For anyone not wanting to click, here's the non-academic potted version.
Alright, so what this theory says is that strained cognitive load is the main thing behind autism. What is cognitive load? Well, it basically refers to the demands on your mental processing capacity. So high cognitive load means your brain is currently working really hard to process everything. Your level of cognitive load affects loads of things, so it’s controlled for in loads of psychology experiments. One would expect something that major to be behind some major psychological condition and I think autism is that major psychological condition.
When I was coming up with this model I realised that I needed to be able to make a prediction based on it so that I wasn’t just acknowledging the things that confirmed my theory and ignoring any evidence against it. Since autism is a developmental condition I figured that something which mimics the effect of strained/high cognitive load in childhood will lead to something that looks a lot like autism. So I figured that since what high cognitive load essentially does is overload the brain so that it can’t fully process all the information coming in at it, a similar effect may be created for anyone who grows up without much information to process in the first place. As it happens, it turns out that there were some studies done on some kids from a Romanian orphanage who were minimally attended to, and if I recall correctly, even chained to their beds and these kids ended up having some pretty autistic symptoms. They had impaired Theory of Mind, which means they struggled to understand other people, and they also had sensory sensitivities similar to that found in autism. Theory of Mind is all about the social difficulties that autistic people have, so this is a big sign that cognitive load does have something major to do with autism.
Okay, okay, so just because strained cognitive load causes some things in autism doesn’t mean that it causes everything. I’m going to show you how it explains A LOT from a very basic analysis, but there are some things which aren’t obviously related to strained cognitive load. My guess is that there will be a whole bunch of things such as various genes which affect our cognitive load (I’m just going to call it ‘load’ from now on) and that if enough of these converge, then autism will emerge. That probably explains why no genes can fully predict autism but plenty seem to make you more susceptible to it. Also, there will presumably be symptoms that are caused by other symptoms of strained load, which makes it difficult to pin down everything at this early stage. This is all I have to say about load affecting things developmentally. I don’t have the resources to look into that further. I have a lot to say about how load affects us on a day to day level though.
Alrighty, so I came up with a way of combining classical economics, Freudian theory and modern psychology, but it’s hard even for me to get my head round. It basically says that your brain wants to exert minimal effort in situations and just make up any old interpretation of things, but of course the demands of a given situation will force the brain to put some effort into understanding and dealing with it more objectively. Trying to think about things more objectively is going to take up more load. Because of the whole theory of mind thing being impaired, autistic people lack a lot of social intuition, so in a socially defined situation we’re going to have a lot of difficulties. A lot of autistic people therefore have a more strained load as they strain to understand situations enough to deal with them. Other autistic people find it too much effort to do that and simply adopt a more associational and simplistic method of thinking rather than a logical way of thinking. E.g. “I’m not afraid of planes. That’s why they fly so high.” I’ve not encountered any other explanation as to why these two seemingly opposite thinking styles are both found within autism. Also, autistic people are known for being fairly black and white thinkers, and that’s to be expected from people who are trying to understand the socially defined world with logic or associational thinking. A lot of autistic people won’t be naturally inclined towards logical thinking or may be unintelligent. Both of these factors will make it even harder to cope with using logical thinking out of necessity, which will make them even less functional! Also, there is a lesser known phenomenon in autism which may provide a less extreme alternative to thinking associatively – the self-devised fantasy worlds which some autistics are able to flit in and out of which essentially contorts the world to something more cohesive and palatable.
Moving on… A lot of autistic people have high anxiety. Anxiety strains one’s load. I suspect the anxiety is often caused by the effects of strained load in the first place, so getting anxiety just puts even more strain on load. That’s a lot of strain. Strained load is going to be pretty unpleasant. We’re going to be inclined to address this or face overloading and meltdowns. Hence, we end up seeking familiar situations, favouring set routines and seeking solace in times of high stress because this requires least amount of extra processing. This can even be linked with the interesting relationship OCD has with autism. Stimming also helps minimise load by providing something simple and predictable to focus on. The autistic tendency to avoid eye contact is generally reported to be because eye contact is too intense – it places too much strain on your load. Even special interests can be traced back to strained load, since they become more intense as stress in one’s life increases – they presumably offer a refuge from the unpredictable and unfamiliar. Selective mutism (not talking around certain people or situations) can also be explained by an attempt to cope with strained load or expected strained load. The sheer strain of trying to adapt to situations is enough to put many autistic people off conforming to society, hence why autistic people often conform more to themselves than society.
I go into all this in more depth in my original essay which is the first post on this blog. Hopefully I’ve shown explanations for a wide diversity of features of autism: Theory of Mind issues; social intuition issues; sensory sensitivities; anxiety; fantasy worlds; highly logical thinking; purely associative thinking; meltdowns; selective mutism; some individual differences attributable to IQ; repetitive motor mannerisms; special interests; black and white thinking; and the need for familiarity, routines and predictability. Much of what has been said here could easily be considered to be mere common sense, and yet until common sense is distilled into a model, it can easily become overlooked in the academic literature.
If you have any questions or thoughts, please ask away!
11 Aug 2015, 8:38 pm
for supporting trump. Because doing so is deplorable.
