I don’t normally watch The Late Show, but I caught it one night a few months ago. They had a skit that was a parody TV commercial advertising a new phone, whose sole use was to take videos at concerts.

“We all know the best part of experiencing live music is filming the whole thing on your phone,” the voiceover went.

It cut to a shot from within the audience looking up at the stage. There was a sea of phones held aloft on arms, hundreds of tiny screens taking the same video.

Then came the kicker: “And when the concert’s over, just dump it in the trash! Let’s face it — you were never going to watch it anyway.”

It’s funny because it’s true. I used to see a lot of live music. Once, my phone storage ran out and a bunch of concert videos were the culprits. Videos I’d filmed and, of course, never watched again. Who wants to hear tinny phone-recorded music? During those concerts, I had to resist the urge to whip out my phone when the band performed my favorite songs, and I didn’t always succeed. There’s a strange fear of loss in the moment, as you see screens out around you. Wait, I don’t want to lose this moment forever!

And so you record, with a screen between you and the world.

We laugh at the absurdity of filming concerts we’ll never watch. Yet so many of us do it. Where does this urge come from? I found myself thinking about Vivian Maier, a woman who spent her life taking photographs. Like the phone you dump in the trash after the concert, she took more than one thousand rolls of film that she never developed. The film stayed spooled in its canisters, shielded from the light.

Vivian Maier, who was born in 1926 in New York City, earned a living as a nanny. She took photographs in her spare time, or on outings with the kids in her care. She almost never showed them to anyone. She was private, a loner, and had no intimates.

It’s only chance that we know about her. In old age she kept her photos, negatives, and undeveloped rolls in a storage unit. She missed payments and in 2007, the unit’s contents were seized and auctioned, dispersed among several buyers. Gradually, those buyers realized they had stumbled on something significant, and word spread online. Since then, over 150,000 photographs have been identified, spanning 1949 to the mid-1980s.

People who lived near the elderly Maier and were interviewed after she died had no sense of her extraordinary existence. In old age, she would sit on a park bench near her apartment for hours on end. “We knew her as a homeless woman,” one neighbor said, unaware that Maier had an apartment nearby, “who seemed, in many ways, neglected by the world.” Another neighbor remarked: “I was struck that she was sitting in a very public place, yet didn’t wish to talk to people.”

Yet Maier’s photographs reveal an intimacy with her subjects that verged on intrusive. She captured people sleeping on park benches. She photographed their trash. Earlier, when she spent time in France, her intrepid photography roused suspicion. “Because of her constant photographing,” biographer Pamela Bannos writes in Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife, “some people thought that she was a spy. A policeman once questioned Maier extensively about her activity.”

Reconstructing Maier’s French itinerary from her photographs and other evidence, Bannos found that she maintained an exacting pace, stopping only long enough to take photos before trudging on. She experienced her surroundings through the viewfinder.

It was in France that many of Maier’s lifelong themes first emerged: documenting other families’ celebrations and rituals, babies in their mothers’ arms, cemeteries and burials. She was not a landscape or nature photographer. People were her subjects.

This paradox is one reason Maier has captured so much attention. In her personal relations, she was distant and aloof. In her photography, she was up close and probing.

The undeveloped film strikes me as a major clue to all this. One thousand rolls is an extraordinary number. Based on the cameras she used, they contained somewhere between 12,000 and 36,000 images that were captured and never seen again.

Share

Why do we take photos?

The “very activity of taking pictures is soothing, and assuages general feelings of disorientation,” Susan Sontag wrote in On Photography. The camera offers the photographer a barrier “between themselves and whatever […] they encounter.”

Perhaps Maier was drawn to capture humanity because she was deprived of it early on. Her father abandoned her, and her mother was emotionally unstable and unavailable. She never experienced the warmth that is the high point of family life, and from contemporaneous accounts, she was guarded and reclusive in adulthood. But in her photography, she was drawn ineluctably to people.

In the mid-twentieth century, Maier’s prominent box camera with its thick strap offered both a shield and a key. It set her apart as an observer rather than a participant, and it gave her a kind of access pass to examine people up close. Perhaps she felt more comfortable being around others with a camera, seeing them through a viewfinder.

Which is not to say that her photographs were merely documentary. Critics note her keen eye for detail and her expert deployment of the right technique for the circumstances. There are two main purposes of photography: creative expression, and documentation.

Perhaps these aims are more twined than we think.

The earliest representational depictions (that is, of specific things rather than curlicues and zigzags) were made 40,000 to 45,000 years ago. In Indonesia, the Leang Bulu’ Sipong cave shows creatures hunting with spears and ropes. In Borneo, the Lubang Jeriji Saléh cave features paintings of cattle-like animals.

These cave paintings represent finely-honed techniques and required substantial human collaboration. They’re found in areas without natural light, requiring painters to have used lamps. Pigments were mixed elsewhere and applied using chewed twigs, feathers, and animal hair. Wads of moss served as primitive paint pads for stippling and spreading pigment.

In other words, they went to a lot of trouble to make these paintings. What impelled them to do it? These weren’t isolated efforts. Cave paintings have been found across Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas. They survived because they were protected from the elements. There must have been many more that were lost, scoured by wind and time.

For these painters, the cave removed them from direct experience. All that time they spent preparing the materials, scaling the rock walls, and painting by artificial light was time they didn’t spend “living in the moment,” to use an anachronistic phrase. Rather than gaze upon nature, they were holed up inside, recreating it. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

“The impulse to capture — to fix in language or in a photograph — life’s more elusive experiences as well as compulsive, can be transcendent,” writes Jayne Marshall in her quietly experimental memoir, A Line Drawn Or Printed: Six Routes Through Madrid. The urge that Marshall describes in 2025 is the same urge these early humans felt: to reproduce a scene, an experience. It’s an ancient impulse, one that must be etched in our biology.

Subscribe now

A core belief of mine is that we aren’t very different from our predecessors thousands of years ago. The patterns of our behavior today can overlay ancient ones to provide clues to our deepest human design. Under this view, our changing tools — that is, technology — have evolved to let us more fully give way to our underlying compulsions.

Overreliance on our phones fits with this theory. It’s not that we are less motivated today to “live in the moment.” It’s that this concept barely made sense for most of our history. With rare exceptions, there was no alternative to living in the moment, so there was no need to ponder it. The demands of survival consumed much of our mental and physical energy. And the environment and people immediately in front of us provided our entertainment and intellectual stimulation.

Modern technology has turned this upside down. Now, the option to ignore the material world for virtual versions is present at every waking moment.

There’s a thread that extends from those first representational cave paintings to the images we capture but never return to. To me, it’s all evidence of an ingrained instinct to pin down what we see. To make the impermanent, permanent. An instinct that lies beyond the domains of reason and rationality.

When it emerged in our evolutionary past, this instinct didn’t need to be calibrated. There was no risk that it would overtake other aspects of our lives. That has changed, of course. The immense planning needed to represent bulls and hunting scenes in caves has been replaced with the instantaneous ability to capture what we see.

Now, those of us seeded with a greater instinct to document have no external buffer against it. It’s no wonder technology has overtaken our lives. The discourse around our digital overuse condemns modern humans as mindless, superficial, passive, and self-gratifying. Yet I wonder, are we all that different from our ancestors? If those cave painters were born today, would they spend their vacations behind a camera lens, anxious to record all they see?

Maybe it’s not technology, or modern values, that disconnect us from the world of experience. Maybe it’s how we’re built, and our current state is inevitable. We were always going to perfect the technology that allows us to indulge our compulsions without limit.

There’s a concept in ethology called stereotype behavior. These are repetitive behaviors with no obvious goal or function, though they may be relics of normal behavior that became maladaptive in changed settings. It’s like the big cats who pace back and forth in their zoo habitats, their roaming instincts having been diverted into pointless walking.

As Sherry Turkle explores in Alone Together, we can begin to feel overwhelmed and depleted by the lives technology makes possible. “Technology is seductive when what it offers meets our human vulnerabilities,” she writes. Though I would expand that notion not just to cover our vulnerabilities, but our predispositions, too.

