today I remember the levels and music of my Sonic games and the aforementioned Castle of Illusion – to the point that you’ll often hear me whistling the tunes while I make a cup of coffee – and very often, as I lie in bed trying to get to sleep, I’ll reimagine exploring those places, my memory of them as rich and fresh as when I was twelve, and before I know it I’ll be sound asleep.
From Marvel comics to the world of My Little Pony or Breaking Bad (and who’d ever expect those two universes to be mentioned together in a sentence – imagine a crossover), these rich, detailed fictional worlds are perfect settings for autistic people to get lost in and find peace and quiet. But there’s more to interests than just make-believe spaces.
A key feature for many autistic people’s interests is collecting. Now, again, collecting stuff is not uniquely autistic – plenty of neurotypical people collect stuff, after all. Nor is it a feature of every autistic person (nothing is, remember?). Yet it’s unusually important to so many of us. It’s very common to see the collection of a fairly esoteric type of object. Perhaps rocks, or beermats, or flags, or insects, or Barbie dolls, or socks, or model trains, or playing cards, or cardigans, or … you get the idea. If it can be collected there will probably be an autistic person who collects them.
Then there’s Pokémon.
Collecting these colourful little monsters has been a favourite interest for so many autistic people since the late 1990s, when the original games first appeared on the Nintendo Game Boy. It’s fascinating to speculate why this particular franchise is so overwhelmingly popular with autistic people; I think it’s the combination of the collecting and the data-heavy numbers game that the monsters themselves represent.
If I may go into a little more detail, all Pokémon, whether in the main series of games or in the mobile-phone version Pokémon Go, have statistics that determine how strong they are, and understanding this can get very deep indeed. Though it is a myth that all autistic people love numbers and maths, it’s not entirely divorced from reality: many autistic people enjoy the security and fixed nature of numerical data, and Pokémon provide this in spades. Finding the little beasts, judging their strength and how they will fare fighting other little monsters, and building them up into lean, mean fighting machines is an experience that really works for a lot of autistic people: it provides lots to think about. It allows for plenty of what we call ‘theory-crafting’, whereby we daydream about good attack combinations and how best to organise our Pokémon – something I’ve always found very useful in boring meetings or on long train journeys when I need a way to profitably pass the time. Figuring out that a combination of ghost and psychic type moves on a fully powered-up Mewtwo will make it essentially unbeatable in competitive play is, quite simply, fun – as well as being an achievement of sorts.
This is collecting with a purpose – collecting interesting rocks never had the option of making them fight each other to the death, after all. On top of this, playing the game provides a safe, manageable means of socialising, where we can meet up with other similarly obsessed individuals and play together.
This particular kind of special interest is very common among autistic people, and it is not limited to Pokémon. Similar pursuits that scratch the same itch are tabletop wargaming, like Warhammer – you know, the game played with little miniature soldiers that have been painstakingly painted. These games are, at their heart, a beautiful combination of collecting models and figuring out their numerical statistics. Then there are massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft or Elder Scrolls Online or even Grand Theft Auto Online, all of which fulfil the same kind of aims and provide the same comforts and detail that so many autistic people thrive on. It may come as no surprise that all of these have captured my interest at one time or another.
Collecting things is a long-term joy, and one that feels forever productive. It gives us focus and goals, and knowing our collections in detail, whether it be the age and origin of our collection of rocks and fossils, or the speed and endurance of our collection of electronic sports cars in GTA, is a source of pride and tremendous satisfaction, once again enabling us to find a calm place to inhabit in the maelstrom of the world.
Beyond the need for a place to hide and recuperate, special interests enable us to focus our brains in a strangely pleasurable way. When the constant demand of looking at the ‘big picture’ in life gets too much and too boring, the ability to tweak our brain’s lens to precisely focus our laser-like attention on something specific is a wonderful feeling, rather like it’s allowing our brain to do what’s natural for it, rather than expecting it to cope with the wide view, which can feel so … false. This is no wonder, if you subscribe to the concept of monotropism.
