Chapter 9
Nurturing the Inventors of the Future
Eindhovens and Silicon Valleys are springing up across the planet—from Silicon Alley in New York to Silicon Roundabout in London, Silicon Fen in Cambridge, Cyberabad in Hyderabad, and the Silicon Valley of India, Bangalore.
This means that, as more and more people who are wired for hyper-systemizing are meeting and having children, we can expect more autistic children to be born in these communities. We need to anticipate and plan for the special needs of these autistic children who may require—and who have a right to—lifelong support. Some will have additional intellectual disability, but at least half of them will have average or above-average IQ.1 If we want to nurture the inventors of the future, the next Thomas Edison or the next Elon Musk, we are more likely to find them among autistic people, and among those who have a high number of autistic traits because they are hyper-systemizers, than among the general population.
The minds of autistic people who have no intellectual disability and who are hyper-systemizers should be seen as one of many natural types of brains that have evolved and that add to human neurodiversity. Autistic people and hyper-systemizers without a diagnosis represent just one type of brain among many, and may excel or struggle, depending on what environment they are in. As one Danish autistic man told me:
“We are like freshwater fish in saltwater. Put us in saltwater and we flail around, suffer, struggle, and may even die. Put us in freshwater and we flourish.”
Psychologists used to talk about “normal” children and described all other types of children as “abnormal,” as if there were just one kind of normal brain. The concept of neurodiversity is a refreshingly different view of the range of brain types out there, because it acknowledges that there is no single way for the brain to develop.2 I would call neurodiversity a “revolutionary” concept because it introduces a radical new view of the world—one with many varieties of brains, all of which occur naturally, rather than the old, inaccurate, binary view of normality vs. abnormality.
The neurodiversity view is that there are diverse pathways in development: some people are more verbal, some more spatial, some more musical, some more mathematical, and some more social. All of these different brain types exist in the population, and this is by no means an exhaustive list of brain types. Consider how some children are right-handed, some left-handed, and some ambidextrous, since handedness reflects differences in wiring in the brain. And some children have more sensory sensitivity, some more physical coordination skill, and some are color-blind. The list goes on.
Neurodiversity is simply a fact, just as biodiversity is a fact. Some estimate that up to 25 percent of the general population are “neurodiverse,” if we include a range of disabilities, from autism to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) to dyslexia and dyspraxia.3 Another view is that we are all neurodiverse, in that we are all different. The five brain types we discovered in the population, defined by where individuals are on the empathy and systemizing bell curves, is consistent with that view. Different brain types likely evolved to be better adapted to certain environmental niches. Einstein reportedly said: “Everybody is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid.”4 The point is well made. Each of us should be judged for what we can do, not for what we can’t do.
There are some who object to the notion of neurodiversity and its application to conditions like autism, which they prefer to argue is a disease and therefore needs a cure. My view is that when it comes to autism, all the four Ds apply: difference, disability, disorder, and disease.5
Difference in those with autistic minds is obvious: a freshwater fish and a saltwater fish are neither normal nor abnormal—they’ve each evolved differently in order to function and blossom in a particular environment but will struggle in another. Difference may be physical, as in some people having blue eyes and others having brown, or being taller or shorter. Differences may also be psychological, with different people having different profiles of strengths and weaknesses. Think of those who have an exceptional memory or who show remarkable attention to detail, or those who are less comfortable with casual chatting and prefer structured activities.
Disability is where an individual is below average in a particular skill, or has a condition that affects their ability to function in everyday life, and so they need support. An example might be a child who is not yet talking by five years old and needs help to communicate. Disorder is where an individual suffers from one or more aspects of their difference, the cause of which is not yet known. An example might be gastrointestinal pain, which, for unknown reasons, occurs in many autistic people. And a disease is where that “symptom” is causing suffering and where the cause is known. An example might be epilepsy, which occurs in a proportion of autistic people.
The first two of these four Ds, difference and disability, are entirely compatible with the notion of neurodiversity. Some view neurodiversity as nature’s strategy for ensuring human minds can cope with the diversity of challenges that different environments present. Harvey Bloom, writing in an early article on this topic, explored the idea that neurodiversity might be as important in evolutionary terms as diversity in the genome or the biome: “Neurodiversity may be every bit as crucial for the human race as biodiversity is for life in general. Who can say what form of wiring will prove best at any given moment?”6
Autism involves hyper-systemizing, which leads to strengths, and it also gives rise to disabilities—difficulties in communicating and socializing and in reacting to unexpected change. But in the right environment, such disabilities can be minimized. In this way, the disabilities are largely a product of the fit between the individual and their environment. When the hyper-systemizing qualities of autism are supported and nurtured, the unique skills and talents of autistic individuals can shine—to their benefit, and to the benefit of society.
