The autistic mind could hold the key to the future

An old, cynical adage holds that ‘if all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’. I remembered that aphorism while reading the new book by Simon Baron-Cohen, one of the world’s leading authorities on autism, in which he unpicks the instincts and processes that have driven human progress. His conclusion? The great engine of our advancement as a species has been autistic behaviour.

It’s a bold, rather startling claim. In this intriguing volume, the author explains that it is the habitual pattern-seekers who are responsible for human invention. These are people who display what he calls ‘the Systemising Mechanism’, which developed in humans around 70,000-100,000 years ago.

This way of thinking is encapsulated in a three-step logical progression, which Baron-Cohen calls the ‘if-and-then’ pattern — if I find the correct stone and I crack the edge off, then I have an axe. The systemiser will loop this process, refining and improving it — adding a handle, using a more durable kind of stone — until the outcome is a new invention. This evolutionary leap led to ever more complex tools, and ‘allowed humans alone to become the scientific and technological masters of our planet’. According to Baron-Cohen, this Systemising Mechanism is ‘turned up very high in the autistic mind… Humans who had minds with a Systemising Mechanism in overdrive were — and are — central to the story of invention.’

This kind of systemised thinking applies not only to specific tools but also to widely applicable processes: if I plant 50 tomato seeds and I water them during the summer, then I will have a substantial yield. Loop this logical process enough times, and you have invented agriculture. If I look at the stars today and I look at them again in six months’ time, then I can measure their movements across the sky.