Sally Hopkins always sensed her mind was different. At her thirteenth birthday party, she sat silently in the corner, meticulously counting the number of times the other children jumped on the trampoline. At her end-of-school party, while her friends drank and danced all night, she spent the evening drawing intricately patterned animals, wolves and owls among her favourites. And at her first job interview – to be a waitress – she became unduly distracted by a coffee stain on her interviewer’s shirtsleeve, and pointed it out to him several times.
‘Suffice it to say, I didn’t get that job,’ Sally told me when I met her for a walk on London’s Hampstead Heath. ‘Or many others, for that matter, even though I tell them that I’m autistic.’ It was a cool summer’s day in July 2021, and I’d reached out to Sally via a colleague who specialises in autism research. I’d read about autism and met many people with the condition, but I’d never truly considered what the phenomenon meant for brain evolution. It was a brain change like any other and so warranted further exploration.
The heath was full of people, desperate to enjoy the outdoors after more than a year of Covid-19 lockdowns. Despite the end of local restrictions, we decided to abide by social distancing. ‘My entire life has felt like an exercise in social distancing,’ Sally noted wryly, ‘so this actually feels normal to me.’
Sally is a laid-back, perspicacious woman with dark hair, bright blue eyes and an easy smile. Growing up in south Norfolk as the only autistic child among four siblings, she struggled to comprehend the reason for her uniqueness – opting instead to retreat into herself, chasing imaginary friends through the cobbled streets and thatched cottages of the English countryside. ‘I spent a lot of time alone, but it was still an idyllic childhood. I felt connected with nature, with its rhythms and patterns. I liked to focus on the geometry of flowers; I still do.’ Today, Sally spends her days writing poetry, devouring books and savouring the ‘thrill’ of freshly ground coffee. Her unique skills and talents include a remarkable memory, a preternatural eye for detail and a deep reverence for the environment. She also struggles socially in large groups and is averse to change.
As we strolled up Parliament Hill, the London skyline gently unfurling below, I asked Sally what she thought of her autism now, given that, at twenty-five, she was mature enough to acknowledge and apprehend it fully. ‘I think of it the same way I did as a child,’ she says,
as a difference that other people find hard to accept. But I also don’t know what to think about it, and I sometimes find myself pondering the concept of neurodivergence and what it signifies in the world. It’s as if I’ve found an anomaly in the flower’s geometry. I need to know what it means.
Like many autism advocates, Sally feels compelled to educate people about the condition. She regularly attends support groups and scientific conferences, and recently went round door to door to tell people to read Naoki Higashida’s The Reason I Jump, a book recounting the experiences of its thirteen-year-old non-verbal autistic author. Higashida’s goal in writing the book was to open people’s minds to the endless wonders of autistic cognition. Like Higashida and so many others, Sally wants awareness, not sympathy; insight, not fear.
‘I like talking to people like you,’ she says, admiring a butterfly resting on a blade of grass.
People who want to understand things, to glimpse their inner purpose. I think most people are contented with the status quo. They find it comforting because it doesn’t challenge them in any meaningful way. But maybe we can change that for autism. Or at least try.
All minds are different, but some are more different than others. This is certainly true for Kim Peak, an American savant who can read both pages of an open book at once, his left eye reading the left page, his right eye reading the right. It’s true for Stephen Wiltshire, a British artist who can draw the cityscape of Rome in meticulous detail, entirely from memory. It’s true for countless techies in Silicon Valley. And it’s been true for some of the world’s greatest minds including Albert Einsten, Henry Cavendish, Nikola Tesla and Lewis Carroll.
We label this extraordinary difference ‘autism’ (from the Greek ‘autos’, meaning ‘self’, and ‘ism’ implying an isolated self). It’s described as a developmental disorder characterised by learning difficulties, aversion to human contact, impairments in communication and social interaction, and the presence of often obsessive, repetitive behaviours. It’s four times more common in boys than girls, and exhibits such a range of symptoms that it’s now more generally referred to as autism spectrum disorder (ASD). First described in the 1940s by the Austrian paediatrician Hans Asperger (a eugenicist and Nazi sympathiser who sanctioned race hygiene policies including forced sterilisation), autism has captured the public’s interest in a way few other conditions have. Powerful myths such as the cold, unloving ‘refrigerator mother’ were blamed for autism, and all manner of behavioural therapy has been called upon to treat it. Maybe – just maybe – the narrative goes, there is a way to release the ‘normal’ child locked inside.
