Hello, and welcome back to The Autistic Writer. Over the years, there have been many theories and many diagnostic models that have claimed to explain or define autism. Many have been wrong, as in the refrigerator mother theory, for example. Some are works in progress. None has yet had the final word. But one theory that is currently gaining a lot of traction is the monotropism theory. But does it actually deserve the credit it is widely receiving as a theory of autism?
My Story
As an undiagnosed and unidentified autistic child in the early 1970s, I had a pretty awful time at school. The most comfortable I ever managed to feel in a classroom was during my time at a middle school. In one particular school year, my main teacher was a lovely, caring, gentle, funny lady who, for the sake of this blog, I will call Miss Rose. It’s safe to say that everyone in that class, boys and girls, fell in love with Miss Rose.
I would have been about nine years old at this time, and I was obsessed with superhero comics. Miss Rose was fascinated by my obsession, and one day, she even bought herself a copy of a Captain America comic, to see what the fuss was about.
I would read every comic I could find, and when I didn’t have one to read, I would be in my own head, swinging from rooftop to rooftop as Spider-Man.
Spidey was my all-time favourite superhero. Not the Spidey most people think of now, from the Marvel movie franchise, though. My Spidey was the 1960s incarnation brought to life by artist and plotter Steve Ditko, and dialogue scripter Stan Lee.
The early 1960s Peter Parker was an introverted, high school nerd, often an outcast in his school, who was frequently mocked and bullied. But when he put on a mask to become Spider-Man, he was fun-lovin’ and wisecrackin’. So absolutely no parallel with autistic kids.
Anyway…
In one art lesson, Miss Rose asked us all to listen to a piece of music, which was some atmospheric, classical piece. It might have been some Erik Satie, I’m not sure. After we’d listened to it, we were instructed to draw a picture based on how the music had made us feel. I had an idea of drawing a cat slinking along a wall at night.
What I ended up with was a drawing of a cat-themed supervillain sitting at some fantastic technological terminal, like something off Star Trek. And Miss Rose, bless her, said, “Darren, you’ve got a one-track mind.”
Monotropism
Monotropism is a theory of autism proposing that autistic people have a fundamentally different way of allocating their attention. Rather than distributing attention relatively broadly across many things at once, autistic attention is said to tend towards a smaller number of interests or stimuli, with a greater proportion of available attention being concentrated on them.
I understand why this idea might appeal. It offers a way of making sense of several familiar autistic experiences, such as our intense interests, our ability to hyperfocus, our frequent difficulty in switching activities, and perhaps autistic inertia.
But there is an important question to ask of any theory. Does it actually explain something, or does it simply give a name to something we already know happens? In the case of monotropism, it’s particularly interesting. The 2005 paper clearly states the following, under the “Approach” subheading:
“We are not attempting to establish new facts about autism but trying to interpret what is already known. Our method is to integrate the known data using a conceptual model that is capable of informing practice.:
Where did the theory come from?
Monotropism is usually associated with autistic campaigner Dinah Murray and her associates Mike Lesser and Wenn Lawson, who published a paper, Attention, Monotropism and the Diagnostic Criteria for Autism in the journal Autism, in 2005. This paper argued that atypical strategies for allocating attention were central to autism, and attempted to link differences in attention with the diagnostic characteristics of autism. However, these ideas first started to emerge well before 2005.
Dinah Murray had been developing some related ideas for a number of years. Wenn Lawson has described meeting Murray in 1998, when Lawson was presenting work on “Single Focused Attention” in autism. Lawson subsequently became one of the main proponents of this developing theory.
The term monotropism emerged, and was used to describe a theoretical cognitive system in which relatively few interests dominate an individual’s attention. Its opposite, polytropism, describes a system of cognition in which attention is distributed across many channels.
The theory was developed partly from the experiences and observations of real autistic people. Lawson is autistic, and the authors explicitly incorporated subjective autistic experience into their 2005 paper.
So it wasn’t simply a laboratory theory imposed upon autistic people from outside. It was an attempt to construct an account of autism from inner experience to objective explanation.
What does monotropism actually Claim?
