Explain the Brain (October 2015 iteration):

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(posted as science - not psychology)
All organisms evolve to sense their surrounding and react in a way that will most probably let them survive. Intelligence can be defined as ability to plan into the future. Every genetic addition that increases capability to sense, store, and extrapolate into the future is evolutionarily advantageous. Cooperation is also evolutionarily advantageous. Emotions evolved as a way for individuals to cooperate. Apparently there is a mismatch between these two functions, extrapolation and pack bonding. As humans develop they start off as pure extrapolators, gathering evidence about the iterative world around them and working out how to anticipate the future. As emotions develop with the conscious mind emotional events become more important. Planning out mundane activities becomes less important. The conscious and subconscious diverge - conscious keeping track of all the emotional pack interactions, subconscious planning for every possible future, all the time. If you can relax, remove distractions and get to planning you can project pretty far into the future. If you become emotional your brain switches gears and all cognitive ability is focused on the short term emotional situation. So your subconscious is where all the analytical, long term stuff goes on - the conscious is for pack interaction and day to day stuff. As your emotions develop it affects the way your memory works. Emotional stuff has greater weight in the calculations. Your early memories are laid down flat, they get jumbled as emotional situations modify your brain to most efficiently work together with a pack. To do this your conscious mind develops an emotional bond that places you in the pack - your ego or "self" is your perception of how the pack perceives you. Ego is pride, shame, love, envy, hate, happiness, sorrow and defines your place in the pack. Positive feedback from others raises you in the ranking, shame lowers your perception of your place. A normal human identifies with many packs. Teams, clubs, socials, states, nations, for and against, etc..
In order for humans to work together efficiently they must be at least a little bit delusional.
Autistic spectrum (AS) is anyone that doesn't make the divergence transition. They are still in the primitive "gather the data and extrapolate" mode of the mind. They have little to no egos and do not identify with packs. Their memories are long and accurate since the emotional prioritization mechanism isn't making some memories more important than others. This is how photographic memories work. Autistic spectrum individuals live in their subconscious (from the NT perspective) and constantly extrapolate. They don't emotionally saturate an ego, so never stop learning. They don't "see themselves" in the pack and so can't rank themselves. They can be terrible or awesome in the packs eyes and have no clue, there is no "self" to compare. Technically adult autistics have the neurochemistry of children, but with many more experiences laid down accurately over many more years.
Autism has been around as long as humans. Humans have a range of emotional prioritization sensitivities - Autistic and analytical on one end, emotionally consumed and completely disconnected from reality on the other, with the vast majority of the bell curve somewhere between. (Google analytical to Facebook social). Societies build themselves with a range of individuals with differing emotional prioritization of memory - The less able planning further and more emotional getting things done *now*. Stress pushes individuals towards the autistic functioning of the mind. Extreme stress in a neurotypical (NT) human causes switch to survival/autopilot/"the hands of god" mode where memories are laid down photographically and "you do what needs to be done" (later having no clue how).