num_pages: 272
description: In The Pattern Seekers Cambridge University psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen makes a case that autism is as crucial to our creative and cultural history as the mastery of fire. Indeed Baron-Cohen argues that autistic people have played a key role in human progress for seventy thousand years from the first tools to the digital revolution.How? Because the same genes that cause autism enable the pattern seeking that is essential to our species's inventiveness. However these abilities exact a great cost on autistic people including social and often medical challenges so Baron-Cohen calls on us to support and celebrate autistic people in both their disabilities and their triumphs. Ultimately The Pattern Seekers isn't just a new theory of human civilization but asks people to consider anew how society treats those who think differently.
language: English
title: The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention
publisher: Basic Books