Chapter 4
The Mind of an Inventor
Over the decades I have watched as Jonah grew into a wonderful man with remarkable talents.
Like a modern-day Linnaeus, Jonah also loves systemizing the world of plants. Wherever he goes, his eyes are constantly noting the plants around him. Jonah told me he is checking each plant against what he calls his “mental spreadsheet,” which is organized into rows and columns. As he describes it to me, each row (the if) might be a plant characteristic (the shape of a leaf, the color of a petal), each column (the and) might be an environmental variable (a preferred soil, the season when it blooms, its geographical location), and where these intersect (the then) might be the name of a specific plant. If-and-then reasoning. In his mind’s eye, all Jonah has to do is read across from the plant name to identify what is special and unique about each plant.
Jonah started classifying types of leaves in the playground at age six, as you’ll recall, and today his knowledge of plants is encyclopedic. His mental spreadsheet allows him to understand how different plants are related to each other, and all these patterns conform to the if-and-then algorithm. In this way, he does what many autistic people do: he records information systematically. Today he is obsessed with collecting information for every species of tree in the world—all 60,000-plus species.1
His memory has the hallmark of hypermnesia (the opposite of amnesia)—it seems to know no limits.2 There are only a handful of documented individuals with hypermnesia, adults who can remember every day of their lives since at least age fourteen. With Jonah, his memory is for factual information about objects, and specifically plants.3 His recall is also extremely rapid. His family describe him as being able to “read” nature. Sometimes they demonstrate this to others by pointing to a random plant and seeing how many facts about it he can rattle off. But Jonah isn’t interested in showing off. He is simply driven to systemize plants accurately and comprehensively, interested in facts, patterns, and truth. For him, as for many autistic people, these three words all refer to the exact same thing.
Jonah’s other passion as an adult is car engines. As a car drives by, he can tell from the sound alone if the engine is developing a fault and can diagnose which component needs replacing. The sound of each component in the engine is the if, tweaking it is the and, the car’s efficiency is the then—again, he is constantly seeking if-and-then patterns. As with plants, he describes looking up these patterns in his mental spreadsheet. Jonah loves nothing better than being asked by someone to tune their car. Then he can lock himself away from the world, sometimes for days, undistracted by people, and concentrate 100 percent on the task, until he has checked, double-checked, and triple-checked every aspect of the car’s engine and the engine is performing optimally. Sometimes he bluntly tells someone their car will develop a specific problem, which can cause anxiety in the listener. Their feelings are not first and foremost in his mind, though; he is simply compelled to tell the truth. His family has learned to heed his predictions, because they always prove to be right.
But despite his talents, Jonah’s skills are underused. He has written more than four hundred unsuccessful job applications, with his parents’ support. Although they encourage him to remain positive, he can see the facts for themselves and often feels depressed and hopeless. Being unemployed and living with his parents at age thirty-two makes him feel like he has not been accepted by society. On two occasions his depression got so bad that he felt like ending his life, and he has made two attempts to do so. I asked him:
“Did you want to die?”
He nodded, and when I asked him why, he simply replied:
“Nobody wants me. I don’t belong in this world.”
I acknowledged his loneliness, aware that over 80 percent of young autistic adults still live with their parents.4 I asked him:
“What would make a difference, what would make life feel worth living?”
Without looking up, he replied:
“A job. To make me feel valued—to give me dignity. Why won’t anyone give me the chance to prove I can contribute, to make me feel included in society, and give me a wage, so I can have independence from my parents?”
I nodded, feeling so sad for him and the millions of other autistic people who languish unemployed when they could be doing something meaningful for themselves while helping their employer and society.5 He added:
“I want what every human being has the right to: to have the basic financial means to make decisions about how to live. Unemployment is killing me, and so many people like me.”
His analysis was totally accurate. We surveyed four hundred autistic adults like Jonah who had attended our clinic in Cambridge, and tragically we found that two-thirds of them had felt suicidal and one-third of them had actually attempted suicide.6 What more of a wake-up call does society need that autistic people are struggling and desperately vulnerable? Jonah’s life illustrates how huge is the waste of talent among these autistic hyper-systemizers, and how unemployment adds to their suffering from exclusion.
Unemployment is just one of the challenges Jonah faces.
