What is Autism?

Autism is a genetically-based human neurological variant. Autistic brains are characterized by particularly high levels of synaptic connectivity and responsiveness.

 

This tends to make the autistic individual’s subjective experience more intense and chaotic than that of non-autistic individuals: on both the sensorimotor and cognitive levels, the autistic mind tends to register more information, and the impact of each bit of information tends to be both stronger and less predictable.

 

 

Autism is a developmental phenomenon, meaning that it begins in utero and has a pervasive influence on development, on multiple levels, and produces distinctive, atypical ways of thinking, moving, interaction, and sensory and cognitive processing.

 

 

Despite underlying neurological commonalities, autistic individuals are vastly different from one another. Some autistic individuals exhibit exceptional cognitive talents. However, in a society designed around the sensory, cognitive, developmental, and social needs of non-autistic individuals, autistic individuals are almost always disabled to some degree – sometimes quite obviously, and sometimes more subtly.

 

 

Social interaction is one context in which autistic individuals tend to consistently be disabled. Difficulty meeting the social expectations of non-autistics often results in social rejection, which further compounds social difficulties and impedes social development. For this reason, autism has been frequently misconstrued as being essentially a set of “social and communication deficits,” by those who are unaware that the social challenges faced by autistic individuals are just by-products of the intense and chaotic nature of autistic sensory and cognitive experience.

 

 

Autism is still widely regarded as a “disorder,” but this view has been challenged in recent years by proponents of the neurodiversity model, which holds that autism and other neurocognitive variants are simply part of the natural spectrum of human biodiversity, like variations in ethnicity or sexual orientation (which have also been pathologized in the past). Ultimately, to describe autism as a disorder represents a value judgment rather than a scientific fact.

 

Abridged. Full text  Copyright © 2016 by Nick Walker Neurocosmopolitanism.com. Used with permission.