Autism : The Next Stage in Evolution

If you've been following names like Ray Kurzweil, Kevin Warwick and others then you know just how antsy some people are for the future. Actually, there are a lot of people who can't wait to see what the future will look like. Many of them have high hopes that its aesthetics will mirror those used in Hollywood movies about cyborgs, androids and robots. Shiny and sleek with plenty of moving parts. Some of those moving parts are expected to be augments of our own body. And brain.

Sure, if we keep pushing in that direction, that may very well be how the future will look. Or, at least, how we will look in the future. Nature is slow. Too slow for man, whose impatience is ready to use brute force to get those genes moving along in ushering in the era of the post-human. 

Of course, there's always the possibility that those genes are already working on the post-human. We're just so damn indoctrinated with Hollywood imagery that we're missing it.

Henry Markram, Tania Rinaldi and Kamila Markram have submitted a very interesting proposition about the nature of autism. Their paper is titled, "The Intense World Syndrome – an alternative hypothesis for autism." The paper was not written for futurists, but futurists should take note since the core principle by the trio is that "the autistic brain is hyper-reactive and hyper-plastic" resulting in a hyper-perceptive, hyper-attentive and hyper-mnemonic individual. This sounds sexy, but only to someone who has not invested a significant amount of time with someone on the autism spectrum. To be sure, this hyper-brain is debilitating for most autists. While the typical brain does an incredible job filtering out all of the crap that comes with information overload, the autistic brain seems to ingest it all, resulting in sensory overload. As Markram and Rinaldi writes, "the core neurophysiological pathology is excessive neuronal information processing and storage in local circuits of the brain, which gives rise to hyper-functioning of the brain regions most affected. Such hyper-functioning in different brain regions is proposed to cause hyper-perception, hyper-attention, and hyper-memory that could potentially explain the full spectrum of symptoms in autism."



Unlike futurism, which hopes to accelerate the brain and body with an artificial addendum, it's possible that autism is natures way of beating us to the punch. After all, evolution is not tidy. If our genes are responding to our over abundant, information saturated environment, and "randomly" working out a way to compensate, then it's conceivable that autism would be one of the many steps it would go through before naturally balancing out at a new type of human body and brain. In other words autism is not so much a disability as it is a work in progress for the next stage in human evolution. I write this to the credit of the people I know personally who are on the autism spectrum: three in total. The first, is a very colorful 29 year old man who has remembered calendar dates up to the year 2053. The other is a 40+ mathematician. He is my go-to guy for most of my questions about number theory. The third is a 20 something young woman specializing in bioinformatics. She's my go-to gal for questions about genetics. All three demonstrate superior memory and intelligence. They also demonstrate severe issues with socializing, as is characteristic with autism. My calendar friend bites his hand when he's angry (his hand is noticeably calloused). My math friend either talks very loud or very low. Consequently, when we discuss mathematics at Starbucks I'm either leaning my ear into his face, as if we're sharing some kind of Pythagorean secret; or the entire store gets a free lesson in number theory. As for my bioinfo friend, she will only communicate via email. Eye contact and direct communication is too distracting for her. Every time I communicate with either three I quietly wonder to myself about what exactly Mother Nature is cooking up in those incredible brains of theirs.

Of course, just like with typical populations, not all people with autism are savants. As I stated earlier, many are struggling to cope with an environment that offers either too little stimulation for their sensory-seeking brains – or too much of it. But If we can entertain the idea of hyper-brains then we can also rethink the implications of other disorders such as ADHD and OCD.

We can also rethink the "future brain."

The futurist's hopeful solution to information overload is to augment the brain with computer processors. The idea – and hope – is to accelerate thinking and give the woefully limited bio-brain the ability to process bundles of information at speeds that far exceed today's computers. Or, as with some flights of fancy, futurists hope for a complete upload of human consciousness into computer hardware altogether (a software downgrade for computers, but that's another story). And yet while we are hard at work, turning our science-fiction into science, the body will be at work naturally transforming the human body into a hyper-body that is better suited for the hyper-active environment imposed on it by civilization. If this is a race, then evolution, even with its small steps and languid pacing, is leaps and bounds ahead of our famous futurists. In fact, it may have already worked out its next masterpiece: Aspergers.

Both my math buddy and my bioinformatics pen-pal are "Aspies". People with Aspergers – or Aspies – are deemed to be higher-functioning autistics. Their reputation for superior intelligence is so legendary that many of our historic geniuses are being retrofitted into this category. Think Einstein. 

If I'm right about this, then Aspergers will do the world a lot of good. While social networking may not be their strong point, neither is any of the social BS that is oh-so typical of we average humans. Aspies aren't all that good with beating around the bush or putting on pretenses and, truth be told, they are all the better for it. Smart is better than smart-ass, and if autism is indeed a step towards smarter humans, then the future will be very interesting indeed.