The Pattern Seekers, Simon BaronCohen
The Pattern Seekers, Simon BaronCohen
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The Pattern Seekers
How Autism Drives Human Invention

Author: Simon Baron-Cohen

Narrator: Jonathan Cowley

Unabridged: 5 hr 42 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 02/16/2021

Synopsis

A groundbreaking argument about the link between autism and ingenuity.

Why can humans alone invent? In The Pattern Seekers, Cambridge University psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen makes a case that autism is as crucial to our creative and cultural history as the mastery of fire. Indeed, Baron-Cohen argues that autistic people have played a key role in human progress for seventy thousand years, from the first tools to the digital revolution.

How? Because the same genes that cause autism enable the pattern seeking that is essential to our species' inventiveness. However, these abilities exact a great cost on autistic people, including social and often medical challenges, so Baron-Cohen calls on us to support and celebrate autistic people in both their disabilities and their triumphs. Ultimately, The Pattern Seekers isn't just a new theory of human civilization, but a call to consider anew how society treats those who think differently.

About Simon Baron-Cohen

Simon Baron-Cohen is a professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of books including Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind and The Essential Difference: Male and Female Brains and the Truth About Autism. A recipient of the McAndless Award from the American Psychological Association, he is a vice president of the National Autistic Society (UK) and was president of the International Society for Autism Research (INSAR) for 2009. Simon lives in the United Kingdom.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Jenna on August 31, 2020

The Pattern Seekers by Simon Baron-Cohen review. I request this book on @netgalley last month. As an autistic person the title jumped out at me and I wanted to know more, although I admit I was quite dubious about what the content might entail due to its author. Simon Baron-Cohen is a controversial......more

Goodreads review by April on September 14, 2020

I am autistic, but this book just frustrated me. Primarily that’s because the author kept hammering it home again and again that animals can’t experiment, don’t have a theory of mind, etc. This may not have been proven conclusively to be false yet, but it has been shown to be in question enough time......more

Goodreads review by Jeff on July 08, 2020

Intriguing Theory. Full disclosure up front: I *am* Autistic, and thus these types of books tend to demand my attention as I attempt to understand my own mind and body. That noted, Baron-Cohen (no apparent relation to the actor of the same surname) here proposes a theory that those who are "high sys......more

Goodreads review by Rick on June 23, 2021

Not a fan. The author makes a lot of bold proclamations without really any evidence to back them up. Every time someone says “this is why humans are special” and then create an arbitrary list of things, I have red flags go up. It used to be tool use. Then it was language. Now this guy thinks it’s sy......more

Goodreads review by Brian on November 23, 2020

There are two main concepts in this book - one is that the thing that makes humans special is what Simon Baron-Cohen refers to as a systemizing mechanism in the brain, and the other is that two of the spectra all humans sit on is how much we are systemizers and how much we are empathisers. Although......more

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