In its simplest form, the theory positions attention as a limited resource, and suggests that autistic people tend to concentrate that resource more intensely. In the 2005 paper, the metaphor of interest as a light source is used; the light of attention might be diffuse, or tightly focused like a torch beam.
It depicts attention as a set of channels. A relatively polytropic mind has numerous channels open at once. Attention can move them readily between them, for example, from what somebody is saying, to what is happening in the room, to what needs doing next, to what somebody’s facial expression means, and so on.
By contrast, a monotropic mind has fewer channels open, but the channels that are open can receive much more attention. This could be seen as an attractive explanation for the intense interests autistic people regularly experience.
If an autistic person’s attention is highly focused on something they find interesting, they may absorb enormous amounts of information about it. The same concentration, however, may mean that information outside the current attentional focus receives less attention. Like the torch beam that lights the narrow path ahead, while leaving the surrounding area in darkness.
This might help explain why somebody might know an extraordinary amount about astronomy, history or a particular computer game, for example, while sometimes failing to notice that somebody has been talking to them.
It also offers a way of thinking about transitions. If an autistic person’s attention is deeply invested in the current activity, moving from that activity to something else isn’t simply a matter of deciding to stop. The attentional system has to disengage and reallocate its resources.
This is sometimes described as attention tunnelling and is related to what autistic people often refer to as hyperfocus.
The theory therefore isn’t merely saying that autistic people “like their interests”. It proposes that differences in the way attention is allocated are fundamental to the autistic experience.
The 2005 paper went further, arguing that the restricted interests described in the diagnostic criteria could be understood as an expression of this attentional system and suggesting that other aspects of autism could follow from it.
The first problem: is the bullseye being drawn around the dart?
Autism is already defined partly by restricted and repetitive patterns of behaviour and interests. Intense or unusually focused interests are therefore not some completely independent observation discovered after developing monotropism.
The 2005 paper itself explicitly makes the restricted range of interests in the diagnostic criteria central to its argument. The authors suggest that the other diagnostic criteria can follow from this difference in attention. This creates an uncomfortable possibility…
We start with an established characteristic of autism: Autistic people can have unusually intense or restricted interests.
We then propose: This happens because autistic attention is unusually concentrated.
And then use the attentional concentration to explain the original observation.
That isn’t necessarily circular reasoning in the strict logical sense. There could genuinely be an underlying attentional mechanism causing the intense interests. But it creates a construct-validity problem.
We need independent evidence that monotropic attention is a distinctive underlying characteristic of autism, rather than simply another description of one of the things autistic people do.
This is where the dart and bullseye analogy becomes useful. If we throw a dart at a wall, observe it landing somewhere, and then draw the bullseye around it, we’ve created a very good description of where the dart landed. We haven’t demonstrated that we knew where it was going to land.
Similarly, saying that autistic people experience intense interests is compatible with the monotropism theory. But it doesn’t demonstrate that monotropism caused those interests. For the theory to become much more convincing, we would want it to make predictions that can be tested independently.
The second problem: what would prove it wrong?
A scientific theory needs to make predictions that could potentially fail.
Monotropism makes some predictions. One is that autistic people should experience unusually intense or persistent attention, and another is that shifting attention away from a current focus should sometimes be unusually difficult. There is indeed some evidence consistent with these predictions, but it isn’t straightforward.
A 2024 study by Patrick Dwyer and colleagues examined hyper-focus, sticky attention and springy attention in young autistic children.
Sticky attention is the term for a slower-than-average ability to disengage focus from a particular stimulus. Springy attention is an attentional behaviour in which an individual disengages attention from a new stimulus to return to a familiar stimulus.
The study included 46 autistic and 28 non-autistic children aged between two and four. Contrary to what might be expected from a simple sticky attention account, the researchers found no evidence that the autistic group had greater sticky attention overall.
They did find interesting relationships between attentional patterns and sensory characteristics, and identified a possible tendency for springy attention.
That doesn’t disprove monotropism. It does, however, demonstrate that the relationship between autism and concentrated attention is considerably more complicated than the simple model might suggest.
There is also more recent research specifically examining monotropism and hyperfocus.
