Pattern Seekers: The Connection Between Autism & Invention, with Simon Baron-Cohen | EDB 232

 

Psychologist and author Simon Baron-Cohen discusses the connection between autism and human invention.

(35 minutes) Sir Simon Baron-Cohen FBA FBPsS FMedSci is a British clinical psychologist and professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge. He is the Director of the University’s Autism Research Centre and a Fellow of Trinity College. He has also made major contributions to the fields of typical cognitive sex differences, autism prevalence and screening, autism genetics, autism neuroimaging, autism and technical ability, and synaesthesia. Baron-Cohen was knighted in the 2021 New Year Honours for services to people with autism. He is the author of several books, the latest of which is The Pattern Seekers: A New Theory of Human Invention.

For more:

https://www.autismresearchcentre.com/

https://twitter.com/sbaroncohen

 

 

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DR HACKIE REITMAN (HR):

Hi, I’m Dr. Hackie Reitman. Welcome to another episode of Exploring Different Brains. And today, I’m really excited because we have with us all the way over from across the pond over there. And I think they still call it England, but I’m not sure. We’ve got none other than Simon Baron Cohen, the author of this… “The Pattern Seekers”, it’s like the new Bible about autism. And Simon, thank you so much for being with us here.

 

SIMON BARON-COHEN (SBC):

I’m really privileged to be part of your show. Thank you for inviting me.

 

HR:

You see, see with that accent, you could say whatever you want. See, I’m from Jersey City, my folks had a gas station there. So whatever ice doesn’t come out as good as we use, say, you say good stuff.

 

SBC:

No, you sound cool.

 

HR:

Oh, let me tell you, my executive function is lacking. So of course, I finished your book at about eight o’clock this morning. And it was great. It was excellent. And I couldn’t wait to do this interview. But first, before we get started on your book, why don’t you introduce yourself properly and tell people what you’re doing and who you are?

 

SBC:

Sure. So um, so Simon Baron Cohen, and I’m a psychologist. I’ve been researching autism for 35 years. And, you know, as as you’ve just announced, I’ve written this new book, which is exploring a question, is there a link between autism and human invention? And on the face of it, we wouldn’t expect there to be a link, you know, autism as a disability. invention is kind of one of the crowning achievements of our species. And yet the book, kind of unpacks a lot of evidence to suggest that there is a link, and maybe we could talk about it.

 

HR:

Well, we are going to talk about it, because it’s amazing how you go back. Sure. 70,000 years or so, I can’t remember last Tuesday, but that’s all right.

 

SBC:

Yes, so I take this kind of evolutionary view. When I was thinking about invention. We have to kind of think, when did it when did invention begin? And are we the only species that can invent which I argue we are. And I take us back 70 to 100,000 years ago, when we see humans, Homo sapiens, creating what I call complex tools, but also inventing unstoppably. They’re not just inventing one or two things, then they’re coming up with a whole range of new ideas, new new devices, new tools. Whereas if you go back the previous 2 million years, our ancestors were doing very little inventing, you know, they would make stone axes to cut meat from the bone, or they’d use that a stone as a hammer to crack a nut. But there was very little kind of change in the design of that of their tools. Very little complexity, very little novelty. And then around, you know, 70,000 years ago, we see the first and we see the bow and arrow, which I think is quite a an amazing new weapon is an invention. We see the first jewelry. So someone has the idea to invent jewelry, it was a necklace, we see the first musical instrument, which was a flute made out of a bone. The first sculpture, the first cave paintings, you know, the list goes on. You know, that’s when we can see a big change happen in the human brain, that that’s my argument, that something changed in the human brain. And that’s what I explore.

 

HR:

you explore it very well, I was I was shocked to learn about the different sizes of our brains as time went on and so forth. And also the the examples you gave from the animal kingdom, how that’s not really creating or inventing. And could you talk a little bit about the if, then?

