Autists retain higher levels of childlike curiosity (neoteny) than their neuronormative cousins.
Jorn Bettin, The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale, quoted in our Psychological Safety entry
There is nothing more human than play.
Play’s Power, Human Restoration Project
We have a Prompts forum in our Discord. For the first prompt we borrowed a question Human Restoration Project posed a while back, because it is light and because it turns out not to be light at all:
“Do you still have a favorite dinosaur?”
And the question sitting right behind it: why are we expected to “grow out” of our childhood enthusiasms like dinosaurs? Dinosaurs are a popular infodumping interest among Autistic kids, and we are often ridiculed for our enthusiasm — especially as we get older and are expected to get “serious,” which usually means focusing on what we can make money at.
So that is Thursday. No video, no slides, no expertise required. Bring your dinosaur. Bring the thing that was your dinosaur. Bring the enthusiasm you were told to put away, and tell us whether you actually did.
Date and Time: Thursday, August 20 at 7PM Central
What We’re Bringing
This is an open mic and show-and-tell night anchored in one question. Ryan goes first so nobody has to go first.
His childhood favorite was the Flintstones-popularized behemoth, the Brontosaurus. Renamed Apatosaurus somewhere along the way — and then un-renamed again, which we will get to. This earthling is huge. Seventy-odd feet of land animal. Come on. How does that even work? There are several genuinely unsettled scientific mysteries about how sauropods got that big and stayed alive.
Also: the first dinosaur ever animated was a long-necked, four-legged one just like his — Gertie the Dinosaur, Winsor McCay, 1914, usually described as a Brontosaurus. Ryan loves cartoons. Sauropods have turned up all across media since; Jurassic Park bucked the trend by putting a Brachiosaurus on screen instead.
At the other end of the size scale, Velociraptor — not the movie version, but the actual animal: turkey-sized, and feathered. We know it was feathered because a specimen preserved quill knobs on the forearm, the anchor points for large secondary feathers (Turner, Makovicky, and Norell, 2007). Sharp teeth, long sickle-shaped claws, and plumage. Picture it with the temperament of our old rooster, who attacked anything and everything at a dead run with wings and spurs flyin’. That comparison is not a metaphor. Birds are dinosaurs. The rooster was the raptor.
Then the floor is open. Your dinosaur, your rock, your trains, your whales, your weather systems, your one specific bridge. Five minutes is plenty, or go longer if you feel like it. Lurking is a real and honored way to show up.
The Stimpunks Frame
In a word, neoteny
Why are we expected to grow out of it? Neoteny — the retention of juvenile traits into adulthood, including curiosity.
In a psychologically safe cultural environment the neurochemical rewards for collaboration are greater than the neurochemical rewards for dominating others. Perhaps the evolution of collaborative and highly egalitarian cultures was catalysed by the presence of autistic people. Autists lack the drive to dominate, as well as the corresponding drive to comply with the demands of higher ranking primates. Autists retain higher levels of childlike curiosity (neoteny) than their neuronormative cousins.
It is conceivable that the distribution of neoteny in humans has been fine tuned by gene-culture co-evolution over the course of several hundred thousand years, resulting in optimal adaptability, i.e. maximum collective intelligence at human scale.
Jorn Bettin, The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale: Timeless patterns of human limitations
Read that second paragraph again, because it inverts the whole complaint. Sustained childlike curiosity isn’t developmental lag. It is a distributed adaptive capacity — the thing that keeps a group’s collective intelligence from ossifying into whatever the highest-ranking primate already believes. Autistic people carry more of it. That is a contribution, not a delay.
Autistic people tend to retain childlike neoteny for longer, and we get shit on for it. We experience it most often through our special interests. Being a big fan of something and infodumping about it gets read as childish and “cringe.” SpInfodumping is our love language, and it gets scored as a symptom.
What does it say about a culture that condemns curiosity and enthusiasm as child-like?
We wish we didn’t shame the neoteny out of each other
Notice what “get serious” actually asks for. Not depth — we have depth; monotropic attention goes further into a subject than most curricula ever ask anyone to go. What it asks is that the interest be convertible. Point the attention at something billable and it becomes expertise. Point it at sauropods and it stays a hobby you should have outgrown. The demand isn’t that you stop being absorbed. It’s that you stop being absorbed for free.
That demand is enforced with shame, and shame is not a neutral instrument.
