|Flickr image by Jason Schleifer| No, you can stop laughing, I
am serious. There was actually a paper published (and covered on
Science Daily) a few weeks back that suggested that "the autism
spectrum may represent not disease, but an ancient way of life
for a minority of ancestral humans." I don't want to copy the
entire article from Science Direct (even though the entire thing
is a riot) so here is just some highlights - The "autism
advantage," a relatively new perspective, contends that
sometimes autism has compensating benefits, including increased
abilities for spatial intelligence, concentration and memory.
Although individuals with autism have trouble with social
cognition, their other cognitive abilities are sometimes largely
intact. The paper looks at how autism's strengths may have
played a role in evolution. Individuals on the autism spectrum
would have had the mental tools to be self-sufficient foragers
in environments marked by diminished social contact, Reser said.
The penchant for obsessive, re