The different omniscient autistic mind

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Able autistic individuals can rise to eminent positions and perform with such outstanding success that one may even conclude that only such people are capable of certain achievements … Their unswerving determination and penetrating intellectual powers, part of their spontaneous and original mental activity, their narrowness and single-mindedness, as manifested in their special interests, can be immensely valuable and can lead to outstanding achievements in their chosen areas. - Hans Asperger

C. Cognitive skills characterized by at least four of the following:

1. strong preference for detail over gestalt
2. original, often unique perspective in problem solving
3. exceptional memory and/or recall of details often forgotten or disregarded by others, for example: names, dates, schedules, routines
4. avid perseverance in gathering and cataloguing information on a topic of interest
5. persistence of thought
6. encyclopaedic or ‘CD ROM’ knowledge of one or more topics
7. knowledge of routines and a focused desire to maintain order and accuracy
8. clarity of values/decision making unaltered by political or financial factors

Several authors in this issue offer hypotheses for why autism should be associated with talent, with remarkable consensus that the ability to process local information plays a key role. Happé & Vital (2009) suggest that detail-focused attention and memory predispose to the development of talent, both in the general population and in autism. Baron-Cohen et al. (2009) suggest that superior sensory acuity across modalities underlies such detail focus, which in turn fosters the tendency to explore and master closed systems (e.g. the calendar). With the enhanced perceptual functioning theory, Mottron et al. (2009) propose that locally orientated processing and, specifically, detection of patterns in the environment, underlies the high incidence of savant skills in autism. Plaisted Grant & Davis (2009) also emphasize the qualitative differences in perceptual and cognitive processing in ASD, and make tentative links to underlying neural systems. These very different theorists share the view that an ability to attend to and process featural information plays an important part in predisposing to special skills of a savant sort. This view is upheld, for example, in a detailed case study of a prodigious mnemonist and calculator with Asperger syndrome and synaesthesia who shows a preference for local processing and an unusual pattern of brain activation while remembering digits (Bor et al. 2007).

Can autism reveal some important truths about all creativity and genius? Among the contributors to this issue there is a strong consensus that one of the deep sources of exceptional skill is the obsessive drive to practice. But this is not all. According to Baron-Cohen there is also an obsessive need to classify and to make systems. One of the illustrations in this issue presents an image of different species of crows by renowned savant Gregory Blackstock. This is typical of his art, which often consists of representing, in the form of a pictorial dictionary as it were, all the types of a category he knows. Other examples include turkeys, mackerel, collie dogs, carnivorous plants, hats, lighthouses, saws and knives. This type of work, which appears to reflect what Baron-Cohen has termed systemizing, exhaustively represents exemplars of a category side by side without concern for higher-level prototype.

Happé & Vital (2009) in this issue suggest that the preference for detail over prototype and generalisation underlies both talent and repetitive and restrictive behaviour in autism. Their analysis of twin data suggests a genetic basis for this association. Further exploration should shed light on whether talents in different domains spring from a common set of genetic/environmental factors. Do genetic factors predispose for talent in any area or for talent specifically in, say, music? Documenting the different or similar talents shown by identical twins will elucidate this question. It would also be of interest to establish whether relatives of savants—at least in cases of familial, versus de novo, autism (Abrahams & Geschwind 2008)—show special skills or cognitive characteristics that might predispose to talent.

Most of the accounts presented in this issue suggest that the predisposition to talent is to a large extent domain neutral. If this is the case, we would not be surprised to find that multiple talents develop in a single individual—time constraints allowing. Wallace et al. (2009) present one such case, and several more are known in the literature. Examples include: perfect pitch, calendar calculation and drawing all present in the case of Trehin (2006); perfect pitch, drawing and music in the case of Wiltshire (1989; Sacks 1995); and memory for numbers and learning languages in the case of Tammet (2006). Such cases would be very surprising if the basis for talent in, for example, calculation, were quite different from that for art or music.

Hardly anything is known as yet about the brain in autistic savants. The anatomical findings reviewed by Casanova and Trippe (2009) in their contribution to this issue suggest that minicolumnar peculiarities are seen in talented neurotypical scientists (Casanova et al. 2007), and are also found in ASD individuals, regardless of savant status. The evidence for atypical minicolumnar organization in autism fits well with the ideas on neural hyperconnectivity in local areas alongside hypoconnectivity over the longer range (e.g. Belmonte et al. 2004). A rather different approach focuses on rare single-gene disorders with a high prevalence of autism, with a recent suggestion that some molecular defects in autism may interfere with mechanisms of synaptic protein synthesis linked, theoretically, to both cognitive impairment and savant skills (Kelleher & Bear 2008).

MICHELLE Dawson can't handle crowded bus journeys, and she struggles
to order a cup of coffee in a restaurant because contact with
strangers makes her feel panicky. Yet over the past few years,
Dawson has been making a name for herself as a researcher at the
Rivière-des-Prairies hospital, part of the University of Montreal in
Canada.

