The Pattern Seekers

Chapter 1

Born Pattern Seekers

Al didn’t talk until he was four years old. Even when he started talking, it was clear he was using language differently to most kids. His mind was different right from the start—he was less interested in people and more focused on spotting patterns, and he wanted explanations for everything he saw. He asked people incessant “why?” questions, to understand how things worked. It was exhausting for his listeners. His unstoppable curiosity was at one level refreshing, yet his need for complete explanations was also often just too much for others. He was clearly a different kind of child.

He showed some other unusual characteristics too. For example, he would chant Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” over and over (a habit that lasted his whole life). At school, his teachers became exasperated with his persistent questioning. One teacher, in frustration, described Al’s brain as “addled,” meaning confused. But Al’s mind was anything but confused. Rather, his relentless questions were requests for greater clarity because he found other people’s explanations of how things work vague. He wanted to build up an orderly, evidence-based picture of the world. From his perspective, everyone else’s way of thinking was sloppy and imprecise.

But his mother was worried. She could see that her son was frequently being reprimanded in class and put down by his teachers, and she worried this would damage his self-confidence. She needed to act decisively. So, when he was eleven, she decided to pull him out of school completely and to home-school him. This was not a decision she took lightly. But given his insatiable appetite for knowledge and the school viewing him so negatively, this seemed the right thing to do. Her child had a right to learn in the way that suited his different kind of mind.

Free of the constraints of a conventional school, Al’s mother watched with amazement as her son devoured books at home and at the local library. When Al read an account of how something worked, whether it was in chemistry or physics, he would rush down to the basement of the house to conduct his “experiments,” to prove that the explanation was true. Free of school, he could finally pursue his passion for seeking patterns in the world, without a teacher telling him to sit still, stop asking questions, and do what he was told. Home-schooling was a liberating gift from mother to son. No longer imprisoned by group learning, Al could finally choose what, when, and how to learn, through individual learning. This suited his mind perfectly, because he was never content to be told by a teacher how something worked, but instead always wanted evidence to verify it for himself. He needed to question all evidence and test things out for himself. His was a mind that didn’t follow the crowd. Instead, he wanted to understand things from first principles, to check that his knowledge was true.

Al’s mother could clearly see that her son’s learning style was different. Some described it as pedantic, obsessive, rigid, precise, and exhaustive. For example, when it came to reading in the library, Al would start by reading the last book on the bottom shelf, then systematically read every book in the order they were on the shelves above, not randomly jumping around the bookshelves. He would follow an unbending rule: one book at a time, in a strict, linear sequence, so he could be sure he hadn’t missed any information. Even though he was most interested in scientific and technical books, he would never deviate from his rule. And he loved rules, because rules were themselves patterns.

By the age of twelve, Al had read Newton’s Principia, taught himself physics, questioned theories of electricity, and conducted his own experiments at home to see if they were right. By age fifteen, Al had become fascinated by Morse code, the ultimate language of patterns. And once he became interested in anything, he had to master it. He couldn’t understand how most people would just dip into lots of topics superficially, since for him a topic had to be understood completely. It was all-or-nothing. He loved how in Morse code the same underlying message could be mapped onto patterns in a variety of ways, using auditory clicks, light flashes, or written symbols. He loved how each letter was a unique sequence of dots or dashes, how a dot was a unit of time, and how a dash was equal to three dots in duration. He loved how a letter was like a musical note, some worth one beat, others two or four beats. He grasped the patterns intuitively—he was a born pattern seeker.

When Al was sixteen, he left home. He wandered the country and discovered that his Morse code skills could earn him money, working as a telegraph operator. But at night he would follow his deeper interests, staying up till the small hours, still performing his “moonlight experiments” on whatever machinery he could lay his hands on. Just as when he was a child, he still loved taking things apart to see how they had been assembled, to see what controlled what. And then when he had done that, he was just as excited to reassemble them.

At age just sixteen, Al produced his first public invention. His “automatic repeater” was a device that could transmit Morse code signals between unmanned telegraph stations, so that anyone could translate the code when it suited them. And as we shall see, he would go on inventing right through his adult life.

