The Passionate Mind: How People with Autism Learn

Whilst if you are monotropic and autistically developing, such as I am, you will be good at either thinking, or feeling, or noticing, but in serial fashion, one at a time. I can multi-task, but only if I have available attention, am interested and have energy resources within my interest tunnel. This suggests that attention and interest are partner

however, this may vary from individual to individual and even vary immensely for the same individual. It is this pattern of uneven skill and variation of skills that is so complementary to an assessment of AS.

So you see, we experience social interaction quite differently because our interest systems are configured differently.

Rett’s disorder,

For us, however, sensory perception is experienced as a separate entity and it may not have a natural boundary or border (not be self-limiting). This can mean sensory information keeps coming and can easily overload us.

you are unsure what an AS individual is interested in try giving them a digital camera and see what they take pictures of. I suggest they will only take pictures of things that interest them.

am concerned if we get caught up in the debate over labels that issues of deeper significance will be missed and we could lose sight of the wood for the trees. So often in AS we are more different than we are alike!

Interest, in this book, is thought of as any aspect of awareness that is brought to our attention. This could be a special interest such as a particular TV programme we would like to watch, or it could be that we are hungry and need to eat. Therefore, interest is actually about more than just one thing and could be thought of as ‘an interest system

By contrast, monotropic attention is focused attention allowing a tighter, smaller set of interests at any one time (Murray and Lesser 2006).