He often says he feels totally lost in the social world. He would like to have close friends and an intimate relationship, but these have never materialized for him. He finds conversation confusing, not knowing what to talk about, when it is his turn to speak, or what his conversational partner is expecting. These challenges reflect his difficulties with “cognitive empathy.”7 So he often avoids company and avoids the stress that conversation brings. When he tries to chat, he worries he is getting it all wrong. Despite his remarkable ability to systemize the world of plants or car engines, he just can’t figure out how to keep a conversation going.
He says people either ignore him in a group or speak over or for him, because he is slower than others to reply. He hates the telephone, because he doesn’t know what to say and finds the silences painful. Some people have told him his voice sounds monotonous, and that he speaks too loudly, but he doesn’t know how to make his voice sound any different. He readily admits that he can’t imagine what other people hear, or how he might come across to them. To do so would involve imagining what someone else thinks or feels, which he finds totally mysterious and beyond him.
When Jonah is in a social group, he often feels that everyone else understands a joke—they all seem to laugh at the same time—and he is left wondering what he missed. This difficulty in understanding humor is evident even in autistic toddlers, compared to typical toddlers, who love to joke around and who can switch easily between serious and playful communication.8 People tell Jonah that understanding humor is all about reading between the lines, but all he can deal with is factual information, not implicit meanings. He notices other people exchanging glances, shrugging, or raising an eyebrow, but he has no clue how to interpret such body language. He says it’s as though everyone else is speaking a silent private language that he doesn’t understand. It makes him feel as if he comes from another planet, that he is watching a complex species from the sidelines of a game that he cannot join, and from which he even feels he is actively excluded.9
His challenges with cognitive empathy are typical of many autistic people.10 But while he struggles with this, people who know Jonah describe him as very caring. For example, if he hears that someone is unwell, he tries to think what he could do for them, to help them. If he hears that someone has been treated unfairly or is suffering, it upsets him, and he wants to do something about it. So as with many autistic people, his “affective” empathy is intact.11 In this sense, an autistic person is the mirror image of a psychopath, whose cognitive empathy is often highly practiced (to exploit others) while their affective empathy is blunted. Psychopaths, unlike autistic people, just don’t care how others feel.
Jonah feels bitter about his childhood. Having been relentlessly bullied, both physically and verbally, has left a mark on his self-confidence, and he attributes his depression in adulthood to this. He thinks if other children had just left him alone, he could have been happy then, and would be happy now. But instead, they teased and mocked him mercilessly as a child, made him feel like a failure, and he still feels like that now.
Jonah is one example of an autistic hyper-systemizer who has struggled. But not all autistic people struggle: Daniel Tammet is another hyper-systemizer who came to our clinic and whose life has turned out remarkably.12 I gave him the diagnosis of Asperger syndrome, a term that was given at that time to a subgroup of individuals on the autism spectrum who had at least average language and intelligence.13 Like Jonah, Daniel has a remarkable mind. For example, he memorized the number pi (π) to 22,514 decimal places, and after reciting it (it took him five hours and was invigilated), he was awarded the title of European champion in this memory competition. I asked him:
“Why did you take on this challenge?”
He smiled at me, and gently replied:
“Memorizing a sequence like pi is comforting and reassuring, because pi is always the same: 100 percent predictable. It’s the exact ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Isn’t that beautiful? Just as some autistic children line up their colored bricks or toy cars in long sequences, which follow a logical order, for me numbers give me peace and pleasure as they always fit together in the same, reliable pattern.”
I nodded, admiring his remarkable mind, and asked:
“What do numbers mean to you?”
He looked up and said:
“As a child, I was stressed by people, because there’s no pattern to their behavior—they never do the same thing twice. So I made friends with numbers, rather than making friends with my classmates. In my mind, I break long number strings down into their component parts, and then spot the patterns. I can multiply three-digit numbers together, sometimes faster than a hand calculator, reassembling numbers from these basic units.”
Daniel, who has learned ten languages, also analyzes human language in the same way, rapidly spotting patterns in grammar and collecting tens of thousands of words, much as Jonah collects plant names. A television crew tested Daniel’s language learning ability by taking him to Iceland, without any prior warning, because they knew he had no knowledge of Icelandic. After spending just one week there, he was interviewed in Icelandic on Icelandic television and performed well. But alongside his talent in memorization, numerical calculation, and languages, Daniel had all the classic signs of autism in his childhood. Like Jonah, he kept to himself at school and didn’t make eye contact until he was twelve years old because he didn’t realize it was important to do so.
