Lots of us have trouble concentrating on specific tasks for a focused period of time; I know whenever I'm performing community service (it happens a lot), any stray bird or shiny object distracts me enough to get me punished by my chain gang.
Annalee Newitz at sci-fi blog io9 posits that in the near future, temporary autism could serve as a solution: Basically, people take a pill to induce autism when they want to shut out the outside world and focus obsessively on work, and then take another pill to bring them out of their autistic state when they're ready to stop being savants. She cites work undertaken by German scientists in inducing autism in rats and reversal of autistic symptoms in mice done by researchers at MIT as inspiration for her predictions.
Even wilder, she suggests people may pursue "recreational autism" to "take a break from having messy emotions about other people decide to unplug and enter a state where human relationships are no more important than inanimate objects."
Newitz's broad speculation ignores that the German researchers are using mice with a particular mutation to study easing the effects of the disease, and they don't mention induction or "causing" the disease. And the mechanism MIT researchers hope to use to reverse the effects of autism operates on a different mutation, so it's unknown whether or not the two methods could even be compatible. Add to that the fact that we have no idea how those autistic symptoms would affect each individual person or how severe they could be, and the whole prediction starts to fall apart pretty quickly.
The comments section is riddled with critics of the piece, and Newitz responds with, "[...] what I wanted to point out was that the research could easily lead to inducing autism-like symptoms in people. This could be for weaponization. Or it could be to gain the focus and intensity experienced by some people who have Aspergers -- and then reverse it. Would that be unethical? I leave it to you to decide."
Granted, io9 is a sci-fi blog, not a science blog, but her question is fascinating. Would you become Rain Man for a day to finish a book, a mathematical theorem, or other grand goal that could benefit from the exclusion of everything else?
One Pill Makes You Autistic -- And One Pill Changes You Back (io9)
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