Autistic talents in set areas

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Autistic people show a much higher rate of special talents than any other group, and fascinatingly, these tend to occur in set areas. There’s mathematical skill, typically represented as lightning calculating or calendar calculating: when somebody can tell you instantly what day of the week a particular date will fall on, often many years in the past or future. There’s artistic talent, and many people are familiar with Stephen Wiltshire, an amazing autistic artist. He can draw immaculate, incredibly detailed drawings. For example, he drew the Tokyo cityscape from memory after a 20-minute helicopter ride over the city.

There’s musical talent, which is often being able to play by ear, being self-taught, and being able to play back music that you’ve heard only once. Perfect pitch is very common in autistic people, even if they haven’t had any musical training. Moreover, there are memory skills: extraordinary memory for things that are in the area of special interest for that person. That could be memorising telephone directories or extensive bus timetables or any other kind of information that’s important to the person.

Why are special talents more common in autism?

This is a real puzzle and a mystery. One theory that we have is that the starting engine for that talent is an extraordinary eye for detail. We’ve shown in our research that autistic people can see, notice and remember details that the rest of us miss. For autistic people, there seems to be a different balance between the details and the bigger picture.

When you or I have a conversation or watch a film, in the end, we remember the gist of what was talked about or was watched, but we won’t remember the exact words that we used. However, some autistic people process things the other way around. Therefore, they would have difficulty telling you the gist of the conversation, but they might be able to repeat back the exact words that were used.

Autistic people seem to have a bias towards processing details, perhaps at the expense of the big picture or the context. We’ve shown this in a range of different kinds of tasks, such as tasks similar to the children’s puzzle, Where’s Wally?, where you have to find somebody within a crowded scene. We can ask autistic people to find a detail within a bigger picture. Whereas non-autistic people get distracted by the meaning of the picture and the whole context, autistic people can zoom in on the detail that matters.

An eye for detail and musical or artistic talent

In the area of music, in typical development, there’s a transition from remembering a song in terms of its exact notes (a child will sing back the song, always starting on the same note) to processing the melody of the song instead. So, now the child can transpose, start higher or lower and still maintain the melody. Instead, it seems that autistic people keep that attention to the exact note and don’t transition into this big-picture processing of the melody.

Researchers have shown that autistic children, even those who’ve had no musical training, who aren’t identified as being exceptionally talented musicians, have the potential for perfect pitch. You can play them a note and say, ‘that’s the note the cat likes,’ and play another note and say, ‘that’s the note the dog likes,’ and so on. If you do this with non-autistic children, and you come back a few hours later, play a note and ask “Which animal’s note is that?”, they can’t remember. However, autistic children remember, and they can remember over many, many weeks. They have the ability to listen to the exact note rather than just the relations between notes. We think that all autistic musical savants, all those exceptionally talented autistic musicians, have perfect pitch, and perfect pitch is that starting engine for talent related to the eye for detail.

Similarly, if one watches an autistic artist draw, they often draw detail to detail. They don’t sketch out the whole and then fill in the parts. They’re going part to part, again illustrating that eye for detail. We’ve analysed the drawings of autistic children who aren’t savants. They’re not extraordinarily talented, but they tend to draw in parts rather than sketching out the whole. For calendrical calculating, paying attention to the exact date and the exact day is where that talent begins, as well.

The link between autistic traits and talent

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An eye for detail is critical in understanding talent, and we’ve demonstrated that in a twin study where we were able to ask parents about their twins’ autistic-like traits. This was a general population group of twins not selected for autism. However, we could still ask their parents, ‘how good is your son or daughter at holding a conversation, flexibly coping with change, or at making and keeping friends?’ Everybody, of course, gets a different score, so we have a measure of autistic traits.

We can also ask the parents how good their daughter or son is at music, maths, memory and art: Are they remarkably good? Are they better than children much older than them? Parents who said that their children were unusually talented in one of those key areas also tended to report that their children had more autistic traits. However, the autistic traits were not necessarily the social and communication traits but the rigid and repetitive traits instead — that non-social part of autism. In particular, the questions that they were endorsing were that their children noticed and remembered details that other people missed.