Two-year-old Jonah was another child who, like Al, was not yet talking. But unlike Al’s mother, who stayed calm, Jonah’s mother panicked. She was distraught that everyone else’s kid was chattering away, so she took her little boy to a pediatric clinic to be assessed.¹

She watched anxiously as the pediatrician did various tests. The doctor could see that Jonah’s mother was worried and thought it might help to show her a chart outlining how every child’s language development is different:²

Still very upset, Jonah’s mother tried to focus on the chart but just couldn’t understand it. She explained to the doctor that all the different lines just seemed confusing. She tried to hold back her tears. The doctor put her hand on the arm of Jonah’s mother to comfort her as she continued her explanation:

Figure 1.1. Different types of children’s language development

The doctor turned to her, waited as if to gauge how much to say, and said:

The doctor again paused, and seeing that Jonah’s mother was now calming down, she said:

Jonah’s mother was now leaning forward, paying attention to the chart, her tears gone. Then the doctor got out her pen and drew a big X.

She turned to Jonah’s mother:

The doctor smiled for a moment, and then looked Jonah’s mother straight in the eye:

Just before his third birthday, Jonah did finally start talking. But how he used language was unusual. When he spoke, he didn’t look up at people to address them. Nor did he use his index finger to point at things, to share interest. Instead, he pointed at things to name them, for himself, even when he was alone. His mother realized that, unlike other kids, he wasn’t pointing at things to communicate something about them to another person. Rather, he was pointing to classify objects, for himself. And as he pointed to each object, he named it—endlessly classifying. But she was reassured that at last he was finally talking!

But she noticed another difference in how Jonah used words: He wasn’t naming things with general words, like “car” or “mushroom.” Rather, he named them with highly specific words, referring, for example, to the precise make, model, and year of a car (“This is a black 2006 Renault Laguna 2.0S”), or the particular species of mushroom (“This is a porcini mushroom”).

Jonah’s mother was nevertheless very proud of how he spoke, because Jonah’s use of language revealed his very exact mind, his laser-sharp attention to detail, not unlike her own—she too would notice if the tiniest thing had been moved in the house and felt compelled to always put it back in its original position.⁵ It dawned on her that Jonah’s language reflected his strong drive to categorize, which was not unlike her husband’s fascinations: he would sit for hours poring over books of photographs of different species of birds, or different types of cars. She knew that genes inherited from one or the other parent could cause a child to have blue or brown eyes, but could genes also cause a child to have a mind compelled to be precise and to classify?

She kept in mind the doctor’s words: Jonah wasn’t worse than other kids, he was just different. She could see that other three-year-olds didn’t do what he did. For example, Jonah would sit, rapt, in front of the television watching the weather forecast, to see what had changed in the graphs and the numbers since the last weather report. And still at just three years old, when he was in the hospital for a few days, she noticed he was reading the names of the different drugs on the trolley as the nurse wheeled it past his bed. When she mentioned it to the pediatrician, the doctor called this “hyperlexia,” the opposite of dyslexia. Jonah had taught himself to read, even before he had started school. How had this happened? All of her friends needed to sit for hours with their child, painstakingly trying to teach them to read, yet Jonah just took to reading like a duck to water.

One of her friends noticed that whenever she came over to the house, Jonah was always obsessively “experimenting.” For example, he would spend hours turning just one light switch in the house—the one at the top of the stairs—to the down position, leaving all the other light switches in the up position, as though to confirm that the light switch at the top of the stairs controlled the light in the downstairs hallway. He would do this over and over and over again, as if to rerun the experiment, delighted as the light came on, flapping his hands and making a series of high-pitched squeals. When her friend narrowed her eyebrows presumably to say, What’s wrong with him?, Jonah’s mother leapt to her son’s defense and said assertively, “Jonah’s just different.”

By age four, Jonah’s interest had moved on to his large collection of toy cars. He would spin one wheel on one car, round and round and round, seemingly getting great pleasure in confirming it spun in exactly the same sequence every time. He would arrange his toy cars in patterns, lining them up in a strict order according to their color and size, and would have a tantrum if anyone rearranged them even slightly.

Jonah’s other favorite activity was sitting in front of the washing machine, listening for when it made the precise click or whirr he expected to hear as it went through each stage of the cycle. And when it reached a particular predictable point in the sequence, he would flap his hands excitedly. His mother ignored these odd behaviors, feeling they were harmless, and they seemed to make him happy.

