Prototypical Autism Is Transformatively Atypical

1. Introduction

Laurent Mottron, an autism researcher based in Montreal, Canada, along with various colleagues and co-authors (hereafter referred to as the Mottron team), has of late introduced and promoted a concept called prototypical autism. Although this concept was hinted at in earlier writings, its main presentation has come in the form of two recent papers. The first paper, A radical change in our autism research strategy is needed: Back to prototypes (Mottron, 2021a), addresses the motivation for delineating prototypical autism from other instances of autism diagnosis, a motivation triggered mostly by concerns over the statistical noise produced by too much heterogeneity within autism research cohorts. The second paper, Prototypical autism: New diagnostic criteria and asymmetrical bifurcation model (Mottron & Gagnon, 2023), outlines in some detail the Mottron team's description of how to recognize prototypical autism among the population and how to distinguish such cases from other forms of autism diagnosis.

There is much to appreciate about this initiative. The highlight of the Mottron team's effort is to be found in the team's general description of how prototypical autism presents, especially during the critical age range of around two to five years. The behavioral characteristics outlined in this description are more accurate, more comprehensive and more vivid than can be found in any of the official diagnostic guidelines, painting an informative picture of what autism tends to look like close at hand. To this can be added the Mottron team's twofold awareness of the potential to be found in the unusual characteristics of autistic individuals, first with an emphasis on the fact that autistic children can often make significant gains by leaning into their unusual interests, as opposed to being forced to suppress them, and second, by reconceptualizing autism as a non-defective and viable branch of human development, including an explicit acknowledgement that many autistic children go on to live relatively normal and even exceptional lives after the age of five. Over the years, the Mottron team has been one of the few autism research teams (perhaps the only autism research team) willing to contemplate and to discuss the potential value arising out of autistic atypicality, and that willingness remains on display here.

Nonetheless, there are some shortcomings in the Mottron team's effort, two of which stand out in particular. First, although the Mottron team does recognize the critical importance of perception in distinguishing autistic individuals from their non-autistic counterparts, the team's characterization of these two different forms of perception is confusing at best, with a vague reference to the "social bias" of non-autistic children and an incongruous reference to the "enhanced perceptual functioning" of autistic children. These phrases fail to distinguish clearly the two perceptual types, but more importantly, they fail to explain why there is a perceptual difference between non-autistic and autistic children. This essay will discuss a more specific and more informative approach to making that distinction, employing the concept of conspecific perception—the innate tendency to perceive first and foremost the other members of one's own species—as the primary means both for delineating the non-autistic and autistic perceptual traits, as well as for explaining the contrasting genesis of each perceptual type.

The second shortcoming of the Mottron team's initiative is its complete silence regarding prototypical autism's impact upon the entire human species. The stated motivation for developing the concept of prototypical autism—to improve the statistical power of current autism research—discounts the possibility that there is a much bigger picture to consider here, one of importance to autistic individuals themselves. This essay will discuss humanity's turn towards behavioral modernity, including the perceptual and behavioral transformations that stand at the foundation of that turn, and will demonstrate that these transformations are mirrored precisely in the Mottron team's contrasting description of the non-autistic and autistic perceptual and behavioral traits. That is to say, the atypicality of autistic individuals within the human population explains much about the atypicality of the human species itself, now perceptually and behaviorally removed from the remainder of the animal kingdom, and perceptually and behaviorally removed from humanity's own not-so-distant animal past. If autistic individuals are going to be understood for who they actually are, and if their unusual characteristics are going to be valued for the impact they actually bring, then autistic contribution to human transformative history needs to be recognized. And although the Mottron team has all the information it requires to make that connection, it chooses not to consider the topic at all.