 

SBC:

Yeah, exactly. So. So what I argue in the book is that there were two big changes in the human brain, the modern homosapiens brain, one of them is what I call the systemising mechanism. So this allowed us for the first time to see patterns or systems out in the world. And a system is what I call an IF and then pattern. So if we take the bow and arrow, if you just follow the logic, if I attach an arrow to a stretchy fiber And I release the tension in the fiber, then the arrow will fly. So it’s taking a starting point, engineers call this the input, that’s the F. And then you’re doing something to the inputs, that’s the end. And they do something, it’s often something causal. And that then is the output. What happened here? What is the what is the system produce, and we see it in the in the in the bone arrow, but if we take the musical instrument, that flute, the same logic, the same algorithm is at work. So if I blow down this hollow bone, and I cover one hole, then I produce a particular note. But if I blow down the hollow bone and uncover the hole, then I get a different note. And suddenly, we can see our Homo sapiens ancestors, this, this goes back 40,000 years, inventing a new tool, a musical instrument, but also inventing a whole new system of notes, which we call music, and, you know, which we still enjoy. So you know, that that ability to see these special new patterns if and then. And that’s what I say is one of the big changes in the human brain. And we’re still inventing today, we’re inventing vaccines against COVID. We’re putting Wi Fi on the moon that’s in the plans. You know, we’re unstoppable inventors.

 

HR:

And now we fast forward to now. And we say that “Well, Simon Baron Cohn thinks is five kinds of brains”, which are really variations of two kinds of qualities in a brain. So, you got the people who are good at systematizing. And you got the people who are good at empathize.

 

SBC:

Exactly.

 

HR:

And then you break them up into different categories, you basically got five kinds of brains with varying degrees of each.

 

SBC:

Yeah, yeah. So you know, I said that there was a big revolution in the human brain 70,000 years ago, 70 to 100, that time window. And I talked about the systemising mechanism as one of the big changes. But the other big change was the empathy circuit. It’s the ability to imagine what someone else is thinking, you know, you and I are having this conversation. And the only reason the conversation has any chance of going well is because we’re trying to keep track of what each other is thinking, what each other might want to say, might want to be interested in, or keeping track of what’s in another person’s head. And again, when you when you look back at the archaeological record, you know, our ancestors weren’t just making jewelry, like a gadget. They were probably imagining, what would somebody else think, if I wore this, this jewelry? You know, how would I be perceived by somebody else? Or if it was intended as a gift? You know, what would this person feel if I gave them this jewelry? You know, would they enjoy it? You know, so we’re thinking about each other’s thoughts and feelings. The same with the musical instrument, it wasn’t just an invention, like a new gadget, the maker of the instrument was probably thinking, you know, would the audience who listens to me play this music? Enjoy it? Would they think I’m trying to communicate with them, you know, so there’s systemising, which I argue underlies invention, but there’s empathy, which gives us a whole new way of interacting. It allows communication, it allows deception, where we can sort of keep track of what somebody else knows or doesn’t know, or might believe. It allows teaching, where we can imagine that somebody might not have the relevant information, so we have to give it to them a whole new set of social behaviors. But back to this idea of, you know, let’s look at people today. When you ask people to take measures of systemising and empathy. You’re right, you see different profiles in the population. we categorize people into five different types of brain. So type s are people who are better at systemising Type II are people who are better at empathy. Type B is balanced people who are equally good at both. And then there are the extremes. The extreme of type s are people who are systemising, non stop, they see patterns everywhere, but they may find empathy quite challenging. And then the mirror image of that is the extreme of Type II, people who empathize nonstop. They’re always worrying about what other people are thinking and feeling. But they may not be looking for patterns particularly or are interested in gadgets and how things work.

 

HR:

And it’s right here, where you run into the Simon Baron Cohen, controversial area. I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but based on what I just read the empathize. The empathizing brain is more of a female characteristic, and the systematizing brain more of a male characteristic. Now, why don’t you explain what you mean by that?

 

SBC:

