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A different path to genius

To be a gifted scientist or artist, a touch of autism may help.

Traditionally, people with autism were deemed to have low intelligence, significant learning disabilities, and a rigid insistence on sameness.

Yet many original thinkers and driving forces in our culture, including Isaac Newton, Lewis Carroll, Einstein, Marie Curie, Mozart, Picasso, van Gogh and US President Thomas Jefferson are suspected of having symptoms of Asperger's syndrome, the high functioning end of autism spectrum disorder.

More recently, people have speculated about whether high achievers like Bill Gates and many of NASA's workforce have Asperger's syndrome. Some public figures are even outing themselves as living with Asperger's, like the author Helen Darville/Demidenko/Dale.

So how is it that a disorder that includes problems with social interaction, communication and emotional interpretation result in such groundbreaking achievements?

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Seeing things differently

For years, autistic people with astonishing artistic, mathematical or technical ability but limited abilities in other areas were referred to as 'idiot savants', though the prefix has now been dropped.

Around 10 per cent of people with autism show remarkable skills where an early inclination (towards music, numbers or some other interest) is honed to an exceptional edge by years of dedication.

Nobel prize-calibre geniuses often have certain core autistic features at their heart, says Professor Allan Snyder, director of Sydney University's Centre for the Mind.

These features include preoccupation with detail, obsessive interests and difficulties in understanding another person's perspective.

"The normal mind is good at recognising the gist of something, but poor at recalling the details," says Snyder.

"We tend to see the world through the filter of what we know - we see a whole, rather than the parts. This is a real bottleneck to creativity because we can't look at the world afresh."

By contrast, living with autism is like being in an unfamiliar country. "The autistic mind is literal and tends to see the parts rather than the whole, that is to see the elements without meaning, intuition or automatic judgement," he says.

People with autism spectrum disorders lack the ability to synthesise pieces of information because of an impairment in the process of concept formation. However, they do see the parts denied to normal conscious awareness. They then build up a logical pattern based on these parts.

Professor Snyder explains that when a person without ASD sees a radical new sports car model, even though it is quite different to the station wagon in the driveway, they intuitively recognise what they are seeing is a car. But someone with ASD sees the parts: wheels, doors, seats, windscreen, position of the engine etc and then has to mentally assemble those components to form what we know as a car."

"The [non-autistic] mind can make unexpected connections between seemingly disparate systems and can invent entirely new systems based on those connections," Snyder continues, "rather than finding novelty within an existing system."

What is autism spectrum disorder?



ASD covers a huge panorama of issues from the relatively mild Asperger's syndrome to people with a severe disability.



Approximately 1 in 160 live births in Australia have ASD, which is four times more likely to affect boys than girls.



Severe autism is characterised by intellectual impairment and the inability to speak or communicate at all. At the other end of the spectrum, those with Asperger's syndrome have the normal range of intellectual capacity but their condition impairs their ability to socialise and communicate with others, both verbally and non-verbally, and gives them an all-absorbing interest in specific topics.



There may be a genetic basis for the condition, with generations of some families having a history of similar symptoms, or a specific chromosomal abnormality such as Fragile X syndrome. Research also indicates that exposure to pesticides during pregnancy may also be a factor.



For more information read ABC Health and Wellbeing's ASD covers a huge panorama of issues from the relatively mild Asperger's syndrome to people with a severe disability.Approximately 1 in 160 live births in Australia have ASD, which is four times more likely to affect boys than girls.Severe autism is characterised by intellectual impairment and the inability to speak or communicate at all. At the other end of the spectrum, those with Asperger's syndrome have the normal range of intellectual capacity but their condition impairs their ability to socialise and communicate with others, both verbally and non-verbally, and gives them an all-absorbing interest in specific topics.There may be a genetic basis for the condition, with generations of some families having a history of similar symptoms, or a specific chromosomal abnormality such as Fragile X syndrome. Research also indicates that exposure to pesticides during pregnancy may also be a factor.For more information read ABC Health and Wellbeing's Autism Fact File

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Challenging creativitiy

The fact that genius can fall within the autistic spectrum challenges our deepest notions of creativity. "Are there two different routes to creativity - normal and autistic?" asks Snyder.

The unique way someone with Asperger's syndrome sees the world means that even though they may be able to perform a task with savant-like abilities, such as play a complex piece of music after hearing it once, they are not necessarily creative.

UK-based autism expert Simon Baron-Cohen argues this is because creativity is strongly linked with imagination, which he says is very limited in people with autism and Asperger's syndrome.

Baron-Cohen's work used standardised tests to show that children with ASD respond less creatively than control groups when asked to imagine what certain shapes might represent. Instead of imagining what the shapes could be, they produced responses that were 'real' inanimate things that the shapes closely resembled.

This means someone with autistic spectrum disorder may not necessarily discover a new mathematical theorem, or render a revealing interpretation of a piece of music.

And just like the rest of the population, not all people with Asperger's syndrome are geniuses. Those that do have exceptional abilities tend to become high achievers through hard work and determination.

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Perseverance pays off

A combination of their ability to focus on details, recognise patterns others do not and an inability to see the big picture (as recognised by those with a normal mind) means people with ASD can often come up with solutions to problems others overlook.

In the right work context this approach can lead to great discoveries, especially when combined with dedication to the task, unswayed by others' opinions, and a desire to log long lonely hours in the lab or in front of a computer.

According to psychologist and autism specialist Dr Tony Attwood, from Griffith University , people with Asperger's are solitary by preference, and their total dedication to solving a problem means they can pursue it when others would have given up, distracted by the need to socialise.

"They usually have a strong desire to seek knowledge, truth and perfection with a different set of priorities than would be expected with other people," he says.

"They also perceive situations and sensory experiences differently, and their overriding priority may be to solve a problem rather than satisfy the social or emotional needs of others."

He says the other key to understanding the difference between an autistic mind and a normal one is that someone not affected by autism thinks in terms of language and conversation because that is the dominant part of the brain.

But a person with autism uses other parts of their brain that have grown to equal or overshadow the communications area, causing a fundamental difference in how information is processed.

"They may see numbers as shapes," he explains. "It's widely known that Einstein's theory of relativity, for example, was based on visualisation. He thought, visualised, analysed, then formed a novel solution."

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The brilliant ones

We will never really know if Newton, Einstein, Mozart or van Gogh had Asperger's syndrome but it would be "interesting to analyse the profiles of past Nobel prize winners," says Attwood.

There hasn't been a lot of research into the personalities of intellectually gifted scientists and artists, but the few studies that have been done show they are often intense, restless, strong-willed, and sensitive to light and sound - all qualities of Asperger's syndrome.

In addition, they often question the status quo, resist direction, have long attention spans,and undergo periods of intense work and effort. As children, they like to organise things, and are often perceived by others as being a bit 'different'.

Hans Asperger, the German doctor who discovered the eponymous syndrome believed that "for success in science or art, a dash of autism is essential. The essential ingredient may be an ability to turn away from the everyday world, from the simply practical and to rethink a subject with originality so as to create in new untrodden ways with all abilities canalised into the one specialty."

And indeed, Michael Fitzgerald, professor of psychiatry at Dublin's Trinity College, argues that many leading figures in the fields of science, politics and the arts have achieved success because they had autistic spectrum disorder, believing that there is a relationship (genetic or otherwise) between autism and genius.

It seems there are many different paths to genius.

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