To the casual observer, trading fours looks a lot like musical instruments engaged in conversation – individual viewpoints and expression, in sync thanks to similar ideas, constructed with no forethought beyond a shared concept and maintained simply through the experience and knowledge of having a vocabulary and putting it to use on the fly to respond to new inputs.

The ultra-connectivity of our modern society is causing a wholesale shift in the way we retain information in our heads. Where most of history up until this point has been a process of wielding tools to remember things for us (everything from scratches on papyrus to the PC), we’re now entering an age where we don’t really have to remember anything.

We’re built to look for, discern and process patterns and what they mean. However accurate it is, autistic people are usually portrayed as being gifted with complex systems, numbers and structures (think of the Rain Man-esque Vegas card-counting cliché).