Dawson's field of research is the cognitive abilities of people with
autism--people such as herself. She is one of a cadre of scientists
who say that current definitions of this condition rely on findings
that are outdated, if not downright misleading, and that the nature
of autism has been fundamentally misunderstood for the past 70
years.

Medical textbooks tell us that autism is a developmental disability
diagnosed by a classic "triad of impairments": in communication,
imagination and social interaction. While the condition varies in
severity, about three-quarters of people with autism are classed, in
the official language of psychiatrists, as mentally ret*d.

Over the past decade or so, a growing autistic pride movement has
been pushing the idea that people with autism aren't disabled, they
just think differently to "neurotypicals". Now, research by Dawson
and others has carried this concept a step further. They say that
auties, as some people with autism call themselves, don't merely
think differently: in certain ways they think better. Call it the
autie advantage.

How can a group of people who are generally seen as disabled
actually have cognitive advantages? For a start, research is
challenging the original studies that apparently demonstrated the
low IQ of people with autism. Other studies are revealing the
breadth of their cognitive strengths, ranging from attention to
detail and sensitivity to musical pitch to better memory.

More recently, brain imaging is elucidating what neurological
differences might lie behind these strengths. Entrepreneurs have
even started trying to harness autistic people's talents (see "Nice
work if you can get it"). "Scientists working in autism always
reported abilities as anecdotes, but they were rarely the focus of
research," says Isabelle Soulières, a neuropsychologist at Harvard
Medical School in Boston, who works with Dawson. "Now they're
beginning to develop interest in those strengths to help us
understand autism."

The fact that some people with autism have certain talents is hardly
a revelation. Leo Kanner, the psychiatrist who first described
autism in the early 1940s, noted that some of his patients had what
he termed "islets of ability", in areas such as memory, drawing and
puzzles. But Kanner's emphasis, like that of most people since, was
on autism's drawbacks.

Today it is recognised that autism varies widely in terms of which
traits are present and how prominently they manifest themselves. The
cause remains mysterious, although evidence is pointing towards many
genes playing a role, possibly in concert with factors affecting
development in the womb.

A single, elegant explanation capturing all that is different about
the autistic mind has so far proved elusive, but several ideas have
been put forward that attempt to explain the most notable traits.
Perhaps one of the best known is the idea that autistic people lack
theory of mind--the understanding that other people can have
different beliefs to yourself, or to reality. This account would
explain why many autistic people do not tell lies and cannot
comprehend those told by others, although the supporting evidence
behind this theory has come under fire lately.

Verbal cues

People with autism are also said to have weak central coherence -
the ability to synthesise an array of information, such as verbal
and gestural cues in conversation. In other words, sometimes they
can't see the wood for the trees.

The idea of the autistic savant, with prodigious, sometimes
jaw-dropping, talents has taken hold in popular culture. Yet savants
are the exception, not the rule. The usual figure cited is that
about 1 in 10 people with autism have some kind of savant-like
ability. That includes many individuals with esoteric skills that
are of little use in everyday life--like being able to instantly
reckon the day of the week for any past or future date.

The reality is that children with autism generally take longer to
hit milestones such as talking and becoming toilet-trained, and as
adults commonly struggle to fit into society. Only 15 per cent of
autistic adults have a paying job in the UK, according to government
figures. The mainstream medical view of autism is that it represents
a form of developmental brain damage. But what if that view is
missing something?

The first way in which Dawson challenged the mainstream view was to
address the association between autism and low IQ. In 2007, Dawson
and Laurent Mottron, head of the autism research programme at the
University of Montreal, published a study showing that an autistic
person's IQ score depends on which kind of test is used. With the
most common test, the Weschsler Intelligence Scale, three-quarters
of people with autism score 70 or lower, which classifies them as
mentally ret*d, as defined by the World Health Organization's
International Classification of Diseases. But when the team
administered a different, yet equally valid, IQ test known as the
Raven's Progressive Matrices, which places less weight on social
knowledge, most people with autism scored at a level that lifted
them out of this range (Psychological Science, vol 18, p 657).

Dawson believes her personal connection to this field of inquiry
gives her unique insights. Recently, she began wondering if autistic
strengths might already have surfaced in research settings, only to
be buried in a literature dominated by the view of autistic people
as damaged goods. "No one had ever thought to ask: What cognitive
strengths have been reported in the literature?" she says.

After reviewing thousands of papers and re-examining the data,
Dawson says she has found dozens that include empirical evidence of
autistic strengths that are cloaked by a preoccupation with
deficits.

