My first ever real job, beginning when I was 17, was as a disability support worker. For around five years I worked with kids and adults who had learning disabilities and needed varying degrees of assistance with everyday life. A couple of the boys I worked with were autistic; they had the communication problems, restricted interests and repetitive behaviours, sensory overload, and lack of interest in social interaction that are characteristic of the condition.
One autistic boy, just a few years younger than me, was particularly challenging to work with. He didn’t talk, and had only very basic non-verbal methods of communication, like tapping his head to indicate he wanted something. He was doubly incontinent, and furniture and objects in his room had either to be bolted to the floor or only left with him for a brief time, or they’d be torn to shreds. Even minor changes to his daily routine caused extreme stress, and he’d hit, scratch, or bite anyone within reach.
Thinking about the fleeting moments where he’d hug his mother, or the eventual progress he made in some areas, like learning when and how to go to the toilet, still brings a lump to my throat. But the general memory I have of his autism is one of suffering — it led to daily fear and anxiety for him, caused endless worry and heartache for his family, and (vastly less importantly) left me and my colleagues bruised, bleeding, and scarred at least a few times each week.
Since then, a movement has sprung up around the idea that “neurodivergence”, which can include autistic traits, should be celebrated, not treated as an illness. It’s an attitude that’s liberating for many. After all, autism is a spectrum — indeed, in the psychiatry manuals it’s officially called “Autism Spectrum Disorder”. In my next job, I found myself regularly encountering people right at the other end of that spectrum: I went off to get a PhD in science.
In any scientific field, you’re surrounded by people who the autism expert Simon Baron-Cohen would call “Extreme Systemisers” — people with a penchant for — indeed, a preoccupation with — spotting patterns. Although not all Extreme Systemisers are autistic, Baron-Cohen argues that there’s a substantial overlap. It’s these kinds of people — in the past they’d be referred to as “high-functioning” — that campaigners for neurodiversity are wont to reference.
Extreme Systemizers — or, at least, the mechanism in their mind that makes them systemise — make the world go round, according to Baron-Cohen’s latest book, The Pattern Seekers (the subtitle for the US edition is How Autism Drives Human Invention). The book’s thesis is that, sometime between 100,000 and 70,000 years ago, the human brain evolved a “systemising mechanism” that allowed us to reason in the following way: if something is a certain way, and something changes, then we get a certain result. That seemingly-simple logic — that focus on understanding systems — is at the root of the human capacity for science, invention, and even art and music. Other animals don’t have the systemising mechanism, which explains why — despite being able to use tools and sometimes solve impressively-difficult puzzles — they don’t experiment or invent things: they’re essentially “system-blind”.
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