Yet for all the frightening canards and scientific intrigue, few understand what autism is or why it exists. For decades, scientists have looked for signs of autism in the brain – for lesions, scars or tumours – all without success. Under an MRI scanner, the autistic brain shows some regions that are smaller than usual, but others that are larger. The cerebellum (the brain’s movement centre) is 20 per cent smaller in some autistics, explaining why some experience problems with balance. An autistic person’s visual cortex responds less strongly to faces than it does to objects and buildings, explaining why many people with autism find it hard to make eye contact. Patterns of communication between brain regions also differ in autistic people: those with high-functioning autism (referring to people with mild symptoms) have greater communication between some regions, but less between others. Under the microscope, the detailed structure of nerve cells shows the odd difference here and there. Some studies have found that neurons made from the stem cells of people with autism grow faster and develop more complex branches than their counterparts taken from cells of people without autism. Others have shown that the brain fails to prune synapses during childhood and adolescence, leaving a surplus of synapses that can overload the brain with information.
However, autistic brains also have distinct advantages. The autistic brain is on average 3 per cent larger than those without autism; in some cases it has been shown to be 15 per cent larger. Larger brains provide an evolutionary advantage, as we saw with the rise of Homo sapiens in the opening chapter. Larger-brained mammals are typically more intelligent, and for autistics the extra brain volume increases the thickness of the cerebral cortex (the brain’s outer layer), creating a powerful memory system which many autistic people say accounts for their exceptional ability to recall visual details.
Genetically, autism is a deep mystery. Since the 1970s, researchers have known there is a genetic contribution, but no ‘autism gene’ has ever been found. We know today that some sixty-five genes are strongly associated with autism – those who carry any of them are more likely to develop autism – and that more than 200 other genes are weakly associated with it. These genes have subtle effects and work in concert. Their function is unclear, but many are believed to help neurons talk to one another or control how other genes are switched on and off. A gene called neurexin, for instance, helps neurons connect at the synapse and has mutated in a small percentage of autistics. Mutations have also been found in genes such as neuroligan and SHANK3, both of which are essential for the proper functioning of synapses. Though there are many other genes that help neurons connect, these findings lend credence to the idea that autism is ultimately a genetically induced synaptic difference.
The genetic picture becomes more mysterious when considering the role of copy number variations (CNVs): genetic changes involving duplications or deletions of vast stretches of DNA. Hundreds of CNVs have been linked to autism, but again they are rare, accounting for no more than 1 per cent of cases. Geneticists often speak of a ‘many-to-one’ relationship between genes and disease – there are many genes for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, but usually only one set of symptoms. But for autism the relationship is ‘many-to-many’, because the many genes that can cause autism in some people lead to other diseases – such as epilepsy, ADHD and schizophrenia – in others. Today, researchers are looking for patterns among autism-related genes. But what such patterns would mean for autistics, no one yet knows.
In fact, how to interpret any of these findings remains unclear. Uta Frith, a neuroscientist who specialises in autism research at University College London, admits, ‘We do not yet know the significance of any of these findings, what exactly they tell us about anatomical structure or physiological function… I cannot hide the fact that there is little specific to report about the causes of autism, or about the brain in autism.’1
There is of course another explanation. What if the way we’ve been thinking about autism is fundamentally wrong? What if autism is not a disease but rather a neurological difference? What if, given all the marvels of brain evolution we have seen, autism is simply another unexpected legacy of our evolving minds?
In 2004, an insightful archaeologist named Penny Spikins began to investigate the evolutionary origins of autism. Based at York University after conducting fieldwork in Patagonia and the Pennines, she started to wonder whether autism could have played a role in what made our species different.
‘When you look back at the archaeological record,’ she told me during a long conversation on Skype, ‘you start to see transitions where there are increasingly finely made tools. The detail is astonishing. They are almost perfect. And that got me thinking… given that autism tends to create a greater attention to detail, what kind of contribution did individuals with autism bring to society?’
Spikins chose an auspicious moment to voice her radical idea. The rise of molecular genetics was transforming biology, forcing scientists to view the subtleties and complexities of autism in a completely new light. What’s more, DNA dating was helping scientists understand the timeline of genes linked to autism in human evolution. And they were old. Very old. Some were older than multicellular life itself. In addition to being particularly sensitive to mutations, these ancient genes were notable for their role in programming the development of the body and the brain. Known in genetic parlance as ‘hubs’, they are often the starting point for larger gene networks to emerge over time. This makes them powerful contributors to genetic diversity.
‘Autism-associated genes seem to be part of the, let’s say, evolvability of the genome,’ said Spikins.
We know there must have been an element of positive selection for autism in the past. It must have bestowed certain advantages. And we know that some genes linked to autism are common in primates; that they’re part of a shared ape heritage which predates the split that led to humans. There’s even been some work on what you might call autistic traits in chimpanzees.