Talking with Daniel, I realized that when you see an autistic child spinning the wheel of a toy car, held close to their eye, they are likely spotting unchanging patterns. I’ve seen this in autistic children with additional learning disability or below-average IQ as well as in autistic children with average intelligence or above. Just as a wheel goes around and around, repeating patterns, so pi doesn’t change. Some autistic people are drawn to more concrete repeating patterns, like the spinning car wheel or a spinning fan or a spinning washing machine, while others are drawn to more abstract repeating patterns, like pi. Whether their interest is more concrete or more abstract may be influenced by their IQ, but autistic people irrespective of IQ are tuned to look for if-and-then patterns so they can discover constants, just as a scientist or a mathematician does. Not for no reason is pi called a mathematical constant, meaning it always applies, to every circle. I realized that what fascinated Daniel about pi is the very same thing that fascinated the Sicilian mathematician Archimedes more than two thousand years ago, in 250 BC.
The positive side of hyper-systemizing is that it confers an advantage in the capacity to see if-and-then patterns, to analyze and fix systems, and to invent new systems. But there can be a downside: some hyper-systemizers get into trouble because their hyper-systemizing leads them to pursue their pattern-seeking obsessively, with a kind of tunnel vision. Some hyper-systemizers become blind to the risks of their behavior, for themselves or for others.
Take Lauri Love, who was a British student of electrical engineering and who for five years faced extradition to the United States on charges of hacking into America’s military computer network to steal data. I met him at the request of his lawyer, to see if he was autistic. It was clear that Lauri warranted this diagnosis. As I probed deeper, I realized that he was not a criminal in the sense of being motivated to profit from others. Rather, his motivation for this alleged crime was ethical hacking, in what he believed was in the public interest, albeit in an obsessive manner. Here’s what he said:
“We hackers are trying to improve the web and digital security. Take TalkTalk, which was hacked by a fifteen-year-old, and in doing so helped that company to realize its security was broken. Hackers can use technology for good, but technology can also be used for bad. For example, GCHQ and the NSA have the power of surveillance of everything. They can hack into your SIM cards to steal private keys.”
Lauri showed me his laptop. On the web browser, he had tabs open for hundreds of websites. I was astonished, as he could name all the websites from memory and recall the information he had read on each of them. Just like Jonah, with his vast memory for plant names, or Daniel, with his vast memory for numbers, Lauri’s vast memory was for websites. He described his interest in computing as a compulsion. But in his single-minded pursuit of information, he had never considered the possibility that he might be branded as a “terrorist” or face life imprisonment for his alleged activities, because hurting people was the very opposite of his values. He told me bluntly:
“If I am extradited to face trial in the United States, I will kill myself, because I would never survive the brutality of an American prison.”
The thought of being jailed was overwhelming for Lauri because autistic people are hyper-sensitive to sounds, lights, unfamiliar people, and unexpected change.14 This doesn’t begin to convey the intolerable suffering they may experience, and he knew prisons could also be violent places, totally unsuitable for a vulnerable person. When Lauri was finally told that the UK government was not going to hand him over to US authorities to stand trial, and that he would not be charged under UK law, he was immeasurably relieved. I was delighted that the UK courts had the good sense to realize this autistic young man, a hyper-systemizer, would be better off staying with his family than being thrown into jail, and would be unlikely to reoffend.15
Jonah, Daniel, and Lauri—all are autistic young men with hyper-systemizing minds who you could argue show the mark of “genius.” And I’ve met many similar autistic women, particularly here in Cambridge University, who are super-talented scientists. Genius is sometimes defined as looking at the same information that others have looked at before and either noticing a pattern that others have missed or coming up with a new pattern that constitutes an invention.16
It’s not that all autistic people are geniuses. Autism is a wide spectrum that includes those with learning disability. But what we do know is that a disproportionate number of autistic people are hyper-systemizers, and that hyper-systemizers, with their talent at spotting novel patterns, therefore have potential to be inventors. Recall Al, with his moonlight experimenting. How did his life turn out?