Monotropism – the attention tunnels
In 2005 a new piece of research, led by Dr Dinah Murray, was published in the scientific journal Autism.* It had been gestating for a number of years through the late 1990s, and would go further than possibly any other theory or research to provide a ‘grand unifying theory’ for autism and, potentially, ADHD. It detailed a new way of considering the autistic brain, centred upon the concept of monotropism. The word, from the Greek for ‘single turn’, refers to the way autistic brains seem to be built to focus attention on single parts rather than the whole, or to put it another way, the predilection for autistic people to struggle to see the wood for the trees, or indeed a tree. Monotropism posits that autism is inherently to do with narrow focus, and it can be applied to almost all aspects or traits of autism, from our sensory sensitivity (a single focus on a particular sensation, driving us to distraction) to our communication difficulties (a single focus on word and phrase meaning causing issues with implication, connotation and such). It also very neatly explains how autistic special interests operate.
Sometimes, autistic special interests are extremely specific. I’ve heard of an individual who had a deep fascination with the masks that plague doctors used to wear – those long, beaky things that haunt the dreams of many of those who have studied the seventeenth century; another acquaintance of mine on Twitter has an interest in watch straps, with particular focus on how the colour of the nylon on certain types affects the fit, by changing the chemical and elastic properties of the material. This is not unusual. Often, broader interests will home in on smaller foci, which can become of great importance to us. There’s comfort to be found in the minutiae of life, something that I find whenever I give myself the chance to really zoom in on things and study the intricacies. Perhaps this is why miniatures of all kinds are very often popular with neurodivergent folks.
Monotropism as a theory helps us to understand why this is so often the case. We autistic people, as Dinah Murray’s son Fergus pointed out to me, ‘tend to concentrate our attention (or processing resources) on relatively few things at a time. That is, where most people are polytropic – meaning that they have multiple channels of processing going on, or multiple interests aroused at a time – autistic people are monotropic, having our attention fully occupied by a small number of interests at any moment.’ As a result, we’re able to devote enormous energy and time to singular focuses. We approach the world like laser beams, I suppose, rather than wider car headlights or floodlights, with everything within the narrow focus of our attention drilled down into its very depths.
And this doesn’t just apply to our interests. According to Murray, ‘Neurotypical social communication generally involves multiple channels of input and output, which people are expected to attend to simultaneously: not just words, but tone of voice, facial expressions, body language and eye contact. Most people are capable of juggling all of these, going in both directions and often with more than one person at a time, without consciously thinking about most of them, and bearing in mind all sorts of social context, like power relations, at the same time.’ It’s easy to see how this could prove to be an extremely effective explanation for much of what I described in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2.
Murray even contends that monotropism could well stand behind autistic sensory sensitivity, suggesting that ‘sensory input from outside our attention tunnels’ is often missed; we simply don’t notice it, as it falls outside of the laser beam, while sensory information that’s within these ‘tunnels’ is amplified considerably for obvious reasons: all of our attention is trained on them, like a hundred microphones pointing at a buzzing bee deafening a listener. I’m a particular fan of the ‘attention tunnel’ analogy, as it fits so neatly with my own experience. When I’m completely engrossed in a topic of particular interest, let’s say reading about it online, then I’m fixated to an uncommon degree upon the computer or the phone in my hand. In a scene reminiscent of slapstick comedy, there could be people fighting in the room with me, fires in neighbouring buildings and Godzilla crashing through the ceiling, and I believe it’s likely I would not look up from my reading. At the very least, I’ve managed to completely miss phone calls, knocks at the door and my own body demanding that I eat or drink something immediately, all for the simple fact that they fall outside of this ‘attention tunnel’ and therefore don’t really exist to me.
The possibilities behind monotropism, as an idea, are very encouraging. Although we’re some way away from it being accepted generally as a central tenet of autism, I believe that it will only be a matter of time before it’s recognised as such. With it may come a realigning of attitudes around what autism really means, both for individuals and for society at large. As Fergus concluded in our talk, ‘We need to take seriously the advantages of monotropic hyperfocus, though. An autistic person given the time and tools they need to pursue their passions can truly be a force to be reckoned with!’
