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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.

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Review by Brian Clegg

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