Monotropism: The Theory of the Single Beam of Attention

Wed Nov 11 · Human Meaning

Wendy Lawson once described what happens when a bird flies past her: "It doesn't matter what else is going on, within or without me, my interest is the birds." [1]

Monotropism is the idea that a mind has a limited supply of attention, and that some minds spend it on one interest at a time, like a torch beam, while others spread it thinly across many, like a room lit by a diffused lamp. Dinah Murray, Mike Lesser and Wendy Lawson set the idea out in a 2005 paper in the journal Autism. They called the narrow-beam style monotropic and the spread-out style polytropic. [1]

That's the whole theory in two sentences. Sit with the bird for a second, though. The rest is what it feels like inside the beam.

Where did the word "monotropism" come from?

The authors credit Jeanette Buirski with suggesting the word in 1991, to capture their earliest rough thoughts. Murray's 1992 conference paper on the idea was titled "Attention Tunnelling and Autism." [1]

The bet underneath it is simple: attention is scarce. "At any one moment the amount of attention available to a conscious individual is limited," the 2005 paper says, and it points to the finite supply of metabolites available to the brain as one reason to believe it. [1]

What is the torch-beam picture?

In the paper's picture, an interest isn't just a topic. It's a topic "charged with feeling," and monotropic minds pour a lot of that charge into a few interests at once, where polytropic minds keep many interests glowing at a lower level and constantly connecting to each other. [1]

The authors call monotropic interests "deep basins of attraction" where attention gets caught. [1] Inside the beam, everything is vivid. Outside it, a lot may simply not register. The paper puts the trade in one sentence: monotropic focus tends to mean "both tending to perform the task well and tending to lose awareness of information relevant to all other tasks." [1]

Temple Grandin's childhood account, quoted in the paper, is the extreme version: "Intensely preoccupied with the movement of the spinning coin or lid, I saw nothing or heard nothing. People around me were transparent." [1]

Doesn't everyone have an attention tunnel?

Yes, and that's part of why the idea is interesting. In a 1999 experiment, 192 people watched a video of two teams passing basketballs and counted the passes by one team. Partway through, someone in a gorilla suit walked through the middle of the action for five seconds. Across all conditions, 46 percent of viewers never noticed the unexpected event, and in the gorilla version only 44 percent saw the gorilla. [2]

So a narrow beam is a feature of every brain. What the monotropism paper proposes is that people differ in their default setting. It suggests the strategies for spreading attention are normally distributed, like a bell curve, with the tight-focus end of the curve being the part it links to autism. [1]

What does the evidence actually say?

Less than the theory's fans would like, and the authors said so first. The 2005 paper states that its authors were "not attempting to establish new facts about autism but trying to interpret what is already known," and it closes by asking for "more research into monotropism." [1]

The research has been slow to arrive. In June 2023, a preprint (not peer-reviewed when posted) described a 47-item Monotropism Questionnaire written by a group of autistic adults and tried out on 1,110 people, 756 autistic and 354 not. Autism status and ADHD status were each linked to higher monotropism scores, and the authors noted that the theory had been little investigated formally. [3] That's a first measuring stick, not a verdict. It's a hypothesis with a ruler now.

What does it look like from the inside?

You start reading about a single bird species at 9 p.m. It is suddenly 1 a.m., you know how its wing bones work, and you have not eaten. Nothing went wrong. The beam was on.

Lawson, in the same paper, writes that she can name the many birds around her on a countryside walk, yet finds it "difficult to answer a single question about what I might like for lunch." [1] A lot of us know that exact gap: total fluency inside the tunnel, a blank when someone asks a side question about lunch.

The authors' practical advice is short and kind. The first of their heuristics for practitioners is: "Start where the child is." [1] Start with the interest and build the bridge from there.

Plenty of us have spent years being told to widen the beam. Monotropism suggests a different question: what happens if you leave it narrow and point it somewhere good?

The cosmic part

Between September 2003 and January 2004, the Hubble Space Telescope stared at one small patch of sky in the constellation Fornax. It took 800 exposures over 400 orbits, 11.3 days of total exposure, and the result shows nearly 10,000 galaxies. [4]

That's a torch beam held very still. The patch got attention for long enough, and the universe filled in.

If time is a flat circle, as a certain fictional detective insists, the beam comes back around too. Somewhere right now, someone is looking at one bird, or one spreadsheet, or one patch of dark, and slowly finding out how much is in it.

More long-form essays live at The Monotrope, our sister site.

Sources

1. Murray, D., Lesser, M. & Lawson, W. (2005). "Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism." Autism 9(2), 139-156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361305051398 (full text: monotropism.org)
2. Simons, D. J. & Chabris, C. F. (1999). "Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events." Perception 28(9), 1059-1074. http://www.chabris.com/Simons1999.pdf
3. "Development and Validation of a Novel Self-Report Measure of Monotropism in Autistic and Non-Autistic People: The Monotropism Questionnaire." OSF Preprints, June 14, 2023 (preprint, not peer-reviewed). https://osf.io/preprints/osf/ft73y_v1
4. NASA Science. "The Hubble Ultra Deep Field" (image release, 2006). https://science.nasa.gov/asset/hubble/the-hubble-ultra-deep-field/