Geek syndrome, talent and situation

As a fully paid-up member of the geek race, I subscribe to a number of mailing lists on various geeky topics. On one of these mailing lists, there was recently an argument between several individuals, focussing in particular on one person whose behaviour was regarded by some others as obnoxious. The argument culminated in a post from another list subscriber, advancing the notion that the individual at the centre of the argument might have Asperger's Syndrome, and that this would account for his apparent obnoxiousness. The poster identified himself as having Asperger's, and wrote a lengthy post about the symptoms that he had experienced.

What surprised me was that many of these symptoms were things that I could identify with myself. At the same time, I had never really considered these to be medical in nature, merely quirks of personality; unusual, but within the normal bounds of variation between individuals without any need for a 'syndrome' to explain them. A bit more research (Googling) reveals that Asperger's is sometimes referred to as 'geek syndrome', the theory being that geekiness itself is a symptom of a physiological difference in the brain compared to the brains of non-geeks. The more I read, the more I read about 'symptoms' which I felt that I had some personal experience of.

'Geek syndrome' is, of course, a loose definition of a set of behaviours which typify many geeky individuals. Typically, it involves near-obsessive behaviour, fascination with particular ideas, concepts or activities. Typically, this involves numbers, patterns or categorisation. Raking back over my childhood memories, in retrospect I can identify quite a few of these obsessions. But at what point does this stop being a question of having a vivid imagination, an interest in numbers and an appetite for reading lots, and instead become a 'syndrome' which carries medical connotations? To this day, I can tell you that 9 ^ 7 = 4782969 or that 614656 is 28 ^ 4 (see, this is a pretty easy one to work out. 28 is 7 x 4, and 7 ^ 4 is 2401. All that remains is to multiply 2401 by 4 ^ 4 (256), which is really easy because it's just 2400 x 256 plus one more 256, and... well, you get the picture), without any conscious effort. But this isn't a gift or an abnormal brain at work; I just spent a long time practising this, for reasons which must have been perfectly clear at the time, but which I cannot now recall. If the nine-year-old version of myself was ever seen staring off into space (out of the window on a long car journey, say) it was probably because I was doing some kind of very interesting sum in my head.

To people who can't do this, it appears weird, and it did take me a while to realise that most people really don't seem to be able to do this, even if they try. But I suspect that the main reason that it seems weird is that it's an internal process. It goes on in people's heads, where we can't see it. I'm not at all convinced that it's any different from, say, being good at football. After all, if someone practices taking free kicks every day from an early age, there's a good chance that they'll end up being pretty damn good at it. This feels less weird, because we can see them doing it; it's easy to make the connection between the person kicking the ball every day and the person becoming better at kicking the ball. It's harder to figure out why people are good at maths, because we don't see them practising. And if we can't understand it, it can be easier simply to claim that the person is abnormal in some fundamental way, capable of doing something that the rest of us can't, and this must surely have a physiological basis.

It seems to me that there are two questions here: is the ability to focus on honing a particular skill a function of neurology, and is there a neurological explanation for which skills are preferred? We might imagine, for example, that the ability to focus obsessively on improving a skill has a neurological basis, but might be expressed differently by different individuals. So we might say that David Beckham is a footballing example of this tendency. He has a few unique skills honed over years of practice, to the point of being amongst the best in the world. The parallels don't stop there. Footballers are famously bad in interviews, barely engaging with the questions of their interviewers and generally giving the impression of being incapable of succintly explaining anything. Not, then, all that different from the prototypical geek who lacks the interpersonal skills to communicate effectively.

Personally, I tend to believe that the choice of area of focus is not predetermined. So, yes, David Beckham could have become a world-reknowned physicist if he had invested his energies into studying physics instead of the precise effects of the contact between ball and foot. Is the ability to focus physiological though? We could imagine that some people simply have the ability to become good at things, whereas others don't; I'm uncomfortable with this notion, for obvious reasons. But that doesn't rule it out. What I do believe, though, is that many of the great differences between people are not so great as they appear; people are shaped by what they do, not by what they intrinsically are. It's not always disease or a gift, sometimes it's just a habit. If we want to maximise the number of people who achieve greatness of some kind, we should have education systems which give people the opportunity to experiment and find those things that they enjoy. Situation and experience can trump 'natural' talent or 'natural' weaknesses.