Human cognitive diversity
Human cognitive diversity
If you are on a plane, do you think about its aerodynamics, or when you look at a mountain do you think about how precisely it was formed or do you notice how the music you are listening to is structured, then you could be a hyper systemiser.
People who think like that have a hard-wired compulsion to seek out patterns in their surroundings following a simple “If this and that then this” algorithm, a thought process of endless iterative discovery and experimentation that such minds eventually stumble upon new inventions pushing human evolutions forward and changing the world forever.
Cambridge University clinical Psychologist and world-renowned autism expert Simon Baron-Cohen lays out his theory, because we can identify patterns specifically if-and-then patterns, and argues that the genes for this unique ability overlap with the genes for autism.
Baron-Cohen reveals how this unique ability has driven human progress for 70, 000 years, by linking one of our greatest strengths with a condition that is so often misunderstood. The Pattern Seekers challenges us to think differently about those who think differently.
Today nerdy brain types are commonly associated with autism as society views the condition as a disorder.
Baron-Cohen, argues that it is the connection with systemising techniques and influence on a human invention that should not go unnoticed.
“Those humans who had minds with a systemising mechanism in overdrive were and are central to the story of invention” Baron-Cohen claims, who anchors his theory on Thomas Alva Edison whose endless compulsion to tinker with things brought us a slew of 19th-century inventions, among them the most famously the light bulb and also the story of Jonah whose compulsive pattern recognising mind unlike Edison is diagnosed as autism, making his life lonely because he can’t easily fit in with others, or get a job.
If truly remarkable inventions are to keep happening such people must be nurtured as gifted individuals, not disadvantaged ones. Systemising mind must be allowed to run free with their curiosity, even if their endless experimenting and stubborn refusal to take accepted norms for granted jars with the other type of mindset in society those whose minds are geared towards emotional intelligence.
For systemising mind everything resembles a puzzle that needs solving, if such skills are nurtured and collectivised constructively via the internet they may be able to achieve remarkable things.
How quickly Reddit users detected the exact location and purpose of mysterious monolith that appeared in the Utah desert in November and took only 48 hours to pinpoint the monolith coordinates.
The Pattern Seekers: A New Theory of Human Invention by Simon Baron-Cohen, Allen Lane £20, 256 pages.