I home-schooled one of my son's who has high functioning Aspergers.Trainspotting as it is called in England was one of the years long stages. This is rote memorization of engine types , specifications and old time tables etc. simply to fill a need.I suspect that high functioning Asperger people would gravitate more toward writing and publishing about beads as adults as the syndrome does seem to evolve with age into a more functional skill set. That same son went to Princeton where the joke around campus was that at least 40% of the students had high functioning Aspergers.The basis for passion and expertise may obviously be found in these people but the hollowness of our modern disjointed lives may well be where most of our aesthetic and cultural passion for beads comes from today.