Shame, she points out, is not the same as guilt. Guilt happens in response to an action or inaction. It is linked to an event, not a person. It can lead to shame, but handled well, it can be turned to positive, restorative outcomes. Shame is toxic. It is the difference between “sorry I did” and “sorry I am.”
Shame is not a Weapon — Debra Kidd, quoted in our Shame entry
Shame about an interest is never only about the interest. It attaches to the person who has it. And because our interests are load-bearing — regulation, flow, joy, the thing that stops a bad day from becoming a worse one — shaming them is shaming the mechanism that keeps us upright. Then we mask the enthusiasm, and call the masking maturity.
Our co-creative director Helen Edgar puts her finger on what gets lost, writing about a track that samples someone recalling the skies of their childhood in exact detail:
The voice on the track recalls skies from childhood in specific detail, such as the exact colours of a sunset, the way clouds caught the light, nights thick with stars, and reflects on how that kind of noticing gets less as people get older; they lose their sense of awe and wonder. What gets framed as “too much detail” or “getting distracted by the sky” is often a different, richer way of encountering the world, not a deficit, but a different depth of relationship with it.
Helen Edgar, Little Fluffy Clouds: An Invitation To Play, Autistic Realms
That is the loss. Not a phase ending — a way of noticing being trained out.
And we wish we didn’t mercilessly exploit neoteny
Here is the darker half, and it is why this session is not just cozy. Neoteny is something our species deliberately engineers in others.
Our genetic manipulation of other species has primarily been directed towards increased yield, improved flavour, ease of cultivation, biddable disposition and so on. But there are more subtle and darker aspects. Domesticated animals have been consistently both bred and conditioned towards a state of ‘neoteny’ – a behaviourally and physically arrested childhood that makes them both more attractive to us (big eyes, rounded heads) and easier to control because less aggressive and more attention-seeking (Price, 1999; Trut, 1999). Think of how cats make kitten-sounds to us when they want food or stroking.
Domesticated animals are by their nature permanent juveniles, dependent upon us for care, for the protection from predators that they can no longer provide themselves; for the food that they no longer know how to find for themselves. (Budiansky, 1997, p.110)
As I have repeatedly emphasised in this chapter, at the same time as domesticating other creatures we have also domesticated ourselves.
Nick Totton, Wild Therapy (second edition): Rewilding our inner and outer worlds, pp. 176–177
So the culture runs two operations on childhood at once, and they only look contradictory. Curiosity gets shamed out of us; dependence and biddability get bred in. The juvenile traits that make a creature easier to manage are cultivated. The juvenile trait that makes a creature ask its own questions is the one marked immature. It was never about being childlike. It was about which childlike things serve whoever is doing the sorting.
Point that at people and you get compliance culture, behaviorism, and the long project of arranging bodyminds by hierarchy — where “mature” reliably means manageable and noncompliance reads as a failure to grow up. This is also why childism belongs in the conversation: a culture that will not respect children will not respect the child-like in adults either.
Totton’s alternative is worth keeping:
Wildness is the First Nation of human culture; it is the ground of our being. Denying and suppressing it can only be disastrous.
Play. Build niches. Embrace neoteny.
The dinosaurs kept changing. The enthusiasm was never the error.
Here is the part that makes this a genuinely good prompt rather than a nostalgia exercise.
Every kid who loved Brontosaurus got told, at some point, that they had the name wrong — actually it’s Apatosaurus — and that being corrected on your favorite dinosaur is part of growing up. Then in 2015 a specimen-level phylogenetic revision of the whole family found that Brontosaurus excelsus is different enough from Apatosaurus to hold its own genus after all (Tschopp, Mateus, and Benson, 2015, open access). Not everyone agrees. The argument is live.
That is not a gotcha about scientists being wrong. It is what a working category looks like: drawn by people, redrawn by people, provisional on purpose. Our own ★ stuff project has a whole zine on this — The Lines We Drew — arguing that the constellation is a line we impose from one vantage point, and so is the border between disorder and difference. A human-made line is ours to redraw.
Sit with how differently that goes for us. The taxonomic name got revised in public, on the evidence, and the revision was published under the authors’ own names. The categories we get sorted into — the tier, the functioning label, the reading group, the diagnosis boundary — arrive first and get applied second, and almost never get revisited when the evidence shifts. Deficit ideology travels on repetition, not evidence. The pathology paradigm does not publish corrections.
