Families with tendencies towards autistic traits tend to cluster in regions with opportunities for the exercise of ‘systemizing’ skills: see the article Diagnosed Autism Is More Common in an IT-Rich Region, Study Finds for a discussion of this interesting yet less than surprising discovery.
Specifically:
The researchers predicted that autism spectrum conditions (ASC) would be more common in populations enriched for ‘systemizing’, which is the drive to analyse how systems work, and to predict, control and build systems. These skills are required in disciplines such as engineering, physics, computing and mathematics.
The team had previously discovered evidence for a familial association between a talent for systemizing and autism in that fathers and grandfathers of children with ASC are over-represented in the field of engineering. The team had also previously found that mathematicians more often have a sibling with ASC, and students in the natural and technological sciences, including mathematics, show a higher number of autistic traits.
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The growth of the High Tech Campus Eindhoven has led to Eindhoven becoming a major technology and industrial hub: 30% of jobs in Eindhoven are now in technology or ICT, in Haarlem and Utrecht this is respectively 16 and 17%.
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The researchers found school-reported prevalence estimates of ASC in Eindhoven was 229 per 10,000, significantly higher than in Haarlem (84 per 10,000) and Utrecht (57 per 10,000), whilst the prevalence for the control conditions were similar in all regions.
Later in the article, one of the researchers points out that “the genes for autism may be expressed in first degree relatives as a talent in systemizing.” In other words, those who have autism to a dysfuntional extent and those who are socially disabled by a somewhat lesser degree of autistic traits will likely have relatives who are skillful engineers and — I would speculate — metal-workers. The economist Thomas Sowell wrote a book, Late-talking Children because he had to fight for years to keep public school bureaucrats from classifying his late-talking son as mentally disabled — the son ended up as a high functioning computer scientist who graduated with high ranking from Stanford University. From research, including some done on relatives of late-talking children, of a high-achieving sort, whose parents joined a support group he founded, Professor Sowell discovered that high-achieving children who were late in speaking had a disproportionate number of relatives who were engineers, skilled craftsmen (such as electronics repairmen), medical doctors, or worked in other fields where at least some of the specialists were ‘systemizers’. This article would indicate they probably also had a disproportionate number of relatives who had more disabling forms of autism spectrum conditions (ASC). (I think it reasonable to assume that most high-achieving, late-talking children have ASC.)
ASC is said to be tied in to ‘systemizer’ personality characteristics. Systemizer talents can only be developed during periods of intense concentration on a very well-specified task. A truly talented tinkerer or car-repairman will concentrate on his task in a way not appropriate for a farmer who has to remain aware of a greater variety of environmental factors as he goes about his work, such as the condition of soil as it’s turned over and the impending weather. A poet crafting lines in his head or a mathematical physicist pondering the applicability of a particular equation to analyzing explosions near a black-hole will concentrate in a way that would not be good for a barber who’s expected to keep up his side of a conversation or a retailer who’s watching for customers who head towards the door without buying any goods.
The researchers who appear in this article seem quite aware of the two sides of this coin. Perhaps there be more than two sides. There are Einsteins who are sociable when they wish to be but can concentrate wonderfully well on a difficult line of thought and there are austistic boys who can’t stand to be touched and get lost in the task of counting leaves falling from the tree in the front-yard — if they can even function that well. There may well be others who lie in between those particular extreme. There might well be some locked into institutions who are socially dysfunctional but would make wonderful repairmen, who shy from human contact but could assemble complex mechanisms better than any existing robots.
I have found little evidence that we modern human beings are truly tolerant or that we make consistent efforts to help our fellowmen to function well given their abilities and disabilities. Our way of being tolerant is to take those with strange bundles of talents and disabilities and turn them into low-performing “normal folk.” In an essay collected in one of his books, the psychiatrist Oliver Sacks tells of finding mentally-disabled brothers who also showed some of the traits of autism in losing themselves in a rather strange but wonderful task — they could identify random numbers at least as large as the ones tabulated by the most powerful of computers of that time. They would sit and engage in a conversation of sorts, one speaking a large random number and the other — after perhaps a slight delay — responding with a larger random number. Dr. Sacks used one of those tabulations of random numbers to get the brothers to produce numbers, later confirmed to be random, which were larger than any of the ones in those tables. Years later, he ran into the higher-functioning brother getting off a bus. He’d been de-institutionalized, was living in a halfway house of sorts, and and was a socially useful dishwasher. With the pair broken up, the lower-functioning brother had to be put away in an institution which could be called a ‘warehouse’.
I don’t wish to insult those who try to provide care for those who can’t even bath themselves, but we show a very bad side when we can’t appreciate such a unique talent, one which might have also been usefully studied by mathematicians — the brothers were incompetent at basic arithmetic and were clearly identifying random numbers by some unknown process. We don’t appreciate such unique talents but we glorify the man who can spin in mid-air before slamming the basketball through the hoop and the one who can prance across the stage while playing on his guitar one of the three chords he’s conquered.
More importantly, we modern men are uncomfortable with those who have any mental talents, unbalanced like those of those two brothers or balanced like those of Einstein. I’ve written before of my damaged abilities to concentrate. They were damaged by the structures of modern schools. When young, I’d just be getting interested in a math problem or another sort of line of thought and the bell would ring. Sometimes, I’d not even hear it and would first hear the yells of a teacher telling me it was time to move on so I could, as they say, continue my learning for the day. We don’t wish any students to be solving difficult math problems when it’s time to move to the lunchroom, do we? We don’t want any students to be lost in thoughts of living through the events of the American Revolution, do we? There’s too much math and history to be learned to put up with such behavior.
Learning is no better than a bureaucratically regulated chore for most. The best parts of the school-day are the periods of socializing so that the students can talk about the latest pop songs or the television shows they watched the night before.
It’s been years since I’ve read any science fiction, other than a recent re-read of Fahrenheit 451, but I remember that was far from the only story or novel which spoke prophetically of the lack of respect of modern men for profound learning or deep thinking or any hints of concentration. I remember one about a future in which those with inclinations to think or learn were outfitted with earphones which blasted junk music into their ears on a steady basis to keep them from so much as following a line of thought. We have become that people who do what we can to drag our children and our fellow-citizens into the constant noise and turmoil of a disordered public life. How generous of us.
I’ve written about this issue before in various weblog entries including: If Only They were Athletes, Part 1, If Only They were Athletes, Part 2, and Math is Hard and Math is Lonely.
It might be a sign of social insanity of sorts that we have so little respect for those who can lose themselves in analysis of some aspect of objective reality, whether at the level of abstract or concrete being. We modern men, at least we Americans of the early 2000s, prefer to live inside our own imaginary world which has degraded standards of what is true and good and beautiful. We can perhaps learn something useful, and true and good and beautiful, by paying attention to the accomplishments of someone with autistic traits, whether those traits are part of a well-balanced personality and mind or whether they are part of a socially-isolated boy devoted to some strange, but perhaps wonderful, task. I would even suggest that some of those who suffer from a relatively severe form of ASC, such a boy who spends his time counting falling leaves, might be more sane in some serious sense than those lost in trash-music and the empty socializing of a cell-phone world. Those leaves are part of reality, unlike much of what fills the minds of modern human beings.