At an online memorial for the philosopher Helen De Cruz last year, someone asked a question that’s stayed with me ever since:
If Helen De Cruz designed a learning space, what could it look like?
That question is where the full-length version this piece began.
De Cruz spent her career exploring wonder and awe.
One of her central ideas is that these aren’t just nice feelings that happen alongside learning. They’re part of how we come to know the world.
That made me wonder what this means for Autistic and ADHD people, whose attention often works differently. And, more specifically, what it might mean for those of us who are monotropic.
What wonder and awe actually are.
It might be a puddle holding an upside-down sky, a strange sound you can’t place, or a pattern that suddenly appears where you weren’t looking for one.
She calls this firstness — the experience of meeting something as though for the first time, even if you’ve seen it countless times before.
If that moment is given enough time and enough safety, wonder can deepen into awe.
Awe isn’t just feeling impressed by something. It’s the experience of encountering something so big, so beautiful, or so surprising that it changes how you think about the world.
Curiosity can lead us towards misconceptions just as easily as genuine understanding. Conspiracy theories and pseudoscience often begin with real curiosity. What matters isn’t the feeling of wonder itself, but whether we have the time, support and freedom to test what we’ve noticed against reality.
That’s why I don’t see wonder as the opposite of critical thinking.
I think it’s often what makes critical thinking possible.
Monotropism, developed by Dinah Murray, Mike Lesser and Wenn Lawson, describes a style of attention where focus gathers deeply around a smaller number of interests instead of being spread thinly across lots of things.
When I put that alongside De Cruz’s work, something makes more sense for me.
If wonder needs attention to stay with something long enough to deepen, then monotropic attention may be especially well suited to it, when it’s allowed the space and people feel safe.
But I don’t want to only tell the good half of this.
That same depth can also make it hard to move with what you meet next.
Once you’re deep in something, it can be genuinely hard to be pulled toward whatever comes after — even when what comes after is the very thing that would deepen your understanding further.
That’s part of why leaving a state of deep focus can feel so hard, not stubbornness, just depth, cutting both ways.
For many of us, wonder isn’t an occasional experience. It’s woven through everyday life.
It’s the mushroom you may stop to look at in the woods.
The pebble that may somehow feel exactly right in your hand.
I think of these moments as glimmers — borrowing Deb Dana’s term for the small cues that tell our body we’re safe and can bring feelings of joy.
A glimmer holds a moment open.
Glimmers give wonder a chance to keep unfolding instead of being cut short by overwhelm or interruption.
Far from being a distraction, these glimmers bring wonderful moments that are often where real learning begins.
Puddles of Glimmers
Imagine a child crouched beside a puddle after the rain.
They notice the sky reflected in the water.
They dip a finger into it.
The sky breaks apart, then slowly comes back together.
If nobody hurries them away, they begin noticing more.
They may begin to connect ideas and think.
Why does the reflection only appear when the water is still?
Why does it disappear when the surface moves?
An Autistic child who wants to stay with that puddle isn’t failing to move on. They aren’t being obsessive or defiant.
They’re following where their monotropic attention naturally wants to go and settle.
Early years practitioners often recognise this as a schema — a pattern of exploration that children return to again and again, with each return adding another layer to their understanding.
Why schools so often interrupt wonder
Most education systems aren’t designed to protect this kind of attentional processing.
Teachers and carers may interrupt the glimmers and the moments of wonder before awe has a chance to surface.
“Come back to the carpet.”
“Eyes this way.”
“Time to move on.”
From the outside these can seem like tiny redirections for a child.
From the inside, for someone with a monotropic style of attention, they can break a whole thread of thinking and be really dysregulating.
The glimmer goes, the moment of wonder disappears.
Being pulled away just as understanding is beginning to deepen can be genuinely painful rather than merely frustrating.
When that happens over and over again, it can contribute to Autistic burnout.
I don’t think this is about teachers or carers getting things wrong.