And the animals themselves kept getting better. Velociraptor turned out to be feathered — smaller than the movie, stranger than the movie, and closer to the chickens in the yard than to a monster. Birds are dinosaurs. Which means nobody in this conversation grew out of dinosaurs. There are dinosaurs at the feeder right now.
The facts moved. The names moved. The enthusiasm was the one part that was right the whole time.
Join Us
Infodumplings happens every Thursday at 7PM Central in the Stimpunks Learning Space.
Bring your favorite dinosaur — current, former, or newly reinstated. Bring the interest you were told to grow out of. Bring the one you did let go of, and what that cost. Bring a fact you have been waiting for an excuse to explain to somebody. Or bring nothing and come to listen — lurking is a real and honored way to show up.
- Cameras optional. Chat-only participation fully valid.
- Stims, movement, and fidget tools encouraged.
- No one will be called on. Silence is participation.
- Screen sharing available if you want to show rather than describe.
- Five to ten minutes is plenty. You don’t need a whole segment.
Want to curate a future session? Get in touch →
How the Hour Goes
| Time | What’s happening |
|---|---|
| 7:00 PM | 👋 Welcome & housekeeping — the prompt, and where it came from |
| 7:05 PM | 🦕 Ryan goes first — Apatosaurus, the feathered Velociraptor, and the rooster |
| ~7:15 PM | 🎤 Open mic: do you still have a favorite dinosaur? |
| ~7:40 PM | 🧠 Bodymind break — 5 minutes, do whatever you need |
| ~7:45 PM | 🎤 Open mic continues — the other half: what were you told to grow out of? |
| 8:00 PM | ✨ Cozy overflow + next week’s reveal |
Sessions run approximately one hour with cozy overflow after. Camera optional, chat always open, safe foods and stimming always welcome.
Related Glossary Entries
- Special Interest
- SpInfodump
- Infodump
- Monotropism
- Flow
- Autistic Joy
- Rabbit Hole
- Play
- Childism
- Shame
- Masking
- Psychological Safety
- Hierarchy
- Noncompliance
- Behaviorism
- Wild
- Ethodiversity
- Niche Construction
- Intrinsic Motivation
- Deficit Ideology
- Pathology Paradigm
Reflection Questions
On the dinosaur
- Do you still have a favorite dinosaur? Which one, and how old were you when it picked you?
- If it wasn’t dinosaurs, what was it? Horses, volcanoes, flags, trains, sharks, weather, planets, a single video game?
- Is it still yours, or did you file it away somewhere? What would it take to get it back out?
On being told to grow out of it
- Who told you to get serious, and what did they mean by it? Was there money on the other side of it?
- Where have you felt an interest get scored as “cringe” — and did you drop it, hide it, or double down?
- Is there an enthusiasm you now only allow yourself in private? What changes if it comes out loud on Thursday?
On categories and who does the sorting
- Brontosaurus got its name back after a century of correction. What have you been corrected about that might yet be revisited?
- Which category you were sorted into arrived before anyone looked closely at you?
- “Mature” often turns out to mean “manageable.” Where have you seen that swap made on you?
Resources
- Infodumplings — the event, the format, and how to curate a session
- Jorn Bettin, The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale — Autistic Collaboration; the neoteny and psychological-safety argument
- Nick Totton, Wild Therapy (second edition): Rewilding our inner and outer worlds — domestication, arrested childhood, and rewilding
- Play’s Power — Human Restoration Project, quoted in our Play entry
- Human Restoration Project — our allies, and the origin of this prompt
- Shame is not a Weapon — Debra Kidd
- Helen Edgar, Little Fluffy Clouds: An Invitation To Play — Autistic Realms, on awe, wonder, and noticing
- Helen Edgar, Glimmers, Autistic Joy and Monotropism — Autistic Realms
- The Five Neurodivergent Love Locutions — infodumping as a love language
- 7 Cool Aspects of Autistic Culture — NeuroClastic, on SpIns
- Tschopp, Mateus, and Benson, A specimen-level phylogenetic analysis and taxonomic revision of Diplodocidae — PeerJ, 2015, open access; the paper that gave Brontosaurus its name back
- Turner, Makovicky, and Norell, Feather Quill Knobs in the Dinosaur Velociraptor — Science, 2007 (paywalled)
- Gertie the Dinosaur — Winsor McCay, 1914, the first animated dinosaur
- The Lines We Drew — ★ stuff, on constellations and the borders we impose
- Bodymind Break
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Part of Stimpunks Recurring Events. See also: Solidarity Sesh and Watering Hole Hangs.