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 Researchers surveyed 312 people online, asking if they had autism
and assessing whether they might have some traits of the disorder
even if they hadn’t been formally diagnosed with it.
They tested participants’ creativity by seeking interpretations of
images designed to be seen more than one way – such as a picture
that might be viewed as either a rabbit or a duck. Then they gave
participants one minute to name as many uses as possible for
ordinary objects like a brick or a paper clip.
Compared to people without any indication of autism, the individuals
who said they were diagnosed with autism and the participants
without a diagnosis who exhibited many traits of the disorder
generally offered fewer responses to these queries, but they also
tended to have more unusual answers, the study found.
“We think that perhaps the people with autistic traits use more
effortful methods to produce answers to divergent thinking tasks
(not based on obvious word associations or common uses for similar
items) and therefore come up with fewer but better responses,” said
lead author Dr. Catherine Best of the University of Stirling in the
U.K., in email to Reuters Health.
Around one percent of people may have autism spectrum disorder, a
developmental disability that can cause significant social,
communication and behavioral challenges, according to the U.S.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some people with autism
may be exceptionally gifted in certain ways, but people with the
disorder can also be severely challenged in some aspects of life.
To explore the link between autism and creativity, Best and
colleagues examined survey responses for 75 participants who
reported an autism diagnosis and 237 people with no autism
diagnosis. Some of those undiagnosed people did, however, display
autistic traits during the study.
And autistic traits, with or without a formal diagnosis, were linked
to an ability to see more than one image in ambiguous figures, based
on results of survey questions on pictures designed to look like two
things at once.
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The authors acknowledge in the Journal of Autism and Developmental
Disorders that because they lumped together people with diagnosed
autism and people without a diagnosis who displayed many traits of
the disorder, they can’t say for sure whether the people with a
clinical diagnosis might have disproportionately influenced the
results for this group.
“There is no black and white dividing line between mild autistic
traits and having a label of autism, and geeks and nerds in Silicon
Valley,” Temple Grandin, an autism activist and livestock researcher
at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, said by email.
“Mild autism can provide some intellectual advantages and severe
autism is a great handicap,” said Grandin, who wasn’t involved in
the study. “If all the autism traits were removed, we would lose
many creative minds in music, art, math and science.”
It’s possible that some people with autism may focus intensely on
their own thoughts, to the exclusion of listening to others speaking
to them, and this might lead autistic people to generate less
conventional thoughts and expressions, said Nira Mashal, head of the
brain and language lab at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel.
“The finding that people with high levels of autistic traits offer
fewer responses to creative questions, but more original ideas does
not surprise me,” Mashal, who wasn’t involved in the study, said by
email.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1JqnCW8 Journal of Autism and Developmental
Disorders, published online August 14, 2015.
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