Thomas “Al” Edison couldn’t stop systemizing.17 But he also struggled to understand people, and posthumously he has been described as autistic. Had he lived today, he might not have sought or needed a formal diagnosis, but he clearly had a high number of autistic traits. He was obsessively experimenting during his childhood in the basement of his house and continued experimenting into his teens—so much so that, when he was supposed to be selling newspapers on the train, he was actually testing chemical reactions in the baggage car. He was so blind to everything but his experiments that he didn’t think of the possible risks to himself or other people. On one train journey, the chemicals exploded, causing a fire, and he was lucky not to lose his job.
When Edison was in his twenties, trying to make his way as an inventor, he fell deep into debt. One day he begged a cup of tea from a street vendor, and while he was drinking it, he noticed that the manager of a local company had a broken stock-ticker (a device for continuously reporting the latest prices on the stock exchange). He couldn’t help himself—he went over and fixed it. The grateful manager hired Edison on the spot. This was a fortuitous turn in his prospects.
For the next twenty years, Edison’s inventiveness was unstoppable. By age twenty-nine, he had invented the carbon transmitter, which made Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone usable. By thirty-two, he had invented the first commercially feasible lightbulb. By thirty-six, he had built the first economically viable system of centrally generating and distributing electric light, heat, and power. By forty-three, he had invented the Vitascope, an early film projector, which led to the first silent motion pictures. Edison also invented the first practical Dictaphone, mimeograph, and storage battery. He was a tireless hyper-systemizer. He is famously alleged to have said about his relentless experimenting:
“I have not failed; I have simply found ten thousand ways that won’t work.”18
This remark perfectly reflects the need to try every variable in a system and to keep track of the effects of these systematic changes, which is at the heart of the Systemizing Mechanism.
But despite the obvious talents of his hyper-systemizing mind, Edison’s obsession with work and his poor social skills continued to cause difficulties. He forged few close relationships. He had married his first wife Mary in 1871, when he was twenty-four and she was just sixteen. Together they had three children, the first two of whom were nicknamed Dot and Dash (reflecting his childhood interest in Morse code). Mary died at age twenty-nine, and at the age of thirty-nine, he married Mina, who was just twenty years old—virtually half his age—and had three more children with her.
Throughout his marriages, Edison
worked 18 hours a day or longer, pushing ahead for weeks on end, ignoring family obligations, taking meals at his desk, refusing to pause for sleep or showers. He disliked bathing and usually smelled powerfully of sweat and chemical solvents. When fatigue overcame him, he would crawl under his table for a catnap or stretch out on any available surface. Eventually his wife placed a bed in the library of his… laboratory.
Edison’s method of inventing, and evidence of his hyper-systemizing mind, was to use
a dogged, systematic exploratory process. He tried to isolate useful materials—his stock room was replete with everything from copper wire to horses’ hoofs and rams’ horns, until he happened upon a patentable, and marketable, combination.
You can imagine walking into this room where he had saved everything in case it might be useful for something at some point. As he searched for solutions to problems, he simply looked around to try this component or that one, continuously experimenting, the seeming piles of junk a veritable Aladdin’s cave of miscellaneous and unusual objects that served themselves up to his hyper-systemizing mind. “If I measure X, and substitute A with B, then X increases. But if I measure X, and substitute A with C, then X decreases.” Simple experimenting, which Edison had been doing since childhood, and which Homo sapiens has been doing for 70,000 to 100,000 years. Evolution has come up with only one kind of algorithm in the brain to enable invention, and in Edison’s brain this algorithm was tuned to the maximum.
He became embroiled in a long argument with Nikola Tesla about the use of electricity. Tesla was a rival engineer (also described as autistic, because he was hyper-sensitive to light and sound, obsessed with the number 3, and socially difficult).19 Their polarized stances made it impossible for them to collaborate, even though doing so could well have paved the way for other remarkable inventions. Their argument may have been a reflection of limited empathy: each believed that there could be only one correct view—his own—and that the other must be wrong. And their limited empathy may have left them unmotivated to try to reconcile different perspectives or to acknowledge equally valid points of view.