Specialisterne is a Danish company that set out to create that right environment to allow the skills in autistic people to flourish in the workplace. The company was founded by Thorkil Sonne, technical director of a telecommunications firm, who set up this revolutionary company that hires only autistic people. A hyper-systemizer himself, he had watched with wonder as his autistic son displayed a talent at recalling train schedules and maps and building complex architecture and robots from Lego kits. Thorkil recognized that his son’s ability would fit in well in a technically minded business environment.
But many autistic people wouldn’t get the chance to demonstrate what they could do if they had to go through the standard job interview, which inadvertently discriminates against autistic people. Many of them prefer not to make eye contact or find it painfully stressful because “reading” another person’s eyes is so confusing for them. Many of them may also struggle to communicate using words: they find it hard to read between the lines to pick up on their listener’s hints or to know if they have given their listener too little information to make their communication clear, or too much information, which may bore or confuse their listener. All these communication skills require cognitive empathy, which autistic people find challenging. The result is that many autistic people experience high levels of social anxiety. So why ask them to go through a standard job interview, which might just be setting them up to fail?
Thorkil had the brilliant idea to develop an autism-friendly interview format. He asked autistic applicants to build and program Lego robots, for example, so that they could show their extraordinary pattern-seeking and problem-solving skills to potential employers. They could shine when given the task of looking for if-and-then patterns. Since then, a rapidly growing list of other companies have followed Specialisterne’s example in an effort to increase the employment opportunities available to autistic people—one survey estimated that only 16 percent of autistic adults are in full-time employment7—and to realize the advantages to be gained from having employees on their team who think differently.8 These efforts can be seen as part of a company’s corporate social responsibility, since employing an autistic person is likely to improve that person’s mental health by allowing them to feel included and valued and by reducing their social isolation.
One such company, Auticon (the name is shorthand for “autistic consultants”), only hires autistic people, who are offered jobs for life. They are placed as consultants in coding and other tech industry companies, whose autistic employees receive continuous support from Auticon on how to handle social interactions in the workplace. Auticon now has offices across Europe and in the United States. Another example is SAP, the multinational software development company that, thanks to V. R. Ferose, has developed an “Autism at Work” program. SAP aspires to have 1 percent of its 70,000-person workforce—700 employees—to be made up of individuals with a formal autism diagnosis. Ferose himself has an autistic child and ran SAP in Bangalore before moving to SAP’s offices in Silicon Valley. Inspired by these two pioneering companies, many high-profile companies have since followed in their footsteps by launching similar neurodiversity employment programs.
Auticon says that autistic minds essentially use “a different operating system,” a metaphor that author Steve Silberman also uses.9 I like this metaphor because it draws attention to the fact that autistic people and other hyper-systemizers think differently: they are more objective, fact-oriented, and exact, and less subjective, emotion-oriented, or willing to approximate. One operating system isn’t better or worse than another, but simply different, and designed to do different things. If you let a different operating system do what it’s designed to do, it runs just fine. If you force it to do what it’s not designed to do, it may crash and appear unable to function. Under the right conditions, hyper-systemizing can manifest as remarkable strengths and talents. Unstoppable if-and-then pattern-seeking works best in environments that do not change unpredictably. No wonder autistic people often find change so difficult that they resist it at all costs, attempting to live in a world that is as far as possible under their own control.
An employee’s total focus, based on if-and-then patterns, brings rewards to teams and clients alike. Tom Monte, an SAP manager, says that the contributions of one of his autistic colleagues are invaluable:
“He uncovers things that we might overlook. He’ll ask questions, and I think, ‘Why aren’t my senior guys asking these questions?’”10
HP Enterprise’s neurodiverse teams are 30 percent more productive in software testing and debugging than teams of “neurotypical” employees.11 Key to the success of these programs is the training and support given to autistic employees to ensure that they can manage the social aspects of the workplace—enough support that employees, such as SAP’s Carrie Hall, feel confident to proudly identify themselves as autistic to their colleagues.12
The idea that autistic people think in a refreshingly different way as a result of their if-and-then pattern-seeking was beautifully borne out in a study of creativity and lateral thinking that used a classic test: “How many uses can you think of for a brick and a paper clip?”13 Most people give predictable “simple” answers, such as using a paper clip to reset their iPhone. In contrast, most autistic people gave unexpected, less predictable, more “complex” answers, such as using a paper clip as a weight for the front of a paper airplane or heating up a paper clip to suture a wound. These answers made logical and scientific sense, but if you’re neurotypical, would you have thought of such left-field examples?
