6.1. The Structural Model of Divergence

The Monotropic Expansion model challenges the foundational assumption that autism is best understood as a cluster of traits, impairments, or surface behaviors. Instead, it reframes autism as a structural divergence in cognitive directionality—a difference in how attention forms, anchors, and expands meaning through internally constructed context. This divergence is not an overlay on a neurotypical core, but an entirely different way of organizing perception, intention, and identity.

Where conventional models group behaviors and deficits into diagnostic criteria, Monotropic Expansion begins from cognitive architecture. It explains why traits commonly observed in autism—deep focus, social divergence, sensory sensitivity, executive dysfunction, delayed transitions—are not random or disordered but emerge naturally from a single, coherent mechanism of inside-out processing. This mechanism is not inherently dysfunctional; it becomes disabling only when systems are built to serve its opposite.

Thus, autism is not a collection of deficits. It is not a disorder of communication, of empathy, or of development. It is a structurally consistent mode of cognition—one that remains misunderstood only because it is measured against systems that reward polytropic fluency.