If we decide that we don’t want to live with a screen between our eyes and the world, recognizing the underlying urge as ancient might offer both clarity and compassion. We are programmed to preserve what we see. But we weren’t programmed alongside today’s tools.

Maier lived much of her life behind a lens. Some concertgoers live behind their phones. The cave painter worked in semi-darkness. Each, in their own way, made a record of the world while holding that world at a distance. The risk today is that the ability to record is so omnipresent that it subsumes the state of experiencing. There’s no separation between the two. The cave painters saw, and then recorded. Now, we can do both at once.

We can overcome that programming — we do this in other areas — but it takes real effort.

Or, we can decide we don’t want to overcome it. Maier was a compulsive photographer; she experienced the world through a viewfinder. Who’s to say that was a better or worse way of being than any other? So long as we’re not harming anyone, the question isn’t what society approves. It’s what kind of life we want — and whether our impulses bring us nearer to living it.

Looking around, it’s clear that the urge to document varies from person to person. What’s your relationship with photography — do you feel compelled to capture everything, or are you unfettered by such urges? For me, the urge comes and goes according to an unknown rhythm. I’m curious to hear your experience.

Did you enjoy this post? Please support my work—for free.

1. Subscribe for regular updates and 2. Tap below to heart this post so others discover it.

Subscribe now

Looking for more to read? Check out these archived posts:

• Evolutionary mismatch: just one part of the neurodivergence story

• The "god trick" and how we read authority

Stay curious,

Laura

Read on…

Imagine if a simple story you wrote about a birthday party revealed the most personal, private things about you. Things you yourself might not even be aware of.

This premise isn’t a thought experiment. It’s reality.

Subscribe now

There are those who can detect things beneath the surface of awareness. Humans with visual impairment who use echolocation (making clicking sounds that bounce against surfaces) to navigate the physical world. Dogs who sniff cancer or explosives. Even my ability to recognize faces and voices across decades and contexts. At base, these are all forms of pattern recognition, drawing on our brains’ ability to sift through sensory inputs and find meaning in minute distinctions.

But these slightly magical abilities are beginning to seem superfluous. Because AI is built to recognize patterns at a supernatural scale, dwarfing anything we can do.

The potential applications are both grand and unnerving. This was brought home when I read a research paper published this month. The topic? Determining whether a person is autistic simply from what they’ve written.

Share

For years, researchers have studied how autistic and non-autistic writing is different.

In a 2021 Spanish study, a group of autistic and non-autistic adolescents wrote a story based on a visual prompt of a birthday party scene. Researchers hand-coded the stories and found that the autistic group produced shorter text, used a more limited mix of vocabulary and sentence types, and often skipped the resolution of the story’s central conflict.

Last year, in 2024, a Polish team ran hundreds of eighth-grade exam essays through software that detected emotional undertones and abstract linguistic elements. Autistic essays were again a bit shorter, used emotionally flatter language, employed fewer “mind” verbs like think or wonder, and packed together denser sentences with more advanced vocabulary.

In both studies, the researchers started out by measuring specific things: word choice, syntax, and narrative elements.

They had to decide upfront which aspects of the writing to measure and compare, which meant the findings were limited to differences that humans could detect.

Which takes us to the 2025 study I mentioned. This time, researchers unleashed large language models (LLMs) on writing samples from autistic and non-autistic people. First, they fed the LLMs the raw text of some of those essays, along with the labels “autistic” or “non-autistic.” This provided a training set.

After training on the labeled essays, the models were tested on new essays they hadn’t seen, to see if they could correctly predict whether the writer was autistic or not.

This time, the researchers didn’t set out to measure specific things like vocabulary, narrative coherence, or sentence complexity. Instead, they simply instructed the LLMs to make a binary classification: distinguish which samples were “autistic,” and which were not.

The researchers also enlisted a small group of human evaluators to serve as controls. They were psychologists experienced in autism diagnosis, and they reviewed the same writing samples as the LLMs.

The results?

The humans did about as well as a coinflip; their predictions were not much better than blind guessing.

Some of the LLMs, though, reached about 90% accuracy. Because of their black box nature, it’s not clear what differences they detected to yield such remarkable results. Whatever the process, they found significant variations that the human experts didn’t.

The researchers cautioned that there’s “still a long way to go before these types of models can be used for clinical purposes,” but declared their results “promising.”

My prediction: Clinicians will be using LLMs to screen writing samples for autism before too long.

The research paper focused on positive implications of the results: the development of a better screening tool.

And I agree, that’s positive. I have real concerns with our current system of diagnosis, which is too inconsistent and too subjective.

On the other hand…

Doesn’t this worry you a bit? If these researchers attained 90% accuracy in this early effort, people with less benign goals could presumably achieve something similar without much effort.

They could use the public writing of self-identified autistic people as a training tool, and then demand writing samples as a condition of employment, government benefits, and more. In the process, a dossier of your cognitive imprint could be compiled—without your knowledge, let alone consent.

And it doesn’t stop at autism.

What else can LLMs tell about us from our writing? A lot.

Researchers are using LLMs to detect other conditions and traits, including depression, suicidal ideation, general personality traits, and early Alzheimer’s disease.

To a limited extent, this is good! There are interventions that help with depression and suicidal ideation. I know people who wouldn’t be here today without them. I also knew people who didn’t receive them in time.

But it’s also scary that our writing can be used so invasively, to determine things about us that we may not know ourselves. This feels like the premise of a dystopian novel.

Ironically, might some of this be mitigated by our growing use of LLMs to write?

I can’t help thinking of the steady march of articles declaring the end of human writing. That students won’t ever learn how to write, since AI will do it for them.

In the future, how much public writing will truly be human-authored? If you can grab a sample of a person’s writing online, you may not be grabbing their writing. It may be an LLM’s.

And, as more writing is produced by LLMs, all writing, even human-produced, may converge toward a uniform style. Our writing is influenced by what we read. If we read mostly AI authorship, then perhaps that will come out in our writing.

If everyone’s writing starts to echo the same AI style, we may lose some of the subtleties those 2025 study results depended on.

In a dark twist, the spread of LLM tools could blunt their diagnostic edge.

Cold comfort, right?

But maybe that’s the strange bargain we’re entering: as AI tools detect more cognitive signals, they also start to retrain those signals in us—remodeling our writing to be generic.

Or maybe I’m underestimating their ability to see what we can’t.

So, what do you think? Does this worry you, excite you… both?

Leave a comment

Did you enjoy this post? Please support my work—for free!

1. Subscribe for regular updates and 2. Tap below to heart this post so others discover it.

Subscribe now

Looking for more to read? Check out these past posts:

• Setting the scene: how visuals and memory intertwine in autism

• The root of storytelling is pattern

Research cited in this post:

• Inmaculada Baixauli, Belen Rosello, Carmen Berenguer, ​​Montserrat Téllez de Meneses, Ana Miranda. 2021. Reading and Writing Skills in Adolescents With Autism Spectrum Disorder Without Intellectual Disability. Sec. Educational Psychology. 12. Read online.

• Izabela Chojnicka & Aleksander Wawer. 2024. Analysis of Autistic Adolescents’ Essays Using Computer Techniques. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. 2024. Read online.

• Izabela Chojnicka & Aleksander Wawer. 2025. Predicting autism from written narratives using deep neural networks. Scientific Reports. 15:20661. Read online.

Share

Stay curious,

Laura

Hello! I hope your summer is kicking off well. I’m mostly doing my best to dodge the rising East Coast heat. Summer is my least favorite season (I tell uncomprehending sun-lovers to think of me as a friendly vampire).

I’ve been writing recently about book proposal-related topics (e.g., problems with biography, the root of creative insight), but this latest post marks a return to form with a research deep dive. I hope you enjoy!

Subscribe now

The more I read, the more I become convinced our current approach to describing and defining psychiatric disorders is hopelessly flawed.

It’s not possible to cover all my research learnings here. (My Reader app says I’ve annotated over 100 research studies on neurodivergence… oh god).