The Israeli army has a special unit, called Unit 9900, for autistic people who wish to go through military service and whose excellent attention to detail and pattern-seeking talents can be harnessed to the army’s needs.14 Autistic people are asked to detect anomalies in satellite images of locations on Earth, to spot any patterns that look unusual. To some of us, this might seem like tedious work, but for a hyper-systemizer, it’s “like a hobby,” as one of the young autistic soldiers said. And the autistic Israelis in Unit 9900 are saving lives, spotting suspicious objects or movements. If it’s an unusual shape, color, or movement, and it’s different from its surroundings, then it could be terror-related.
The organization Ro’im Rachok now goes into schools in
Israel to recruit autistic teenagers into this army unit so that they will feel equal to their peer group, experience a sense of inclusion, and feel valued for what they can bring. In societies where there is no conscription into the army, there are many jobs, such as looking at X-ray data in airport security or in hospitals, where it pays not to miss a single instance of an anomaly, such as a hidden weapon or a tumor. Indeed, one study confirmed that autistic security employees spot more suspicious items in X-rayed hand luggage.
James Neely, who is autistic, had difficulty keeping a job before he applied to Auticon. His sensory issues and social difficulties meant he needed to work in a quiet environment, and he now wears headphones to block out the noise while he is programming. His job-for-life at Auticon allowed him to recover from a long period of poor mental health, including depression, the result of trying to fit into workplaces that didn’t understand him or offer him any help. In an interview with the Guardian, Neely reported that he is now happier, describing his placement with the pharmaceutical company GSK (GlaxoSmithKline) as “playing with data, just to see what we can do with it.”15 It’s a win-win, benefiting both the company and its autistic employees’ mental well-being.
We must scale up supported employment, not just for the benefit it will bring to society but because employment greatly improves the mental health of autistic people. Employment for autistic adults may turn out to be a far more effective intervention than any medical treatment, because it confers dignity and a sense of inclusion.
Of course, some autistic people don’t express hyper-systemizing as a talent for computer programming or by being a modern-day Linnaeus. Instead they hyper-systemize by watching the washing machines going around all day, or lining up toys in strict patterns, or spinning objects. Many autistic people become lost in the detail and can’t see the bigger picture. Yet, by looking at their autism as a form of hyper-systemizing, we might be better able to understand their world and to provide more opportunities for them to flourish at the same time.
Some parents will rightly protest that their autistic son or daughter, or even the majority of autistic people, do not have Rain Man–like “savant” skills, and that the day-to-day reality of autism is about multiple disabilities, diseases, and disorders.16 Some of these parents and indeed some autistic people themselves are part of a vocal lobby group on the internet who are “anti-neurodiversity.”17 They may be taking this stance because they live with an autistic person who is clearly suffering, and consequently the whole family suffers too. These concerns are important, as there are indeed diseases and disorders associated with autism, including gastrointestinal pain, epilepsy, severe anxiety, severe learning disability, minimal verbal ability, and self-injury.18 These can rightly be described as diseases and disorders in that they cause suffering. We must not ignore these challenging aspects of autism, and I share the wish for treatments or cures for such unwanted symptoms.
However, I would say, without wishing to cause offense to autistic people or their families, that these are not core features of autism. They co-occur with autism in some individuals, but by definition they are not core because they are not universal to all autistic people; they are not diagnostic of autism. It is absolutely right to demand treatments for unwanted symptoms, since ethically we should do anything to alleviate another person’s suffering. But these symptoms do not characterize the autistic mind. Pattern-seeking and hyper-systemizing don’t need to be cured any more than eye color does, which is also partly a reflection of a person’s genetic makeup.
Returning to an example of disability, why do some 25 percent of autistic people have a major learning disability? This can arise from rare genetic mutations, such as in the NRXN1 or SHANK3 genes, which affect the development, structure, and functioning of the brain.19 About one hundred of these rare genetic variants—which occur in only about 5 percent of autistic people—have been identified so far. Other factors that can increase the likelihood of learning disability co-occurring with autism include prematurity and birth complications.20 For the majority of autistic people with learning disability, however, we don’t yet know why their autism co-occurred with their learning disability.
