Unfortunately, “The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention” by Cambridge University professor Simon Baron-Cohen never really lives up to its thought-provoking title. Despite the best of intentions, it too often feels half-baked, like a pastiche of ideas from other books.
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The traditional scientific hypothesis you learned back in high school can be characterized by its “if-then” structure: If you drop a ball, then it falls to the floor. Baron-Cohen proposes an innovation that he feels is magic: the addition of the word “and,” so it becomes “if-and-then.” Seriously. While he admits that the words may seem simple, he sees this update as representing how humans introduce variables into a hypothesis to look for patterns (if you put a tomato seed in the soil and the soil is moist, then a tomato plant will grow).
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It would be a much easier case to make if it stayed narrowly focused on the autistic traits found in successful inventors, but Baron-Cohen swings for the scientific fences. He identifies the systematizing mechanism as being responsible for an enormous array of developments.
In this sense, his promotion of the idea that the systemization found in autistic brains is the driver of inventiveness can be seen as a forceful argument for why we should value those with autism.