So I’ll illustrate what I’m talking about with an example: problems with the DSM’s approach to narcissistic personality disorder (shorthand: NPD or narcissism) and how it obscured a link to autism.

Two tracks: clinical practice v. research

When it comes to our understanding of psychiatric conditions, there are separate tracks: clinical, and research. (This is… mostly relevant, so bear with me.)

The clinical track is represented by the DSM (and its international equivalent the ICD), which are used by clinicians as diagnostic tools. Clinicians are the ones who diagnose and treat patients. They adhere to official manuals for a number of reasons: credibility, consistency, practicality.

The DSM is published by the American Psychiatric Association, and any revision goes through a multi-year process involving expert working groups, public comment, internal review panels, and a vote by the APA’s Board of Trustees. This is diagnostic definition-by-committee; a process that is biased toward conventional thinking and slow to evolve.

The research track, on the other hand, is comprised of the decentralized patchwork of scientific research. Whereas clinical approaches are mostly dictated by the singular authority of the DSM, research teams are free to pose whatever hypotheses they like and see what the evidence says. They build on past ideas, but they’re not bound by them.

Research findings sometimes conflict, which can be a good thing. Conflicts surface methodological flaws, as we’ll see in a study below, leading to breakthroughs.

Changes to the DSM require years of vetting and layers of process. On the research side, well-evidenced and persuasive findings can rapidly float to the top and springboard further investigation. That’s not to say research is perfect. But it’s the more innovative and up-to-date of the two tracks.

Which is all to say: If you want to truly understand psychiatric disorders, dogmatic adherence to the DSM is not the way. We’ll see that in action in a bit.

Rethinking the DSM’s approach to narcissism

More relevant context: the DSM’s approach to narcissistic personality disorder.

NPD was added to the DSM-3 in 1980. Contextualized as one of 11 personality disorders, narcissism’s diagnostic definition was heavily influenced by psychoanalytic theory.

Today, the DSM-5-TR defines NPD as “a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts,” and sets forth nine sub-criteria, five of which must be present for diagnosis.

Although the DSM presents NPD as a single disorder, by 2009 researchers were proposing two distinct phenotypes based on clear variability within the NPD population: grandiose narcissism and vulnerable narcissism.

What’s the difference between these two types?

• Grandiose narcissism is marked by arrogant, aggressive, attention-seeking, and exploitative behavior, a lack of empathy, and self-serving beliefs about one’s own importance and entitlement. “These individuals can be socially charming, despite being oblivious to the needs of others, and are interpersonally exploitative,” a 2015 study notes.

• Vulnerable narcissism is marked by hypersensitivity to criticism or failure, avoidant or inhibited social behavior, perfectionism, and acute, intrusive shame. “Interpersonally these individuals are often shy, outwardly self-effacing, and hypersensitive to slights, while harboring secret grandiosity.”

Growing appreciation of narcissism’s variability prompted a slight change in 2013’s DSM-5 edition, which allowed for more nuanced presentations.

(Illustrating the DMS’s definition-by-committee approach, NPD was initially proposed to be dropped from the DSM-5 for lack of empirical support, but a group of clinicians and researchers successfully lobbied for its continued inclusion. This supports my point above, that the DSM is biased toward conventional thinking.)

The DSM today describes a “single, relatively homogenous syndrome” that doesn’t account for the wide range of real-world presentations. “Individuals with narcissistic personality disorder may be grandiose or self-loathing, extraverted or socially isolated, captains of industry or unable to maintain steady employment, model citizens or prone to antisocial activities,” the 2015 study noted.

Nor does the DSM acknowledge what researchers now align on: there are (at least) two different kinds of narcissism. (Some researchers present evidence for a third, “high-functioning” category alongside “grandiose” and “vulnerable.”)

Researchers aren’t sure if these types even belong under the same label. Grandiose and vulnerable narcissism could be extreme ends of the same continuum, but it’s also possible they’re different conditions entirely. This is a focus of current research.

Leave a comment

The broader problem with the DSM and personality disorders

We just saw problems with the DSM’s treatment of NPD. But there’s a growing belief that the DSM’s approach to all personality disorders is flawed.

Researchers increasingly believe that personality disorders aren’t distinct, diagnosable pathologies. Instead, they are loosely defined, overlapping clusters of traits that lack strong empirical support.

A core goal of diagnostic manuals like the DSM is to guide treatment through diagnosis. But in addition to lacking empirical support, the DSM’s personality disorders don’t reliably map onto effective treatment plans. There’s simply too much variability within each category.

If these diagnostic labels don’t reflect well-defined conditions, nor do they inform effective treatment, is the current system really serving us?

Many researchers think not. There’s a growing trend toward using the Five Factor Model (FFM)—a trait-based system that categorizes personality along five broad dimensions and their facets—to study psychological conditions. Against that backdrop, some experts believe that personality “disorders” are extreme or maladaptive variants of normal personality traits.

This aligns with a trend in autism research. Guided by genetic evidence, researchers increasingly see most forms of autism as a concentration of “normal” traits. (Normal because they circulate in the general population). Under this framework, autism’s individual traits are not atypical. What is atypical is their concentration in a single individual.

(I covered this polygenic understanding of autism in a prior post.)

New research: Autism and vulnerable narcissism

All of this sets the stage for a recent study that found a link between autism and vulnerable narcissism.

Researchers had already observed through the lens of the Five Factor Model that autistic individuals and people high in vulnerable (but not grandiose) narcissism tend to score high on neuroticism. Neuroticism is one of the eponymous Five Factors and is marked by emotional reactivity, self-doubt, and sensitivity to stress.

These shared links to neuroticism raised an interesting possibility: could autism and vulnerable narcissism be directly connected?

A team of researchers in Milan set out to test that idea. In 2024, they published the first study to directly measure traits of vulnerable and grandiose narcissism in autistic adults (without intellectual disability).

They administered a widely used narcissism questionnaire (the PNI-52) to 87 autistic adults and compared their responses to a large normative sample.

The results were striking: autistic participants scored significantly higher on vulnerable narcissism traits, but not on grandiose traits.

Roughly one-third of participants scored high enough to suggest a pathological narcissism diagnosis. Pathological narcissism is when narcissistic traits are severe enough to interfere with emotional functioning, relationships, or self-regulation. This risk was driven almost entirely by the group’s scores on the vulnerable subscale, not the grandiose one.

The study also found that vulnerable narcissism was strongly correlated with autistic social communication difficulties. The more social difficulties someone reported on an autism measure, the more likely they were to score high in vulnerable narcissism.

A shared sensitivity?

So why the link between autism and vulnerable narcissism?

The researchers propose a couple explanations.

One is based in neuroticism, the personality trait associated with emotional sensitivity, self-doubt, and difficulty regulating negative emotions. Neuroticism tends to be elevated both in autistic individuals and in people high in vulnerable narcissism. This was the common link that initially prompted the study. In other words, this presence of this trait is a shared causal factor.

Another explanation involves the more specific trait of sensory sensitivity. This trait is commonly found in autism but was only recently linked to vulnerable narcissism. It involves heightened sensitivity to sensory and emotional input, which can make social environments feel overwhelming.

The researchers propose that both autism and vulnerable narcissism result from this underlying sensitivity. In people who are especially reactive to criticism, uncertainty, or social overload, these sensitivities may lead to coping strategies like withdrawal, perfectionism, or internalized shame, which are patterns that appear in both profiles.

This raises a deeper question: to what extent are vulnerable narcissism and autism truly distinct conditions, versus diverse presentations of a shared genetic foundation?

That question is likely to shape future research.

Why this link was missed before

And here’s the aspect of the study that underscores shortcomings in the DSM’s approach to NPD.

There were earlier studies that found no correlation between autism and narcissism. At first glance, the 2024 study seems to contradict those studies.

But there’s a clear explanation: the prior research treated narcissism as a single construct, following the DSM’s lead. Those studies did not disentangle grandiose and vulnerable narcissism scores and test them separately.

Once the two kinds of narcissism are independently tested, a different picture emerges. The association between autism and vulnerable narcissism, previously hidden, becomes visible.

