Simon Baron-Cohen, Cambridge professor and clinical psychologist, has rarely shied before an overbroad claim. In 2003’s The Essential Difference, his discussion of the fundamental differences between male and female brains was somewhat undercut by his admission that “your sex does not dictate your brain type.” In his more recent The Science of Evil, he dismisses the concept of evil as “unscientific” in the preface before proceeding to look at the often only tangentially related neurobiology of empathy. His newly released The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention sets a new standard in this regard, particularly given its sweeping sub-subtitle, A 70,000-Year History.
To begin with: There is no evidence that autism drives human invention, and just one chapter is devoted to archaeological evidence of the unique evolutionary developments that enabled humans to distinguish themselves from other primates. Not a single instance is put forward of an autistic person who has left a significant mark on human history; at best, we read of some famous figures who might have been autistic, who share some traits with the autistic, or who were skilled in STEM fields and had autistic children. Instead, Baron-Cohen reiterates a series of hypotheses familiar from his earlier writings: that the human brain contains two fundamental if neuroanatomically ill-defined systems, the empathy circuit and the systematizing mechanism; that the empathy circuit tends to predominate in women, while the systematizing mechanism is more prevalent in men; that autistic people exhibit empathy deficits and tend to obsess over systems and patterns and that their brains, for this reason, may be described as hypermale; and that innovators are often male and show a tendency to think systematically and that their eccentricities are similar to those of the autistic.
It would be grotesque to call autism fashionable, but I’m not sure there’s a better adjective. For 20 years now, we’ve been talking about the autism epidemic. At one time, autism was thought to affect only 1 in 2,500 people; more recently, that number was revised upward to 1 in 166. With the broadening of autism into a spectrum encompassing four or five subcategories, lifetime prevalence is now thought to reach just over 2%. An Amazon search for the present book recommends a long list of “hot new releases” in the category “Autism and Asperger’s Syndrome,” including Was Yosef on the Spectrum? Understanding Joseph Through Torah, Midrash, and Classical Jewish Sources, a cookbook for the intellectually disabled, and The Autistic Trans Guide to Life. Conspiracy theorists blame the rise of autism on vaccines, wireless radiation, or environmental toxins; practitioners say diagnostic criteria have been refined, and growing awareness has allowed more people to seek treatment. There are occasional dissident voices who warn of overdiagnosis: Laurent Mottron, a researcher who left France in disgust at the use of psychoanalysis to treat childhood autism, has stated that the criteria for autism are now so broad that they endanger attempts to arrive at a cogent understanding of what it is. Unsurprisingly, his scruples have failed to gain currency in the United States, where our passion for pathologizing our every frailty is provender for a huge array of snake oil salesmen, talk show hosts, and celebrity “advocates.”
The Pattern Seekers begins with a narrative account of the early lives of two people, Al and Jonah. Al didn’t begin speaking until age 4, and even later, he showed little patience for idle conversation, instead incessantly inquiring into the workings of everything around him. He was a troublesome student, and his mother pulled him out of school, giving him freedom to experiment and read the scientific and technical texts he was drawn to. Jonah, too, had difficulties with language. Instead of communicating, he would repeat the names of things to index them in his mind with an obsessive degree of specificity. Naive and trusting, he was frequently bullied and seemed ignorant of social boundaries, even cutting a girl’s bangs when their unevenness got on his nerves. Al (Surprise! He’s Thomas Alva Edison) went on to become one of the most famous inventors of all time; Jonah, diagnosed as autistic, remains unemployed and lives with his parents.
What the two men have in common, Baron-Cohen writes, is an unusual urge to seek out what he calls “if-and-then patterns,” which posit an indefinite range of variables leading to a theoretical outcome. This capacity, present in all human beings but predominant in scientific thinkers, developed between 70,000 and 100,000 years ago. It has a genetic basis, is not found in other animals, and is the motor behind many forms of innovation.
Right away, the argument is problematic. Baron-Cohen is suspiciously choosy about what constitutes “if-and-then” logic. So, for example, a crow dropping stones into a glass to raise the water level until a piece of meat floating inside it comes within reach does not qualify despite the operation’s multiple steps and complexity, but autistic bassist Jonathan Chase playing a single chord somehow does (“If he hits the eighth fret on the bottom string, he plays an A,” Baron-Cohen writes, as if this weren’t the very definition of a tautology). When he later states, of the body movements of maybe-autistic pianist Glenn Gould, that “rocking back and forth is … a soothing if-and-then pattern on repeat,” neither the variables nor the predicted outcome is specified, nor does Baron-Cohen mention the fact that rocking behavior has been observed among elephants and many species of ape.
Things get murkier still in “A Revolution in the Brain,” which situates the birth of experimentation and invention sometime between 70,000 and 100,000 years ago. Evidence includes engravings on stones and ostrich eggs, travel over long distances by boat, fishhooks, and bone flutes. That something remarkable happened in this period is beyond debate; the difficulty lies in Baron-Cohen’s imposition of the “if-and-then” paradigm on cases in which increased working memory or the eureka effect are likely more relevant, his portrayal of changes that took tens of thousands of years as constituting a single age of discovery, and his insistent use of the word “invention.” There is no evidence, for example, that agriculture was “invented,” and every indication that human beings, whose water requirements far exceed those of most mammals, settled near riverbeds where edible grasses and tubers grew wild and learned to manage and eventually cultivate them over many generations.
The conclusion, “Nurturing the Inventors of the Future,” is perhaps the book’s most rewarding section. I have tended to look askance at the term “neurodiverse,” which seems just one more of the endlessly proliferating euphemisms by which liberals try to outdo each other in their enlightened sensitivity. But Baron-Cohen makes the reasonable point that diagnosis of a disorder is only useful for therapeutic purposes and can prove harmful for those not in need of treatment. There is a large class of people whose deviations from the norm are not so extreme as to qualify as pathologies but who nonetheless find it difficult to integrate into society and whose skills often go to waste. Now, there are companies that seek these people out, aware that their resumes or their job interview performance may not adequately represent their potential. Specialisterne, a Danish firm, employs 75% autistic people, and its hiring procedure includes such unusual tests as having applicants build robots from Legos. Auticon, an IT consultancy, exclusively hires adults on the autism spectrum, and the Israeli military has a special unit of autistic specialists in satellite and aerial intelligence.
These small-scale efforts are inspiring, but the space devoted to them here may suggest an outsize degree of relevance. In his attempts to wedge autism into the systematizing mechanism hypothesis, Baron-Cohen has consistently favored so-called high-functioning individuals over their more numerous “low functioning” counterparts. A tiny number of autistic individuals have savantlike abilities. Many others never learn to speak, are intellectually impaired, and show high rates of depression, suicide, and homelessness. Rain Man and Greta Thunberg’s “superpower” remark have done enough to distort autism in the public imagination without a specialist such as Baron-Cohen taking the exceptional as the typical and then assigning it a star role in the shaping of human history.
Adrian Nathan West is a literary translator, critic, and the author of The Aesthetics of Degradation.
