Autistic genius is more than math -- it's leadership systems and social justice
The platitudes about autism being a gift miss the more important point that pretty much every major movement, invention, and breakthrough has been from someone autistic. Here’s the science behind why that is true:
Dis/ability is contextual. For example, OCD is annoying when you’re trying to get someone to leave the house. But OCD is also finding fulfillment through consistency. When there are 100 musical phrases, and two are not written consistently, a person with OCD might feel a sense of fulfillment from adjusting those two. This is why autistic people focus on patterns — it’s fulfilling in a way birthday parties are fulfilling to neurotypical people.
Culture determines what we think is useful. Obsessively sorting rocks at the beach when the other kids are playing makes a kid look like an outcast. But when the kid can geologically date rocks by just looking, then rocks are a special interest, not an obsession, because society values that skill. Similarly we call behavior repetitive until it becomes a path to invention, and then we call it trial and error.
Social interest is not lower in autistic people. It’s different. Autistic people have a strong social drive to connect with people by sharing ideas. Neurotypicals connect by narrating their day or sharing personal feelings. To an autistic person, this is boring, and it’s why we prefer our dogs to small talk. ?If you ask an autistic person to narrate their day, they’ll pick out something surprising that happened because autistic people value connecting through interestingness ?over connecting through emotions.
Autistic empathy helps society more than neurotypical empathy. Neurotypicals have cognitive empathy which means they understand how someone feels and why they feel that way. Autistic people don’t have that, but autistic people do care about how someone is feeling. As usual, a deficit in the autistic brain makes room for another skill to develop. In this case, autistic people have a unique empathy for the greater good, which we see in the autistic drive toward social justice.
Autistic people are futurists. Our person-perception deficit means we can’t accurately predict an individuals’ intentions, emotions or thoughts. But our social-cognitive skills enable us to see what groups need before the groups know. Autistic people can predict social-psychological phenomena by looking at patterns and use that knowledge to predict trends. This autistic skill brought us concepts like “groupthink” and “social loafing”.
The autistic gift is the drive to understand systems. That’s mechanical systems, for sure — like a video recorder or a window lock. But it’s also social systems like management hierarchy or tango routines. We are familiar with the autistic obsession with natural systems like weather patterns and tides, but a less familiar one is motoric systems — throwing a frisbee or skydiving. Collecting is also systematic thinking – collectible systems distinguish between different types of stones/coins/stamps/marbles etc.
I talk with many people who think they are autistic but not gifted, or their kid is autistic and not gifted. But that’s simply not true. Behind the meltdown in the airport and behind the picky eater in your kitchen there is a genius waiting to shine.