This is what I meant earlier when I said that conflicting research findings can sometimes expose methodological flaws.

In this case, the flaw was relying on the DSM’s definition of narcissism as a single condition — an approach that has been criticized for more than a decade — in studies of narcissism and autism. The Milan team broke from that pattern by treating grandiose and vulnerable narcissism as distinct constructs. That innovation allowed them to uncover links to autism that had previously been obscured.

What else are we getting wrong?

This study illustrates the value of getting granular with psychological profiles and staying open to new frameworks. What we currently label as a single disorder may turn out to be multiple, distinct conditions that never should have been grouped together in the first place. Or, distinct conditions may end up having a common basis and should be linked together.

More broadly, our system of “disorder” labeling may be flawed. Many so-called pathologies might just be maladaptive concentrations of common traits, deemed maladaptive only because they clash with a society built around the more prevalent templates.

Rethinking “disorders” this way could open the door to a better understanding of difference, and to more effective support for traits that cause distress across a range of conditions, rather than siloed treatments based on arbitrary line-drawing.

Did you enjoy this post? Ways to support my work—for free!

1. Subscribe for regular updates and 2. Tap below to heart this post so others discover it.

Leave a comment

Looking for more to read? Check out these past posts:

• My autistic special interests: the fire that burns itself out

• Evolutionary mismatch: just one part of the neurodivergence story

Research cited in this post:

• Eve Caligor, Kenneth N. Levy, Frank E. Yeomans. 2015. Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Diagnostic and Clinical Challenges. American Journal of Psychiatry 172(5):415-422. Read it online.

• Giovanni Broglia, Veronica Nisticò, Bianca Di Paolo, Raffaella Faggioli, Angelo Bertani, Orsola Gambini, Benedetta Demartini. 2024. Traits of narcissistic vulnerability in adults with autism spectrum disorders without intellectual disabilities. Autism Research 2024 17:138-147. Read it online.

Share

Stay curious,

Laura

I’ve been researching a book proposal for months, and I’m at the stage of putting the proposal’s pieces together. The project involves looking at historical figures, historical minds, from a new angle. (You might guess what that angle is).

I’d been blocked for a while on one of the figures, a medieval nun. I felt I had really gotten to know her — what motivated her, the way her mind worked, how she related to others. But there was one piece I hadn’t figured out.

She had divine visions which, she said, revealed to her the interpretation of scripture. It wasn’t in her nature to lie, to falsely claim that these visions were divine. Which means that she truly believed them to be revelations from God.

So, assuming that 1. she had a true belief in a divine author (and a corresponding true belief that she was not the real author), and 2. these visions weren’t actually divine (which I confess I’m powerless to rule out!), what accounts for them?

How do we explain why the nun believed that God, and not she herself, was behind the interpretations that sprang from her own mind?

Subscribe now

Yesterday, I had a flash of insight, which I get during periods of deep research and study.

This time, my insight was about insight. What if the nun’s visions were — themselves — simply flashes of insight? That they only seemed to come from an external source, because she wasn’t conscious of actively producing them?

I suppose this explanation seems obvious when I say it now, but I can promise that it had never entered my mind before. Nor do the many biographies and articles about this person explain her visions this way.

(Some historians have suggested that she was being disingenuous in claiming divine authorship; that the interpretations were the product of intentional, conscious effort that she falsely promoted as divine. I think this flies in the face of everything we know about her, and is no better than idle speculation. I’ll reserve further comment for the book.)

This nun, of course, wasn’t the first person to attribute a creative solution to an external agent. Speak, muse is the way ancient poets began, casting themselves as mere vessels for knowledge imparted by the divine muse of poetry, Calliope.

What led to my late-breaking insight about the nun had been this: the day before, I was researching another figure for my book proposal — this one, a modern novelist.

I read a foreword in which the novelist’s longtime editor explained that the novelist believed her writing “happened to her.” It seemed to the novelist that she was a passive channel for her work; she lacked autonomy and authority. The novel “possessed her” and “would dictate its own shape and atmosphere.”

Although the novelist felt she lacked autonomy, the work was obviously hers. Her novels were always highly autobiographical, turning her life experiences into thinly-veiled fictions. This foreword was important, because it showed me for the first time that a mind can create something significant — not a single idea, but an entire narrative structure — in the recesses of its subconscious. Which then lifts suddenly to the mind’s conscious layer, already fully formed.

That foreword simmered in my mind until the next day, when I put two and two together. The novelist’s account of her writing sparked my insight about the nun1 — that what the novelist described, the nun had experienced too. In both cases, spontaneous insight was the reason their ideas felt like visitations (for the nun), or being possessed (for the novelist).

I didn’t make this connection consciously. It appeared in my mind, unbidden, probably while I was eating cereal (which I, somehow, always seem to be doing). Just like her novels’ shape and atmosphere would suddenly parachute into the novelist’s awareness, the connection parachuted into mine.

In a sense, you might view the belated realization that gave rise to my recent insight — the nun is like the novelist, the novelist is like the nun — as a delayed processing of the information I’ve absorbed while working on this project.

Because I see a potential connection to another kind of experience I have that’s characterized by sudden onset, which as I’ve written — in a funny parallel to what I’m talking about today — “seem to come from nowhere.” These are my sudden meltdowns that stem from emotional processing delays. Are insights and meltdowns two sides of the same coin?

Having connected the novelist’s flashes of insight to the nun’s, I became hungry for more examples.

They’re everywhere in history. Here’s a smattering:

• Samuel Taylor-Coleridge said that Kubla Khan (1816) came to him in an opium-induced dream. When he awoke, he began writing it down, a fully formed “composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort.”

• Harriet Beecher Stowe recounted that her bestselling antislavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), entered her mind as a completed story. “The story can less be said to have been composed by her than imposed upon her,” she wrote of herself in the third person (emphasis mine).

• Mozart (1756-1791) said that entire compositions would come to him all at once. He simply recorded what was already in his head.

• The Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920) claimed that many of his equations and formulas came to him in dreams, sent by the Hindu goddess Namagiri. He wrote them down as revealed, without articulating the steps to derive them — puzzling later mathematicians when they initially tried to recreate the solutions. (Validity would ultimately be confirmed, after much effort.)

• In 1890, Friedrich August Kekulé discovered the ring structure of benzene one night after he set aside his work and dozed off, and fell into a dream where he saw a snake devouring its own tail. The solution of benzene’s structure came to him suddenly: the carbon atoms must be organized in a circle. “As if by a flash of lightening I awoke; and this time I also spent the rest of the night in working out the consequences of the hypothesis,” Kekulé explained.

It’s the property described by Coleridge — the emergence of a work “without any sensation or consciousness of effort” — that seems key to why many have credited their insights to a divine author.

If something pours out of you and you have no memory of creating it, nor of even intending to create it, how should you account for it? Particularly before modern science and psychology, when the facticity of religion was taken for granted?

In that light, explaining sudden insights as matters of divine revelation seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Share

The book project I’m working on has to do with figures in history who were aligned with autistic cognition. (Surprise, surprise …)

So, given that I have autism, and that I suspect both the novelist and the nun did too, I wondered: might there be a connection between insight and autism?

I pose this question cautiously, because the aha! moment is universally recognized (Oprah says she coined the term!). Everyone seems to have them. So why would I think to connect such moments with autism, which everyone decidedly doesn’t have (even if sometimes it seems otherwise)?

Well, as I’ve written before, autistic traits are not the exclusive domain of autism. We don’t have a monopoly on sensory sensitivity, or desire for routine, or clumsiness.

So, it’s possible that even if spontaneous insight is universal, it can be more concentrated in autism. Possible, yes, but is it at all likely?

That’s what I turned to next.

Insight is a hot research topic. That’s unsurprising; sudden insights have been essential to scientific progress. There are countless stories of spontaneous realizations that catapulted scientific discovery ahead. No wonder scientists are eager to study a mechanism that has underwritten their discipline.

