Pete Twiddlfeet and the Heart on his Sleeve (Murray & Me Book 0)

Product Information

MurrayandMe's personalised pieces are all handprinted, which means each letter, number, punctuation and symbol is individually handprinted into your jewellery. Due to the nature of this technique, spacing, depth and alignment will vary. This is the beauty of handprints as each piece is completely unique and distinctive. If you prefer a uniform look, chances are you prefer engraved jewelry. A lot of processing power goes into modelling other minds, something that can seem effortless but is never trivial. It becomes much harder when the minds in question are very different from your own. When autistic people fail to do this, it’s not so much that we’re unable – the idea of ‘mind-blindness’ is deeply misleading – but that we don’t always have the processing power left over to do it effectively, when our attention is being pulled strongly in another direction. Lawson, W. (2011). The passionate mind: How individuals with autism learn. Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Everyone’s passions are repetitive; that’s just in the nature of strong interests. When people talk about ‘restricted interests’ what they mostly seem to mean is that they can’t fathom our failure to be interested in things that seem important to them. It is true that we’re often powerfully interested in a few things for a relatively long time, but they do change over the years, and sometimes over much shorter time periods. For my part, I have many interests, some of them fascinations since childhood, most of them all-consuming when I get into them. Chatting with autistic adults about the things that interest them often makes the idea that their interests are ‘restricted’ seem preposterous. My mum Dinah started thinking about the mind as an interest system when I was a kid, with her PhD on Language and Interests submitted when I was eight. A few years later she read about autism in Uta Frith’s book Explaining the Enigma, and I remember her excitement as she started to realise her model could easily be modified to explain rather more of this enigma than Frith or anybody seemed to have managed up to then.

None were enmeshed in the world of professional psychology, and despite Lawson’s book pointing to several possible tests, they do not seem to have known which strings to pull to make sure psychologists conducted the empirical work needed to rigorously test monotropism. Autism deserves good, well-evidenced theories, and while it is easy to point out major flaws in autism theories that psychologists have largely accepted, it makes sense that they would be reluctant to accept a newer theory from relative outsiders, however much it explains. Sue Fletcher-Watson, a psychologist in the field, points out that ‘often in psychology a new theory is built on top of an empirical finding — this is what happened certainly with Theory of Mind which was rooted in a 1985 experimental study by Simon Baron-Cohen, Alan Leslie and Uta Frith. For non-autistic psychologists, there is no lived experience of autism out of which to build a theoretical model and so experimental data have to come first. This could be another reason why autistic-led theories, drawn at least in part from internal observations, struggle to make a big impact in mainstream research.’ The bulk of what’s usually referred to as ‘executive dysfunction’ in autism – difficulties getting going with things, executing plans, and tearing ourselves away from things once we’ve started – are more informatively talked about as ‘autistic inertia’. That is, resistance to a change in state: difficulty starting, stopping or changing direction. This is central to many of the difficulties autistic people face in life, but it is also part of what makes autistic thinking distinctive and valuable. Different experiences in youth and throughout life, and particularly the different choices we make about where to focus our attention, are likely to account for a good chunk of the diversity of ways that autism can present. Growing up in a household where eccentricity was embraced and hyperfocus understood probably helped me to grow into a relatively confident adult, and not an especially anxious one. Neither myself nor my mother grew up thinking of ourselves as autistic, but we were allowed to be weird, and that makes a big difference.Fergus Murray (aka Oolong) is a science teacher and writer based in Edinburgh; formally assessed as autistic in 2010, at the age of 32.

Autism is still widely seen as mysterious – so much so that the most widely recognised symbol of it (unpopular in the autistic community) is a puzzle piece. Various psychological theories of autism haven’t helped all that much, largely because all of the most established ones leave vast swathes of autistic experience completely untouched, and tend to leave people with harmful misconceptions. The one theory I think comes anywhere close to explaining the whole shebang – monotropism – has been largely overlooked by psychologists. If, as I’ve argued, monotropism provides a common underlying explanation for all the main features of autistic psychology, then autism is not nearly as mysterious as people tend to think. We do not need to rely on theories which explain only a few aspects of autistic cognition, with no convincing explanation for sensory hyper- and hypo-sensitivity, or the intensity of autistic interests. Conversely, if we can’t tune an input out, it is often experienced as horribly intrusive. I think this is from a combination of discomfort at our attention being constantly pulled away from where we want it to be, with the tendency to feel something strongly if it’s present in our awareness at all. Our brains throw a lot of resources at whatever our focus is on, which accounts for both the intensity of conscious awareness and the pain of distracting stimuli we can’t filter out. There is likely a developmental aspect to this: neural pathways that receive a lot of stimulation grow stronger, so perhaps autistic people are prone to long-term hyper-sensitivity in senses receiving intense attention, and under-sensitivity in channels we regularly tune out. Despite their dinky appearance these beads are solid gold/ sterling silver, so we recommend up to 3 beads to maintain a comfortable weight when worn. Part of the variation in autism is also likely to be due to different degrees of monotropism: it has been suggested that the trait might follow a normal distribution, with some people being very monotropic, while others (perhaps the world’s natural multitaskers and people-wranglers) are unusually polytropic. However the trait is distributed, the implication is that some people are closer to having autistic minds than others without qualifying as autistic themselves, and some autistic people have more atypical minds than others in terms of monotropism. This doesn’t make the spectrum linear: there are so many different ways for autism to manifest, and so many co-occurring conditions, that no one variable can come close to capturing them all.The developmental perspective is particularly crucial because we go on learning throughout our lives, and some of the things that are impossibly difficult when we are young get much easier over time once we start focusing on them and practising. This does not mean we stop being autistic – all signs are that a monotropic brain is for life – but it does mean that many of the traits which are considered telltale signs of autism in children are only sometimes seen in autistic adults. What is true is that our interests pull us in very strongly and persistently, compared with most people. It can be hard to think about anything else when we’re particularly invested in a topic, and hard to imagine how little other people might care about it. That can be a huge asset in many fields – intense focus is indispensible in science, maths, technology, music, art and philosophy, among others. Obviously autistic people are not the only ones capable of hyperfocus and persistent interests, but it is a common feature of the autistic psyche, and one that is too often squandered when workplaces and schools are not set up to allow it. Please note that the personalisation is handstamped rather than machine engraved. Each letter and number is individually stamped into the metal by hand with a hammer and steel stamp, variations between spacing and depth will occur which gives each piece its truly unique character.