*A New York Times Editors' Choice Pick* An "ambitious work" ( Washington Post ) tracing the links between autism and ingenuity Is the ability to invent things unique to humans? In The Pattern Seekers , Cambridge University psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen argues that it is, and proposes that autistic people have played a key role in human progress for seventy to one hundred thousand years, from the first complex tools like the bow and arrow and the first musical instrument to the digital revolution. He presents the science that the same genes that contribute to autism enable a special kind of pattern seeking that is essential to our species' inventiveness. However, these abilities come at a cost for autistic people, including social and neurological challenges. Baron-Cohen calls on us to support and celebrate autistic people in both their disabilities and their talents. Ultimately, The Pattern Seekers isn't just a new theory of human evolution, but a call to reconsider how society treats those who think differently.

This book focuses on a recent, important psychological theory of autism, the 'theory of mind' hypothesis. This claims that children with autism fail to develop the ability to think about mental states in the normal way, and thus fail to understand behavior in terms of mental states. In current terminology, they are impaired in the development of a 'theory of mind'. This psychological deficit is held to underlie some of the key feature of the syndrome: the abnormalities in social and communication development. The editors have collected together both the evidence and the controversies surrounding the theory, and present these as a valuable debate about the nature of what is widely recognized as the most severe childhood psychiatric disorder. The chapters are written by scholars from a variety of disciplines (developmental psychology, neuropsychology, philosophy, psycholinguistics, primatology, child psychiatry, and psychoanalysis). The book stands as an illustration of the mutual influence of studies of the mind from the prespectives of normality and pathology.

Newly available in paperback, this is the first book to bring together classic and contemporary readings illustrating the new subdiscipline, evolutionary psychopathology. Each chapter demonstrates how evolutionary arguments are being brought to bear on the study of a different psychiatric condition or pathalogical behaviour. The Maladapted Mind is aimed primarily at primarily at advanced students and researchers in the fields of psychiatry, abnormal psychology, biological anthropology, evolutionary biology and cognitive science.