In other words, she is the opposite of autistic. Autism is perfectly compatible with a high IQ—yet some degree of social disconnectedness, of extreme self-centeredness, has been a core feature of the disorder ever since it was first described in the 1940s and given a name derived from the Greek word for self. Baron-Cohen first encountered it when, fresh out of Oxford with an undergraduate degree in developmental psychology, he went to work teaching autistic children one-to-one at a small school in London. It was then he realized that autism is fascinating as well as sad. "I was struck by this dissociation between intelligence and social development," he says. "It became glaringly obvious that they are two different things."
Thanks in part to Baron-Cohen, that understanding of autism is now widely shared—which is one reason the number of children diagnosed as autistic has risen so dramatically in the past decade. Autism was once almost invariably associated with a below-normal IQ, and its prevalence was said to be around 4 in 10,000. Nowadays, it is ten times that. Many children are diagnosed with an autism-spectrum disorder, many of them at the high-functioning Asperger's end. With the explosion in diagnoses there has been an explosion in research. Geneticists are looking for genes linked to autism, which surely exist; the disease has been known to run in families. Neuroscientists are looking for the anatomical or physiological irregularities in the brain that must result from the anomalous genes.
Baron-Cohen is engaged in genetics and neurobiology, too, as codirector of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University. But his background is in cognitive psychology; he seeks to identify the basic mental processes that are common to all cases of autism and that link autistic behavior to its biological roots. In 1985, while still a graduate student at University College London, he made a breakthrough discovery of one such process. With his advisers Uta Frith and Alan Leslie, he presented autistic children with dolls named Sally and Anne, and the following story: Sally puts a marble in her basket and leaves the room. Anne takes the marble and hides it in her own box. Sally comes back and looks for her marble—where does she look?
A normal 4-year-old child says that Sally will look for the marble where she left it, in her basket. The child may even giggle at the joke on Sally. A kid with Down's syndrome will get it right too. But autistic children don't get it right. They say Sally will look in Anne's box—because after all, that's where the marble really is. They have no notion, Baron-Cohen discovered, of where Sally might think the marble is. They lack a "theory of mind"—abstract jargon for the simple realization, which the normal child comes to at around age 4, that other people have thoughts and intentions that may differ from his own. And that figuring those thoughts out helps him to understand what those people say and do.
Baron-Cohen later coined a term for this deficit: "mindblindness." In 1989, Uta Frith proposed that autistic people's inability to derive a theory of mind from their experience of the world was just one aspect of a broader deficit: the inability to draw together information so as to derive coherent and meaningful ideas. Frith's weak central coherence theory explained why people with autism remember strings of nonsense words almost as well as they do sentences, or why they do jigsaw puzzles without the picture: They just don't seek the pattern in a mass of details. "Their information-processing systems, like their very beings, are characterized by detachment," Frith wrote. A rival theory, which has proponents today, attributes the narrow interest in details, as well as other symptoms of autism, to executive dysfunction, a very broad inability to plan, to control impulses and to switch attention as needed to solve a problem.
Neither weak central coherence nor executive dysfunction, though, explain why some autistic people do so well. And in the 1990s, after Baron-Cohen had moved to Cambridge and begun seeing adult Asperger's patients, including many high achievers, at his own clinic, he became increasingly aware of that gap. Furthermore, he says, nobody seemed to be addressing another key fact: Autism affects far more boys than girls. At the Asperger's end of the spectrum, the ratio is about 10 to 1. The sex difference, says Baron-Cohen, is "one puzzle that has been completely ignored for over 50 years. I think it's a very big clue. It's got to be sex-linked."
"When I read the newspaper, I am drawn to tables of information, such as football scores or stock-market indices. Strongly agree? Slightly agree? Slightly disagree? Strongly disagree?"—from the Systemizing Quotient questionnaire
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