That work was done in 2016 by Kyoko Yoshida and his colleagues in Japan.2 They noticed that one of their macaques was displaying some unusual behaviour, namely reduced sociability, repetition, obsessiveness and an inability to change its behaviour in response to other macaques. When they sequenced the macaque’s DNA, moreover, they spotted two rare genetic variants linked to autism and other psychiatric conditions including depression, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The genes, known as ABCA13 and HTR2C (their full names are a biochemical mouthful), reduced the number of neurons in the monkey’s medial frontal cortex, a brain region important for social behaviour. In particular, the medial frontal cortex is known to house so-called mirror neurons – cells that let us mirror the behaviour of others – and so-called partner neurons – cells that let us respond appropriately to others. Yoshida’s findings don’t prove that monkeys can develop autism, but they nonetheless show that autism might not be an inherently human phenomenon.
The growing conclusion is that autism is with us for a reason. Our autistic ancestors probably played a fundamental role in shaping early human societies due to their unique strengths and special abilities. For example, many people with autism possess a deep understanding of natural systems. Isaac Newton, who experts agree showed signs of autism, was constantly preoccupied with understanding the systems that explained the complex motions of the planets. This obsessive focus on detail – called systematising – is how many autistic people are able to calculate what day of the week a given date falls on with astonishing accuracy: anything that obeys rules and patterns is child’s play. Integrating such a skill into human communities would have enhanced our understanding of calendric systems and maps – critical innovations during times of environmental strife such as the wintry conditions of the Ice Age.
Because autism predominantly affects males, some scholars believe that systematising is proof of a popular theory of autism called the ‘extreme male brain’ hypothesis. It posits that autistics possess a turbo-charged ‘masculinised’ brain, and that higher than normal levels of testosterone cause autistic people to lack empathy. The idea was mainstream science until new research showed it to be bunkum. In 2019, in the largest study of its kind, a group of Canadian and American scientists found that the evidence for the male brain hypothesis had relied on samples far too small to prove cause and effect.3
What people with autism do often have, besides a remarkable memory, are enhanced vision, taste and smell. The incorporation of these skills into early human groups would have led to the creation of ‘specialists’: members who would have been indispensable for tracking, hunting and the creation of new farming systems – all of which would have been essential to group survival. Indeed, there is evidence for specialists in our own time. In 2005, Piers Vitebsky, an anthropologist who once lived among an indigenous community in the Russian Arctic, observed an elderly reindeer herdsman from Siberia who had memorised the parentage, medical history and character of every one of his 2,600 animals. Although he preferred the company of his reindeer to humans, he was highly respected in the community and had a wife, son and grandchildren.4 His gift is just one example of the sophisticated, autism-like abilities of modern tribal peoples, who typically have at least one member with extraordinary skills of navigation, husbandry and predicting changes in the weather.
Autism is often accompanied by extraordinary visual skills. Some report that they can read the small print on products from across a room, or spot tiny variations in the fabric of a carpet. Temple Grandin, the famous autistic professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University, says her sight is so good that she often forgets to turn on the headlights when driving at night. The autistic brain processes fine detail much faster than the non-autistic, explaining why many autistics score twice as high as non-autistics on tests of visual acuity. From an evolutionary perspective, the benefits of enhanced vision are substantial: it helps us find food, avoid predators, seek out shelter and spot mates.
Art too may have benefitted from our autistic forebears. Cave art, such as the paintings found in the Chauvet Cave in southern France, demonstrate exceptional realism and a mystifying love of detail. Early humans relied on depicting and memorising their surroundings, and the autistic brain’s ability to focus on parts rather than wholes would have made them the go-to choice of artist. Today, countless artists have revealed how autism has shaped their art. ‘I became a geological and archaeological book illustrator using my skills in 3D and love of detail,’ says John Adams, a digital media professional.5 ‘I have always been attracted to shapes and patterns of different forms and sizes and now create unique fused art glassware,’ says Angus Corbett, an artist working with glass. ‘Being an artist connects me to people. It gives me a language with which to share my unusual vantage point,’ says Sonia Boue, an artist who has made films about art for Tate Britain, adding, ‘My work is not about being autistic, but if you’re touched by it and later discover I’m autistic, I may change your point of view.’
As for taste, it is well known that many autistic people are picky about what they eat and avoid trying new foods. Some will only eat mushy foods, for instance, and reject any food that doesn’t fit a strict regime of only a handful of dishes. Since there are no differences in the taste buds of people with autism and the rest of the population, the trait must have its origins in the brain. It may be that the heightened sensory abilities of autistics make them oversensitive to certain tastes, like veritable supertasters. As for smell, studies have found that people with autism experience smell more intensely than is usual. Many will refuse to walk on grass because the smell is too overpowering. Others will refuse to change clothes each day because the smell of freshly washed laundry is intolerable. Why this is the case remains unclear; it may be due to a genetic variation that put their senses on a different evolutionary path. Whatever the reason, smell and the other senses are clearly different in people with autism. Some scholars think that heightened senses flood the autistic brain with information, interfering with their social brain and thereby prioritising perception over social ties.6
Attention to detail is a common trait in autism, beautifully captured in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time when Christopher, the fifteen-year-old autistic narrator, describes an encounter with the police:
Then the police arrived. I like the police. They have uniforms and numbers and you know what they are meant to be doing. There was a policewoman and a policeman. The policewoman had a little hole in her tights on her left ankle and a red scratch in the middle of the hole. The policeman had a big orange leaf stuck to the bottom of his shoe which was poking out from one side.7
This fondness for detail was long treated as yet another weakness by early researchers, who labelled it ‘weak central coherence’, a fancy term for not being able to see the forest for the trees, for missing the big picture.