It might be stated in the Mottron team's defense that contemplating the conceptual leap from autistic traits to the transformative characteristics of the human behavioral turn goes beyond the jurisdiction of normal autism science. But the problem with this defense is that it dooms autism science to a self-imposed tunnel vision, a kind of group myopia that has been producing endless decades of null results (Myers et al., 2020; Parellada et al., 2023; Whitehouse et al., 2021). Accordingly, this essay will conclude with some thoughts on the stultifying consequences of modern scientific practice, where focus has shifted entirely towards cultivating professional and collaborative craft—standards and guidelines, grants and funding, credentials and citations, etc.—and has abandoned the type of individualistic and revolutionary effort that used to produce breakthroughs of understanding. Thus, it can be seen that the most significant problem with autism research is not one of statistical noise. The most significant problem with autism research is its perfunctory application of normal autism science.

2. Prototypical Autism

A rough summary of the Mottron team's description of a prototypically autistic child would include the following features:

1. The autistic child is generally indistinguishable from non-autistic children until sometime during the second year of life. Around the second birthday, the difference from typical development becomes prominent and remains prominent for the next two to three years.

2. During this period of around two to five years of age, the autistic child will display a significantly low degree of orientation towards social stimuli. This includes a diminished attention to human faces and to human voices, and also includes a noticeable lack of joint-attentive activities and human-mimicking behavior.

3. During this period, the autistic child will also display a high degree of orientation towards structural and environmental stimuli. This includes a focused attention on such things as patterned movement, geometrical objects, repetitive and/or musical sounds, the shapes of numbers and letters, etc.

4. During this period, language skills plateau, or even regress, resulting in a limited vocabulary and extremely limited sentence formation. Language peculiarities, such as echolalia and pronoun reversal, are also apparent in many instances.

5. During this period, certain unusual and telltale behaviors are more common, such as lateral gaze, hand flapping, food selectivity, resistance to change, etc.

6. After this period, there is usually some degree of developmental catch up, both in social orientation and language ability. This developmental catch up can vary greatly, resulting in outcomes that range all the way from non-verbalness in adulthood and a lifetime need for assistance and care, to promising prospects of advanced education, career, family, etc., with many prototypically autistic individuals experiencing outcomes that fall somewhere on the interval between.

In advocating for its concept of prototypical autism, the Mottron team notes there are a significant number of individuals who will receive an autism diagnosis under the current official diagnostic guidelines but who will tend not to have a presentation that follows the pattern as outlined above. There appear to be three major sub-categories of these individuals who could be described as being non-prototypical:

1. Individuals with specifiable neuro-genetic conditions. This would include such known instances as fragile X syndrome, Rett syndrome, identifiable de novo mutations, or a medical history giving evidence of neurological trauma. Such individuals will often display similarities to autistic-like behavior, but will also tend to deviate significantly from a course of prototypicality, either in intensity, timing or both.

2. "Quirky" or behaviorally challenged individuals who possess only a smattering of autistic-like traits. Many children are referred to specialists because of their developmental and/or behavioral challenges, and due to the current latitude in the official autism diagnostic guidelines, such individuals will often receive a diagnosis of being on the autism spectrum. But a large number of these individuals will not follow the prototypical course—that is, they will display a reasonable degree of social orientation, or will have limited structural and environmental engagement, or will give evidence of language skills that are progressing in the usual way. The Mottron team argues that such individuals are better excluded from certain types of autism research (Mottron & Bzdok, 2022).

3. Asperger-like individuals. This forms a less clearcut case. Until around a decade ago, Asperger Syndrome was an official diagnostic category, intended to delineate children with pronounced autistic-like characteristics but who also possessed notable language skills. This diagnostic distinction proved to be unworkable in practice, and the classification was dropped for the current diagnostic manual (Gamlin, 2017). Nonetheless, there are a significant number of children who appear to fall within this category, and their relationship to the remainder of the autism spectrum remains unclear. The Mottron team suggests these individuals could be formed into a second "prototypical" group (Mottron, 2021b), with characteristics similar to those of the first prototypical group but without the language plateau or regression. However, it could be argued that Asperger-like children are simply choosing linguistic structures as one of their preferred circumscribed interests—that is, instead of an intense focus on something like ceiling fans or calendar calculation, Asperger-like children choose to concentrate on spoken and/or written words. This is evidenced to some degree by the fact that Asperger-like language skills are usually not typical (Saalasti et al., 2008); that is, Asperger-like children do not employ language primarily for social purposes but instead make use of language in idiosyncratic ways (for example, perseveration). If this is an accurate depiction of what is actually taking place, then it would appear these two prototypical groups are far more similar than dissimilar, and the Mottron team's separation of Asperger-like children from the team's main prototypical definition is perhaps just a case of splitting hairs.

