How has the understanding of autism changed from "disorder" to "different way of thinking"?
Autism is down as a cognitive development disorder, but it is not a disability. Autism is a different way of thinking. There are theoretical arguments that autism is actually an evolutionary attempt to increase the intelligence of the species, but it does come with challenges and these challenges are only represented by around 1% of the population.
The way of autistic thinking, which is not thinking outside of the box, but really not seeing a box at all. You literally have to show the autistic where the box actually is! This makes autistics able to solve very complex and difficult problems, because they are cognitively categorizing information in a non-linear way! How autistics think show similarities to the gifted mind, but less abstract & theoretical, but more like building complex systems designed to the nth degree. Literally, everything needs to make sense to them. The NT mind tends not to have this ability to connect the dots per se.
A great example, NTs using eye contact and body language to decided if somebody is telling the truth and they base their decisions not one what somebody is actually saying, but psycho-physiological clues. On the other hand, autistics do not care about eye contact and body language at all. They are very careful listeners and they think deeply on what is actually being said, not who and how they said it. In terms of the decision making process, autistics win hands down! Big corporations are spending billions of dollars researching on how to harness autistics’ cognitive abilities.
Unlike giftedness, autism is considered a cognitive development disorder, but how the gifted mind and autistic mind develops is actually very similar and they share common psychological traits. But the gifted mind is adaptative to society, while autistics are fairly ridged, they require fairness, routine and calmness - which strongly goes against the flow of the NT world! Some autistics believe they are living in a world that they don’t belong! This causes huge amounts of psychological dissonance leading to mental health issues. The fact is autistics live 5 years, on average, shorter than their NT counterparts and this caused by the amount of stress they face on a daily basis and high rates of suicide.
If we think of a busy Tokyo street with loads of people, bright lights and loud, NT’s love this level of excitement as it boosts up their dopamine levels and they feel great. For the autistic, such an environment is hell, will causes overstimulation and a meltdown.
I don’t think we can ever determine when autism first evolved, there are just too many genetic and environmental issues at play. We probably could nail down a date for the genetic component, which would effectively say, when the autistic mind was actually possible. My hunch is that the autistic mind evolved sometime after 100,000 years ago, when language evolved but before emergence of city-states, i.e. 5000 years ago. The logic being, there had to be an evolutionary push to increase human intelligence, which is effectively true through hominid history but the communication and overstimulation challenges probably would not have existed beyond this time period. An autistic would be perfectly fine in the life of a caveman per se - all superpowers and virtually no challenges.
What I am getting at is autism is not a disability, it is only a disability in the NT world we live in and this is seen as a disability compared to NTs way of life, which is the majority of the population calling the shots.