I found an academic book chapter2 surveying decades of research on insight. In it, there’s a compelling description of what insight feels like. This description was given to research study participants, who were asked to push a button when they felt it arise:

A feeling of insight is a kind of ‘Aha!’ characterized by suddenness and obviousness. You may not be sure how you came up with the answer but are relatively confident that it is correct without having to mentally check it. It is as though the answer came into mind all at once — when you first thought of the [solution], you simply knew it was the answer. This feeling does not have to be overwhelming but should resemble what was just described.

Research confirms that insights do arrive in our consciousness fully formed (“all at once”), a thesis that psychologists had posited before neuroscience provided confirmation. Advanced brain imaging techniques have revealed that what seems to be happening — sudden awareness of a solution, as opposed to gradual, stepwise problem-solving — is indeed what’s happening in the brain.

What is an insight made up of? As reported in the book, moments of insight involve a “sudden representational change seen during the perceptual switch of ambiguous figures.” In plain terms, it’s like the mental reorganization that occurs when you’re looking at an optical illusion, and your perception suddenly flips. Your brain doesn't gradually morph one image into the other — it snaps into the new interpretation.

From what I can tell, no one has investigated a potential link between autism and insight. But there are indicators that such a study would be worthwhile:

• Research shows that aha! moments are not evenly distributed. Some individuals are more likely to experience spontaneous insight than others. So, what determines that likelihood?

• EEG recordings of brain activity during moments of insight show neural activity that has been linked in other studies with “feature integration and pattern recognition during perceptual processing.” (Whenever I read “pattern recognition,” I sit up straighter.)

• fMRI readings point to the same thing. When an insight happens, there’s increased blood flow in the right anterior superior temporal gyrus (rSTG). The rSTG “has a specific role in semantic integration of distantly related associations.” For the researchers, this finding “established that connections across distantly related pieces of information can facilitate insight by allowing solvers to discover new associations among concepts.” Making connections? Across distantly related pieces of information? To form new associations among concepts? That’s pattern recognition, baby! (All these studies are discussed in the book chapter.)

What these points demonstrate is that 1. not everyone experiences insight to the same degree, and 2. insight is the product of subconscious pattern recognition.

Which cognitive profile is highly prone to pattern thinking? Autism.

I’d say there’s enough here to justify research on potential links between insight and autism, if anyone’s listening.

People consistently report that insights come when they least expect. The problem or creative work has been set aside; an easy, calming task has been taken up, and boom! Inspiration strikes.

(A famous saying, attributed to multiple different scientists so who really knows, is that the greatest discoveries arrive via the “three Bs”: bus, bath, and bed.)

Science corroborates this idea.

In the studies discussed in the book, researchers took EEG and fMRI readings before the insight occurred. What was happening immediately prior? They found that “participants tended to direct their gaze away from the problem itself and were more likely to fixate on a blank portion of the screen,” just before the insight’s emergence.

They also found that insight frequency was positively correlated with “the degree to which subjects reported being in a positive mood at the outset of the experiment.” Researchers theorize that “being in a positive mood may facilitate insight” by allowing the brain’s anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) “to notice weakly activated prepotent solutions in memory,” that is, small salient details that otherwise escape notice.

So, turning away from a project — and being in a good mood — makes your brain more likely to make subtle linkages of things burrowed in your gray matter, sparking insight.

Mozart, for his part, agreed on the importance of a positive mental state: “Pray do not write me any more melancholy letters,” he complained to his father, “for I require at this time a cheerful spirit, a clear head, and inclination to work, and these no one can have who is sad at heart.”

Likewise, Richard Feynman emphasized the importance of a playful, relaxed state of mind. He found that insights came to him when he was not actively focused on a problem, like when he came up with a Nobel-prize winning insight while looking at the wobble of a spinning plate in a cafeteria.

Share

Another reason there might be a correlation between experiencing insights and autism: monotropic focus.

A hallmark of autism is the deep mining of a subject. Autistic individuals research things deeply and recursively — that is, they return to the subject again and again, exploring from different angles, tentacling out to related ideas.

In the process, they amass a ton of relevant, but haphazardly organized information.

That information is steeping in the brain, infusing the unconscious, so that in a quiet moment — brushing your teeth, eating breakfast — a connection crystallizes, and with it, an impression of sudden discovery.

This is essentially what Harriet Beecher Stowe described in her Author’s Introduction to the 1879 edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Over many pages, she inventories the accounts of slavery she’d absorbed over many years: specific incidents discussed among friends, newspaper reports, moral debates. A long list of the ways she’d encountered the problem of slavery. The result was layers of accumulated knowledge steeping in her mind.

The final spark came from an antislavery magazine article — an eyewitness account of a woman escaping across the frozen Ohio River with her child. After reading it, “she began to meditate.” (Stowe writes about herself in the third person.) “The faithful slave husband [from the story] occurred to her as a pattern of Uncle Tom, and the scenes of the story began to gradually form themselves in her mind.”

The first section she wrote was the death of Uncle Tom. “This scene presented itself almost as a tangible vision to her mind,” Stowe recounted. “From that time the story can less be said to have been composed by her than imposed upon her.” (All emphasis mine.)

You might object that spontaneous clarity on an elusive scientific problem (as for Ramanujan, Kekulé, and Feynman) is vastly different from the sudden appearance of an artistic work (in the case of Coleridge, Stowe, and Mozart).

But are they really all that different? I wonder.

Traditionally, we categorize scientific insight as that which is verifiable, and creative production as that which is ineffable. But many scientific breakthroughs began as intuitive flashes, inexplicable realizations, that were only confirmed through conscious analysis after the fact. These breakthroughs were ineffable at the beginning, too.

When Ramanujan’s formulas arrived in dreams, how were they different from Coleridge’s dream of Kubla Khan?

I think the real difference lies not in how these insights arise, nor how they feel to the person when they do, but in whether we demand an after-the-fact justification. Scientific insights are required to be confirmed through proof; artistic ones are allowed to stand on their own.

So, perhaps the boundary between scientific discovery and artistic creation isn’t as solid as we think.

The nun and the novelist both described insights that arrived as if imposed on them, not generated by them. So have many others, across centuries and disciplines. Whether the content is mathematical, scientific, or artistic, the deeper truth may be this: there is a mode of thinking — unfocused, calm, perceptually attuned to small details — that gives rise to insight.

And we might ask whether some of us default to that mode more often, as a function of how our minds have been designed to operate.

Did you enjoy this post? Please support for my work (for free!): Subscribe for regular updates and tap below to heart this post so others discover it.

Subscribe now

Looking for more to read? Check out these past posts:

• The root of storytelling is pattern

• The empathy penalty: a startling study on girls, math, and social sensitivity

Imagine transplanting a cactus into a marshland or a giraffe into a treeless plain. Each organism is pleasingly in sync with its original habitat, but it struggles in these new environments.

It’s a helpful analogy for considering ourselves. We humans have been catapulted from our ancestral environments into a world that transforms far faster than we can evolve.

Evolutionary mismatch is an artifact of that warp-speed transformation. It’s when an advantageous trait becomes maladaptive due to rapid environmental changes.

This phenomenon explains many of the challenges neurodivergent people face today. But the evolutionary origins of our traits also provide a framework for understanding how these traits continue to strengthen humanity today.

Subscribe now

Our original environment

Homo sapiens emerged around 300,000 years ago in Africa and then migrated distally, interbreeding with archaic humans – like Neanderthals – along the way.

The ancient environment established our core genetic makeup. Agriculture emerged only 12,000 years ago, and the first urbanized settlements just 5,000 years ago. This means that for about 97% of human history, our genes were shaped by a pre-agricultural, hunter-gatherer existence.

That environment was highly variable. The climate swung frequently between cold glacial periods and warmer respites. Our ancestors inhabited a range of biomes: woodlands, savannas, coasts, and river valleys. They cycled through periods of famine and feast. Exploiting diverse resources through hunting, foraging, and fishing was key. This overwhelming lack of stability selected for cognitive flexibility, social cooperation, and behavioral adaptability.

Early humans also had regular exposure to parasites and bacteria, and our immune systems evolved to manage chronic low-level infestation. No space was free of contamination.

