Skip to main content

The Pattern Seekers - Simon Baron-Cohen ****

There are two main concepts in this book - one is that the thing that makes humans special is what Simon Baron-Cohen refers to as a systemizing mechanism in the brain, and the other is that two of the spectra all humans sit on is how much we are systemizers and how much we are empathisers. Although it's possible to be strong on both spectra, many who are particularly strong on one are not very strong on the other. And although they aren't the same thing, people diagnosed on the autism spectrum are more likely than the average person to be strong systemizers.

We'll come back to the detail of the invention part of the subtitle, but in some ways, the aspect of the systemizing as what makes humans different is not particularly original. I've seen plenty of examples (including What Do You Think You Are?) of books that suggest our uniqueness comes from the interplay between seeing the world through patterns and the ability to ask 'What if?' Baron-Cohen uses a rather clumsy formulation of the process as 'If-and-then', but for me that felt artificial.

One of his many examples is 'If he closely examined the sole of his basketball boot and shaved off a few millimetres then he would achieve an improvement.' This seems little more than a convoluted way of saying 'If he shaved a few millimetres off the sole of his basketball boot then he would achieve an improvement' - the classic computing IF... THEN. Of course, as he points out, you can add in more ANDs, but I'd argue that the basic format really is If... then.

However, this niggle apart, I was impressed by both the assertion that invention was a result of being a strong systemizer - hence trying it out all sorts of different possibilities and structuring the outcome to be most likely to come up with something really original - and that this makes modern Homo sapiens different from both the other animals and other hominids, such as Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis. 

Baron-Cohen gives many examples to overcome the obvious argument that a good few other animals (for example chimps and crows), plus these other hominids use or used tools. He shows convincingly that while this is true, both the animal and early hominid use of tools seemed to be a result of learned behaviour. So, for example, hand axes were used well over a million years ago - but they remained the same. There was no invention, no development. What was likely to be an accidental discovery was sustained but never developed. Human invention, which seems to have started around 70,000 years ago, is a totally different phenomenon, because, Baron-Cohen argues, of the systemizing mechanism.

Given his speciality, it's no surprise that Baron-Cohen spends a fair amount of time covering the difficulties those with a diagnosis of autism face, and how these can be overcome, pointing out that the overlap between this and being strong systemizers means that with the right support, there is an opportunity for more of those with a diagnosis to have satisfying and useful employment, something that is relatively rarely the case at the moment.

I did have one issue with the book - it felt more like a long article that had been stretched to fit book form. There is a significant amount of repetition of different examples of 'if-and-then', and it's quite a shock to get to page 148 of a 230-page book and find it ends (the rest is appendices, notes and index). However, I've no doubt that this is an interesting and valuable contribution both to the discussion of invention and what makes humans different, plus our understanding of human neurodiversity.

Paperback:

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...
Post a Comment
Read more