Yeah, so, you know I’m a scientist — that’s not meant to be like a sort of get out of jail card. But what we did is we did a very big study, it was over half a million people, we gave these measures of empathy and systemising. And just as you say, What did the data show, it showed that on average, there were more women in the population that had a preference towards empathy than systemizing. And then, on average, more males in the population who had a bias towards patterns and systems. So this is just simply what the data is telling us, you know, and it’s not true of all males, or all females, that would be a kind of misinterpretation. And so, you know, somebody may be typical or atypical for their sex. But you’re right, it’s controversial. anytime anyone talks about sex differences, or gender differences, you know, it’s going to be a bit of a political minefield. And, and I explore this a little bit in the book. But the book is more about maybe the bigger surprise, which is that in our, in our big study, 36,000, autistic people took part, it was an online study, one of the largest studies of autism that’s ever been conducted. And what we found was, they were much more likely to be type s, or extreme type s. So systemise is or hyper system noises. And, and we know that autism is, you know, is all about struggling with social relationships, struggling with communication. But that’s the kind of disability side alongside their disability. These are individuals who, who are very interested then almost magnetically drawn to systems to understanding how objects work. So that was the first clue that systemising, which is what we needed for invention, across the last 100,000 years, seems to be a profile that’s more common in autistic people. A second clue was that when we took the half a million people who took part, and divided them into people who work in STEM, science, technology, engineering, or math, or people who don’t work in STEM, the people who work in STEM have more autistic traits. So again, we’re seeing this link, that if you have an aptitude, for invention for understanding patterns, it goes hand in hand with having more autistic traits. So that was, you know, as I said, at the beginning of this, of this program, we, you know, why would we even sort of predict such a link, and yet the link seems to be there. And then the last big clue which I’ll you know, then I’ll see your reaction is in the DNA, because we we had the opportunity to work with this company called 23andme. You may have heard of them, you know, you pay, you pay $100, or whatever it is, and they’ll tell you what, what’s inside your genes. And, and these people had taken our questionnaires, the systemising questions, the empathy question. And what we found was that the people who score higher in systemising, they carry genes that overlap with the genes that are found in autism. So even at the molecular level, there’s a link between this capacity for invention to seeing patterns and understanding how they work and autism. And so you can take a kind of, you can draw a conclusion or an inference, that if that’s true today, it was probably true all the way back because our DNA hasn’t changed that much. You know, so, autistic people may have been contributing to human progress in their ability to, to see patterns.

 

HR:

I found myself a little bit uncomfortable. Yet I recognize the objectivity of it. In the use of a term that we hear a different brains.org we try to avoid the term Not extremely. But we talk about differences. Yeah. And we try to stay away from what really does exist in certain aspects which are disabilities, right. Today being international people with disabilities day, I forgot the exact name of it. Sure. Give us because you did a very good job. I thought in the, in your book discriminating between these two things, and I don’t think we shouldn’t be afraid by No, we’re not being politically correct to saying, you know, when somebody’s got a problem that keeps them from thriving, we’ve got to, we’ve got to give someone with poor eyesight, some glasses.

 

SBC:

Yeah, absolutely. Just so that you don’t feel all alone. I’ll put mine on to. And whilst we’re at it, this was an invention, right? It was celebrating the human capacity for invention. Right. No other species has come up with things like this, you know?

 

HR:

Yeah. But to tell you how far I’ve eveolved, mine are from the dollar store.

 

SBC:

Okay. Well, as I have to say, they look very fashionable. They look very cool. And let’s go back to your question, though, because it’s not just about difference and disability. In my book, I talk about the four DS. So difference, disability disorder, and disease. You know, I’m guessing you don’t like any of those last few days. But…

 

HR:

No, no, I enjoyed I enjoyed the enjoy is the wrong word. I heartily endorse when you separate something like epilepsy. Okay. And by the way, the way I’ve thought of this holistically, and the reason I started Different Brains, is because I found everything’s in different size. So you had the mental health issues over here, PTSD and depression. And you had neurological issues like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s over here and epilepsy. And then over here, you had neurologic, you had developmental and learning differences. Yeah. And they all all overlap, you can have autism without a little anxiety.

 

SBC:

So yeah, so So, you know, the view I’ve come to, instead of kind of arguing between ourselves as to is autism a difference, a disability, or disorder or disease, actually, depending on which aspect of autism you’re talking about, all four of these days may apply. So I would say, there’s plenty of evidence that it’s a difference, that these are individuals who are fascinated by patterns to a much higher degree, they have excellent attention to detail. Sometimes they have phenomenal memory. So these are just differences. They’re certainly not disabilities, right. But there is evidence of disability, because sometimes they develop more slowly in terms of social skills, or in terms of language development. And these things can cause it can cause difficulties. So if somebody is struggling, if somebody is having a hard time, and they need a diagnosis to get support, I would say that’s evidence of a disability. Difference by itself doesn’t need support, right. But disability may do. And then disorder, while the American Psychiatric Association, as you know, calls everything a disorder — you know, disorder just means that the person is suffering, but we don’t know the cause. If we know the cause, then you can call it a disease. So, you know, epilepsy is a good example of a disease. Because sometimes we know the precise location in the brain, the temporal lobe epilepsy, epilepsy, we might even know the gene, that’s the mutation that’s causing it. So you could track it right down to a causal mechanism. And in some autistic people, they do have epilepsy. Some autistic people have gastrointestinal pain, you know, which is certainly a disorder, they want to be free of it. Some autistic people have learning difficulties, which we might argue as a disability. So there’s kind of a space for all of these descriptions, I think..