What does finally emerge from the Mottron team's lucid description of prototypical autism is a class of individuals remarkably similar to one another and yet identifiably distinct from the biologically typical population. Furthermore, this is a class of individuals who have been giving no evidence of possessing any underlying defect—not genetic, not neurological, not environmentally caused—and this despite the fact the autism research community has been assiduously searching for these defects for dozens of years. The Mottron team highlights this apparent biological benignity of prototypical autism by suggesting the condition would be more effectively understood as a minority but otherwise normal bifurcation of human development, analogous to similar asymmetrical bifurcations, such as left-handedness or twin pregnancy. This opens the door to embracing autistic characteristics for their potential constructive value, including making full use of these characteristics to support developmental progress. Such a viewpoint would stand in stark contrast to the standard approach taken towards autistic traits, where these traits are routinely suppressed instead of being productively employed, suppressed through an assortment of disruptive interventions that would appear to be no more effective than attempting to turn left-handedness into right-handedness (Brignell et al., 2018; Sandbank et al., 2020).

3. Atypical Autistic Perception

In attempting to explain the source of the bifurcation between non-autistic and autistic individuals, the Mottron team highlights the differential targets of interest and attention during information processing, assigning a label of "socially biased processing" for the preferential interests of non-autistic children and a label of "non-socially biased processing" for the preferential interests of autistic children. The Mottron team also tends to reserve use of the words perception and perceptual for the latter type of preferential interest, and this leads in turn to frequent employment of the phrase "enhanced perceptual functioning" to describe autistic cognitive traits. This approach seems confusing in several respects. First, it implies that non-autistic children lack perceptual characteristics, or at the very least are experiencing diminished perceptual functioning. It also suggests that autistic children possess a kind of fortuitous brain capacity that gives them perceptual skills beyond those of ordinary experience (Poulin-Lord et al., 2014), and yet somehow this fortuitous brain capacity proves disruptive to developmental progress. Although the Mottron team's highlighting of information processing and perceptual characteristics is very much on target, the team's odd labeling works to derail the discussion. Under any commonsense use of the words perception and enhanced, it would be difficult to reconcile the phrase "enhanced perceptual functioning" to the developmental pathways of autistic individuals.

For the purpose of this discussion, perception is to be understood as the filtering, foregrounding, and organization of the manifold of impressions arising from the sensory field. Perception creates targets of cognitive attention and provides the potential for a directed and productive reaction to environmental stimulus. Consider the example of three men sitting together in the grandstands at a football game. One man is intently following the plays on the field, scarcely aware of the crowd—he can accurately predict the play that is coming next. The second man is mesmerized by the workings of the scoreboard—he is counting down in his head the seconds until the yardage and downs are updated. The third man is flitting a gaze from person to person—cheerleader, then referee, then that cute snuggling couple three rows down—and he would be unable to tell you the score of the game if his life depended on it. Each individual has access to the exact same sensory stimuli, but each individual perceives something entirely different, foregrounding certain aspects of the sensory experience and backgrounding everything else. This is a commonsense approach to the word perception, and by its means, it should be abundantly clear that both non-autistic and autistic individuals possess perceptual characteristics, with neither of those perceptual types being ultimately enhanced or diminished relative to the other. Given the same sensory environment, non-autistic and autistic individuals simply tend to perceive different classes of things.