Other aspects of human existence were more constant. Scientists believe humans worked in small, mobile foraging bands of 20-50 people and expended large amounts of energy daily. Several small bands would associate to form larger groups of 100-150 people for trading, mating, support in hard times, and periodic gatherings. This nested structure is ancient and widespread across foraging societies, making us highly social and deeply reliant on smaller-group intimacy.

Evolutionary mismatch

The phenomenon of evolutionary mismatch — the cactus in the marshland, the giraffe on the treeless plain — is present in all aspects of modern life. The ancient environment that shaped us was vastly different from the one we inhabit today.

For instance:

• Sugar and fat consumption. Ancient humans’ high energy needs, together with those feast and famine cycles, conditioned us to particularly crave sweet and fatty foods, since these nutrients provided calorie-dense energy but were relatively rare. Today, abundant sugar and fat contribute to obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.

• Physical activity levels. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had highly active lifestyles. Today, we’re mostly sedentary, and our bodies suffer for it. It’s not that being sedentary is per se a bad thing (hi, sloths), but it is bad for us because of the way our bodies evolved.

• Social isolation. Humans evolved in small, closely knit groups that were essential defenses against predators and starvation. Isolation posed a real survival risk, so humans were conditioned to need deep social relationships. Modern life often involves isolation or superficial interaction within oversized groups (hello, social media), leading to mental health struggles such as depression or loneliness.

• Hygiene and immunity. Our immune systems evolved in environments teeming with microbes. Modern hyper-cleanliness limits early exposure, which has been hypothesized to result in increased autoimmune diseases and allergies.

I could go on about the mismatch between our fight-or-flight response and the small threats of modern life (what’s up, microaggression), between our circadian rhythm and today’s artificial light exposure… but you get the point.

To be clear, this is not meant to romanticize ancient human existence or argue a return to a hunter-gatherer heyday. The fact that humans, on average, might have been physically stronger or slept better 300,000 years ago does not mean they were better off.

Evolutionary mismatch and neurodivergence

The mismatch concept also applies in the more targeted context of neurodivergence.

Based on genetic distribution, researchers believe that neurodiverse profiles with polygenic bases – like autism, ADHD, and dyslexia – were positively selected.1 In other words, they offered evolutionary advantages that resulted in humans passing on these genetic profiles to their offspring over many generations, onto the present day.

For instance, the DRD4-7R allele is linked to ADHD.2 This gene variant is associated with risk-taking and is “under strong positive selection in the human population.”3 It’s believed that DRD4-7R accounts for early human migration over long distances.

Here are some examples of evolutionary mismatch within neurodivergent traits:

• ADHD hyperactivity, novelty-seeking, and frequent attention shifts. These traits may have been advantageous in unpredictable ancestral environments by helping individuals detect threats, explore new territories, or experiment with unfamiliar tools and food sources. But these traits often clash with modern classrooms and workplaces, which impose sedentary, routine-focused demands.

• Dyslexic exploratory focus. Researchers have identified patterns of exploratory strength in people with dyslexia, and they hypothesize that a deficit in reading and writing ability may be the flipside of redirecting brain resources toward exploratory search.4 In modern society, which views reading and writing ability as fundamental to intelligence and potential, dyslexia is often seen as a deficit rather than a strength.

• Autistic heightened sensory sensitivity and reduced habituation. I’ve written about the reduced habituation trait previously. Heightened sensory sensitivity may have been beneficial when detecting subtle environmental changes was crucial to survival. For instance, being a light sleeper may have helped people like me identify nighttime threats. Today’s world, filled with artificial lights, loud noises, and other relentless stimuli, creates sensory overload for autistic individuals, exacerbating anxiety and discomfort.

• Autistic monotropic focus. Some problems require deep, intense focus to solve, and being oriented toward that kind of attention could have been a bonus as early humans developed solutions and methods for survival. Modern technology puts many of our survival needs just a tap or click away, and monotropic focus can now seem counterproductive.

Subscribe now

Neurodiversity makes us stronger

And yet, while mismatch explains why certain traits cause friction today, it doesn’t mean those traits lack value. The reality is, as ever, nuanced.

Though corporate success isn’t the only, or best, measure of value, it’s often the one society takes most seriously. And so, for instance, it’s striking that many CEOs have dyslexia and see it as an important differentiator. It makes sense that an orientation toward exploration — of new ideas, methods, strategies — would benefit a CEO, right? This fact subverts the conventional wisdom that excelling in reading and writing is fundamental to modern success.

And even if individual traits can misfire in modern contexts, what happens when they’re pooled into a group?

There are certain universal principles that hold true across unrelated domains. These are the ones that really excite my pattern-seeking mind. And that’s the case for the diversity = strength principle.

Diverse groups are more adaptive, resilient, and effective than homogenous, one-size-fits-all groups.

We see this everywhere:

• In the ravages of monoculture crop production and the benefits of ecosystem diversity

• In the resilience of distributed computer networks

• In groups of human problem solvers

• In investment portfolio optimization

• In microbiome health

• In in-species genetic diversity as a shield against disease

• In gender and ethnic diversity as a predictor of better business performance

This principle should logically extend to neurodiversity, although I haven’t found any peer-reviewed research addressing it.

However, support for this idea comes from our early ancestors.

To use a couple traits discussed above as examples, dyslexic exploratory focus logically complements autistic monotropic focus. Cognitive exploration produces new ideas. Monotropic focus mines those ideas for effective implementation. A hunter-gatherer team with both profiles would be well-situated to explore new environments and develop them effectively.

Perhaps as circumstantial support of this theory, there is little polygenic overlap between dyslexia and autism, and they rarely co-occur. Dyslexia and ADHD, on the other hand, have high comorbidity,5 which makes intuitive sense given the similarity between exploratory focus and novelty-seeking behavior.

Evidence from corporate neurodiversity programs

It doesn’t take a great mental leap to predict the benefits of neurodiversity today. Exploratory orientation, attention-shifting, novelty-seeking, deep focus, and sensory sensitivity each result in seeing things others don’t and thinking of things others aren’t.

For instance, an overly uniform team is susceptible to groupthink, blind spots, and cognitive bias; a neurodiverse group would be better equipped to resist those pitfalls and generate a wider range of ideas.

Companies, ever eager to achieve marginal advantage to boost competitiveness and profitability, are already experimenting with this hypothesis.

A growing number of businesses, including Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, Ford, EY, Caterpillar, IBM, JPMorgan Chase, and Lego, are making efforts to enhance neurodiversity among their workforces.

And business case reports and pilot programs show measurable improvements when teams are neurodiverse.

For instance, an EY pilot program found:

Quality, efficiency and productivity were comparable, but the neurodiverse employees excelled at innovation. In the first month, they identified process improvements that cut the time for technical training in half. They learned how to automate processes far faster than the neurotypical account professionals they trained with. They then used the resulting downtime to create training videos to help all professionals learn automation more quickly.

In another example, a Hewlett Packard program reported a 30% productivity boost in teams that integrated neurodiverse individuals.

As I look through these corporate case studies, I notice a concentration in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. That’s not a coincidence. Those countries have government programs and policies aimed at supporting neurodivergent individuals in the workforce, which has fostered environments conducive to such initiatives.​

Australia, for example, has a National Autism Strategy focused on supporting and empowering “Autistic people to thrive, in all aspects of life.”

I can’t help but compare those government initiatives with the current trend in my country, the US, of dismantling DEI and defunding programs and research that focus on support and inclusion.

The takeaways

Before closing, an important caveat: Neurodiverse people often feel a need to defend their existence. No one needs to justify their existence, and the point of this post is not – absolutely not – to defend people who need no defending.

A greater understanding of context, history, science, processes, and society is worthwhile for its own sake. That belief animates my work here.

So I find it worth observing that millions (billions?) of people alive today – that is, most (or all?) of humanity – may owe their existence to the simple fact that our neurodiverse ancestors worked in harmony. Our ancestors’ complementary traits enabled humans to overcome ever-present threats to species extinction, threats from which every other archaic human species perished.