But as researchers soon learned, focusing on the trees is no bad thing. In 1978 a famous study led by the psychologist Tim Langdell showed that autistics are much better at recognising faces than non-autistics, even if the image of a face is turned upside down or only the lower part of a face is shown.8 They are better at seeing ‘pure pattern’ rather than ‘social pattern’, says Langdell.
This is a very useful skill for the Intelligence Community. Today GCHQ employs more than 300 staff with autism. ‘[They] have a different way of approaching problems,’ said a member of GCHQ’s recruitment team. ‘They have a much more analytical, investigatory mindset.’9
Seeing pure pattern has another advantage. It stokes creativity, something autistics, long stereotyped as cold and inexpressive, were thought to lack. Ironically, this is because the tests researchers used to measure creativity were so uncreative themselves that they missed it entirely. They would ask a subject to name as many uses as they could for a paperclip or some other common object. Or ask them to use a circle to create as many drawings as possible in five minutes. Invariably, those with autistic traits would come up with fewer suggestions and not many drawings. But in 2015 scientists realised that while autistic people have fewer ideas, they are more likely to exhibit divergent thinking – thinking outside the box.10 Common uses for a paperclip include a bookmark or a tool to clean your nails, but an autistic’s uses for a paperclip include innovations such as a weight to balance a paper aeroplane or a light-duty spring. And where those without autism may use a circle to draw a smiley face or a pie, an autistic may draw a periscope view or a merry-go-round. The link between autism and creativity is staggering, and almost certainly reshaped human evolution.
Autistic creativity may have even reshaped our understanding of movement and light. In 2008, mathematicians spotted something oddly familiar in the Asperger artist Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night (1889). The swirling patterns of luminescence in the sky seemed to be speaking their language. On closer inspection, and to their amazement, the painting displayed the mathematical formula of fluid turbulence.11 Hidden within the dazzling eddies of stars is an equation strikingly similar to that discovered by the Russian mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov in 1941. No other artist’s work demonstrates this. The physics of fluid turbulence is remarkably complex: it’s thought to involve an interplay of tiny quantum whirlpools (small punctures in space-time) surrounded by cascades of circulating fluid. With no instruction, van Gogh’s troubled mind had unlocked one of nature’s deepest secrets.
Van Gogh’s paintings contain many riddles that scholars still can’t answer. But one thing is clear: the artist was not merely interested in painting, he was obsessed. It was an obsession that pushed him to the verge of insanity and probably foreshadowed his suicide in 1890 – a dark, inner pain that tormented him into manic depression and fits of creative brilliance: a curse and a gift. From an evolutionary perspective, autism and obsession share genetic roots. People with autism are twice as likely to be diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and people with OCD are four times as likely to have autism. The overlap relies on a gene called KDM4C, an enzyme that regulates DNA. In the brain, circuits in the striatum (responsible for movement and reward) have been linked to people with autism and OCD, and a region within the striatum known as the caudate nucleus is unusually large in both groups. These brain regions also control habit formation, which helps to explain the repetitive behaviours seen in many autistics.
What’s important to keep in mind is that obsessions can be a good thing. Though we often associate them with overpowering and unwanted thoughts, they can be an advantageous trait and have extraordinary results when channelled into skills such as tool-making, systematising thought, painting, or computer-coding. Today, we are dependent on the fruits of such obsessions. When the autistics working in Silicon Valley obsess over the latest technological innovations, amazing things happen that benefit us all. ‘The movers and shakers have always been obsessive nuts,’ wrote the American author Theodore Sturgeon. Obsessions can be empowering, life-changing and world-altering.
On a summer day in August 2021, Sally Hopkins looked up from her coffee to see me, once more, arriving for another chat about her extraordinary mind. My meeting with Sally, at a hip coffee shop in Shoreditch, was not to retread the familiar ground of how she experiences autism – I already knew a lot about her particular traits – but to learn what she thought about how autism aided human evolution. Since most of the research in this field was relatively new, I wondered how – and if – it changed the way she thought about her condition.