The genesis of each perceptual type begins in earnest by the second year of life. When human newborns enter this world, they must soon achieve a sensory grounding, because otherwise the manifold of sensory impressions would remain chaotic and unorganized, thwarting all effort towards productive action and developmental progress. The emerging components of this sensory grounding are what determine the perceptual type. For both non-autistic and autistic individuals, biological demand will bring certain environmental features to the fore—that is, the need for food and water, a fear of danger, and eventually the desire for sex will bring into cognitive attention certain ecologically critical aspects of the surrounding world, providing some of the means by which sensory experience can be differentiated and organized. As the Mottron team notes, prototypically autistic individuals give little to no evidence of having a diminished capacity in these basic biological domains, even when life circumstances cause the expression of these capacities to be manifested in alternative ways.

What does turn out to be the distinguishing characteristic between the non-autistic and autistic types of perception is that non-autistic perception is fundamentally human centric, and autistic perception is not. From out of the manifold of sensory impressions, what tends to foreground naturally and frequently for non-autistic individuals are human faces, human voices, human touch, human smells, human laughter, human activities, etc. Non-autistic children provide abundant evidence of their human-forward attentive awareness, responding with consistent delight to human interaction, joint-attentive sharing, and people-mimicking behavior. Even when their attention is drawn to the non-human aspects of the surrounding environment, it is usually done so through the means of human prompting and human encouragement. Thus, in addition to its basic biological components, non-autistic perception can be characterized by its human-forward content, meaning that non-autistic children tend to organize their sensory experience primarily around the species itself, and around the species' shared and natural interest in all things human.

There is of course nothing unusual about this non-autistic perceptual tendency. The foregrounding of species-specific sensory experience is not just typical within the human population, it is typical across the entire animal kingdom (Lickliter, 1991; Nunes et al., 2020). Lions tend to perceive first and foremost other lions, honeybees tend to perceive first and foremost other honeybees, etc. This widespread tendency can be given the label of conspecific perception, and it can be defined as the innate tendency to perceive first and foremost the other members of one's own species. Conspecific perception's ubiquitous appearance throughout nature can be attributed to its biological and evolutionary necessity. If mates are going to be able to recognize and discover mates, if parents are going to be able to keep track of their offspring, if members of a pack are going to be able to follow one another, then a foregrounded perceptual attention for the other members of one's own species is nothing short of essential. Conspecific perception has evolutionary roots that reach very far back in time, and conspecific perception is one of the more prominent carryovers from humanity's not-so-distant purely animal past.

With this as backdrop, autistic perception can be characterized as a significant diminution of conspecific perception. Autistic children—by the Mottron team's own definition of prototypical autism—do not have a natural and favored interest for human faces, human voices, human touch, etc., and autistic children do not frequently engage in human interaction, joint-attentive sharing, or people-mimicking behavior. There are two different approaches to depicting this autistic diminution of conspecific perception. As the Mottron team would have it, the characteristics of autistic perception arise from a strong and positive interest in the non-socially biased and raw informational aspects of various environmental features (Mottron et al., 2006). This "enhanced perceptual" interest is the result of a presumed alternative neural-cognitive mechanism (Kéïta et al., 2011; Mottron et al., 2014; Soulières et al., 2009), and its effects are powerful enough to eclipse the usual people-focused foregrounding of conspecific perception. Although this depiction is not an unreasonable hypothesis, it does appear to lack for parsimoniousness. Not only must this explanation postulate a special and mostly unspecified neural-cognitive mechanism, that mechanism must also be capable of producing for each autistic individual a particular and distinctive set of interests chosen from an extremely broad range of perceptual targets. Some autistic children are focused primarily on the auditory domain, others on the tactile domain, and still others on the visual domain. Some autistic children concentrate on geometric objects, such as ceiling fans and lined-up toys, while others concentrate on the repetitions of music and television scenes, while still others hone in on the properties of numbers, letters and words. What brain mechanism, special within the species, could produce such a selectively targeted set of interests across such a motley range of potential targets? And furthermore, why should it be expected that this "enhanced" brain mechanism would drown out the usual conspecific attachment to the other members of the species? If a population were almost entirely right-handed, but a portion of that population had special neural abilities to make extra use of the left hand, why should these special abilities result in exclusive left-handedness, why not instead ambidextrousness? If autistic children have a special neural ability to engage with the non-socially biased aspects of the surrounding environment, why should this special ability preclude their willingness to engage in the usual ways with other people?