At critical points in their existential fight to survive, our ancestors contributed strengths that created a sum greater than its parts. Those same strengths still shape how we meet today’s challenges.

Thanks for reading Strange Clarity, where I write about neurodivergence, cognition, and the hidden architectures of thought.

If this post sparked something:
→ Leave a comment: even a simple “I was here” makes a huge impact.

Leave a comment

→ Share it with someone thoughtful. Substack makes it easy.

Share

Related posts:
🔍 What we know about genetics & autism
📢 Why autism gave me supersonic hearing

Prefer fewer emails? You can choose which sections to follow by clicking “Manage subscription” at the bottom of any newsletter.

Strange Clarity is reader-powered. If you’d like to support my work, the best way is to subscribe, like, comment, or share a post that resonated.

With curiosity,

Laura

As I dig into autism research, I keep running into this thing called the Empathizing-Systemizing Theory (E-S for short), first proposed by psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen in the early 2000s.

Given how often it’s discussed (one paper on the theory has been cited 1,555 times), I assumed it must offer something of value for autism: a useful lens, maybe even a foundation.

Subscribe now

But as I’ve looked closely at one study grounded on the E-S theory, I learned how very wrong my assumption was.

What I found instead was that the E-S model not only fails to deliver insight into autistic cognition, but also quietly reinforces some of our most persistent gender stereotypes. I’ll show you how I got here.

The Empathizing–Systemizing Theory, in brief (and why it’s due for retirement)

Simon Baron-Cohen’s empathizing-systemizing (E-S) theory has been a staple of autism discourse for over two decades.

The original theory went like this: empathizing and systemizing are two distinct cognitive traits. Baron-Cohen described them as separate dimensions. You could score high or low on either one, independently.

• Empathizing is the ability to identify what someone else is thinking or feeling and to respond appropriately. It includes both understanding others’ perspectives and emotionally resonating with them, as seen when someone is skilled in reading facial expressions, grasping social cues, or offering comfort.

• Systematizing is the drive to understand and predict rule-based systems, whether mechanical, mathematical, linguistic, or abstract. It’s the impulse behind spotting patterns, building models, or figuring out how things work.

Baron-Cohen created tests to score how much E and S a person has. He then measured the difference in a person’s scores (S minus E) to slot them into five “brain types”:

• Type B (balanced)

• Type E (more empathizing than systemizing)

• Type S (more systemizing than empathizing)

• Extreme Type E (much more empathizing than systemizing)

• Extreme Type S (much more systemizing than empathizing)

He hypothesized that autistic individuals fall into the last category: the Extreme Type S brain, where systemizing vastly outweighs empathizing.

Over time, though, the model was increasingly misinterpreted and simplified. Rather than being understood as two separate traits, E and S came to be treated as opposites on a single continuum: more empathizing meant less systemizing, and vice versa.

At the same time, the theory’s gendered framing intensified. Baron-Cohen had always linked systemizing to the “male brain” and empathizing to the “female brain,” but this became central. Autism, in this view, came to represent an Extreme Male Brain.

His logic went like this:

• Autism = extreme systemizing + impaired empathizing

• Men systemize more than women, on average

• Therefore, autism is an exaggeration of male cognitive traits

This gendered framing was speculative from the start. Still, it became a cornerstone of the theory’s appeal. Baron-Cohen often cited male overrepresentation in math and engineering as evidence that systemizing, and therefore the autistic brain itself, is aligned with male traits.

However, as we’ll soon see, one of the few studies to directly test this connection uncovered something surprising.

The 2016 study that used the E-S Theory to predict math abilities

That’s all important prelude to what I really want to focus on today: a startling discovery on the link between empathy in girls and math ability.

That link was uncovered in a 2016 study that set out to rigorously test some of the E-S theory’s central claims.1

The researchers started with a long-standing Baron-Cohen hypothesis: that better math performance stems from stronger systemizing abilities. Yet despite years of speculation and citation, only one study had ever directly tested this and found no evidence of a link.

So, these researchers set out to try again, with sharper tools and a more comprehensive approach.

The researchers studied 112 typically developing children, ages 7 to 12, about half of them girls. Here I want to underline that although the E-S theory is closely tied to autism, this was not a study about autism.

They gave the children math tests, as well as validated questionnaires measuring systemizing (the S score), empathizing (the E score), social responsiveness, reading ability, IQ, and math anxiety. (Math anxiety measures whether a child experiences feelings of tension, worry, or fear when engaging with math-related tasks.)

Their hypotheses, drawn from Baron-Cohen’s work, were straightforward:

• Children who scored high in systemizing on an absolute basis (predicted to include more boys than girls) would perform better in math

• Those with a Type S brain (high systemizing, low empathizing) would outperform those with a Type E brain (the reverse) in math

• If both of those predictions held, then the study would reveal that systemizing tendencies contribute to gender differences in math achievement

• The researchers also set out to test whether E and S were on a continuum, such that a high score in E meant a low score in S, and vice versa

Instead, the study dismantled these assumptions one by one.

What they found undermined the E-S theory at nearly every turn

First, E and S were not on a continuum for the study group. Being strong in one area didn’t predict being low (or high) in the other. They are independent traits. This already chips away at the idea that girls are generally stronger in empathizing relative to systemizing, and vice versa for boys.

Second, although it was true that boys had slightly higher systemizing scores (an insignificant difference), and girls had meaningfully higher empathizing scores, these results related to math ability in surprising ways.

The first surprise was that systemizing scores didn’t correlate with math performance. This held true even when controlling for IQ and reading ability. Kids who scored high on systemizing weren’t any better at math calculations (like arithmetic problems). There was a slight positive link to more conceptual math reasoning tasks, but even that wasn’t strong enough to be statistically significant.

The idea that systemizing predicts mathematical skill, a frequently cited implication of the E–S framework, simply didn’t hold.

Indeed, IQ and reading ability explained much of the variation in math reasoning scores. The systemizing score (S score), by contrast, added no meaningful information.

It’s worth underlining here that Baron-Cohen’s theory was explicitly gendered: he argued that men are, on average, more systemizing than women, and that this may explain male overrepresentation in math-heavy fields like engineering. But this study found no link between systemizing and math performance in children, and no math advantage for systemizing “brain types,” axing that logic at its root.

The second surprise is a real twist: higher empathy scores were linked to slightly lower performance in basic math tasks, even after adjusting for general cognitive ability. This negative link between empathy and basic math was statistically significant for the girls in the sample, but not the boys.

This wasn’t just a null result for systemizing: it was a reversal of expectations. The very trait we often praise in children and especially girls – the ability to tune into others – was the one most closely linked to lower math scores in this group.

In the end, and despite the researchers’ hypothesis, it wasn’t the gap between systemizing and empathizing that mattered. It was empathy alone that predicted math ability.

The researchers dug deeper to figure out why. They found that girls with high E scores were also more socially responsive, as measured by the separate Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS).2

By excavating more layers of linkages, researchers found that empathy alone didn’t directly impair math skills. Instead, it predicted higher social sensitivity scoring on the SRS, and that score was linked to lower math performance in girls.3

It’s worth pausing here. The study didn’t just fail to support Baron-Cohen’s theory; it actively undermined it. It challenged the assumption that systemizing is a cognitive strength linked to mathematical reasoning. It showed that systemizing and empathizing are not diametrically opposed. And it hinted at something more concerning: that empathy, and specifically, social awareness, may actually impair girls’ math performance under certain conditions.

A theory of stereotype absorption, with earlier data to back it up

Why would this happen?

Why would high empathy predict lower math ability, even as other measures of intelligence like IQ and reading ability hold constant?

The researchers offered a compelling hypothesis: girls who are especially socially aware may be more attuned to implicit messages about what girls are (and aren’t) supposed to be good at. In classrooms where teachers harbor anxiety about math or subtly doubt girls’ abilities in it, or where peers assume boys are naturally better at STEM, these girls pick up on those cues and internalize them.

