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posted by martyb on Tuesday August 18 2015, @06:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the whoda-thunk? dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by infodragon on Wednesday August 19 2015, @11:48AM

    by infodragon (3509) on Wednesday August 19 2015, @11:48AM (#224928)

    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.

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