Several people think about a mind that is on the autism spectrum as being a specialist mind. In the DSM-IV, one of the main symptoms of classic Autism, atypical Autism, or Aspergers Syndrome is that someone has a special interest in a select few topics to the point where he or she has difficulty talking or thinking about other things. That was pretty much my life to a T in elementary school. I didn't get any sort of social skills training until junior high when my two aunts worked on it with me. With their help, I was able to talk with friends about more than my fixations. These fixations (or special interests as other people might call them) were mainly around people, places, natural science topics, or medical topics. Good things resulted from several fixations: My medicine fixation got me to premed, my science fixation got me into psychology / HDFS and fueled my interest in research and now I have a master's degree. When I listen to interviews by Temple Grandin, I can tell when she starts going into her fixations, even though she has had training on speaking as a professional. One thing that's nice is that others know her fixations so they generally keep things within those interests. She often starts to tangent into her cattle research or about stuff she's written about early intervention for children on the Autism spectrum whenever she's answering a question and something related to the question or her answer reminds her of those two topics.
When I was little, my special interests were not dealt with in the most adaptive way (more on that here if you really want to know). The only special interest that others tried to stop Dr. Grandin from having was her thing with the squeeze chute. They put a weird Freudian spin on it, and now all developmental psychologists know that Freud's theories are pretty whacked and the only reason we ever talk about him was because he knew early development was important. Erik Erickson straightened a lot of Freud's stuff out, so that's good. Anyway, Dr. Grandin still talk about how it was hard for her to explain to others that the squeeze chute met a sensory need she had, and no one got it until sensory dysfunction started to be researched. In fact, she used this fixation to advocate for research and intervention for sensory issues, especially for people on the Autism spectrum.
Wow... speaking about tangenting, I'll give people bonus points if they can figure out my current fixations... ahem.. anyway, how does all this back-story relate to worship in a specialist mind? As a Christian, I am to submit my mind to Christ. Yup. Even the not-normal parts because as Creator, He allowed my DNA to be sequenced to express all my neurotypical and autistic traits! Something I wondered was: How will God use any fixations I have or end up having for His glory? If God hard-wired my brain this way, it must be for a reason that He sees is good.
I got a glimpse of the answer during worship at church when the worship leader asked us to focus on one specific trait of God as we sang a song. It was one of those, "I GET IT!" moments. Paul often prayed for people to know more about one of God's attributes specifically. If someone has a specialist mind, he or she can take a particular aspect of God and dig deep for information about it and how other attributes of Him relate to it or how it is played out in the Bible. I've had this happen before :) During my premed days, God tackled me with His Truth that He is Creator and He did not create by evolution. He used our biology major pastor to do it :) I went from being the skeptic evolutionist girl to the girl everyone knew talked about Creation and God as Creator. I still do to some extent, but that really fit well with my special interest of medicine at the time, so I had a one track mind for both for a very long while. Did it help? Yes. No matter if I found the world confusing or painful, knowing there was a Person who created it and redeemed it was my comfort. It kept me humble because I didn't learn things only with the intent of puffing myself up. I knew that Someone had made the human body, chemistry, the physical laws, and He allowed me to learn them for His glory.
I think in heaven, we will have perfect brains that will be able to also be specialist brains. We will never stop learning about God, therefore, we would need a lot of storage room to learn about His many attributes. Yet we will not do it in isolation. We will do it in perfect community, extending perfect love to each other and being in perfect love and relationship with Jesus Christ who made us and redeemed us all!!!! :)
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