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ScienceDaily summarizes a new study (paywalled) published a few days ago in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.
It is the first study to find a link between autistic traits and the creative thinking processes.
People with high levels of autistic traits are more likely to produce unusually creative ideas, new research confirms. While they found that people with high autistic traits produced fewer responses when generating alternative solutions to a problem - known as 'divergent thinking' - the responses they did produce were more original and creative.
The research...looked at people who may not have a diagnosis of autism but who have high levels of behaviours and thought processes typically associated with the condition. This builds on previous research suggesting there may be advantages to having some traits associated with autism without necessarily meeting criteria for diagnosis.
People with high autistic traits...are typically considered to be more rigid in their thinking, so the fact that the ideas they have are more unusual or rare is surprising. This difference may have positive implications for creative problem solving.
They might not run through things in the same way as someone without these traits would to get the typical ideas, but go directly to less common ones. In other words, the associative or memory-based route to being able to think of different ideas is impaired, whereas the specific ability to produce unusual responses is relatively unimpaired or superior.
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Interesting) by infodragon on Tuesday August 18 2015, @06:47PM
Or is it more logical and simplified? The most "creative" ideas in solving problems comes from viewing the problem in ways neurotypicals do not. The reason there is a problem is because it hasn't been solved. A vast majority of neruotypicals have viewed the problem from the same "typical" perspective. Someone comes along and views the problem from a different perspective and presents a solution that is logical, simple, and obvious to them. The neurotypicals proclaim creativity. The observer doesn't understand or comprehend how their structured, logical and obvious solution could be called creative, gives up trying to understand their reasoning and moves on to solving the next problem.
It all comes down to perspective!
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by vux984 on Tuesday August 18 2015, @07:16PM
Or is it more logical and simplified?
No. You had it right further on:
"Someone comes along and views the problem from a different perspective and presents a solution that is logical, simple, and obvious to them."
Emphasis on to them. Just because its logical, simple, and obvious to an autistic person, (or anyone else) doesn't make it objectively logical and simplified. It could still be a Rube Goldberg machine with needless complexity and even completely superfluous steps.
In my experience with autistic people; their solutions are not necessarily better than others. Sometimes they see genuinely clever optimal solutions to problems. But they also commonly fail to see the simplest solution. And frustratingly they are far more likely to "stick" to the solution they see as "simpler and more obvious" if you try to show them a better solution.
It all comes down to perspective!
Agreed.
(Score: 2) by infodragon on Wednesday August 19 2015, @11:48AM
This is not about autistic people but people with autistic tendencies but not "autistic." I believe Einstein was one of them and to paraphrase one of my favorite sayings from him... "Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler." Also something else I attribute to him (It could be someone else), “Any fool can complicate things. It takes a genius to make things simple.”
No matter who said them these have been guiding posts in my life. People that develop creative solutions that are effective, I forgot to use that word, almost invariably produce simple but novel/creative solutions that to them were logical, simple and obvious. The touch of autism seems to lend a different perspective on most things in life. That different perspective lends to different solutions. Different does not mean creative.
Don't settle for shampoo, demand real poo!
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday August 18 2015, @07:33PM
I think you overstate the case.
There is noting to suggest that the problem was not solved by normal people, in a wide variety of ways.
All they mentioned was that occasionally unique and obtuse solutions were invented by the autistic or near autistic person, usually because they refused to think outside the box and bulled their way to a solution. But arrival at a solution happened FAR less often among the near-autistic than with normal people.
Unusual solutions by the near-autistic (forced choices usually, due to refusal to abandon their inside-the-box starting place) were preferentially labeled "creative".
That labeling seems suspect to me.
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