The alternative approach to depicting autistic diminution of conspecific perception would be to accept this diminution as a definitive and fundamental fact, and then work out the consequences from there. To begin, since autistic children do not possess as strong a sense of conspecific perception as non-autistic children do, autistic children are more in danger of experiencing an ongoing sensory chaos. For autistic children, human-centric features do not emerge prominently from the manifold of sensory impressions, and this means that, other than some basic biological components, sensory experience for autistic children has the potential of remaining unorganized and ungrounded, a near jumble of undifferentiated sensory noise. The potential for this sensory chaos is evidenced by the frequent reporting of sensory issues in autistic children (Hazen et al., 2014; Kern et al., 2006)—hypersensitivity, hyposensitivity, synesthesia—with the wide variety of these sensory symptoms suggesting they are not the result of a particular physical defect so much as they are the result of a generalized difficulty in organizing sensory experience. And indeed, it can be surmised that the most troubling cases of autism, those in which developmental progress remains minimal, are those cases in which the attainment of a sensory grounding is insufficient to support timely developmental gains.

Nonetheless, most autistic children do not become stuck inside a sensory chaos and most autistic children do go on to make significant developmental progress. Since conspecific perception is not providing the primary means by which sensory experience can be organized, autistic sensory grounding must be getting attained by some other means. Chaos as a term denotes a lack of structure, and chaos can be dispelled by the foregrounded presence of structural properties—symmetry, repetition, pattern, number, form. Needing a sensory grounding to dispel their potential sensory chaos, and lacking a natural human-forward attentive focus, autistic children begin to latch onto those structural features that inherently stand out from the surrounding environment, features that serve to break the background sensory noise. Note the symmetry of ceiling fans and lined-up toys, the repetition of flapping, humming and predictable routines, the patterned and formal properties of calendars and television shows, the shapes and sequences of numbers and letters. Autistic children provide abundant evidence of a structure-forward attentive focus, responding with consistent delight to artifact interaction, pattern-oriented exploration, and form-mimicking behavior. Each instance of an autistic child's so-called restricted and repetitive behavior is an instance thoroughly suffused with structural underpinning, and autistic children do not just prefer these mostly non-human structural experiences, autistic children require them—they are what serve to organize the autistic child's sensory world.

Thus, a special or enhanced neuro-cognitive mechanism is not needed to explain autistic perceptual characteristics—all that is needed is the diminution of conspecific perception, the requirement of a sensory grounding, and the presence of inherently structural features within the surrounding environment. The artificially constructed modern world contains an abundance of these structural targets, and it can be surmised that an autistic child latches onto his or her particular subset of these potential targets through a combination of personal proclivity and random exposure to particular environmental elements. For some it will first be ceiling fans and spinning wheels that emerge from the sensory field, for others it will be rhythmic and musical sounds, and for still others it will be numbers, letters and words. Any circumstance that an autistic child happens upon that boosts that child's sensory grounding will become a circumstance likely to be returned to again and again. And to increase the range of an autistic child's perceptual domain, frequent exposure to a wide variety of structural features, along with encouragement to explore freely, can only be beneficial (Jacques et al., 2018). This is the strongest argument that can be made for aiding the developmental progress of autistic children by leaning into their autistic characteristics, instead of mistakenly suppressing them.