There are several indicators that Edison’s empathy was quite limited. For example, some of his experiments led to inventions that other people simply didn’t want, which, in his solitary and obsessive state, he simply didn’t foresee. One example is his invention of the talking “Edison doll,” which children simply didn’t like. He hadn’t bothered to check with any actual children to see if this was something they would enjoy. To hear the doll recite a nursery rhyme, you had to crank a handle, and to hear it recite a different nursery rhyme, you had to open the doll and replace the small phonograph record with another one, a fiddly procedure.
While any parent could have told him that most children would quickly get bored hearing the same rhyme again and again, Edison hadn’t checked what they might like or dislike, their feelings, and therefore hadn’t anticipated how they would react. And he also hadn’t appreciated that children wouldn’t have the patience to figure out how to change the record. Nor had he thought through that the voice of the doll, which was high-pitched and monotonous, would be unattractive, even scary. These were all signs that Edison didn’t put himself into other people’s shoes—that he had reduced cognitive empathy. Unsurprisingly, the doll was a total commercial failure. Of the 2,500 dolls distributed to stores, no more than 500 were sold, and production of them ceased after just a few weeks.
A second example of Edison’s limited empathy was his design for a concrete home fitted with concrete furniture that could be mass-produced using an intricate mold. He tried to sell the idea for seven years, even offering it for free to builders, until he was forced to accept that what he believed was a brilliant idea was a non-starter.
But occasionally Edison’s inventions met a pressing public need, as when he came up with the formula for a reliable lightbulb. His ceaseless drive to systemize thus not only led at times to enormous failure—pursuing an invention well beyond the point where it was clear that there was no market for it—but also at other times to enormous successes. His story vividly illustrates what can happen when one’s Systemizing Mechanism is ramped up to the maximum and one’s Empathy Circuit is tuned low.
Not all scientists and technologists fall at this extreme, yet a strong bias toward systemizing over empathy can be observed in modern-day inventors like Bill Gates, based on his own description of himself in his twenties, when he was founding Microsoft:
“I was a zealot. I didn’t believe in weekends. I didn’t believe in vacations. I knew everybody’s license plate, so I knew when they were coming and going.”20
Gates’s mind had a mental look-up table for detecting if-and-then patterns that showed hundreds of employees and their unique car number plate. In the documentary about his life, Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates, it is clear that he struggled to understand his mother’s feelings and thoughts, even though she tried hard to help him, and that he was an awkward, socially isolated child and teenager. His mother patiently taught him social skills long after the age when his peer group had intuitively mastered these, giving him a set of rules about how to behave in social situations. Although Gates’s affective empathy is clearly intact—he gives millions of dollars to alleviate suffering in the poorest parts of the world—these biographical accounts suggest that his social development was delayed, while his systemizing was way ahead of his peers. Steven Levy, reviewing the documentary in Wired magazine and having interviewed Gates dozens of times, commented that “Bill Gates arrived on Earth as a Martian.” His profile fits that of a hyper-systemizer.
Edison famously went through 10,000 loops of checking and rechecking his if-and-then patterns to detect important mistakes or to find novel valuable patterns. This is reminiscent of how modern engineers check and recheck manufacturing processes to eradicate one-flaw-in-a-million cycles of the system. Indeed, engineers today repeat the cycle of if-and-then patterns not 10,000 times but one million times, to ensure that the new system they have created or assembled delivers a near-identical result every time. They call this “Six sigma,” written like this, using the Greek character sigma:21
It’s called Six sigma because it is six standard deviations from the mean—an extreme outlier. Engineers, who are hyper-systemizers, want 99.99966 percent of the repetitions of a mechanical system to be defect-free, allowing for just 3.4 defects per million opportunities (DPMO).22 That’s pretty close to that definition of perfection. I find it hugely reassuring that, when the plane I’m on takes off, or when I sit on the chairlift at a ski resort, these machines will work flawlessly at least 999,996.6 times out of a million. The Six sigma rule is not just reassuring to us as passengers and consumers, but it can also lead to massive profits. General Electric, for example, announced that when they first used Six sigma, their profits grew by more than $1 billion.
Good engineering and invention hinge not just on going through the if-and-then steps but also on the feedback loop, which itself entails the twin processes of iteration and refinement. These map onto steps 3 and 4 in the Systemizing Mechanism (see figure 2.1). Iteration simply means repeat, virtually indefinitely. Refinement is tweaking the system by changing either the if or the and variables, to fine-tune, optimize, or obtain a new output. The engineer looks at each component in the system and analyzes it for potential weaknesses or—in the worst-case scenario—actual system failure.