‘It’s amazing,’ she said, her eyes beaming. ‘It’s as if there’s been a de facto brain segregation in our society, a kind of neural apartheid, and it’s finally crumbling.’ Elaborating, Sally described how her unique skills and talents made sense in an evolutionary context. She counts things obsessively because our ancestors needed to systematise their thoughts. She draws dazzling wildlife pictures because our ancestors depicted animals in ancient cave art. And she possesses an all-consuming attention to detail because our ancestors needed to create complex tools to survive. Her mind is not a problem to be solved; it is the legacy of millions of years of brain evolution.
‘I’ve been remembering things from my childhood in a completely new light – times when I was picked on, times when I knew my behaviour was okay even though I was made to feel it was wrong, times when my parents needlessly worried about me.’ For a long time, Sally’s parents didn’t accept her autism. She still has difficulty discussing it with them.
When I asked Sally if she thought this new understanding would help dispel the myths about autism – that it used to be rare but is now common, that we’re over-diagnosing eccentric children with an interesting condition, that we should be aiming to make people with autism indistinguishable from their peers – she was optimistic.
I’m a big George Orwell fan, and one of my favourite quotes of his is, ‘In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.’ I think the autistic community has been living in a time of deceit for centuries. It feels like it’s been one myth after another, one discrimination after another. But now that we know that autism was a part of the story of how the human brain evolved, it feels like, by telling people this, it’s our revolutionary act, our revolutionary truth.
Of Sally’s many qualities, her intelligence struck me most. It’s often said that nearly one in three autistic people has an intellectual disability, defined as having an IQ of below 70. But in reality, autism is a condition of high intelligence.
In fact, autism is now thought to have evolved several enhanced, but imbalanced, components of intelligence. One is the enlarged brain seen in many children with autism. Another is the well-documented synaptic peculiarities, which on one hand underlie difficulties in communication but on the other boost learning and memory. And the emerging picture is that, for all their difficulties with social interaction, autistics possess a stronger aptitude for focusing on tasks, a more deliberative decision-making style and a marvellous penchant for jobs involving science and technology.
Autistic children have even been found to get cleverer over time. Marjorie Solomon, a clinical psychologist at the University of California, Davis, and her colleagues have found that half of children with autism significantly improve their intellectual abilities between the ages of two and eight.12 Even autistic children considered intellectually disabled can achieve average intelligence in the same period. ‘This tells us that you can’t be too hasty in diagnosing intellectual disability, because you just don’t know what’s going to happen,’ says Solomon.13 Her team analysed data from a long-term study of children diagnosed with autism, known as the Autism Phenome Project. In it, families are invited to have their child’s brain scanned at age two or three, and then again two years later to assess their development. Behavioural and cognitive tests are also performed at this time, and then again when the child is between six and eight. From this, four groups of children emerge: the ‘High Challenges’, children whose intelligence drops over time; the ‘Stable Lows’, children whose intelligence remains the same over time; the ‘Lesser Challenges’, children whose intelligence increases modestly over time; and the ‘Changers’, children whose intelligence balloons over time.
Solomon’s Changers represent the largest proportion of children in the study, a staggering 35 per cent. The Changers showed improved intelligence, better communication skills and a decline in disruptive behaviours. Solomon is now trying to understand what it is about the Changers that distinguishes them. ‘We really think it’s important to understand the differences, both biological and in terms of treatment experience and other characteristics,’ she said. One unanswered question is why the Changers improved their verbal ability over time, yet only modestly improved in terms of ‘autism severity’: the behaviours associated with their condition. Curiously, it was the Lesser Challenges group that showed the greatest improvement in autism severity, despite not seeing the same intelligence gains as the Changers. Whatever the reason, Solomon concludes that her findings offer ‘a hopeful message for many’.
The indisputable fact is that autism often brings new ways of seeing the world, and without autism it seems unlikely that human communities would be where they are today. This doesn’t mean we should view ancient savants in a utilitarian fashion. ‘Autism wasn’t integrated solely because people with autism had some use,’ Spikins points out, ‘but because being human is about integrating people who are vulnerable without asking questions. And then a side-effect of that is that you do end up with all sorts of trades and talents that are useful.’
A pressing question for many is why we are only hearing about autism’s role in evolution now. Why, given all our efforts to teach the public the truth about human origins and the wonders of evolution, has such a pivotal subplot remained conspicuously absent? The main culprit appears to be our evolutionary narratives, which tend to focus on the role of strong, independent men. Here again, the famous ‘monkey to man’ illustration that presents our history as a gradual transition from lowly ape to perfect man tells us more about the way we view ourselves than about human evolution. The final drawing is of a man, standing alone, ready to face whatever comes his way. It is an image sanctifying independence, the exact opposite of what made our species successful in the past and continues to do so today: interdependence.
