Article on usefulness of describing Autism as a spectrum

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Is the 'spectrum' The Best Way To Talk About Autism? - The Atlantic

Thanks for the link - I found it interesting!

(Way off-topic but I'm imagining us all as ghosts... And the Grammar Nazi in me takes issue with 'phenomena' )


That makes sense to me. People understand that any type of cancer involves a certain amount of pain, exhaustion, and anxiety - which might not be visible in the person. Autism comes with a set of social, communication, and sensory issues which the person might hide well, but it would be nice if others realized our limitations do exist, and we're not just "faking it as an excuse to be rude", or whatever else we habitually get accused of.


I agree with this as well, because it describes the reality of how it affects our lives. Instead of 'high-functioning' or 'low-functioning', we are 'job-functioning', 'school-functioning', 'marriage-functioning', 'independent-functioning', etc. (Though it might be more helpful to define which ones are not realistic goals for us... I'm just thinking of myself personally here, but I struggled with all of these things, and it would have been helpful to have known the reason for it!)

Thanks for posting this

It seems to me that the author is saying the idea of a spectrum is inadequate to convey the complexity of individual cases of ASD. This seems like basic ignorance on the part of the author, Rose Eveleth.

Eveleth seems to imagine that a spectrum somehow implies a single data point on a single axis. Anyone who knows anything about electromagnetism and the uses of emission spectra and absorption spectra will recognize this as scientific illiteracy.

How do we know which stars are metal rich or metal poor? How do we know that one vast cloud of interstellar gas consists of ionized hydrogen while another consists of methanol? It's not because a spectrum is a simplistic framework that cannot convey complexity.



The simplistic structure that makes it hard for many to accept or understand the complexity of autism is not the concept of a spectrum but the reductionist habits of mind of most human beings.

Arrg, just lost a big edit to this thanks to cloudflare! Don't have time to fix.

Simple version: just as stars are classified by spectral characteristics, so meaningful subgroups may emerge from looking at individual expressions of the autistic phenotype. There is nothing inherently wrong with the spectrum idea, as long as it isn't reduced to another way of saying high functioning vs. low functioning, an oversimplification which doesn't advance understanding.

I like the ideas in the article but strongly disagree with the misunderstanding of the idea of a spectrum, and so don't like the article as a whole.

Ah, thanks for pointing that out. I think you're right, most people (including the author, and me) have always thought of a spectrum as a simple, linear thing, and don't realize that to people with a deeper scientific understanding of the word, it actually does allow for complex variations.

So essentially there needs to be better education in what 'spectral' means. (Heck, I thought it was about ghosts!)

Thanks, ASPartOfMe, for sharing this. It was a good read that I'm sure I'll think about for a while before knowing what I actually think.

Adamantium, I greatly appreciate your response and feel pained that a good portion of it was lost to technical issues. I disagree with your point about the non-linearity of a spectrum in this case, simply because my concept of the ASD spectrum encompasses only neural interconnectivity, hence is it solely squared upon one axis. I understand if you would say I'm being a reductionist in this regard, though. (Disclosure: My current understanding of ASD is greatly influenced by the Intense World Theory.)

For me, the spectrum is simply a range of differing levels of neural interconnectivity within the brain, spanning from all levels of ASD through the most "normal" of NTs. The most overconnected brains are where we find the non-verbal, fully in need of assistance Autistics. For them, the noise inside their head is overwhelming to the point of almost paralyzing disability. Slightly overconnected brains would be where you find Aspergers. Averagely connected brains would be the realm of NTs. And... I have no idea what underconnectivity would be. (I'm still a work in progress, you see.)

Under this linear vision of a spectrum, the realm of ASD itself is fairly limited and co-morbid conditions play a more prominent role in expanding the breadth of Autistic experiences.

Though, now that I re-examine your image... maybe that's kind of what I'm talking about. In my mind, the ASD spectrum would be only one band (say, HD 12993 at the top), describing neural interconnectivity. Furthering this, HD 158659 would be intelligence, HD 30584 would be anxiety, BD 61 0367 would be some other neural trait, etc., and the combinations of all of these different bands would be the end result: How this person presents.

So, really, ASD would be only one spectral axis on a broader portrait. The nuance from combinations of other traits is where we get the breadth.

Again, work in progress here. Open to ideas.

I thoroughly liked Ari's dig in the final paragraph. Good stuff.