Ouch. I’ve often thought that today’s conservatives weren’t the brightest bulbs on the whole, and wondered whether there was some causal link there, but to have it bluntly spelled out like that is pretty damning.

Maybe these studies should be publicized a lot more. Nobody wants to be labeled a dunce, so it might cut down on racism, homophobia, and Tea Party Republicans all at once.

(I have to point out that this refers only to today’s conservatives. Conservatism was a respectable position twenty or thirty years ago, it has just been hijacked more recently by the anyone-different-must-be-destroyed crowd, and the politicians willing to pander to them.)

I’m not a scientist, and I’m operating solely on my own experience and what I’ve read of others, but it seems to me that autism is a broad diagnosis of a malfunction in certain parts of the brain, parts that are different for each sufferer. Sometimes early intervention allows the child’s brain to rewire itself to bypass the malfunctioning parts; in other cases, areas critical for recovery are too damaged to compensate. For some, the same malfunction may also result in developing skills or abilities that people don’t normally have as well: perfect pitch, a dramatically better memory for places and physical layouts, superior mathematical skill, or something similar.

I’m not sure it would be possible, especially at this point in medical science, but classifying autistics by the affected areas might be useful. Then again, once science advances far enough to do that, we may well find that most people suffer from such problems, and autistics are only different by the kinds of areas affected (often social and language) or the number of them.

Just my two cents’ worth.

[...] according to researchers at the University of Warwick and the University of Basel, we’ve pretty much hit the limits, and we’re never going to develop a science fiction-style ‘supermind’.

Thomas Hills and Ralph Hertwig looked at a range of studies, including research into the use of drugs like Ritalan which help with attention, studies of people with autism and a study of the Ashkenazi Jewish population.

And they’ve concluded that there’s just too severe a penalty. For every gain in cognitive functions, they say – such as a better memory, increased attention or improved intelligence – there’s a price to pay elsewhere. [...]

I have no doubt that their facts are correct, but their conclusion is simply wrong. It doesn’t take into account the fact that we barely scratch the surface of what we can do right now. I’m not talking about the mythical “we only use 10% of our brains” crap, but proven techniques. There’s one that allows anyone with a normally working brain to remember essentially anything they want to for as long as they want to. There’s a second that lets you defuse limiting emotions and painful memories at will. Those two alone would allow most people to get a lot smarter, probably twenty additional IQ points easily, forty if they put some effort into it.

That’s just the low-hanging fruit, too. I have no doubt that there are other techniques I don’t know about, and more that will be developed in the future… things that will let people evaluate logic statements more easily and with more certainty, shut off internal mental distractions and focus your entire energy on a project, completely control your emotional state and emotional health (rather than just put the brakes on damaging emotions), tap creativity that only a lucky few can now touch, and all sorts of other things. In the self-improvement industry I’ve seen a number of attempts at such things, many of which seem to work for at least a few people. These will only get better over time, as people find the similarities between the ones that it works for and determine the deeper reasons behind their successes and failures.

Is there a price, as the article says? Sure. You’ve got to work to get those kinds of benefits. But that’s a price that’s easily met, for those who are willing — the people who can do such things “naturally” paid that price, usually without even noticing they were doing so, and time is the one thing that almost everyone has. The work doesn’t have to be difficult either, it can even be fun if you approach it the right way.

And for the future, there’s technological enhancements. We’ll inevitably come up with a working brain/computer interface sooner or later, and that pretty much defines the much-touted technological singularity — the point beyond which we unenhanced humans can only speculate on. But even without it, I suspect nearly everyone could reach an IQ of 140 with a few years of part-time effort, if they had the desire and the willingness to work on it.

Of course, I can’t prove that at present, because so few people have any such desire. But that will change. Some people will learn because they enjoy learning, or excelling at something; others will learn because it’s a way to get an edge when competing with the other presently-seven-billion warm bodies on this planet. Eventually most people will learn techniques like those, for whatever personal reasons they have — and the world will be a lot better for it.

(It’ll be interesting to find out the whys and wherefores of the brain mechanism responsible. I hope someone manages it in my lifetime.)

On a complete tangent, the statistic that 1% of the population counts as psychopathic is disturbing. According to at least some people who’ve studied the phenomenon, people with autism only make up about 0.5%, one person in two hundred. Considering the number of other people with HFA or Asperger’s Syndrome I’ve met, I shudder to think what that implies about the number of psychopaths out there.

I’ve noticed, from stories that my father-in-law tells and from movies of the era, that people seem to have gotten less aggressive in the last sixty years. I’m sure that helps endeavors like this, since the pessimistic predictions of murder and mayhem during such long-term voyages seem to be hold-overs from the imaginings of the fifties and sixties. Probably a good idea to be pessimistic about such things, but it also feels pretty good to learn that we’re not entirely the savages that we thought we were.

I’ve got some ideas about the future of the human race, and the techniques and technologies that will enable us to advance far beyond what we think of as normal now. Oddly enough, most of those techniques and technologies already exist, there are only a few that I have identified as necessary but haven’t found yet. More on this later.