Autistic individuals have a social handicap. Yet, it comes with a benefit. We all can think logically, but if you’re autistic, you are less prone to group pressure. Humans are social animals who cooperate by sharing their fictions. We share beliefs to cooperate, so groups pressure their members into accepting them. Most people accept false beliefs or do stupid things to get accepted by the group. That ailment doesn’t plague autistic persons. That sets them apart. Autism is also a failure of intuition, so that autistic people can be inept and poorly adapted to their environments. They might make up for that by analysing the situation. Sometimes, it yields spectacular results because intuition can fail us.

Most of our thinking happens intuitively. Intuition works fast. You can call it fast thinking.¹ When our intuition fails us, which may happen when the situation changes, our reason steps in. You can call it slow thinking. You consider the options and evaluate them. If intuition suffices, that is a waste of time and energy. Evolution made this happen. Wasting energy reduces your chances of survival, as you must find a new meal sooner, and that meal may not be forthcoming. You could die of starvation because of thinking too much, because your brain consumes a lot of energy. And species that considered all the possibilities when a hungry pride of predators was coming their way didn’t survive.

Great chess players don’t consider all the options. Their intuition presents a few options that their reason consciously evaluates. They thereby ignore billions of options, most of which are not worth considering. That’s what makes them such great chess players. Training and experience help improve our intuition, so intuition is not entirely innate. 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. Chess players may fail to see the best moves. Computers don’t have intuition to consider options and calculate through them. They have sufficient processing power to find better moves than chess players, enabling computers to beat the best human chess players.

So, what if intuition fails you more often than most people? In that case, you consider options other people don’t think of. They may call you crazy or insane. Indeed, most options you consider may not be worthwhile, but you don’t know that until you have found that out yourself. If that applies to you, then you may be autistic. If the condition is sufficiently mild or you are sufficiently intelligent, you can still lead an ordinary life like everyone else, with a job and a spouse. As you lack innate intuition, you must train yourself to do what comes naturally to most people.

An example can illustrate that. 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 to be geniuses simply because they tried 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.

Figuring out social rules by trying actions and evaluating others’ responses is a recipe for trouble. Most people make sense of the world intuitively, but if you are autistic, you may have to do it like so. To you, reality appears like a 10,000-piece jigsaw puzzle or a shattered mirror. You must fit the pieces together by applying logic to evidence. That takes a lot of time and effort, and the pieces hardly ever fit perfectly. What you end up with is something similar to what other people consider reality. If you are normal, you make sense of the world intuitively by ignoring misfitting pieces in your model of reality and filling in the gaps with the fairy tales others tell you to believe. However, if you do not, you’re out there, alone in the wilderness, making sense of it yourself.

Autism nevertheless survived the evolutionary rat race. As people say, good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment. Mistakes improve judgment, at least if you are willing to learn from them. As a Dutch proverb says, good fortune is with the stupid. The road to wisdom runs through misfortune and failure. The group’s survival may depend on the eccentric who walks a different path and accepts the consequences, such as rejection and ridicule. For who else can find the answers when everybody’s intuition fails? And if reality is like a 10,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, a proper understanding can only come from endless puzzling rather than joining a herd and following it.

Latest revision: 13 February 2025

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