One new hypothesis might be that a Systemizing Mechanism tuned high can produce a talented mind, but if tuned even higher, it manifests as learning disability. We can imagine that a person so exclusively focused on a tiny slice of data (the look and feel of sand grains as they pass through their fingers, or the shape and color of tiny soap bubbles in the kitchen sink) might have an extreme hyper-focus on detailed if-and-then patterns that interrupts their learning about the wider world, and even their language learning. But this is currently just a speculation awaiting research.
Alongside supported employment, autistic people should also be offered more support in negotiating the complexities of the social world, since the downside of hyper-systemizing is that it increases the likelihood of a disability in cognitive empathy. Interventions are available, and some of these help autistic people by harnessing their hyper-systemizing talents to learn social skills.
One example of such an intervention is Lego Therapy, where autistic kids enjoy and develop peer relationships in the safety of a systemizing activity they feel confident in, like building Lego models.21 They learn to socialize and communicate in a context where they can use their if-and-then reasoning. And this is true of many people, such as those who enjoy socializing in a pub by playing darts or snooker, but who struggle to have conversation without a structured activity.
Another intervention for autistic children is The Transporters, an animation whose characters are all vehicles with human emotions appearing on their “faces,” which are presented in the context of a highly systemizable domain.22 These children can enjoy the predictability of trains, trams, and cable cars in these TV animations while also looking at faces and learning what situations cause them to change. A final example is Mind Reading, a digital resource that has systemized every human emotion, as expressed by actors.23 Mind Reading’s encyclopedic video and audio format enables a person to learn to recognize emotions much as they might learn a foreign language: if a person’s eyes are in shape A, and their mouth is in shape B, then their emotion is X. Each of these interventions has been evaluated and shown to lead to improvements in autistic children’s social or emotion recognition skills.
Chris Worley noticed that her five-year-old autistic son Sasha naturally gravitated toward skateboarding. Sasha was good at it, probably because he had systemized all the moves with his if-and-then pattern-seeking skills.24 His mother had the brilliant idea to start a foundation called ASkate. The idea was to use what Sasha was good at in order to overcome what he struggled with: learning to socialize through doing tricks with other skateboarders. Chris’s foundation is a terrific example of taking a child with a disability and focusing on their talent. Chris set up ASkate in the car park of her local church in Alabama. Sasha loved skateboarding because he could experience total control over his board, and his mom realized this was how Sasha could be happy and be accepted as just another kid.
Ron Suskind’s autistic son Owen had a different passion: Disney movies. Each sequence of the movies contains multiple if-and-then patterns that are evident if you watch them on a loop. Characters do and say the identical same thing every time.25 Owen watched each movie thousands of times, until he knew every lyric and every character’s intonation perfectly and could imitate them with exquisite accuracy—and yet he didn’t talk to people or seem to understand them.
Ron had the remarkable insight that if he imitated different Disney characters, using the highly scripted voices in the exact intonations heard in the movies, this would not only grab Owen’s attention but provide a scaffold and predictable structure so that Owen would provide the next phrase or next line in the dialogue—all from that specific movie. Ron would then ever so gradually adapt the “scripted” (that is, systemized) interaction to the current context, so that Owen would now not just be saying a line in the movie but talking about something in the current context. In this way, Owen started to communicate with Ron, and over many years he started to talk to others. Disney movies had become his stepping-stone into the previously confusing world of human social interaction and communication.
Anxiety is very common in autistic people—perhaps as many as 80 percent suffer from it. Common forms it takes are anxiety due to either unexpected change or social interaction. Is anxiety in autistic people so high because of the limits they encounter on which aspects of the world can be systemized? We discussed earlier how many autistic people may avoid the social world because many forms of social interaction can’t be systemized.
Another new hypothesis that needs to be tested is whether, in an autistic person with preexisting anxiety and in whom the Systemizing Mechanism is tuned high, this might cause obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).26 OCD occurs at higher rates in autistic people than in the general population, and often takes an if-and-then form: “if there are germs on my hands, and I don’t wash my hands through a strict sequence of actions, then I will contaminate others.” Or, “if I contaminate another person, and that person dies, then it will all be my fault.” While a Systemizing Mechanism tuned high might be highly advantageous for spotting patterns that help a person understand how something works, it may be that in the context of underlying anxiety it can also produce a disabling psychiatric degree of OCD. Again, this explanation for the elevated rates of OCD in autistic people is currently just speculation and needs testing.