Most are doing their best inside systems built around timetables, targets and measurable outcomes.
The problem is that those systems often treat wonder as something extra, something to fit in after the “real learning”, rather than recognising that wonder is often where the real learning starts.
Some of what gets labelled demand avoidance makes more sense through this lens too.
If someone is already deeply engaged, protecting that engagement can look like refusing demands from the outside. What looks like resistance may actually be an attempt to protect a way of thinking that’s already fully occupied.
The double empathy problem, by Damian Milton, also helps explain why these moments are so often misunderstood. Autistic and non-Autistic people frequently misread each other’s intentions. What looks like disengagement from one perspective may actually be profound engagement from another.
Is there a normal way of thinking?
The idea of a “normal” mind feels obvious today, but it hasn’t always existed.
Ideas about normal attention developed alongside systems that needed people to work in particular ways, at particular speeds, for particular purposes.
What gets treated as the average isn’t simply descriptive.
It’s political. It quietly decides whose pace, whose attention, and whose way of thinking gets to count as successful, productive or acceptable.
That matters because monotropic attention is often treated as a problem to manage rather than a valid way of understanding the world.
Building places where wonder can grow
Being neuro-affirming matters, and it’s at the heart of much of my work.
Being neuro-affirming isn’t enough on its own. It can still leave one way of thinking as the default, with everyone else simply being included around the edges.
That’s why I increasingly think in terms of the importance of neuroqueering, developed by Nick Walker.
Neuroqueering isn’t about making existing systems more inclusive. It’s about questioning whether there was ever one correct way to learn, think or communicate in the first place.
That’s the thinking behind two projects I’ve been developing with Ryan Boren and the Stimpunks Foundation: Neuroqueer Learning Spaces and Cavendish Space.
Cavendish Space takes its name from Henry Cavendish, whose life reflected many traits that Autistic people recognise today: deep sensory sensitivity, a love of routine and an extraordinary capacity for sustained attention.
The point isn’t that Autistic people are only valuable when they become great scientists.
It’s that all people flourish when they’re allowed to learn in environments that genuinely meet their needs.
The Cavendish Space framework centres around three kinds of space:
- Caves — places for solitude, sensory regulation and uninterrupted processing.
- Campfires — places for sharing ideas and communicating with people you trust.
- Watering holes — places where people explore questions and make sense of things together, share stories and learn from each other.
Running through all three is the idea of attentional sovereignty — having real agency over where your attention goes, how deeply it settles, and when it moves on, instead of constantly having those decisions made by someone else.
So, if Helen De Cruz had designed a learning space?
I think it might look a lot like this.
Not because Cavendish Space came from her ideas. It didn’t. We built it before I’d read her work.
But her idea of firstness helps explain why caves, campfires, and watering holes need to be different from each other, not just three versions of the same safe space.
Caves are where firstness gets to happen without being immediately explained away.
Campfires are where someone else can start to notice what you’re noticing.
Watering holes are where a few of you get to be changed by the same thing, together.
A small place to start
None of this requires rebuilding education overnight.
It can begin with one child.
One glimmer.
One adult who chooses not to interrupt.
A child watching raindrops race down a window doesn’t always need to be called back to the lesson straight away.
Given a little more time, noticing can become wondering.
Wondering can become understanding.
And understanding can change how someone sees the world.
A child’s wonder isn’t something to smile at before gently moving them on.
It isn’t distraction.
It isn’t non-compliance.
It’s one of the ways human beings learn.
Every time it’s allowed to survive, it’s a small act of resistance.
None of it happens by accident, though.
Wonder isn’t just waiting out there to be discovered.
It’s something we build the conditions for, together.
The time we’re willing to protect.
The safety we build around each other.
The relationships that make it possible to co-regulate, and to trust.
The different kinds of knowledge we choose to value.
A child pausing as light moves across the floor isn’t stepping away from learning.
They’re already, wonderfully, inside it.
Inside a glimmer. Inside wonder. Inside awe.