In summary, the significant presence or diminution of conspecific perception determines the non-autistic and autistic perceptual types. Non-autistic perception has deep biological and evolutionary roots, continuing the species-specific perceptual focus evident throughout the entire animal kingdom and accounting for the non-autistic child's natural affinity for human interaction and human engagement. In contrast, autistic perception, lacking this influence of conspecific perception, produces little natural affinity for human interaction and human engagement, but in compensation nudges the autistic child to hone in on those structural features that inherently stand out from the surrounding environment, leading to a structure-forward perceptual focus. This distinction is most apparent during the critical age range of around two to five years. Sometime during this period for non-autistic children, and by the end of this period for autistic children, each perceptual type will begin to overlap with the other. Following the encouragement and instruction of the humans that fascinate them so much, non-autistic children will begin to explore a world of non-human structural features, thereby expanding their perceptual horizons and furthering their developmental course. At the same time, and with their sensory grounding now more firmly established, autistic children soon discover that many of the structural features they have taken such interest in also have human connections and human origins, and this discovery will eventually prompt a secondary interest in the workings of the species itself, including the leveraging powers of language and personal interaction. Given enough time and opportunity, both types of perception can become broadly effective.

Nonetheless, the difference in the genesis of each perceptual type is not to be ignored. There is great significance to the fact that one of these types of perception is biologically typical, and the other type of perception is thoroughly atypical.

4. The Autistic Influence on Behavioral Modernity

The fascinating and stubborn question facing humanity is how did this species transform from being pure animal not more than a few hundred thousand years ago to being the modern creature observed today—talking, writing, calculating, constructing, innovating, driving, flying, and so on. What launched human behavioral modernity, and what sustains its operations today? Many vague suggestions centered around the concepts of evolution and brain intelligence mechanics are frequently tossed around (Klein, 2002; Pinker, 1994), but these suggestions clearly lack for specificity, seldom reaching the level of detailed hypothesis. Furthermore, there is an obvious problem with the timeline. For sake of argument, assume that the beginning of the human behavioral turn happened around two hundred thousand years ago. By fifty thousand years ago, although the evidence of this turn was now unmistakeable—control of fire, structured tools and weapons, cave paintings, etc.—human life was still extraordinarily primitive, a hunter-gatherer's bare subsistence, with virtually nothing of modern culture to be found anywhere within the human environment (Christian, 2018). By ten thousand years ago, agriculture and civilizations were only on the verge of getting started, and by a mere five hundred years ago, the revolutionary impact of modern science had yet to be seen. Almost everything that humans experience today—electricity, fast transportation, effective medicines, vast stores of readily available information—nearly all this has appeared within only the last century or two. Thus, the human transformation has been continuous but it has never been uniform. The human transformation has instead been accelerating, and it continues to accelerate through the present day, its ongoing effects now experienced almost immediately population wide. Vague suggestions centered around the concepts of evolution and brain intelligence mechanics will never fit the dynamics of this unprecedented scenario.

A more effective answer is to be found in the extraordinary expansion of human perception. When humans were still in the state of being pure animals—a period of time lasting for millions of years—their perceptual characteristics would have been the same as those of all the other animal species. Responding to the pressing demands of biological and evolutionary need, human attentive focus would have been directed exclusively to those environmental features crucial for survival and procreation—food, water, danger, sex, etc. Within this biologically driven attentive focus would have been found also the workings of conspecific perception, allowing humans to foreground naturally and frequently the other members of their own species, a trait essential for the various activities promoting survival and procreation. For these ancient humans—as is the case for all the wild animal species—this powerful combination of biological and conspecific perception helped foster the continuation of the lineage, directing all attentive awareness and all resulting behavior towards the essential requirements of evolutionary demand.