Take, for example, a 2004 study where autistic and non-autistic
people did sentence comprehension tests while lying in a brain
scanner (Brain, vol 127, p 1811). The autistic volunteers showed
less synchronicity between the different language areas of the brain
as they performed the task. The authors speculate that this could
explain some of the language problems seen in autism. Yet according
to the results section, the autistic group did better at this
particular comprehension task than the control group. "The
researchers use the higher performance in one area to speculate
about deficit elsewhere," says Dawson.

Attention to detail

Evidence for autistic advantages is also coming in from new studies.
One strength derives from an aspect of autism that has long been
seen as one of its chief deficits: weak central coherence. The flip
side of an inability to see the wood for the trees is being very,
very good at seeing trees.

Psychologists investigate the ability to aggregate or tease apart
information by showing volunteers drawings of objects such as a
house, and asking them to identify the shapes embedded within it,
like triangles and rectangles. Numerous studies have shown that
people with autism can do these tasks faster and more accurately.
And that's not just with pictures; autistic people also do it with
music, in tasks such as identifying individual notes within chords.

Maretha de Jonge, a child psychiatrist at the University Medical
Centre in Utrecht, the Netherlands, who has done such studies,
explains that "weak" in the context of central coherence doesn't
have to mean inferior in daily life. "Weakness in integration is
sometimes an asset," she says. It can be useful to filter out
external stimuli if you are writing an email in a noisy coffee shop,
for example, or are searching for a camouflaged insect in a
rainforest. Recasting weak central coherence as attention to detail
and resistance to distraction suggests a mode of thought that could
have advantages.

Other autistic strengths are harder to paint as disabilities in any
way. For example, Pamela Heaton of Goldsmiths, University of London,
has shown that people with autism have better musical pitch
recognition.

On the visual side, a few autistic savants who are immensely
talented artists are well known, but recent studies suggest superior
visuospatial skills may be more common in autism than previously
supposed. Autistic people are better at three-dimensional drawing,
for example, and tasks such as assembling designs out of blocks
printed with different patterns (Journal of Autism and Developmental
Disorders, vol 39, p 1039).

Brain scans indicate that this may be because people with autism
recruit more firepower from the brain's visual areas when doing such
tasks. They may even use their visual areas for other thought
processes. Mottron's team found that people with autism were
completing the reasoning tasks in the Raven's IQ test by using what
is usually regarded as the visual part of the brain, along with more
typical intelligence networks (Human Brain Mapping, vol 30, p 4082).

Many researchers note that people with autism seem hypersensitive to
sights and sounds. In 2007, based partly on this finding, Kamila
Markram and Henry Markram and Tania Rinaldi of the Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology in Lausanne set out a theory of autism
dubbed the "intense world syndrome" (Frontiers in Neuroscience, vol
1, p 77). According to this, autism is caused by a hyperactive brain
that makes everyday sensory experiences overwhelming.

One of their planks of evidence is autopsy findings of structural
differences in the brain's cortex, or outer layer. People with
autism have smaller minicolumns--clusters of around 100 neurons
that some researchers think act as the brain's basic processing
units--but they also have more of them. While some have linked this
trait to superior functioning, the Lausanne team still framed their
theory as explaining autism's disabilities and deficits.

Mottron's team has published an alternative theory of autism that
they believe more fully and accurately incorporates autistic
strengths. Their "enhanced perceptual function model" suggests
autistic brains are wired differently, but not necessarily because
they are damaged (Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, vol
36, p 27). "These findings open a new educational perspective on
autism that can be compared to sign language for deaf people," says
Mottron.

While Henry Markram maintains that autism involves a "core
neuropathology", he told New Scientist that the intense world idea
and Mottron's theory are "aligned in most aspects". "Of course the
brain is different, but to say whether the brain is damaged or not
depends on what you mean by damaged."

What other cognitive abilities make up the autistic advantage? More
rational decision-making seems to be one--people with autism are
less susceptible to subjective or emotional factors such as how a
question is worded (New Scientist, 18 October 2008, p 16). Still,
until the idea of the autie advantage gains ground, the full range
of autistic strengths will remain unknown.

Yet the idea seems to be taking root. When speaking at the TED
conference in Long Beach, California, in February, professor of
animal science Temple Grandin, who has autism, was cheered after
quipping that Silicon Valley wouldn't exist without the condition.
She also claimed the tech-heavy crowd was probably stacked with
"autism genetics".

A big problem is that, even in our so called modern and enlightened society, Autistics are still shoved to the corner as mere footnotes in life. While the savant myth is great for books and TV shows, the fact is that many Autistics exhibit various gifts beyond what most NTs display. But these gifts are often locked away inside each Autistic, because they have no way to present them to the outside world. Aspies, while possibly genius, are often undiscovered because they don't stand up and say, "look at me," the way NTs do. Their social dysfunction precludes them from becoming known for their abilities. Extreme social phobia keeps them from networking and making the necessary connections with others to get ahead (and known) in the world.