Autism's Hidden Superpower

People who are autistic have a different type of cognitive process. They tend to be really superior pattern recognizers. They're able to connect the dots. Some of them are visual spatial thinkers, so they're able to design something in their mind and manipulate it within their mind before they even build it. People who are visual spatial thinkers make great engineers. Nikola Tesla was somebody who could do that. That type of thinking is extremely efficient at solving a lot of problems versus verbal thinking, which is what most neurotypical people are, is they think in words, they think in language. And the problem with language is it's very linear. Language can also be very deceptive. We can talk ourselves into or talk other people into believing something that really isn't true all through language, whereas with these other processing styles, it's more like pure perception.