The Pattern Seekers

How Autism Drives Human Invention

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By Simon Baron-Cohen

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A groundbreaking argument about the link between autism and ingenuity.

Why can humans alone invent? In The Pattern Seekers, Cambridge University psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen makes a case that autism is as crucial to our creative and cultural history as the mastery of fire. Indeed, Baron-Cohen argues that autistic people have played a key role in human progress for seventy thousand years, from the first tools to the digital revolution.

How? Because the same genes that cause autism enable the pattern seeking that is essential to our species’s inventiveness. However, these abilities exact a great cost on autistic people, including social and often medical challenges, so Baron-Cohen calls on us to support and celebrate autistic people in both their disabilities and their triumphs. Ultimately, The Pattern Seekers isn’t just a new theory of human civilization, but a call to consider anew how society treats those who think differently.
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On Sale
Nov 10, 2020
Page Count
272 pages
Publisher
Basic Books
ISBN-13
9781541647138

Simon Baron-Cohen

About the Author

Simon Baron-Cohen is professor of psychology and psychiatry and director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University. He is the author of over six hundred scientific articles and four books, including The Science of Evil and The Essential Difference.  

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