{"id":7060,"date":"2016-03-14T08:30:54","date_gmt":"2016-03-14T12:30:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=7060"},"modified":"2016-03-14T14:16:48","modified_gmt":"2016-03-14T18:16:48","slug":"autism-genius-and-the-power-of-obliviousness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=7060","title":{"rendered":"Autism, genius, and the power of obliviousness"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/nypost.com\/2016\/03\/13\/theres-a-link-between-autism-and-genius\/\">There\u2019s a link between autism and genius<\/a> says a popular-press summary of recent research.<\/p>\n<p>If you follow this sort of thing (and I do) most of what follows doesn&#8217;t come as much of a surprise.  We get the usual thumbnail case studies about autistic savants.  There&#8217;s an interesting thread about how child prodigies who are not autists rely on autism-like facilities for pattern recognition and hyperconcentration. There&#8217;s a sketch of research suggesting that non-autistic child-prodigies, like autists, tend to have exceptionally large working memories. Often, they have autistic relatives.  Money quote: &#8220;Recent study led by a University of Edinburgh researcher found that in non-autistic adults, having more autism-linked genetic variants was associated with better cognitive function.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>But then I got to this: &#8220;In a way, this link to autism only deepens the prodigy mystery.&#8221; And my instant reaction was: &#8220;Mystery?  There&#8217;s a mystery here? What?&#8221; Rereading, it seems that the authors (and other researchers) are mystified by the question of exactly <em>how<\/em> autism-like traits promote genius-level capabilities.<\/p>\n<p>At which point I blinked and thought: &#8220;Eh?  It&#8217;s right in front of you!  How obvious does it have to get before you&#8217;ll see it?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>OK, now I have to lay out some credentials. (Sorry for the repetition, regulars; I&#8217;m writing the following with an eye on the high likelihood that the researchers won&#8217;t already know who I am.)<\/p>\n<p>I am not an autist, and to my knowledge have no autistic relatives.  I was thought to be a child prodigy with exceptional mathematical gifts; in 1975 I was the first high-school student in the institution&#8217;s memory to present original research at the annual meeting of the American Mathematical Society. Unusually large working memory, check. I&#8217;m pretty sure the authors would consider me a genius, unless they know a lot of people who have been all of: A-list software architects, New York Times bestselling authors also nominated for a Campbell Award, musicians good enough to do session work on two albums, world-championship-level players of strategy games, speakers who&#8217;ve drawn packed crowds on six continents, martial-arts instructors, sought-after advisors to investment bankers, and founders of successful reform movements that arguably changed history.<\/p>\n<p>I also have the advantage that my peer network has been stiff with geniuses for forty years.  I&#8217;ve logged a lot of time interacting with both autistic and non-autistic geniuses, and I&#8217;m anthropologically observant.  So hear this:<\/p>\n<p>Yes, there is an enabling superpower that autists have through damage and accident, but non-autists like me have to cultivate: <em>not giving a shit about monkey social rituals<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/isnt.autistics.org\">Neurotypicals<\/a> spend most of their cognitive bandwidth on mutual grooming and status-maintainance activity. They have great difficulty sustaining interest in anything that won&#8217;t yield a near-immediate social reward. By an autist&#8217;s standards (or mine) they&#8217;re almost always running in a hamster wheel as fast as they can, not getting anywhere.<\/p>\n<p>The neurotypical human mind is designed to compete at this monkey status grind and has zero or only a vanishingly small amount of bandwidth to spare for anything else.  Autists escape this trap by lacking the circuitry required to fully solve the other-minds problem; thus, even if their total processing capacity is average or subnormal, they have a lot more of it to spend on what neurotypicals interpret as weird savant talents.<\/p>\n<p>Non-autists have it tougher.  To do the genius thing, they have to be either so bright that they can do the monkey status grind with a tiny fraction of their cognitive capability, or train themselves into indifference so they basically don&#8217;t <em>care<\/em> if they lose the neurotypical social game.<\/p>\n<p>Once you realize this it&#8217;s easy to understand why the incidence of socially-inept nerdiness doesn&#8217;t peak at the extreme high end of the IQ bell curve, but rather in the gifted-to-low-end-genius region closer to the median. I had my nose memorably rubbed in this one time when I was a guest speaker at the Institute for Advanced Study.  Afternoon tea was <em>not<\/em> a nerdfest; it was a roomful of people who are good at the social game because they are good at just about anything they choose to pay attention to and the monkey status grind just <em>isn&#8217;t very difficult<\/em>. Not compared to, say, solving tensor equations.<\/p>\n<p>The basic insight here is not original to me.  The term &#8220;neurotypical&#8221; was actually coined by a very bright autist who then proceeded to write a <a href=\"http:\/\/isnt.autistics.org\/dsn.html\">hilarious fake DSM entry<\/a> on how wacky and self-defeating &#8220;normal&#8221; cognitive function looks from his point of view.  I looked at his site years ago, saw truth, and have been collecting related observations ever since.<\/p>\n<p>So, contra the authors, I don&#8217;t think there&#8217;s any actual mystery here &#8211; just the awesome power of not caring what the (other) monkeys think.  That gives us time to be excellent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There\u2019s a link between autism and genius says a popular-press summary of recent research. If you follow this sort of thing (and I do) most of what follows doesn&#8217;t come as much of a surprise. We get the usual thumbnail case studies about autistic savants. There&#8217;s an interesting thread about how child prodigies who are&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=7060\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Autism, genius, and the power of obliviousness<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-psychology","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7060"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7060\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7072,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7060\/revisions\/7072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}