Dear John,

The most famous people with autism tend to be exceptionally good at something – often maths or some kind of collecting.

There’s the phenomenon known as Savant Syndrome where people demonstrate exceptional abilities in a very narrow field – think Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. Apparently, about half of all savants are autistic (the other half mostly have some kind of brain injury), but because it’s so rare, only a tiny proportion of autistic folks have it. But because it’s so remarkable, it’s a lot of people’s impressions of autism.

But it’s not at all unusual for autistic people to have a few heightened abilities. The way I understand it is that there’s all kinds of stuff you miss, like non-verbal communication, which gives you lots of extra capacity to focus on other things, like logic and facts.

In the same way, an autistic kid might struggle with social interactions because they can’t pick up body language signals, so they have a lot of extra capacity, which they use to memorise the statistics of railway engines. Is that a good use of their capacity? Not necessarily, but it can feel more rewarding than constantly feeling like a failure socially. 

If I say that facts / maths / computers are our friends, you know exactly what I mean. They behave according to consistent rules, they don’t always change, and they don’t snap at us for no reason. On the face of it, that makes them better friends for bright autistic folk than 90% of people. Of course that’s not the way that people should be – trains aren’t “suitable helpers” for us. But in some ways isn’t the problem that in general folk are so bad at being friends to autistic kids that often trains seem like better options to them?

But the same effect gives some significant advantages to autistic people. So you find a high proportion of autistic people at the top of some professions that require a very high level of knowledge or specialist thought patterns and don’t require much in the way of social skills – maths, physics, computer programming, etc.

There’s also something of the left-handed cricketer effect. In cricket, it’s an advantage to have a team with a range of different skills and styles. As a result, the higher the level of cricket, the closer to 50% the proportion of left-handers is, even though they are a small minority in the general population. In the same way, there are lots of areas where having a team with diverse intellectual abilities and perspectives is an advantage. Having an autistic person like you on a team makes the team much stronger than it would be otherwise. If they can cope with you, that is! 

All the best,

Future John