But at school the teachers were becoming concerned because Jonah just wouldn’t join in. During group reading, when all the kids sat together on the carpet, Jonah would sit with his eyes tight shut, his fingers in both ears. He hated sitting with other children, and he wouldn’t look at their faces. The other kids started calling him “finger ears” and would chant it when he came into the classroom, upsetting him. He would run outside when he heard it, leaving his teacher Julia trying to persuade him to come back in. Julia worried about Jonah, and spoke to him gently, asking him how he was feeling. He said he felt anxious when other children moved because they were “unpredictable.” She was surprised at a five-year-old using such a grown-up word.

In the playground, Julia noticed that Jonah always tried to keep to himself. Despite the school’s best efforts, and even with her help, sometimes he was bullied. She was mortified to discover that on one occasion some kids had picked him up, put him into a dustbin, dumped rubbish on top of him, laughing as he screamed, and then closed the lid. He stayed in there, terrified to move or make a sound in case the bullies were still there, waiting for him to come out. He was in the bin for hours until, fortunately, he was discovered by the school caretaker at the end of the day.

Generally, Jonah preferred to be alone at the edge of the playground, collecting leaves, classifying them into precise categories. Julia, who had by this point decided she should take him under her wing, asked him one day what he was doing. Initially, he didn’t answer. When she asked him again, he said, without looking up, in a monotonous voice:

Julia was amazed. She’d never come across a child who was so logical, so different, so self-contained. She asked him why he wanted to find all the different ways to sort the leaves, and he answered simply:

Julia felt she was in the presence of a child-scientist who needed no encouragement to conduct his observations but was motivated by pure curiosity to understand the world. When Jonah’s mother came to the school gates to collect him that day, Julia told her she should be proud of her son’s remarkable mind.

But Jonah’s mother was increasingly anxious about his behavior. Other parents were starting to say Jonah was “obsessive” or “weird.” He was the only child in the class who wasn’t invited to other children’s birthday parties. She would dread picking him up at the end of each school day, in case a teacher or a parent came over to her to report yet another incident. On one occasion, Jonah had reacted to another child chanting the “finger-ears” nickname by pushing him so forcefully that the child fell backwards and hit his head. On another occasion, she arrived to pick up Jonah and was called into the head teacher’s office. He had apparently picked up some scissors, walked over to a girl sitting at the same table, and cut her bangs because it bothered him that they weren’t straight. The little girl was speechless with shock, and her parents were furious.

Jonah’s mother longed to have a child who played easily with other children and didn’t come home with odd collections in his pockets, of snails, small rocks, or crumpled pieces of paper with his handwritten lists of cars—their make, model, number plate, color, year, and owner—all systematically organized in a grid. And she worried about Jonah because he totally trusted other people.

One time, a child in the playground had asked if he could see Jonah’s wallet, and when Jonah agreed and handed it over, the other boy ran off with it. His mother despaired at how she would ever teach him all the different ways someone might trick him. He just didn’t seem to understand other children. He said that social interactions were incomprehensible to him, unlike the world of objects or patterns, for which he had an intuitive understanding. So Jonah preferred to be solitary, learning not from others but by and for himself.

It seemed as if everyone completely missed why Jonah was doing what he was doing, endlessly sorting and classifying. One child psychiatrist to whom Jonah’s mother took him called his behavior RRBI, which he explained stood for “repetitive and restrictive behavior and interests,” as if reifying it in this way somehow explained it. To Jonah’s mother, calling it RRBI was insulting: the label medicalized his behavior as a symptom of some disease. And she thought it was meaningless because it was totally circular: “Jonah collects things because he’s got RRBI.”⁷

She decided not to go back to the child psychiatrist and instead to talk to the kind pediatrician, who she felt understood Jonah better. The pediatrician was delighted to see her again and told her that, if you watched Jonah’s repetitive behavior carefully, you could see that he was trying to discover the laws for how things work. Jonah’s mother felt this doctor was helping her to open her eyes, to see what motivated her son.

And then the pediatrician shocked her:

The doctor shook her head.

Jonah’s mother sat in admiration of this doctor who was helping her to finally see her son as gifted.