‘We still cling to this idea of complete independence,’ said Spikins.
Of the perfect, independent person who we can look back on and think, yes, that’s us. When people ask me about human origins, what they often mean is my origins, the origins of me individually, what did I look like in the past? But when we look at the skeletal record there’s virtually nobody who doesn’t have some sort of injury or trauma or something that made them different from the rest of the group. Life was tough. We depended on other people and we weren’t perfect. We were all sometimes vulnerable. And that just isn’t in our narratives.
I dislike the word disability. It suggests there’s something wrong with the individual rather than the society that excludes the individual. Most of us are only ‘able’ insofar as we have the necessary biological hardware for life as defined by the majority – adjustable limbs to navigate changing habitats, five basic senses to understand what’s happening around us, and brains able to adopt the social and cultural conventions of the day. None of this would feel remotely special if an alien race with different needs colonised our planet.
Picture it: a hegemony of extra-terrestrial beings who use telekinesis to move objects and telepathy to exchange thoughts. If we were to coexist and thrive among such beings, we would have to rely on their willingness to modify their society. The alternative would be for them to decide against this, opting instead to label all of humanity ‘disabled’. Perhaps our alien overlords would establish research centres to investigate what was wrong with us. Perhaps they would offer us medication to be more like them. The point, wonderfully made by an autistic, pseudo-named ‘Muskie’, is that this is precisely what non-autistics, otherwise known as neurotypicals, have been doing to autistics for decades. In a playful tit for tat, Muskie inverts the narrative with his website ‘The Institute for the Study of the Neurotypical’, which states:
Neurotypical syndrome is a neurobiological disorder characterised by preoccupation with social norms, delusions of superiority, and obsession with conformity… NT is believed to be genetic in origin. Autopsies have shown the brain of the neurotypical is typically smaller than that of an autistic and may have overdeveloped areas related to social behaviour.14
You don’t have to be a neuroscientist to understand that autism is merely a different kind of mind. In 1993 the autism-rights activist Jim Sinclair wrote the famous essay ‘Don’t Mourn for Us’, calling for an end to the fear, pity and public stigma associated with autism. Parents in particular were reprimanded for their role in creating the narrative. In words controversial to this day, he declared,
You didn’t lose a child to autism. You lost a child because the child you waited for never came into existence. That isn’t the fault of the autistic child who does exist, and it shouldn’t be our burden. We need and deserve families who can see us and value us for ourselves, not families whose vision of us is obscured by the ghosts of children who never lived. Grieve if you must, for your own lost dreams. But don’t mourn for us. We are alive. We are real. And we’re here waiting for you.15
Sinclair’s mission was to allow people with autism to become the narrators of their own experiences, free to validate their feelings and ready to celebrate their differences as all other differences are celebrated. Following Sinclair, the Australian sociologist Judy Singer coined the term ‘neurodiversity’ in 1998, which was quickly picked up and championed by the autistic community. In a nutshell, it means the following: just as there are infinite variations of body type, ethnicity and culture, so too are there infinite variations in neurocognitive function within our species. Autism is therefore just another form of human diversity. There are no ‘misfits’, ‘oddballs’, ‘eccentrics’, ‘nerds’, ‘loners’ or ‘weirdos’ – there is only humanity, with all the wondrous biodiversity and neurodiversity it entails. In her pioneering sociological thesis, Singer declared,
I wanted to see a neurodiversity revolution as potent as the feminist revolution had been. I wanted to see if, given a more understanding, inclusive and supportive environment… a new type of human, capable of rising to a new level of human creativity, would evolve.16
Reaching this understanding has not been easy. Even today, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnosis and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM-IV, defines autism as a condition manifesting in an ‘abnormal development in social interaction and communication, and a markedly restricted repertoire of activity and interests.’ But I am reluctant to accept the words of a psychiatric organisation that as recently as 1968 defined homosexuality as ‘a mental disorder’.
The sad truth is that for many autistics, the medical establishment – with its need to atomise, objectify and institutionalise – has been an engine of oppression, not emancipation. As Temple Grandin observes:
Parents come up to me all the time and say things like, ‘First my kid was diagnosed with high-end autism. Then he was diagnosed with ADHD. Then he was diagnosed with Asperger’s. What is he?’ I understand their frustration. They’re at the mercy of a medical system that’s full of label-locked thinkers. But the parents are part of that system too. They’ll ask me, ‘What’s the single most important thing to do for an autistic kid?’ Or ‘What do I do about a kid who misbehaves?’ What does that even mean?17
Grandin, who has had her own brain imaged and studied, goes on to explain that the differences are what make us individuals. For example, she has more connections in her corpus callosum (the bundle of nerves bridging the left and right hemispheres) but others could just as well have more, fewer, or the same number. Her brain’s language circuits branch more than a ‘normal’ person’s, but this too exists on a continuum of neurological variation. The same is true for her unique genome. ‘I have often thought that eventually we’re going to be asking ourselves at what point this or that autism-related genetic variation is just a normal variation,’ she writes. ‘Everything in the brain, everything in genetics – they’re all on one big continuum.’
