My wife Bridget Lindley died unexpectedly during the writing of this book. She gave our family so much love over decades, and our children, Sam, Kate, and Robin, were beyond amazing as we supported each other through this huge loss. Their partners, Alice Seabright and Alex Rodin, and my siblings, Dan, Ash, and Liz, were also a tremendous source of support. My friend Lucy Richer, who loves stories, particularly those giving a voice to the voiceless, encouraged me back into writing. When I did, my editors Josephine Greywoode, Helen Conford, and Thomas Kelleher; my literary consultant Robin Dennis; and my agents Katinka Matson and John Brockman, gave me invaluable feedback.
Many talented past and present graduate students, postdocs, and colleagues helped me with the research behind this book: Dwaipayan (Deep) Adhya, Carrie Allison, Chris Ashwin, Topun Austin, Bonnie Auyeung, Ezra Aydin, Richard Bethlehem, Jaclyn Billington, Thomas Bourgeron, Ed Bullmore, Bhismadev Chakrabarti, Tony Charman, Emma Chapman, Adriana Cherskov, Lindsay Chura, Jamie Craig, Dorothea (Dori) Floris, Jan Freyberg, Lidia Gabis, Gina Gomez de la Cuesta, Davíð Guðjónsson, Ofer Golan, David Greenberg, Sarah Griffiths, Sarah Hampton, Rosie Holt, Nazia Jassim, Therese Jolliffe, Rebecca Knickmeyer, Mariann Kovacs, Meng-Chuan Lai, Johnny Lawson, Mike Lombardo, Svetlana Lutchmaya, Aicha Massrali, Michelle O’Riordan, Owen Parsons, Arko Paul, Alexa Pohl, Wendy Phillips, Tanya Procyshyn, Howard Ring, Caroline Robertson, Janine Robinson, Amber Ruigrok, Liliana Ruta, Emily Ruzich, Fiona Scott, Paula Smith, John Suckling, Sophia Sun, Teresa Tavassoli, Alex Tsompanides, Florina Uzefofsky, Varun Warrier, Elizabeth Weir, and Sally Wheelwright. Our amazing admin team, Emma Baker, Anna Crofts, Joanna Davis, Becky Kenny, and Aubree Wisley, kept my lab running smoothly to give me space to write. To all of them, I say a warm thank-you.
In particular, I am indebted to Lucy Richer, Carrie Allison, Jon Drori, Mike Lombardo, Varun Warrier, Lauri Love, Daniel Tammet, David Greenberg, Imre Leader, Tanya Procyshyn, Nicholas Conard, Shankar Balasubramanian, and Adam Ockelford, who gave me really helpful feedback on the draft of this book through their careful reading and engaging with the ideas.
The first draft of this book was written during a writing retreat with my son Sam, on Lac Masson in the beautiful Laurentian Mountains in Quebec, overlooking the lake. The final draft was written during a second writing retreat with my son Robin and daughter Kate, in Treyarnon Bay in Cornwall, overlooking the wild waves of the Atlantic and the equally beautiful Cornish cliffs. And I thank my parents, Judy and Vivian, who encouraged a love of learning in their children.
As I finish this book, on March 24, 2020, when governments around the world have declared a state of emergency in the war against the biggest viral pandemic for a century, we humans remain connected even in a state of physical isolation by using video phone calls that hyper-systemizers invented. Our thanks should go to people like Janus Fris, the Danish co-inventor of Skype, who had no formal education and dropped out of high school. And night and day, in molecular biology laboratories, hyper-systemizers are working tirelessly to invent a new vaccine that will outsmart the invisible killer that is COVID-19, the new coronavirus. And as we look beyond COVID-19 at the other major challenge our planet faces—climate destruction—we look to hyper-systemizers to invent new solutions.
The great physicist Freeman Dyson wrote a book called Maker of Patterns to describe his life exploring patterns in mathematics and physics. This book joins the dots between pattern-seeking in our world’s greatest scientists and inventors, and pattern-seeking in autistic people. Autistic people, even if not formally diagnosed, often hide in the shadows, avoiding the limelight, and systemize to such an extreme that they are more likely to invent something, though they may not even put their name to their invention. They just systemize for the pure pleasure of systemizing. Systemizing is wired into our brains by evolution, and it is wired into the brains of autistic people to such a high degree that they can’t help but do it all day long.
Psychologist Steven Pinker writes in The Language Instinct about how language is an instinct for humans just as much as web-spinning is an instinct for spiders:
“Web-spinning was not invented by some unsung spider genius and does not depend on having had the right education or on having an aptitude for architecture or the construction trades. Rather, spiders spin webs because they have spider brains, which give them the urge to spin and the competence to succeed.”
Autistic people systemize not because they are driven by ego or a quest for fame or fortune (some may be, but in my experience most are not), and not because a schoolteacher has told them to systemize. Rather, they systemize because this is what evolution has designed their brains to do. They systemize for the sheer pleasure of detecting if-and-then patterns, patterns they often see almost effortlessly while the rest of us may labor to spot it at all.
To every autistic person, and to your families, I extend a warm thank-you. Science has confirmed my everyday experience of meeting you: that even if you struggle with cognitive empathy, you are more moral than others, because you combine affective empathy with a strong love of logic and an overriding belief in fairness and justice. You, like countless other autistic people who walked the earth before you, including many who were never formally diagnosed, understand how things work, having identified patterns and introduced one tiny modification to them at a time. In so doing, you have invented.
Now, thanks to the genes for systemizing passed on to you by your ancestors of 70,000 to 100,000 years ago, I can send a text message to you in a split-second, anywhere on the planet, carried invisibly on the waves.