However, there is a significant limitation that accompanies this type of perception. As humans have come to realize and to take advantage of in recent years, the surrounding environment contains a plenitude of inherent structure that can provide benefit to a species when used in the right way—for example, the linear forces of gravity, the patterned repetitions of celestial objects, the framework of numerical and symmetrical groupings, and so on. Yet despite these available benefits, no other animal species has ever displayed a perceptual awareness for any of these underlying structural features, and neither did humans for a very long time (Klein, 2009). The powerful combination of biological and conspecific perception is such that it locks each organism into a perceptual and behavioral stasis, leaving the organism fixated entirely on the immediate needs of survival and procreation, and utterly oblivious to everything else. This is why the perceptual and behavioral characteristics of all the wild animal species are so remarkably similar, both across species and across time. With each organism bound to the exact same way of perceiving its environment, each organism is bound also to the exact same set of responsive behaviors—eating and drinking, fighting and fleeing, mating and rearing. Each organism within the species, and each species within the animal kingdom, lives out essentially the same biologically driven existence, again and again and again. It is an existence determined primarily by the restricted attentive focus imposed by biological and conspecific perception.

Therefore, to explain the human turn towards behavioral modernity, it is necessary to explain how this perceptual and behavioral stasis has been broken within the species, and how this stasis has been replaced with the types of expanded perception and resulting behavior that can be observed broadly within the human population today. Vague suggestions centered around the concepts of evolution and brain intelligence mechanics do not even go to the heart of the matter—they specify nothing about the recent dynamics of human perceptual properties. Instead, the question to be asked is as follows: are there any observable characteristics, significantly present within the human population, that can account for a diminishment in the restrictive power of biological and conspecific perception, while at the same time introducing an expanded awareness for the underlying structural properties that humans now take advantage of in overwhelming abundance? The answer to this question is yes. There are such observable characteristics, and they have already been identified earlier in this essay. They are the same perceptual and behavioral characteristics that the Mottron team has outlined in exquisite detail in defining the distinctive nature of prototypical autism.

It remains unclear how and when the size of the autistic population became significant within the human species, but once that significance was reached, its impact would have been persistent and predictable. Not bound by the combined restrictive power of biological and conspecific perception, and driven by sensory need to an awareness of the structural features to be found in the surrounding environment, autistic individuals would have begun to bring these structural features to the perceptual fore, mostly through engagement in the so-called restricted and repetitive behaviors, behaviors that mirror and reconstruct the underlying structural properties autistic individuals naturally perceive. In turn, the non-autistic population, previously locked inside the restrictions of biological and conspecific perception, and yet keenly attuned to what other humans do, would have begun to notice these atypical autistic behaviors and the artificial constructions they engender, eventually adopting these behaviors and constructions for themselves.

This symbiotic process would have been slow and halting at first, but because it results in a permanent and artificial reconstruction of various aspects of the human environment, its impact becomes accretive. The increasing amount of artificial construction accruing within the environment gives autistic individuals an ever-growing array of perceptual targets to latch onto, and the survival-and-procreative efficacy of many of these artificial features—for instance, structured tools and weapons—gives non-autistic individuals an ever-growing incentive to adopt these atypical constructions for themselves. This symbiotic and accelerating process defines the historical pattern of the human behavioral turn, a pattern of increasing environmental reconstruction, built upon an increasing and autistically originated perceptual awareness of the environment's underlying structural properties.

This pattern continues unabated through the present day. It can be seen in the developmental course of non-autistic children, a course established first through the powerful and species-connecting consequence of conspecific perception, and furthered through a species-forward introduction into a broader world of artificial construction, a world valued precisely for the advantages it continues to bring to the species. And the pattern can be seen also in the ongoing discovery of previously unseen underlying structural attributes, a process notably and remarkably dominated by individuals possessing an abundance of autistic-like traits—Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Gauss, Dostoyevsky, Beethoven, Wittgenstein, Turing, to name just a few (James, 2003; Snyder, 2004). The human behavioral turn is still ongoing, and any search for its causal mechanism inside a genetic sequence or a neural signature would be nothing short of folly. Much easier would be to observe the process as it unfolds right before one's very eyes, unfolds in the symbiotic and productive relationship between the non-autistic and autistic types of perception.

