Ep 6: What Is Autism, Really? A NASA Scientist Explains It Through the Lens of Light

Show NotesEpisode details* Season (Thread): 1* Episode number: 6* Release date: 2026-05-21* Hosts:* Natasha Stavros, PhD — author of The Unmasking Diary and Burning Inside Out (coming to a bookstore near you in December 2026)* Sarah Liebman — licensed marriage and family therapist, ADHD-diagnosed, special interests all things neurodiverse* Audio Engineer and Composer: Noah Smith* Director: Linda Highfield* Duration: 00:30:50* Audience and tone: Educational, conversational, supportive; stigma-free exploration of neurodivergence, diagnosis, and self-understanding using personal experience as a case study* Summary: What is autism — really? In the Season 1 finale of Following the Threads, Natasha Stavros, Ph.D. and Sarah Liebman, MFT break down autism spectrum disorder from three angles: the DSM-5 clinical criteria, the current state of neurobiological research, and what disability actually looks and feels like in daily adult life. They unpack why the diagnostic framework still skews toward children and boys, why the science remains correlative rather than mechanistic, and how ableism — both external and internalized — shapes the identity of every late-diagnosed autistic adult. The episode closes with a reframe: the shift from "I have autism and something is wrong with me" to "I am autistic, and the world wasn't built for my rainbow" is the moment unmasking, self-compassion, and real change become possible. Inspired by the forthcoming memoir After the Masquerade.Key takeaways about what is autism* The DSM wasn’t built for you. The clinical criteria for autism were designed around children — specifically boys — which is why so many adults, especially women, go undiagnosed for decades. Understanding that the diagnostic framework is incomplete, not that you are, is the first step.* Ableism isn’t just external — it lives inside you. The shame, the “I don’t try hard enough,” the sense that your struggles are a moral failing: that’s internalized ableism, not the truth. Unmasking means learning to separate your neurodivergent traits from the meanings a neurotypical world attached to them.* Your brain isn’t broken — it’s a different rainbow. Autism doesn’t mean deviation from normal; it means your brain function follows a different but persistent pattern. The disability isn’t the pattern itself — it’s what happens when the energy required to comply with a world built for the average rainbow exceeds your capacity.Resources and referencesFor more information on this topic, check out Clarifying Autism in the DSM-5: A guide for adults by Embrace Autism.While research has found correlation between ASD and neurobiological (brain and genetic) factors, a recent review Frontiers in Psychology shows that these studies do not sufficiently characterize the full clinical and behavioral heterogeneity. Part of that is data sufficiency and sample size across gradients of variation, and part of that could be ableism. A recent perspective piece in Frontiers in Psychiatry argues that autism science has a history of false leads in part because of unexamined ableist ideologies that undergird researcher framings and interpretations of evidenceWhat actually qualifies as disabled is when the amount of energy it takes to “fit” into the neurotypical mold exceeds one’s capacity. It’s not a choice. It’s a hardwired, physiological challenge that inhibits you from continued and sustained participation as “abled”.Don’t Miss Out on Early AccessJoin our community of late-diagnosed adults learning to unmask. Subscribe to get the next episode of Following the Threads directly in your inbox. Upgrade to paid for early access to the book and other resources.Leave a review and share your own diagnostic journey to help others feel seen.Thanks for reading A Jester's Musings! This post is public so feel free to share it.The Unmasking Autism Diary: Memoir Excerpt on Autism Beyond the DSM - Identity, Science, and the SpectrumMy therapist asked me if I knew what autism is. Here is what I said.But first, you must know who I am so that you can understand my perspective.I am not a psychologist, a psychotherapist, nor a neuroscientist. I did get a PhD in quantitative forest ecology as the first person to quantify extreme fire events under climate change. I have a bachelors in mathematics, which had the oh so very big graduating class of about 30 people at an R1 university with over 30,000 students. Later, I did a post-doc at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology.Over the last six years I have written a book on science, innovation, leadership, and systematically changing broken systems. [Side bar: subscribers get updates on the book launch and substack paid subscribers get an early autographed, hardback copy of the book].My understanding of autism comes from lived experience or from reading other people’s research and educational content as a researcher and scientist myself. I do have deep knowledge of science, measurement, mathematics, and systems.In science there are a few things that we can measure - time, length, mass, electric current, thermodynamic temperature, amount, luminous intensity, and electromagnetic energy.In remote sensing, my background of research, we measure either the electromagnetic energy of particles, or the collective vibration of atoms. Most of my work focused on measuring energy radiated and emitted across the electromagnetic spectrum. The electromagnetic spectrum spans radio waves to gamma waves. My area of focus extended just beyond visible light into the shortwave, mid, and longwave infrared. For simplicity, let’s use only the visible part of the spectrum - this is a rainbow.Imagine that everything you look at has a rainbow associated with it. That rainbow represents the unique characteristics of it – for example, the rainbow of a pine tree represents its water content, health, bark to leaf ratio, etc.Now, if we took all the pine trees and averaged their rainbows together, we would expect that whenever we saw a rainbow that looked like that, it could very likely be a pine tree.But what happens when a pine tree has to live in harsh conditions on the side of a cliff, and it is in nutrient poor soil with harsh winds? Its roots may be more present and it may have a skewed nutrient representation - both affecting that pine tree’s rainbow.Autism is like this. If we were to imagine that everyone’s brain function was a rainbow, it is not a leap to imagine how we build our society and our systems with the average rainbow in mind. But, someone who is autistic has a rainbow that doesn’t quite look like average. Technically, everyone’s rainbow differs from average, but it’s the amount of variation in your unique rainbow that determines how much energy it takes to comply with average assumptions. When the needed energy to comply exceeds your capacity, that’s when you become “disabled” and require more support to comply.Does everyone have a unique rainbow that differs from the average? Yes.Does everyone need support to function within the unimodal assumption of normalcy? No.What autism, ADHD, and AuDHD tell us is that there are persistent patterns in those rainbows of brain function, enough so – that brain function is not a unimodal distribution.Brain function is a multi-modal distribution, and we can map those patterns of difference in brain function to human behavior, and that’s what we see when we look at what autism is in the diagnostic statistical manual (DSM) for mental health.By classifying neurodivergent people as disabled, we inherently prioritize one way of living and penalize people for deviating from the average rainbow. This perpetuates ableism and supremacy – the idea that average brain function is a supreme way of being. When in reality, unique rainbows can harness immense creativity and exceptional ability.This text is a snippet from my next book: After the Masquerade. For early access to the book and other resources, upgrade to a paid subscription via substack at natashastavros.substack.com. 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