In a 2025 study, Investigating autistic hyperfocus and monotropism: Limited convergence of event-related potentials, laboratory tasks, and questionnaire responses, Dwyer and colleagues compared 18 autistic and 22 non-autistic adolescents using questionnaires alongside a range of laboratory measures, including visual working-memory tasks, attention-capture tasks, and EEG measures intended to examine hyperfocus.
Autistic participants reported greater hyperfocus, and their caregivers also reported greater hyperfocus. But the laboratory measures did not show corresponding group differences in the measures intended to capture hyperfocus or behavioural attention capture. The different types of attention measures were generally not strongly related to one another.
Again, this isn’t a refutation. But it is important evidence against treating the theory as though its central mechanism has already been demonstrated.
What I find fascinating from this research is that the subjective experience we autistic people have of hyperfocus does not necessarily correspond to a distinct attentional neurological architecture.
Does monotropism explain autism, or describe some autistic experiences?
I get it. Monotropism appears to have considerable explanatory appeal for certain autistic phenomena, such as intense interests, hyperfocus, difficulty disengaging from an activity, and autistic inertia. But autism is more than these things. An overarching theory of a mechanism of autism needs to explain how the autistic traits are produced.
The 2025 study illustrates the problem particularly well. The authors found evidence of increased self- and caregiver-reported hyperfocus, but the laboratory measures did not consistently capture the same phenomenon. They consequently argue that more research is needed to understand how laboratory measures relate to real-world autistic attentional experiences.
So, this all means we are still some distance from demonstrating that monotropism is the underlying mechanism of autism.
So is monotropism useful?
If, as I expect, monotropism ultimately turns out not to be a comprehensive explanation of autism, maybe it still offers a useful perspective. I suspect its most useful application is in education.
If an autistic child in the classroom is deeply engaged in an activity and doesn’t respond immediately when a teacher tells them to stop and move on, that could be interpreted very basically as that child is not listening. And we have all experienced teachers getting shouty when they think pupils are not listening.
But a teacher who understands the monotropic aspects of autism might think, What currently has this child’s attention, and how can I help them transition to the new subject? That is neuroinclusivity in practice.
So, instead of abruptly and/or loudly demanding a transition, a teacher might:
- Provide some advance warning of the change.
- Allow some additional transition time.
- Connect new material to an existing focus of attention.
- Avoid interpreting delayed responses automatically as defiance or lack of motivation.
These changes alone would make classrooms more tolerable for many autistic children.
The same principle can apply outside education. If somebody is deeply absorbed in an activity, giving them a few minutes’ warning before an interruption may be more effective than simply demanding that they stop immediately. Understanding monotropic attention focus can be a game changer for how neurotypical people interpret autistic behaviour.
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There is also some emerging research attempting to use monotropism as a positive framework for reinterpreting existing autism research. For example, a 2024 review of verbal-fluency studies argued that apparently inconsistent performance by autistic participants could be reconsidered through the lens of monotropism rather than automatically interpreted as evidence of deficit.
But it’s important to remember here that just because a recommendation emerging from the monotropism theory is useful, it does not validate the theory as a complete explanation for autism.
We don’t have to prove that autistic people possess a fundamentally monotropic attentional architecture before deciding that teachers should give some autistic pupils more time to transition between activities. If a particular approach helps an individual autistic person, that is useful information regardless of which theoretical model eventually explains why.
So what should we make of monotropism?
I think the fairest conclusion is somewhere between enthusiastic acceptance and outright dismissal. There is a genuine phenomenon here, certainly.
Many autistic people experience intense interests and periods of extremely focused attention. There is empirical evidence for increased self- and caregiver-reported hyperfocus in autistic people, and there are interesting experimental findings concerning attentional persistence and returning to previous stimuli.
There is also value in treating those experiences as something more meaningful than simply another autistic “deficit”.
However, the evidence does not currently demonstrate that autistic people possess a single, distinctive monotropic attentional architecture which explains autism generally.
But it is a useful way of thinking about how attention may operate for some autistic people, and it can help people understand some autistic experiences.
It has given researchers, practitioners and autistic people an interesting vocabulary for talking about attention, interests and transitions. It can encourage neurotypical people to look at seemingly disengaged autistic behaviour from another perspective.
That’s all for this time. Take care.
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