5. Normal Autism Science

It was Thomas Kuhn who coined the phrase normal science to denote those stable periods of scientific practice during which revolutionary ideas are seldom considered or explored (Kuhn, 1962). As Kuhn describes it, the work of science during such periods tends to be more technical and incremental in nature, directed towards a shoring up and a promulgation of the prevailing paradigm. In Kuhn's world of the 1950s and 1960s, normal science was embodied in its textbooks, journals, conferences, academic associations, and so on, with these routine proceedings balanced to some extent by the fresh memories of recent upheavals, such as relativity and quantum mechanics. Thus, an equilibrium between normal science and scientific revolution seemed to have been established, and Kuhn was eloquently capturing its outline.

But what Kuhn failed to anticipate was that this particular form of normal science would soon grow into a cancer. Heavily influenced by the twentieth-century surge in governmental and commercial interests, the scientific community had been rapidly transforming from a relatively isolated domain of individuals into a mass operation gainfully employing many millions (Agar, 2012). And to keep this burgeoning crowd under paradigmatic control, science quickly transitioned into a system of professional and collaborative craft. Individuals stopped being individuals and became members of ever-enlarging teams. Scientific method morphed into countless codified standards of practice. Intricate networks of funding were established and soon became a primary and necessary goal. And credentials and citations began to form into a currency of status, the price of admission to the more elite corners of the field. Trampled in this march towards professional and collaborative craft was any interest directed towards individualistic and iconoclastic innovation, the kind of innovation that used to spawn scientific revolutions. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, for all intents and purposes, science had turned into nothing but normal science.

Nowhere is this circumstance more apparent than in the field of autism research. Having established early on a paradigm of autism as a dire medical condition, the autism research community has been leveraging this framework to grow by leaps and bounds (Jiang et al., 2023). The size and number of research teams, the catalogs of practice guidelines, university and government grants, citations and self-congratulatory awards—all have expanded exponentially over the last fifty plus years. And to keep this expansion under professional and collaborative control, autism projects and hypotheses are restricted to an acceptable domain: the search for the genetic markers of autism (Wiśniowiecka-Kowalnik & Nowakowska, 2019), the quest for the neural signatures of autism (Hernandez et al., 2015), the hunt for the metabolic insults of autism (Cheng et al., 2017), and of course the development of treatments and cures (DeFilippis & Wagner, 2016). Perhaps with just a few more research teams, perhaps with just one more set of practice guidelines, perhaps with the essential increase in government grant funding, or perhaps with some additional journal opportunities for self-citation, a breakthrough in an understanding of autism will appear around the corner just about any day. And so goes fifty plus years of normal autism science.

In the meantime, the plight of autistic individuals remains unchanged. Misunderstood and mistreated, autistic individuals continue to be subjected to a broad range of corrective activities: applied behavioral analysis (Gitimoghaddam et al., 2022), depressive drug therapies (LeClerc & Easley, 2015), stem cell experimentation (Siniscalco et al., 2018), and so on—each treatment costing a pretty penny and each treatment designed to suppress autistic characteristics instead of making productive use of them. Normal autism scientists benefit greatly at the hands of normal autism science; autistic individuals suffer.

The Mottron team might be seen as pushing against the boundaries of normal autism science, and to a certain extent this characterization is valid. The Mottron team has been the one autism research team consistently arguing for the potential value of autistic characteristics, and the Mottron team has been the one autism research team willing to offer new theoretical approaches to the condition. But over the years, these efforts have amounted to little more than a chipping at the edges, a token stab at the idea of being revolutionary, with the team ultimately unwilling to venture far from modern science's career-protective walls. So when it comes to embracing a truly atypical conception of autism, and when it comes to considering and exploring autism's monumental impact upon the human species, the Mottron team maintains a comfortable silence. For autistic individuals, such reticence is a tragedy. Because for autistic individuals, of what value is a description of prototypical autism, if its primary purpose is to boost the statistical power of normal autism science?

References

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