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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2015, @06:59PM
re: quality of filtering
I read an interesting article once. The writer was suffering from a lifetime of depression (dysthymia) and was frustrated at both the world's view of depression and the expectation that it be treated with drugs.
One of the points the writer raised was the perception among, say, artists, that using these medications reduced creativity. This is a common complaint. Her take was that with depression, the person tended to focus on their depression (consciously or otherwise) and that affected their awareness on the creative process. When they had an original idea, it seemed to spring out of nowhere. OTOH, when they were on the meds and were no longer wallowing in depression, the creative process was "visible" and original ideas no longer seemed spontaneous. The creative process had not changed, but the filtering of ideas had.