An unfortunate product of autism research, in my view, is the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ).18 Like IQ, AQ seeks to label people based on some pretty sketchy science. The test consists of a fifty-item questionnaire meant to assess things like social skill, attention to detail, communication and imagination, scored on a 4-point scale (1 = definitely agree to 4 = definitely disagree). The average score is 16.4, with scores above 30 veering into autism territory. Examples from the questionnaire include: ‘When I’m reading a story, I can easily imagine what the characters might look like’; ‘I would rather go to the library than a party’; ‘When I talk, it isn’t always easy for others to get a word in edgewise’; ‘I enjoy doing things spontaneously’; ‘New situations make me anxious’.
Frankly, they’re absurd. Anyone could be classified as autistic or non-autistic with questions this vague. We can all get pretty anxious in new situations, and I, for one, enjoy going to the library more than a party. The test’s goal, of course, is to create arbitrary lines to label-lock people into arbitrary groups. Perhaps you scored ‘better’ in the social domain, but ‘poorly’ in the imagination domain. Perhaps, based on your score, you do not have the ‘deficit’ of autism after all.
Temple Grandin points out that AQ can shame many autistics into silence: ‘A generation ago, a lot of these people would have been seen simply as gifted. Now that there’s a diagnosis, however, they’ll do anything to avoid being ghettoized.’
Cracks in AQ started to appear in 2017 when Swedish researchers showed that the majority of the questions (thirty-eight out of fifty) had no explanatory power. They couldn’t even suggest who did and who didn’t have autism.19 Worse, we now know that even if a person scores high on the test (over 32), the odds of that person having autism are about one in ten. When scientists tested AQ using what we call the positive predictive value, which is the probability that someone with a positive test result truly has the condition, the data churned out only 8 to 12 per cent, hardly a ringing endorsement. Ironically, the failure of AQ to spot and measure autism revealed more than the test itself ever could.
The public’s understanding of autism is certainly improving. Progressive writings such as Steve Silberman’s Neurotribes and Andrew Solomon’s Far from the Tree have changed the zeitgeist, shifting society away from biological determinism and towards a more liberating social constructivism. Consequently, the neurodiversity movement has spread far and wide, creating information networks that allow autistics to share their experience and enter mainstream society. Autistics are finally starting to see themselves for who they are: a diverse community of extraordinary individuals with unique brains, long oppressed by a dominant culture of unenlightened, unchallenged neurotypicals. But don’t take my word for it. Hear what they themselves have to say:
ADAM: I’m not weird or socially awkward, I’m just different. I like to be logical and I don’t understand why people lie. My autism comes with challenges, but I definitely don’t see it as a burden. It’s a part of me and I wouldn’t change it… I would change how others view me. I see it in their eyes, that ‘something’s wrong’ look. And I want to say to them, ‘My brain just works differently, please don’t judge me.’ But I feel too sad and frustrated to say anything… When will people accept us for who we are?
SUSAN: I feel that people should stop trying to fit autistics into neurotypical moulds. As a lower functioning autistic who can’t tolerate the strain of hard effort and rigorous learning, I feel that people should stop pushing me to ‘train myself out of my shortcomings’… if autistics and other disabled persons want to push themselves to the limit and put themselves through tough teaching programmes, fine with them. But those who can’t shouldn’t be put through torture… I am fed up with being thought of as lazy… I wish they’d realise that some people may not have the wiring necessary to do certain things.
GWENN: Neurotypicals need to get over themselves. Why should I bend to their ways? How about they try to be more like me? I learnt to read before all my classmates. I see pictures with every new thought. But all I hear, all the time, is how ‘difficult’ I can be. How science needs to find a cure for me. To be honest, I think it’s appalling. I know there are autistics out there who want and sometimes need medical help, and I wouldn’t dream of speaking for them, but we need to stop lumping all autistics together. Treating me would feel like assault.
LEE: When I discovered that others like me were speaking out about their autism, I couldn’t believe it. I’d been living completely under the radar. I wouldn’t even try to talk to people about it, because as soon as the ‘A’ word comes up the conversation moves to a parallel universe, a nightmarish universe, where every word, every syllable leaving my mouth is dissected by the other person’s thoughts. I know they’re trying to be supportive, but they can’t help it: society has programmed them to see us a certain way, to feel sorry for us… We will one day reach a true understanding. I’m optimistic now. The neurodiversity movement has changed everything.