It is said that engineers are “omnipresent but invisible”: the products of engineering are literally everywhere in human
society (and conspicuously absent by and large in non-human animals’ worlds, save for limited examples like termite mounds and birds’ nests, but where there is no evidence of the individual animal being motivated to experiment with variation and are likely the result of a rigid genetic program).23 We don’t tend to notice engineering until it goes wrong. For example, an estimated 100,000 planes take off and land somewhere in the world every day, but the only ones we hear about are the ones that crash. Thankfully, in 2018 there were only fifteen plane crashes across the world, which equates to one per three million flights.24 The products of modern engineering are successful simply because they work, and the hyper-systemizing engineers who designed and installed them remain anonymous and invisible.
Many of us have experienced the frustration of a jammed pepper grinder. No matter how hard you try to turn the crank, nothing comes out, as if the wheel of the grinder has stopped working. But often the grinder isn’t the problem: the issue is congestion. Vint Cerf, who back in 1973 invented the TCP/IP protocol, a system for electronic communication, became interested in how congestion arose in his pepper grinder.25 First, he dropped a handful of peppercorns into it all at once and saw that the mill got blocked. Then he poured peppercorns in one at a time, and they didn’t get stuck, but instead flowed out smoothly.
For Cerf, solving the pepper grinder problem was about solving any congestion problem where there is variation in the flow across time, whether it is car congestion in cities, the post office not being able to cope with the volume of letters, or email congestion in your online service provider. Cerf’s systemizing is how most successful scientists, engineers, and inventors approach problem-solving.
Figure 4.1. Systemizing the pepper grinder to solve the congestion problem
As I think about the complex tools that modern humans make to solve a problem, from the mundane (grinding your coffee beans in the morning) to the extraordinary (landing a rocket on the moon), the thinking process is exactly the same: if-and-then pattern-seeking, followed by the repeating feedback loop.26 This is the working of the humble, infinitely powerful Systemizing Mechanism that has been inside the human brain for 70,000 to 100,000 years and will continue to deliver invention for our species for a lot longer than that.
Science and technology are not the only systems-based fields in which we would expect to see the benefits of having a Systemizing Mechanism tuned to a high level. We usually think of STEM fields as ones that might require a systematic mind, but many arts-related fields also benefit from systemizing, such that some now refer to STEAM (the A standing for the arts).27 Arts such as music, dance, craft, and design are all domains in which we can see the Systemizing Mechanism at work, leading to invention. And as we discussed earlier, even the arts of filmmaking; writing drama, literature, or comedy; or the performing arts can all be systemized, to result in invention.
Consider Glenn Gould, the virtuoso classical pianist, who had an amazing memory for music and was also known for his obsessive practice routine.28 Going over and over one particular musical phrase or sequence is the if-and-then algorithm writ large. He also practiced mentally so that he didn’t need access to an instrument. And the inventiveness we see in jazz and other musical composition and improvisation is how the if-and-then pattern is modified in step 4 of the process.
As a child, Gould learned to read music before he could read words. His father describes how Glenn wouldn’t come out of his bedroom until he had memorized a whole piece of music. As an adult, he had to control every aspect of his life, complaining, for example, about even slight changes in temperature. He played the piano only if he could use his own special chair designed so he could sit very low at the keyboard: he had to sit exactly fourteen inches above the floor. He also rocked back and forth while playing the piano, including during performances. Rocking back and forth is a very physical repeating behavior, a soothing if-and-then pattern on repeat. To achieve total control, he gave up live musical performance in favor of recording. He also hated the cold and often wore gloves even in warm places. He hated being touched, refusing to shake hands with people, and hated social functions, and in later life he limited his social contact to letters. In his hometown of Toronto, he would go to the same diner between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m., sit at the same table, and order the same meal of scrambled eggs. Some have speculated as to whether Gould was autistic but was never formally diagnosed. Such speculations may be misguided if he functioned just fine, because a diagnosis is only ever for those who are struggling to cope and are seeking support.