 

HR:

That catapults us into a great point you made in the book that Temple Grandin agrees with you 100% where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. employment. Yeah, yeah, what’s gonna stop you from getting employed, you gave that very poignant example of the the young man thinking about suicide? Yeah, just think and get a job. Yeah. So those things that are going to prevent you from getting employment and what I call independence? Oh, sure. Yeah. Let’s talk about that. Let’s go into that.

 

SBC:

In the book, I tell the story about Jonah. You know, chapter one even opens with a description of what he’s like in the playground at school, as a two year old, a three year old, delayed in language, but then we meet him later in the book. And he’s a young man of 40. And he’s been applying for over 400 jobs, and he hasn’t got a single reply. And he’s, he’s got depression, as any of us would, you know, we know that unemployment is not good for your mental health. And it turns out, the majority of autistic adults are unemployed. And we could try and think, what are the barriers to employment? Why aren’t they getting a job? It could be because they’ve dropped out of high school without, you know, formal educational qualifications, because a lot of them have a miserable time at school. Because they have a different learning style. Not disabled, but different. But it just doesn’t fit learning in a crowded, sociable, noisy classroom. It could be that it could be that when they if they got, you know, if they got shortlisted, and they got called for an interview, for a job, that the way our interviews work, you’re expected to make eye contact, you’re expected to be able to read between the lines and say, socially appropriate things. And these are exactly the areas of disability in autism. So the selection process might be discriminating against them in terms of their disability. And either way, I find it a kind of human tragedy, that the majority of autistic adults, despite having good intelligence, are wasting away, you know, not doing anything meaningful or purposeful, and feeling excluded by society. Because most of us feel we belong in society, because we work. We have colleagues, we we chant, you know, we feel included, autistic people want just the same as us. But somehow there are barriers, and we just need to get the message out to employers, that if they hire an autistic person, they’re bringing in a different kind of diversity. People are now talking a lot about neurodiversity. So you have somebody who thinks differently. The book makes the claim that autistic people may not just think differently, may come up with new solutions for old problems, you know, so we might get invention or innovation in the team. And, and often, the employer doesn’t have to make big changes to accommodate an autistic person. You know, we talked about reasonable adjustments. Maybe the autistic person just needs to have a quiet space, not in an open plan office, which is too distracting, overwhelming on their senses. Just let them get on with their work quietly. Maybe we shouldn’t expect them to join us for lunch every day because they don’t like chatting. But just let them be themselves and let them contribute to the productivity of their of their workplace.

 

HR:

I was recently asked to be on a panel with real experts, like yourself, but psychologists and psychiatrists, not neuro diversity experts, and it was on teen suicide and depression. And I felt very uncomfortable because I’m not a professional. I’m just neurodiversity. You know? But they didn’t know any of the statistics like high functioning autism has sometimes up to 10 times the rate of suicide attempts of ADHD three times the amount and the dealing with them on their suicide lines. And they don’t know they’re not trained. Yeah. Which is one of the reasons I want to help mainstream your works in your book because you know, more on the fingernails. And unlike me, you are a You’re a real researcher.

 

SBC:

Well, we didn’t we didn’t we did that that first piece of research, documenting the the sort of unacceptably high levels of suicidality in autistic adults. So we found we’ve got a clinic here in Cambridge. And we just, you know, we just asked the patients who come to the clinic to get a diagnosis of autism. Two thirds of them had felt suicidal and one third had attempted suicide. And these, these, these are, these are people who are born to go on to develop autism. But autism doesn’t need to entail suicidal feelings or feeling so desperate you know, If you’re feeling suicidal, it’s because you haven’t been supported. You haven’t found a niche where you feel you belong. And I think the world of work could make a big difference. So I, you know, I’m very pleased that SAP are doing this in the in the IT sector, but we need to open it up to every sector. I know whether it’s whether it’s the local bicycle store, because autistic people could fix bicycles, or whether it’s the local bakery, because autistic people could bake wonderful…

 

HR:

And yeah, you segwayed into a very interesting what I found. issue with the parents, okay, I was presenting once at Florida Atlantic University. And one of the I showed slides of my family’s gas station in Jersey City and, and I, I showed my mother pumping gas. But I also showed the rising tide carwash here in South Florida, which only employs autistic individuals, and a good model, because the brother and father made it because their brother was autistic. Yeah, and I take my truck there. And I was saying what they love their work, they’re paying attention to detail.