RAMILA: We need to organise ourselves for our voices to be heard. Neurodiversity is a great start but its message will only be effective if it changes the public’s perception of autism. I’m always online now, searching for others who will come out of the closet, so to speak… I don’t think anyone with autism should feel scared or stigmatised by society. I think society should feel ashamed of the way it’s made us feel. I think society is the thing that needs to change. We’re here now. And more of us are being found every day.20
Could autism be the next phase of human evolution? With autism on the rise, the question isn’t nearly as absurd as it sounds. Today’s 1 in 59 rate represents a 15 per cent increase from the 1 in 68 rate of 2010, an 86 per cent increase from the 1 in 110 rate of 2006, and a 154 per cent increase from the 1 in 150 rate of 2000. Some of this rise will no doubt be due to increased awareness and better ways of identifying autism, but not all of it will. Which leaves the door tantalisingly open.
This is what I love about evolution. Autism could be the next phase of human evolution. It’s entirely possible, probable even, if just two conditions are met. The first is that autism must be heritable, that is, transmissible from parent to offspring via genes. Which it is. In fact, recent estimates place the heritability of autism at 83 per cent, up from a previous estimate of 50 per cent. This means that the child of an autistic parent is highly likely to develop some form of autism themselves. The second condition is that people with autism must have differential reproductive success, which is a fancy way of saying they need to have more children than people without autism. This isn’t so clear. Mild forms of autism can go unnoticed, and we’re a long way from understanding how wide the spectrum really is. Yet there are signs that people with autistic traits are reproducing more than they once were. In 2014 researchers demonstrated that children considered ‘geeks’ consistently outperformed those deemed ‘cool’ in later life.21 Cool kids were more likely to develop drug addiction and social insecurities, while geeks and social introverts, many of whom very probably had some form of autism, were more likely to thrive in their careers and go on to form meaningful relationships.
Evolution has no purpose, of course, so there’s no reason the autistic brain would be singled out specifically. Despite the beguiling high-functioning traits of many autistic minds – the enhanced memory, learning and intelligence – it would be a fallacy to suggest that these brains are in competition with neurotypical brains for ascendency. Yet there is something about different minds and our reaction to them that feels purposeful. One of the most singular traits that has evolved in the human brain is empathy, the capacity to perceive and apprehend another’s misfortune. In decades past our empathy for autistics was virtually non-existent. Autistics were labelled as mentally retarded or insane, locked up in asylums and underwent medical interventions that were as thoughtless as they were cruel. But empathy has experienced its own form of evolution. I want to say we’re now more compassionate towards those with different minds, but even that feels condescending. More apt, I think, is to say we’re finally alive to those with different minds. We recognise that such diversity is to be treasured, not problematised – embraced, not feared.
Reaching this understanding requires every faculty evolution has built for us: our ability to form groups and build social bonds; our ability to construct emotions right for the times; our ability to remember one another’s plight and lay down collective memories; and our ability to marshal our astonishingly malleable intelligence and ever-expanding repertoire of language.
Rethinking autism is a grand project. So it’s encouraging that new ways of conceptualising it are beginning to emerge. Among them is how we think about stimming, the repetitive fidgeting behaviour seen in those with autism (rocking, bouncing, flapping etc.). Many autistics say it calms them down when they are feeling anxious and allows them to express their excitement about something when words fail them. Unsurprisingly, stimming has long been discouraged and even suppressed by parents and teachers who view it as disruptive and potentially harmful. One girl with autism reports how she was forced to cross her fingers to stop snapping them, only to find that she then couldn’t do her schoolwork. One boy with autism reports how he was forced to hunch over his desk to stop rocking back and forward, only later to develop back problems and a poor posture. With children like these in mind, activists in Canada have launched the International Day of the Stim, a day for all autistics to share their stimming experience with others on social media. ‘It was really an example of autistics reclaiming something that, through negative and abusive therapies, had been taken away,’ says Anne Borden, an activist who helped establish the day.22
Another positive sign has come from the tech giant Microsoft, which recently announced that neurodiversity would become central to its recruiting strategy. And where Microsoft goes, others usually follow: now multinationals including Ford, Ernst & Young, J. P. Morgan Chase and the Royal Bank of Canada have started neurodiversity employment programmes. If companies like these can persuade others of the need for neurodiverse people in the workplace, and if the wider public can pressurise governments to enforce neurodiversity quotas at state level (a recent poll found that 72 per cent of UK employers ignore neurodiversity in their policies23), the movement would spread rapidly.
No one knows how many autistics are out there, lost, hidden in the shadows of prejudice and ignorance; some estimate it may be up to 200,000 in the UK alone.24 Only when we change our own minds will we recognise the wonders of the autistic mind. Autism is not and should never be something to solve. It is one of the most beautiful spin-offs of human brain evolution.