Monotropism is experiencing a bit of a moment on TikTok, apparently.

What is Monotropism?

It’s a hypothesis of autistic and ADHD attention that suggests that in atypical brains processing resource strongly tends to localize and concentrate to the exclusion of other input – resulting in passionate interests, differences in attention, and flow states. The first work was done on monotropism in 1992 by Dinah Murrey (Murray, D. K. C. (1992). Attention tunnelling and autism. In Living with autism: The individual, the family, and the professional. Durham conference proceedings, obtainable from autism research unit. School of Health Sciences, University of Sunderland, UK.), but the most well-known work is Murray, D. K., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9, 139–156.

You’ll find other work on it in Lawson, W. (2011). The passionate mind:

The key individuals here are Dinah Murray, Wenn Lawson and Mike Lesser. Murray and Lesser have both died, but Wenn Lawson is still kicking about and publishing.

Lots of work was done by Lawson and Murray in the years between 2005 and Murray’s death. Both toured and spoke at conferences and events in the UK and Australia. Wenn Lawson turned his PhD thesis into the book The Passionate Min: How individuals with autism learn. (London: Jessica Kingsley) published in 2011. I have this book, it’s really good. Wenn then published papers in 2013, 2015 and 2017 on the subject.

At the same time, in 2011, Damian Milton started working on monotropism, flow states and the double empathy problem. In 2018 PARC had an event focusing on monotropism, that Wenn Lawson, the Murrays, Damian Milton, Nick Chown, Sue Fletcher-Watson, Rebecca Woods, Larry Arnolds and Julia Leatherland all spoke on the subject. You will see there names often on papers about monotropism.

For a record of work done in the last five years, see this page on Monotropism.org. I don’t know enough about all the work that’s been done, this is just my outline of information. I’ve had to make changes with prompting from Fergus Murray, who pointed out the 18 years of work between 2005 and 2023 that I didn’t originally mention. This is a deep subject. A lot of the work has been done in the overlap between Autistic communities and academic researchers. Eventually, I will work my way through the research and get a deeper understanding.

In 2022 Fergus Murray first published their website Monotropism and a Discord (I’m there, occasionally contributing). The website has a history page if you want greater detail. I’m not replicating their work when I can link to the work of an expert. See here for more details.

Recently the pre-print for a new paper based on the equally new Monotropism Questionnaire has been published. The paper is: Garau, V., Murray, A. L., Woods, R., Chown, N., Hallett, S., Murray, F., Fletcher-Watson, S. (2023, June 14). Development and Validation of a Novel Self-Report Measure of Monotropism in Autistic and Non-Autistic People: The Monotropism Questionnaire. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/ft73y

If you want to know more about recent work on monotropism, Fergus Murray has a post with a list, here. I highly recommend the article on Emergent Divergence by Tanya Adkin and David Gray-Hammond.

Someone on TikTok turned the questionnaire into a self-assessment tool, here. It’s causing a storm on the Discord and Autistic Twitter. I’ve done the MQ three times, getting broadly similar results: 211, 208 and 209, which suggest strong reproducibility. I think the large number of people taking the MQ through this self-assessment questionnaire might help to validate the MQ if the data can be gathered effectively. Might be some work in there for a researcher if they want to do it.

We are watching Neurodivergent History happening.