I was surprised – horrified – to discover that this hypothesis builds on established research. Previous studies have shown that when female teachers are anxious or uncertain about their own math abilities, it can negatively affect girls’ (but not boys’) performance, likely by sending subtle signals about who is expected to excel.4

This study adds a sharper edge: it suggests that the very capacity to pick up on those signals might itself be a vulnerability in this context, allowing stereotypes to take hold earlier and more deeply in the girls who are most attuned to their environment.

The idea that empathy can backfire in this highly specific way is both fascinating and unsettling. It challenges our usual assumption that a surplus of empathy is always a strength, and a deficit always a weakness. For the socially gifted school girl, the ability to pick up on subtle social cues can be a real asset. But in certain environments, it may also make her more vulnerable to internalizing harmful, unspoken messages.

Where this leaves us

Baron-Cohen’s E–S theory continues to circulate in the literature, but studies like this make it hard to take the theory at face value. At best, it’s an oversimplified model. At worst, it may have distracted researchers for years from more productive questions, especially those about how social cognition interacts with environment, context, and stereotype.

Indeed, studies show that the gender gap in math achievement begins as early as kindergarten, emerging at the same time as teacher expectations that boys are naturally better at math than girls. The linkage to empathy discussed above underscores the urgent need for early classroom interventions, before these subtle but damaging beliefs take hold in young minds.

This isn’t a story about autism, even though that’s how I came across the E-S theory initially. It’s a story about the seductive power of tidy cognitive theories and how easily cultural assumptions, especially gendered ones, get folded into scientific frameworks.

It’s also a story about empathy: not as a universal good, but as a context-sensitive tool, one that can either support or sabotage us depending on what it’s tuned to.

The better question is not: “Why aren’t girls better at math?” but: “Who is most attuned to what they’re being told – explicitly or not – about who they’re supposed to be?”

There’s no reason this phenomenon would be limited to math. What other messages are being internalized by socially-attuned girls about the limits of female achievement?

Did you appreciate this research deep dive? If so, please consider supporting my work here at Strange Clarity.

Donate to My Tip Jar

When I watch TV, subtitles are on—always. When I go out to dinner, I never catch the specials. At parties, bars, anywhere with a buzzing crowd, about half the time I’m only pretending to hear what’s been said.

And yet, I can hear the pitter patter of tiny feet on a staircase two rooms away. Despite earplugs, my husband’s loud breathing keeps me from falling asleep. And once I do, the soft creak of a window shifting in its frame is enough to wake me again.

If these things seem utterly contradictory to you, you’re not alone. For years, I’ve been flummoxed: how could I be so hard of hearing in some situations, and supersonic in others?

It turns out, there’s nothing wrong with my hearing itself—my ears are garden-variety.1 The issue lies in auditory processing, or how my brain processes sound.

I put this together after reading a lengthy research review2 on a different subject: the predictive skills of people with autism.

Many things are tied up with our ability to make predictions, but of particular importance here is habituation. In one study, habituation was defined as “the attenuation of neural or behavioral response over repetitions of the same stimulus,” which is really just referring to the point at which the brain says: I’ve seen (or heard or felt) this before—I don’t need to react so strongly now.

The more predictable something is, the more the brain tends to habituate (calm down, stop reacting). A habituation response is a signal that the brain has successfully made a prediction and decided it no longer needs to keep reacting. Without that prediction, the brain is alerted whenever the sensory input occurs. The more a person struggles with prediction, the less pronounced their habituation responses will be.

To see habituation at work, imagine someone moves into an apartment above a busy intersection. At first, they might jolt awake at every honk or siren. But after a few weeks, they sleep through it. Their brain has become accustomed to the noise—the sounds are predicted—and no longer reacts with the same intensity. Habituation is the brain’s natural “tuning out” process.

Subscribe now

In autism, due to challenges with certain kinds of predictions, habituation happens more slowly. The world stays loud, bright, and distracting even when it’s familiar.

This explains my ping-ponging hearing, in which I struggle to hear what people are saying in some situations, and hear such teensy noises at other times that I lose sleep.

(Not all predictive capabilities are impaired in autism. A specific domain is affected: contextual modulation, which causes challenges with integrating or relying on environmental signals when making predictions.)3

Those times I’m straining to hear what’s being said, it’s because there’s a lot of background noise. That happens to everyone, you might say. True, but my problem is that I’m uniquely unable to hear in these situations. Everyone else follows the conversation just fine, as the background noise fades into irrelevance. But for me, every sound remains equally loud, equally important. Nothing gets filtered out.

They can hear what’s said because they’ve become habituated to the din around us. Their brains zero in on the useful sounds: the voices in the immediate conversation. My brain hasn’t habituated—it hasn’t turned down the volume on the background noise—and as a result I can’t distinguish what the person next to me is saying from the clatter of dishes or the music floating through the sound system.

Even though at night my hearing is seemingly too good, it’s the same mechanism at work. When it’s time to sleep, most people’s brains habituate to the nighttime soundscape. Their brains tell them the neighbor’s barking dog or the AC turning on is nothing important. My brain, on the other hand, reacts to each noise anew: Hear that? And that? Oh there it is again!

(Not really, of course; there’s no internal chatter about these sounds. This isn’t something I can will away. Habituation happens below the level of conscious awareness. If I could choose which sounds to ignore, I would have done it long ago.)

That’s the irony: what looks like contradictory hearing—partially deaf in one context, hypersensitive in another—is really the same mechanism at work. A brain that doesn’t know when to stop paying attention.

This habituation slowdown likely also explains why some autistic people experience sensory overload. The slower the brain is to habituate, the louder, brighter, itchier, smellier, and altogether more overwhelming the world becomes. What is tolerable or even pleasant to someone whose brain habituates easily may be utterly intolerable to a person with autism.

My sensory sensitivity, for all my trouble conversing and sleeping, isn’t particularly severe. It doesn’t stop me from going to concerts, or attending sporting events (my lifelong disinterest in sports stops me from that). But understanding how my lack of habituation does result in a sonar experience that’s completely out of sync with others has given me more empathy for the extreme range of autistic experience.

Share

If you’re neurotypical, understanding how habituation works might help you empathize, too. Imagine a time when something was just too much for you—too loud, too bright, an overpowering stench, a feeling that made your skin crawl. That’s how it feels for some people constantly, as the initial punch of a strong perfume never fades, or the idle bleating of a car alarm demands all their attention. The sensation might feel within the range of normal to you, but that’s because your brain has calibrated it. For them, it’s dialed all the way up.

It can get bad. In one study,4 researchers compared the autistic sensory overload—rooted in a chronic inability to make predictions from sensory input—to torture:

Several studies have demonstrated that unpredictability of stressors is one of the key aspects of torture and leads to the development of anxiety, fear, and aversion. “Acoustic bombardment” has long been used as an instrument of torture. Unfamiliar, and hence unpredictable, music is found to be especially effective. Tying this back to the domain of autism, the PIA hypothesis suggests that an endogenous predictive impairment causes environmental stimuli to appear more chaotic, leading to reduced habituation and hence greater stress.

All this urges attention to autistic children in particular. Children lack control over their environments and can’t easily flee when sensations become too much. Although it’s hard to understand a sensory meltdown if the environment seems just fine to you, appreciating that their experience is truly different—and that they’re powerless to stop the sensations flooding in—can lead to more patience. Their suffering is real, even if you can’t experience the cause.

And thus ends the story of how I finally figured out why my hearing is whacky. Thanks for listening.

Did you like this deep dive into neurodivergence research? If so, support my work by putting a small amount in my tip jar. That’ll allow me to keep publishing without a paywall. Thank you!

Donate to My Tip Jar

To branch out from here, you might read:

• Jyoti Madhusoodanan’s article for The Transmitter, Confusion at the crossroads of autism and hearing loss

• Nick Dean at Neurokindness’s piece “Sensory overload. Heathrow. I should have thought this through”…

• Jack Eaton at Asterisk Mag on misophonia in The Unbearable Loudness of Chewing

• Ebony Nash from Meticulously Organized Chaos on Reasons I thought I may be autistic: Sensory Edition