In contrast, Jonathan Chase, a master of the bass guitar, does have a formal autism diagnosis. His approach to music again displays the workings of a hyper-systemizing inventor’s mind. Chase talks explicitly about visualizing patterns on the frets of his guitar. He sees the key of C major as a series of dots in the grid of the frets. In Chase’s mind, these dots across the frets are joined by imaginary lines, forming an identifiable shape: two sharp spikes. He uses these, and other shapes, to build repeatable if-and-then patterns, which he fits together into riffs that he can execute with precision and speed, identically and with perfection, every time. He can go around the loop 10,000 times.29
And Chase can vary the series of patterns systematically, so that the result is a seemingly endless ability to improvise jazz. He is producing beautiful, repeatable patterns. If he hits the eighth fret on the bottom string, he plays an A, and if he moves across to the eighth fret on the next string, then he plays a D. Each new note creates a pattern with the note that precedes it, and the sequence of notes in a riff is another pattern.30
An obvious place where we can see hyper-systemizing is in the world of games. Max Park is autistic, diagnosed at age two with a delay in social and fine motor development. At age ten, he was given his first Rubik’s Cube, and by age fifteen he had won the World Championship in both the 3x3 Rubik’s Cube and the one-handed events. His average solve time was 6.85 seconds with two hands, and 10.31 seconds with one hand. He had systemized the 3x3 cube. At best, solving the cube takes a minimum of twenty-two moves. You can see how rapidly if-and-then reasoning would help solve the cube: “if the red cube with the green side is positioned on the top layer on the right side, and I rotate the top layer anti-clockwise by ninety degrees, then this will complete the top layer as all one color.” Rapid is of course an understatement.31
We can also see hyper-systemizing and invention in elite athletes. An example is Los Angeles Lakers basketball All-Star Kobe Bryant, who tragically died in 2020 in a helicopter accident. Bryant looked for patterns in his performance and followed strict regimes. In high school, he practiced basketball moves for fourteen hours a day, from 5:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. As a professional athlete, he had a room in his home in which he could rehearse the actions associated with imaginary shots, over and over again, with no distractions—without even a ball or net being physically present. He even figured out that if he closely examined the sole of his basketball boot, and shaved off a few millimeters, then he would achieve an improvement of one-hundredth of a second in his reaction time. Bryant also systemized his hobby of music, learning to play Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” by putting a recording on loop and figuring out the composition by ear. Bryant’s approach to both basketball and music reveals that his behavior was the product of the Systemizing Mechanism in hyper-mode.32
Some hyper-systemizers, in a range of fields, have been described as autistic. For example, Andy Warhol in the field of art, Ludwig Wittgenstein in the field of philosophy, Hans Christian Andersen in the field of literature, and Albert Einstein and Henry Cavendish in the field of physics, have all been described as autistic.33 In my view, it is unhelpful to speculate if someone—living or not—might be autistic, since a diagnosis is only useful if the person is seeking help and is struggling to function. Diagnosing someone—living or not—on the basis of fragmentary biographical information is unreliable and arguably unethical, since diagnosis should always include the consent of the person and be initiated by them.
And from a scientific perspective, hyper-systemizing does not automatically mean you’re autistic. These two descriptions are not synonyms but merely overlap, both in terms of “cognition”—how you process information—and in terms of genetics and prenatal sex steroid hormones (just some of the causal factors). Equally, hyper-systemizing does not automatically make you an inventor or an exceptional musician or athlete. But being a hyper-systemizer increases the probability that you will invent something, because if you keep experimenting with new if-and-then patterns, you are more likely to find a pattern that produces a potentially groundbreaking result. Indeed, hyper-systemizers can excel in any field in which they can search for if-and-then patterns. Of course, whether your novel system becomes commercially successful depends on whether you also have the opportunity, resources, and skills to exploit your idea. This echoes our discussion way back about the difference between an invention and an innovation, which often needs such resources to be disseminated or become a product that can be taken to market.
We’ve focused on the Systemizing Mechanism in modern times, but throughout the book I’ve claimed that the Systemizing Mechanism has a history stretching back 70,000 to 100,000 years and is the result of human evolution. To prove that claim, we need to show that systemizing was absent in our hominid ancestors. It’s time to look at three of our ancient human ancestors, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and Homo neanderthalensis, to establish that there was indeed a revolution in the human brain.