On the day after the hottest day in British history, in a small, stuffy office at the University of Cambridge, Simon Baron-Cohen's empathy is being put to the test. He has already sent his secretary to hunt down one of the few available fans. Crawling under his desk to plug it in, he has abandoned whatever donnish dignity he might have preferred to convey. He has shut the door, in spite of the heat, to keep hallway noise from troubling my tape recorder, and we have begun our interview—only now we are both hearing the relentless hum of the fan. Whuppa whuppa whuppa whuppa. "It's OK," I lie. Baron-Cohen says, "I'm not comfortable with this. You've come such a long way." He gets up and switches off the fan. An autistic person would not have done that. In spite of my sidelong glances at the tape recorder and my furtive efforts to nudge it closer to him, an autistic person would not have been able to see through my polite fib, put himself in my shoes and decipher my concerns. And, anyway, he wouldn't have shared my concerns. Autistic people, says Baron-Cohen, a psychologist who has studied and treated them for 20 years, lack empathy.
But they have a surfeit of something different—what Baron-Cohen calls "systemizing ability." They are lousy at understanding people but relatively good, he says, at making sense of the world. Some of them have a disablingly low IQ, and in such cases the systemizing may take the form of a seemingly purposeless obsession—they may stare for hours, say, at the veins of a leaf, or they may memorize train schedules or license plates. But in others, such as a mathematician Baron-Cohen knows at Cambridge who has been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome—a disorder at the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum—that same systemizing ability can lead to work that is rewarded with fame. (Asperger's is a mild form of autism in which individuals are able to function normally, but have difficulty reading the emotions of others.)
Low-empathizing, high-systemizing: That, in a nutshell, is Baron-Cohen's theory of what characterizes autism. Those traits span the autism spectrum, from people who are mute and unable to function to people who find a niche in society. Moreover, Baron-Cohen's theory embeds this autism spectrum firmly in a much larger two-dimensional continuum—one that includes all of us. The essential difference between men and women, according to Baron-Cohen, is that women are better at empathizing and men at systemizing—on average, he stresses. There are plenty of male brains in female bodies, and vice versa. There are even female autistics, but there are many more male ones: In Baron-Cohen's theory, autism is a case of the "extreme male brain."
In the back of Baron-Cohen's book, The Essential Difference: The Truth About the Male and Female Brain, you can fill out questionnaires that allow you to determine your Empathy Quotient (EQ) and Systemizing Quotient (SQ). Baron-Cohen himself can't take the empathizing and systemizing tests, because he wrote them. But from all appearances he may be one of those fortunate individuals with a brain that is equally balanced between male and female. People who know him place him far up on the empathizing axis. "When you go into a meeting with him, you always feel good afterward," says one graduate student. Says another, "On the one hand, he'll coach us very closely, but on the other, he leaves us lots of space to do what we like." Yet Baron-Cohen is pushing a theory that attempts to capture the full diversity of human brain types in a single X-Y graph—and if that isn't male systemizing, what is? "We all have some autistic traits," he says. "It's just a matter of degree."
"I am interested in knowing the path a river takes from its source to the sea. Strongly agree? Slightly agree? Slightly disagree? Strongly disagree?"—from the Systemizing Quotient questionnaire
Baron-Cohen—born in 1959—grew up in Golder's Green, a middle-class and strongly orthodox Jewish neighborhood in North London. His father worked in the family menswear business; his mother taught dance. His first cousin, Sacha Baron-Cohen, is Ali G, the notorious assault comedian and on-air deflator of pompous windbags. Simon, in contrast, seems like he would be polite even to windbags. He is around six feet tall, with narrow, sloping shoulders and short, sandy hair that is beginning to show a male pattern; on the day we met he wore a blue short-sleeve shirt over khaki pants and sensible black shoes. The photo on his book jacket shows him without his wire-rim glasses, but he looks more natural with them on. His voice is mild and measured. Nothing in his bland and tidy little office—a Cezanne print, a few framed book covers—provides any obvious clues to where he is coming from.
Baron-Cohen himself offers one: He grew up with an older sister who is severely disabled, both mentally and physically. Today she lives in an institution, is confined to a wheelchair and has a very low IQ. "Yet despite that," says Baron-Cohen, "as soon as you walk into the room, she makes eye contact, her face lights up. Even though she has no language, you feel like you're connecting to another person."
Tags:
autism spectrum,
autistic person,
british history,
fib,
hottest day,
lack empathy,
mathematician,
mild form of autism,
sense of the world,
sidelong glances,
simon baron cohen,
spite,
surfeit,
tape recorder,
train schedules,
university of cambridge,
veins