As young children, Al and Jonah were remarkably similar. They both struggled to understand people, yet their minds were tuned to a hyper level to analyze and understand patterns and systems, questioning, experimenting with, and classifying everything they encountered. Both of these two children, despite being born in different centuries (Al was born in 1847, Jonah in 1988), questioned everything: “Why did X happen? What happens when I do this? Is this an X or a Y? What’s the proof that A really causes B and that it’s not some other factor C?” With their critical minds, they were constantly analyzing and experimenting.

Both Al and Jonah looked at the world in a fresh way, uninfluenced by social convention, not feeling compelled to follow the consensus. And they both wanted explanations that were complete, without gaps. As his pediatrician had astutely observed, Jonah was like a little scientist, examining every assumption and testing the evidence for it—except that Jonah, like Al, was doing this without any formal training. All these two children seemed to care about was the search for “truth,” which for them was simply a word for consistent patterns. Anything that did not fall into a pattern or follow a predictable rule or law was of no interest to them. They were born pattern seekers.

Despite their similar characteristics as children, their lives took very different trajectories. As an adult, Al became famous. He was Thomas Alva Edison, became a celebrated scientist and inventor with 1,093 US patents, and invented remarkable, transformative technologies, such as the lightbulb. He was affectionately nicknamed “the Wizard of Menlo Park” by those who respected his different way of thinking.⁹

In contrast, Jonah today is a young man who still seeks patterns in the world around him. He didn’t become a world-famous inventor, but in his own quiet way, he shows the same drive to understand, experiment, and invent. For example, as an adult, he is fascinated by patterns on the surface of the ocean. He drives to the coast every weekend to go fishing, and the local fishermen all know him. Since his teens, they have grown to love having him join them on their boat because, as he gazes at the surface of the sea, he reads the patterns of ripples on the water. The patterns tell him where there’s a shoal of fish, how big it is, how deep beneath the surface it is, and even what kind of fish may be in the shoal. Often he says nothing and simply points. The fishermen have learned to trust him, and they throw their nets where he points. They still marvel at how easily Jonah spots patterns they miss. And they say his predictions are always right. The joy that Jonah experiences on these fishing expeditions is palpable, because he can become engrossed in the detail—there’s no pressure to see the bigger picture—and these trips also allow him to socialize without having to make conversation.

But even though Jonah has a talent for spotting patterns, remarkable attention to detail, and an extraordinary memory, he has struggled to make a single friend. When I pointed out that the fishermen were his friends, he bluntly corrected me.

Jonah is autistic. But perhaps you already guessed that.

As these two children’s stories make plain, the very same behaviors and fascinations can be viewed very differently. Seen through one lens, a child’s “obsessions” are a symptom of a “disorder” or a “disease” and associated with disability. Seen through another lens, a child’s relentless experimenting and detailed observations are the product of a mind whose pattern-seeking engine operates in overdrive and can lead them to invent, and sometimes to become great inventors.

The capacity to invent is hugely important because once humans became capable of invention, we transformed our world, and we are still doing so today. And yet the capacity to invent is poorly understood. There doesn’t seem to be a theory of how we invent, or an understanding of where this transformational ability comes from. ¹⁰ The conventional wisdom is that invention involves playing with or exploring an object, seeing it in a new light, or having an insight into it, but these are vague descriptors and don’t amount to a theory. Yet when we look at the minds of inventors like Edison, or of autistic people like Jonah, we can glimpse a connection between them that needs exploring.

Glimpsing this connection has driven me to ask some fundamental questions: How do we invent? What goes on in the human mind when we invent? Are humans the only species that can invent? At what point in evolution did we or our ancestors start to invent? What is the intriguing link with autism? And does this link hold true across the autism spectrum, including even those who have learning disabilities or very little language?

As a psychologist and an autism researcher, I have studied the human mind for thirty-five years. In this book, I present a new theory of human invention. Here it is in a nutshell.

First, humans alone have a specific kind of engine in the brain. It’s one that seeks out if-and-then patterns, the minimum definition of a system. I call this engine in the brain the Systemizing Mechanism. Second, the Systemizing Mechanism developed at a landmark moment in human evolution, between 70,000 to 100,000 years ago, when the first humans began to make complex tools in a way that no previous animal had ever been able to, or any non-human animal can do today.¹¹ Third, the Systemizing Mechanism allowed humans alone to become the scientific and technological masters of our planet, eclipsing all other species.