Autism-Powered Career: Thinking in Patterns

Autism-Powered Career: Thinking in Patterns

This article is the second in a three-part series highlighting ways my career has been enhanced by my autistic brain. Click here for part 1: Driven by Truth

Part 2: Thinking in Patterns and Creativity

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn't look at all like the way you said it before.
Richard P. Feynman

Ask me, "what is the square root of 2,508,259,281?" and with breakneck speed, I'll reply...

..."I have no idea, let me get my calculator."

There is a common misconception that autistic people have near-magical abilities to manipulate numbers without the aid of a calculator; or that they can recall every detail from their life; or that they can memorize incredible amounts of data and repeat it back flawlessly; or that they can hear a piece of music for the first time and play it back perfectly. This type of "savant" capability, though it does exist, is rare. The misconceptions around savantism are often a disservice to the autistic community. If you are expecting a magical performance of memory or computational wizardry from an AS (Autism Spectrum) person, you'll be sorely disappointed. Worse, the AS person will likely feel ashamed and confused wondering, "why are you let-down because I can't do something that you can't do either?" Autistic people do not have superpowers; we have different abilities.

Differences in Brain Make-up

Those different abilities come from some very real differences in the physiology of our brains. Just as there is diversity within neuro-typical (non-autistic) brains, there is endless diversity among autistic brains as well. However, there are some common differences in the wiring and size of specific brain regions. Note that I used the word "differences" not "disabilities." Just as an NT (neurotypical) brain is not disabled because it cannot easily compute PI to 100 places, the AS brain is not disabled simply because it cannot easily comprehend social cues. As Temple Grandin often says, autistic brains are "different, not less."

If we can encourage our communities to embrace these differences, rather than try to eradicate them, we can begin to leverage some of the incredible strengths that neurodiversity can offer. For my autistic brain, one of those differences that has been extremely helpful in my career is the ability to think in patterns.

Connecting the Dots

Are you wondering what it's like to "think in patterns"? If you've seen the movie A Beautiful Mind, you may recall the following scene, where the main character (John Nash, who I will unofficially-diagnose as autistic) performs some incredible code-breaking for the government. Give this clip a quick view to refresh your memory or see it for the first time:

This is a fantastic depiction of a pattern-thinker at work!

...but replace "fantastic" with "fantasy" in that statement and read it again.

For me, being a pattern-based thinker is nothing like this hollywood scene. I see patterns all over the place where NT people apparently do not; but there is no mysterious background music, flashy lights, pensive expressions, or data flowing in and out of my mind. When a pattern emerges, it's just there, uninvited, unsolicited, unprovoked, and sometimes unwanted. I imagine it's pretty similar to how a non-autistic person "just knows" when a person they are talking to is happy.

Understanding another person's emotional state is something many/most autistic people need to heavily analyze to figure out; and we often feel tremendous confusion and embarrassment when we end up being wrong. If you are an NT person talking to somebody who is happy, your brain is funneling a tremendous flow of social cues into your cranial computer and quickly popping out a computation that "this person is happy." You don't have to think about it, you just know. As my brain is funneling data into the pattern-recognition channel of my brain, it has a tendency to recognize, identify, categorize, and articulate patterns that don't appear as readily to most non-autistic folks. I don't have to think about it - a fact that has been of incredible benefit to my career.

Working in a highly technical field involves a sometimes-excessive number of meetings with brilliant people who are crafty with words. There seems to be an unspoken rule that technical meetings must follow these rules:

  1. Minimum word count of 100,000
  2. At least 50% of words per sentence should contain at least 10 letters, sometimes numbers, special characters also allowed
  3. If it can be stated as an acronym, no matter how obscure, it must be stated as an acronym

I have no problem admitting that much of this stuff goes over my head - I sometimes can't keep up. (Sidenote: I've learned that in these settings, most people are only pretending to understand - they are just as clueless as me.) I frequently find myself sitting in one of these meetings where a very smarty-pants person (I mean that endearingly) is going on and on about how wizgidgets need to be changed to work with the slambadgers so the WUH9s won't disrupt the filterflabbers, causing a failure with the whalsterfelts; in other words, talking about something very important and very complicated; but I'm not following. At this point, my AS predisposition toward honesty and truth (see previous article) will prompt me to interrupt and ask the person to "tell me a story."

For those who aren't used to working with me, I'll have to continue to explain and it usually goes something like this...

"I don't understand what you are saying, my brain needs something simple. I need to hear a story. Can you give me an example of how the whalsterfelts might fail?"

The truth is, my brain isn't necessarily simple, it's just different; and 99 times out of 100, before the speaker is even halfway through their story, I've connected all of the dots from the wizgidgets to the whalsterfelts and fully comprehend the problem. But where my autistic brain really shines is that perhaps 90 of those 99 times, I'll also identify patterns between their story and obscure, unrelated experiences that help me to:

  1. Quickly identify potential problems or weaknesses
  2. Interject questions or conditions that may not have been considered
  3. Offer creative / innovative alternate solutions

Unconstrained Creativity

That last point, creative/innovative thinking, is an incredible strength of many autistic minds that really should be better leveraged by employers. I've heard this referred to as "bottom-up thinking". The basic idea is that the autistic brain does not encounter a new situation with most of the contextual prejudices that non-autistic brains employ as a natural, social-survival technique. Instead, the autistic brain, with it's sensitive sensory-input, is simply taking in all of the details as they come. These details then begin to drop into the brain's computational process that usually includes some form of analysis, categorization, recognition, and pattern processing (for me, at least). For example, consider somebody presenting you with a list of physical symptoms such as: coughing, fever, sneezing. The non-autistic mind will begin fitting that data into some pre-defined contexts, such as "common cold", "flu", "allergies" to determine the most likely cause. The non-autistic mind may instead be gathering all of that data and comparing it against all sorts of unconstrained circumstances like the recollection of an animal sneezing, a movie where a person pretended to have a fever, a physics class where dust stimulated a cough reflex, and on and on. The difference is in the constraints of context. The AS brain is often unconstrained and immediately begins to process details associatively rather than linearly.

This form of free-association is often the impetus for finding solutions that are "outside of the box." It's also the reason why an autistic person will sometimes smile and laugh to themselves while hearing otherwise uninteresting details; they've stumbled upon some association that is ridiculous, ironic, or otherwise humorous. "Brainstorming" with an autistic mind, so long as they can be made to feel safe and comfortable, can be an incredibly fruitful and entertaining experience for everybody involved.

Conclusion

Autistic brains are physiologically different from neurotypical brains. Autistic minds process the world differently than neurotypical minds. "Different, not less." Some of these differences can be leveraged by employers to improve problem-solving efficiency, enhance the effectiveness of strategies / plans, and increase innovation. If an employer is willing to invest a little effort and time towards understanding autism and perhaps making a few simple accommodations for autistic employees, the payoff may far outweigh any investment costs.

#HireAutistic #autism #aspergers

Yuriy Chekh

Senior VP of Engineering @ Sombra

7mo

Jer, thanks for sharing!

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Danny Oakenfull

Regional Manager at Catholic Healthcare

4y

Exactly!

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