Because they were twins, we were also able to do some twin modelling that showed us that the genetic influences on those autistic non-social traits — that eye for detail — are largely overlapping with the genetic influences on talent. Therefore, when people are looking for the genes that influence autism, they’re also going to be looking at the genes that influence talent. Maybe when a geneticist is taking a family pedigree and trying to find out who in the family has something relevant to autism, they should not only be asking, ‘do you have any grandparents, uncles or aunts who have autism?’ They should also be asking, ‘do you have any uncles, aunts or grandparents who are unusually talented?’

Autism and originality

Autistic people find it challenging to know what others are thinking. This is sometimes referred to as mentalising. Non-autistic people can intuitively mentalise. We automatically recognise that other people have thoughts and that their thoughts may be different from our own. Autistic people don’t seem to recognise what other people are thinking intuitively. This can be a real liability; it can be challenging for ordinary social interaction. However, there is one place where it affords autistic people an advantage: in avoiding herd mentality.

Non-autistic people automatically think like other people because we can’t help but absorb others’ thoughts intuitively. You can think about how, as a teenager, it’s so important to wear the same things as other people, to be into the same new trends as other people, to think like your peers. If you don’t, it can be a very lonely experience. Still, thinking like your peers does not lead to great originality. It doesn’t lead to great inventions and discoveries. Autistic people can think their own thoughts, without those being watered down by the thoughts of others, and therefore, they are often capable of highly original thought.

Temple Grandin, who is an autistic professor and has written comprehensively about autism, often says that if it had been left up to neurotypical, non-autistic people, we’d all still be sitting around a fire in a cave gossiping and telling stories. It took some intelligent and original autistic individual to get so bored with the gossip that they went off and invented the wheel. I think there’s some truth in that: real originality comes from the autistic way of looking at the world, which can differ significantly from the neurotypical way.

Developing autistic talents

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Studying talent in autism is important because developing an individual’s abilities and interests can give them enormous self-esteem. In some cases, it can provide occupation and employment. We owe it to autistic children to spot talent where we can and to develop it. Often, children have had somebody who championed them, who was their mentor and saw that they had the potential for real talent. That is important. It is also important to say that not every autistic child or adult has something that they’re unusually good at.

I know parents of autistic children who would say, after Rain Man or some other sensationalist presentation of autism and talent, that they’re frustrated; their neighbour will say, ‘You have an autistic child, you’re so lucky. What’s his amazing talent?’ The parents want to answer, ‘My son’s amazing talent is having a meltdown in the supermarket because the fluorescent lights distress him.’ So, of course, autism is a mixture of benefits and difficulties, and we mustn’t forget about the struggle that a lot of autistic individuals have. Nonetheless, it is crucial to focus on assets and what autistic people are unusually good at because that way, we can develop those talents and give them the support that they deserve.

I’m pleased that now some companies specifically look to hire autistic people because they recognise that, on average, autistic individuals have a better eye for detail. They’re more thorough, for example. For some jobs in artificial intelligence, IT and other areas, employers know that their autistic employees are going to be the very best employees that they can get. Recognising that autistic people bring a great deal to society, not only through talent but through their personal qualities and contribution, is a significant advance that we need to make as a society.

Talent in non-autistic people

The idea that autistic talents are based in an eye for detail is relevant to non-autistic people too. There’s a sort of tendency, which I don’t like, to autism-spot when you consider somebody a genius. People will often say, Einstein was autistic, or Hans Christian Andersen was autistic. Yet, who knows without really delving into these people’s development?

An eye for detail is not restricted to autistic people, and it can be found in non-autistic people, too. We see it very commonly in autism, but we see it in non-autistic people, as well. For example, in our studies, we find that the fathers and mothers of autistic children often have this excellent eye for detail without having any social and communication difficulties. They’re not autistic, but they share an autistic characteristic, and this characteristic helps us to understand talent more generally. A lot of extraordinarily talented people also share this eye for detail with the vast majority of autistic people.

Discover more about

autistic talents

Happé, F. (2018). Why are savant skills and special talents associated with autism? World Psychiatry, 17(3), 280–281.

Happé, F., & Frith, U. (Eds.). (2010). Autism and Talent. Oxford University Press/The Royal Society.