How can we bring hyper-systemizing into education? Hyper-systemizers, including autistic people, learn differently, and while some will gravitate toward systemizing subjects such as math, physics, or music, others may even fail because many high school subjects are taught in a way that is not well designed for their kind of mind. These students will struggle in classes that are taught superficially or imprecisely, by a teacher focused on keeping most kids’ attention at the expense of presenting factual information. Even worse, some school subjects are built around fuzzy tasks like writing a story rather than around rule-based systems like understanding how things work. Our schools should be identifying children from the earliest age as hyper-systemizers (which will include some children who have been formally diagnosed as autistic), so we can provide an educational environment that plays to their strengths, presenting information in an if-and-then format, so they can shine rather than fail or be turned off education altogether.27
As an aside, a hyper-systemizer only needs a diagnosis of autism if they are struggling to cope, to the detriment of their daily functioning. If someone has a supportive parent or partner to help them function, they may not need a diagnosis. Or if their lifestyle fits well with the characteristics of autism (such as being self-employed or having self-directed employment, together with a very accepting, tolerant, and open-minded set of neighbors or colleagues), again, they may not need a diagnosis. A diagnosis should be restricted to those who are struggling as a result of their autism.
Imagine an educational system that offered two streams: a broad curriculum—as we have now—for those who are generalists, which is most kids, and a narrow curriculum for those who are specialists, the hyper-systemizers. We have the tools to identify these kids because they are Extreme Type S on the systemizing and empathy bell curves. The broad curriculum already exists—this is what defines mainstream education. The focus is on learning a little about many subjects. But the broad curriculum doesn’t work for some kids, because it involves too much switching too frequently. The broad curriculum is also often structured as group learning from a teacher, but some pupils learn better studying one-to-one, or even alone. The narrow curriculum would encourage those kids interested in one subject to go into as much depth as they want. It would be based on the idea that the most important thing is that the child has chosen a subject that ignites their passion and interest. Whether it’s math or history or something far more focused, like an extinct ancient language, if the child simply wants to study only that subject for their whole semester, or their whole school career, it would still constitute a valuable education and prepare them for a specialist occupation. They should be allowed to pursue their strong narrow interest, sometimes pejoratively called their “obsession.” Greta Thunberg, the Swedish autistic teenager, has a strong narrow interest in climate breakdown, and she has succeeded in raising awareness of the urgency of this issue for the future of the planet.28
I’ve met such people, and they blossom when given the opportunity. Daniel Lightwing, whom I diagnosed with Asperger syndrome when he was a student at my college, Trinity, in Cambridge, represented the United Kingdom in the International Math Olympiad. The documentary film Beautiful Young Minds is based on his life.29 This is what he told me:
“When I was about ten or eleven, it struck me that all of the subjects except maths and science are only relevant to, kind of, our civilization on this planet. But then maths, it studies everything that exists and everything that doesn’t exist. And then, you know, from that moment I set apart everything else and just went to study maths.”
For the kids who are natural specialists, a narrow curriculum designed for their strengths would prevent education from being a time of misery, which often results in underperforming and leaving school with few qualifications. Instead, they could enjoy their learning experience. We would be providing the right conditions in which their particular learning style could take root and blossom. Although some may argue that education should be broad, not narrow, if broad education is turning kids away from pursuing any education at all, a narrow education can surely be defended as better than none. As one parent put it to me: “Mainstream schooling is not fit for purpose for a proportion of children.” Ironically, the generalist inevitably ends up specializing (by the time they get to college or into a job), and the specialist often discovers interesting connections between the initial highly focused starting point of their education and neighboring fields. So, these are just different routes into learning: broad to narrow for the majority, or narrow to broad for the tiny minority.
Al, who we now know was Thomas Edison, had a high number of autistic traits, and Jonah is diagnosed as autistic. They are just two of the millions of hyper-systemizers who have driven human invention, and therefore human progress, over the past 100,000 years. Their minds are wired to seek patterns and to systemize insatiably, through eagle-eyed observation and careful, step-by-step experimenting. Among the new generation of hyper-systemizers will be some of the great inventors of our future. Their novel ideas can become innovations, but only with our support. If we acknowledge that some autistic people were and still are the drivers of the evolution of science, technology, art, and other forms of invention, their future can be different—but only with a big shift in our culture and society.