Last week, I wrote about the difference between a psychological trait and a neurological one, and why autism sits firmly in the second category. This week I want to address something that makes that distinction harder to see: a widespread misconception about what "spectrum" means in the context of autism.
Most people hear "autism spectrum" and picture a line. At one end, severe autism. At the other, neurotypical. Somewhere in the middle, people like me: a little autistic, but mostly fine. The spectrum as a gradient, a dial you can turn up or down.
That's not what it means. Here's an analogy that I find clarifying, using vision 👓.
Most people have some degree of myopia. It's very common, it exists on a continuous scale, and crucially, it's fixable. Glasses, contact lenses, laser surgery. You correct the optics, the problem goes away. Myopia is a vertical spectrum: more or less of the same thing, with a clear correction available.
Color blindness works differently. It's not that color blind people see less color than everyone else, instead they process color through a different configuration of receptors. There's no dial connecting their vision to standard vision. It's a horizontal spectrum: many different ways of being color blind, each with its own profile, none of them simply "less" than normal. And critically, you can't correct it. You can't give someone new cone receptors. What you can do is design the world differently: accessible interfaces, patterns alongside colors, signage that doesn't rely on red-green distinction alone.
Autism is more like color blindness than myopia.
The spectrum in autism isn't a scale from "a bit autistic" to "very autistic" with neurotypical at zero. It's a range of different neurological profiles, all sharing the same underlying difference in how the brain processes certain things — social signals, sensory input, pattern and context — but expressing that difference in very different ways. Some people are overwhelmed by noise; others seek it. Some struggle with eye contact; others make too much. Some have significant language delays; others are relentlessly verbal. Same underlying configuration, very different presentations.
And like color blindness, it's not correctable — only compensable. You can learn strategies, build workarounds, train yourself to recognize patterns you don't process automatically. Many of us do, invisibly, for years. But you're not fixing the wiring. You're working around it.
Autism asks for the same shift as color blindness. Not "how do we correct this person" but "how do we design interactions, workplaces, and social environments that don't rely exclusively on automatic social processing that not everyone has."
That's not a lowering of standards. It's a more accurate picture of human variation.
This is part of my April 2026 autism awareness month series. First published on LinkedIn on 2026-04-07.
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