rook

Snottlebocket said:
People sometimes think that autism is some form of evolution or improvement because it let's people do amazing things. It would be more accurate to say that autism let's people do amazing things because it breaks or frees up certain parts of the brain to allow them to do so at a cost.

A very simple example is the savant who can draw everything he sees, no matter how brief. This isn't some great artistic gift on his part, instead his brain lacks or disables the many filters that prevent "normal" people from experiencing sensory overload.

In everyday life the vast majority of things your senses detect are unimportant noise, things like distinction between background voices or the number of bricks in a wall. These things are not of immediate importance and your brain automatically filters them out blurring them into the background to prevent you from processing so much (useless) information you don't get the chance to respond to the important stuff.

An artistic savant might lack the filters that do this, it gives him both amazing powers of perception, but at the same time it overloads his senses with information, making it hard for him to decide what is important and what is not.

I have an autistic cousin who has a very hard time making a distinction between great and small or even unlikely risks. To him the risk of being run over by a car while crossing the road, or having a bridge collapse while crossing it are equal. Both are real risks despite the fact that one is much more likely to happen than the other.
As a result it is very hard to get him to adjust to new experiences such as crossing a bridge he has not crossed before, because to him there is a very real risk the bridge might collapse while crossing it. On the flipside once crossed safely the bridge is marked as safe and he permanently views it as such. This way of viewing the world obviously has some great disadvantages, unlikely risks such as crossing a bridge form a significant barrier while crossing off risks as safe can cause the opposite problem, for example safely crossing a busy street now marks this street as permanently safe in his mind.

It's a crude example but my point is that autism is not a form evolution, you could see it as a malfunction that potentially let's the brain operate more efficiently in certain matters by removing safety precautions.

An old biology teacher of mine once said "considering how incredibly complex the human brain is, it is nothing short of miraculous it does not malfunction more often".

Reproduced without permission.