Why would someone with Asperger’s Syndrome uncover the Great Mystery of the Universe? Inquisitive minds want to know. It is a question requiring an answer. It made me come up with the following explanation. Most of our thinking happens intuitively. Intuition works fast. You can call it fast thinking.¹ When our intuition is inadequate, our reason comes into action. It is called slow thinking. If your intuition does the right thing, there is no reason to consider all your options. Evolution made this happen. It is easy to understand why. It saves a lot of time and energy. And species that deliberated all the possibilities when a hungry pride of predators was coming in their direction didn’t survive and died out.

Great chess players don’t consider all the options, either. Based on past training and experience, their intuition presents a few options that their reason consciously evaluates. They thereby ignore billions of options, and nearly all of them are not worth considering. That’s what makes them such great chess players. Our brains have limited processing capabilities. Clogging a brain with countless useless options downgrades its performance. That’s also why we train for our jobs. However, that makes chess players ignore the best options. Computers don’t have intuition but are fast enough to consider so many options that they can find better moves than chess players can think of. Computers now beat the best human chess players.

But what if intuition fails you more often than most people? In that case, you consider options other people don’t think of. Others may call you crazy or insane. Indeed, most options you consider may not be worth considering, but you don’t know that until you have found that out yourself. If that applies to you, then you may be autistic like me. If the condition is sufficiently mild, you can still lead an ordinary life like everyone else, with a job and a spouse. Still, you need significant experimentation and reasoning to achieve what comes naturally to most people.

Let’s explain that using an example. Yuor brian autmotaically corercts speillng erorrs. You were probably able to read the previous sentence without any effort. Otherwise, you must solve the puzzle by trying different words in various orders to see if they make sense. In that case, you consider several possible meanings, and perhaps you find something no one else has found. And if there is a hidden meaning, you might only find it in this way.

Many people think of autistic people as weirdos cracking riddles no one else can. Fixing broken mirrors requires patience, dedication, imagination, and determination. Perhaps Newton and Einstein were autistic. They may have appeared geniuses simply because they tried out ideas others didn’t think of. In this way, they may have discovered things other people couldn’t. Autistic people can keep working on their eccentric projects despite constant rejection. And sometimes, they are on the right track. And for the ladies who go after the wrong guys, men with Asperger’s Syndrome are usually faithful. But who wants a weirdo if you can get a drunk who cheats on you?

If you must figure out social rules by trying out actions and evaluating other people’s responses, you’re in for a lot of trouble. Most people make sense of the world intuitively, but if you are autistic, reality appears like a 10,000-piece jigsaw puzzle or a shattered mirror. You must fit the pieces together somehow. And you can only do so by applying logic to evidence. That takes a lot of time and effort, and the pieces hardly ever fit perfectly. What you get in the end is something similar to what other people think of as reality. But if you work like that, you might discover patterns others don’t notice.

Autism, nevertheless, survived the evolutionary rat race. How could this have happened? As they say, good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment. Perhaps you arrive at a better judgement by making errors. In that case, autism can be an advantage. Computers find chess moves people don’t think of. And who can find the answers when intuition fails? These situations require trying out ideas other people don’t think of and, quite possibly, ignorance concerning social conventions to pursue these ideas. And if the survival of the group depends on finding these answers, groups without autists get killed and die out. Life is a bitch. If reality is like a 10,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, and the truth is something no one believes, you can get there by puzzling and ignoring negative responses if you are on the right track. And the truth is out there, somewhere.

Latest revision: 18 January 2025

1. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Daniel Kahneman (2011). Penguin Books.