Is autism the legacy of humans evolving the ability to innovate?

If you find yourself pondering the marvel of aerodynamics when you fly on a plane, or if you concentrate on the structure of music as it plays, rather than simply listening, you may score high on measures of "systemization," according to University of Cambridge neuroscientist Simon Baron-Cohen.  

And if so this may reflect abilities that he thinks may have first evolved in humans between 70,000 and 100,000 years ago, when our human ancestors took a cognitive leap forward. This new capacity enabled them to analyze and understand patterns in the world that would, among other things, facilitate the invention of complex tools from bows to musical instruments.

In Baron-Cohen's new book, he argues that humans became "the scientific and technological masters of our planet" because of our brain's "systemizing mechanism." Also, some individuals — particularly those with Autism Spectrum Disorder, are the "hyper-systemizers" of our world. He suggests this should cause us to re-evaluate the capacities and strengths of people with autism.

Simon Baron-Cohen is a cognitive neuroscientist and director of the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge.

Quirks & Quarks host Bob McDonald spoke with Baron-Cohen about his book The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention.  

Here is part of their conversation. 

You joked with your editor that your book could be the shortest book in the universe, just three words long. What are those three words and why are they central to driving human inventiveness? 

Yes, the three words are if, and, and then. I think that these three words describe how humans, Homo sapiens, are the only animal that can reason and can reason in order to invent. I mean, we're talking in the time of COVID and we could say if the death rate is high and we do nothing, then the death rate will be even higher.

But if the death rate is high and we impose lockdown, then the death rate will decrease. So lockdown, as an invention happens to be like a public health invention, but it shows the reasoning of how humans, how modern Homo sapiens think in order to invent. 

OK, so you're saying if I do this, then that will happen. But how does this systemizing mind come into that? 

What I argue in my book is that between 70,000 and 100,000 years ago, there was a change in the human brain that this systemizing mechanism evolved. And the systemizing mechanism is what allows us to look for systems in the world or invent new systems. And a system is nothing more than these if and then regularities or patterns. So that's why I called the book The Pattern Seekers. Other animals don't seem to look for these special patterns, but we do. 

Well, what happened back 70,000 years ago that brought about this inventiveness? What changed in the evolution of the human brain 70,000 years ago?

We see the first bow and arrow to see if and then logic, if you like, was what allowed us to come up with a complex tool like the bow and arrow. But equally, we can look for other examples in the archaeological record, like the first musical instrument, the oldest or the earliest musical instrument that's been found is a flute made from a bone, a hollow bone from a bird. And it's dated to about 40,000 years ago.

But we can imagine the person who made it was thinking, if I blow down this hollow bone and I cover one hole, then I get a particular note. But if I blow down the hollow bone and uncover the hole, then I get a different note. So what we can see just in these simple examples, although in fact, you know, they are the tools that were being made complex. What we see is that human beings were playing with these if and then patterns. 

And it led to what I call generative invention. We didn't just generate ones we could generate in multiple different spheres, whether it's music or mathematics or public health or medicine or cooking. We can invent new systems, new patterns of this kind in any sphere that we choose. 

We've been inventing for a while. What's the connection then, between that kind of thinking and autism? 

Autistic people love patterns, if we can generalize. And when we give them tests of this kind of reasoning, this if and then reasoning, they score higher on average than non-autistic people. And, you know, you opened this interview with some questions for the listeners that come from a measure called 'systemizing,' questions that just simply ask questions about how interested are you in a variety of systems.

And autistic people score higher on that measure compared to non-autistic people. But we also worked with the company 23andMe, so we could look at the genes that are associated with how much you like to be systemized, how interested you are in systems. 

And what we found was that the genes that are associated with scoring high on systemizing overlap with the genes for autism. So that was telling us that even in our DNA, there's a link between your aptitude at systemizing and autism. 

You work with people with autism. What do you think, that the idea that human invention has largely been driven by traits that we associate with autism, what could that mean for our perception of what autism actually is? 

Part of the reason I wrote the book was to really change our perception of autism, because for the longest time, autism has been really just characterized as a disability, which it is, but with a focus on all the things that autistic people find difficult, what they struggle with. But we know that autism is more than just a disability, that autistic people think differently. Sometimes they have strengths.

I've suggested strengths in pattern recognition and attention to detail, being able to stay very focused on patterns and even sometimes talent in these areas. The fact that we can now see a link between those strengths in autism and human invention may change the way we look at autistic people. We might want to see them for who they are, people who think differently and have contributed to human progress. 

Produced by Sonya Buyting and written by Mark Crawley.