Perhaps this is just a different mental model thing, but in a spectrum each of those colors would be, maybe, a frequency of light or maybe even a range of frequ

Perhaps this is just a different mental model thing, but in a spectrum each of those colors would be, maybe, a frequency of light or maybe even a range of frequencies measured at different intensities. Autism might be thought of as a band in the larger spectrum (think of the infrared or ultraviolet spectrums as subsets of the electromagnetic spectrum), and any one person might emit a different spectrum, like a combination of these different colors. An autistic person, specifically, would exhibit higher intensities in that named spectrum, and conversely the spectrum is identified as a part of the larger spectrum of human experience where people often show similar combinations of colors. It's always going to be a metaphor, but that's the way that I best understand it.