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Notes -
Autism and schizophrenia can be modeled as opposing cognitive strategies—autism compressing into narrow, high-fidelity pattern recognition and coherence maintenance, while schizophrenia expands into wide, low-filter signal processing and generative variability—both shaped by environmental and informational pressures in increasingly complex systems. Autism appears to emerge as an adaptive response to cognitive overload, reinforcing structure and specialization, while schizophrenia highlights the fragility of coherence under excessive input and recursive noise. Rising autism rates may reflect selection pressures favoring pattern-matching and abstraction capabilities in high-information environments, while schizophrenia may signal edge cases of system instability where variance outpaces integration. Together, they illustrate a species adapting under selection for cognitive architectures that balance specialization and generalization, testing the boundaries of predictive processing and distributed reasoning in the face of accelerating complexity.
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