 

SBC:

The example is great…

 

HR:

I was interrupted by a woman, who was very offended by this said, My son should be doing something better than washing cars. I said, My father was a guest. Yeah, what are you talking about? Not everybody’s gonna be a computer whiz? I’m sorry to interrupt.

 

SBC:

No, first of all, I think it’s a great example. And one of several points. My my, my big point, I guess, in response to that woman who spoke to you that way, would be to say that there’s dignity in every kind of work, right? You know, we need our cars washed. And we need computer programs written, and one isn’t better than the other, we need both, right. But the second point is that, whether you’re talking about the carwash, or the computer program, it’s the same logic we spoke about earlier, this, if and then you know, that you can find a system in many different types of work. When you wash a car, you have to use particular materials, particular, you know, ingredients in the wash. And when you’re, you know, when you’re doing math, again, you have to, you have to use that if and then logic, if I take the number three, and I cube it, then I get 27. You know, it’s this, it’s that kind of logic. And autistic people love these patterns, these rules. And you know, where invention comes in, is that once you know the rule, you can start to play with the variables in the in the pattern. So instead of saying, I’ll take the number three, you can say, I’ll take the number four, you know, and then see how that plays out in the system. And so I think autistic people, you know, they’ve got assets or strengths, or even talents, that would lend themselves to many types of work. And I think it’s time you know, for us as a society, to be kind of welcoming autistic people, you know, they’ve been contributing, this is the theory in the book, they’ve been contributing to human progress. They’ve made the planet what it is today, the fact that we can even have this conversation through zoom. You know, these kinds of platforms, were probably invented by autistic people. Certainly Skype, which is the one of the first examples was invented by a Danish guy who dropped out of school. And, you know, that he thought differently. He didn’t have a formal diagnosis of autism. But, you know, we owe them a lot of we owe them a lot. And yet the way we show our gratitude is to leave them outside of society to leave them suicidal in poverty, it’s time to change.

 

HR:

Is there anything we have not covered that you would like to cover?

 

SBC:

Maybe two things. And one thing that you may have seen in the book, it’s called “The Pattern Seekers” was a study we carried out in Silicon Valley. And because if, if the if parents who are good at invention and good at with good with systems are carrying the genes for autism, because we think that they’re very They are the very same genes, then we should expect that in places like Silicon Valley, we might see much higher rates of autism. Right? So we, we didn’t go to Silicon Valley, California because it’s quite far away from where I live. You can hear my accent. We went to a Silicon Valley, closer to home in the Netherlands, to a city called Eindhoven. Eindhoven has had the Philips factory there for 100 years. So it’s been attracting people who are good at technology for at least three generations. And they settle there they have kids, the nine Hoban also has an Institute of Technology a bit like MIT. So it’s a kind of hub for system misers. What we found was that autism rates were twice as high in that city compared to to other cities in the Netherlands that was matched for size for other demographics. So it was giving us another clue that the genes for systemising for invention are also linked to the genes for autism. And I just hope that this kind of research would change the way we think about autism. We used to just focus on the negative side, the disability side, know the areas of difficulty. This is kind of making is forcing us to rethink autism. But autism isn’t just disability, it’s also different than even talent. And it’s right there in the genes.

 

HR:

Beautiful Absolutely. I was talking once to a psychologist out in Silicon Valley. Yeah. Who was not a specialist in autism. And but he, well, we were having a conversation. And I was saying to him, and he was saying, well, autism is genetic. And I said, Well, I think it’s multifactorial, and you know, a lot of things. Yeah. And he got very angry with me. He’s, you know where I am? I’m on Silicon Valley said, he goes, Becky, do you know what I do? He goes, let me tell you what happens here. They all come here to work. But Google and Microsoft, right. You know, what they do? They meet each other? Yeah. And then you know, they do they breed? Sure. No. Who has to take care of all of their kids who have autism? Me? Don’t tell me it’s not genetic. Yeah. You know,

 

SBC:

What I would say is you’re both right. I’m not just being diplomatic here. I mean, he’s right, because the evidence is coming out that autism is, is genetic. But it’s only partly genetic. We also know you can have identical twins, when one is autistic, and one isn’t. So if it was 100%, genetic, you know, with identical twins, if one has it, the other one should also have it. So we know that there’s also some non genetic factors that play a role in increasing the likelihood of autism. We’ve been looking at hormones in the womb, testosterone and estrogen, as I mentioned, because the hormones themselves change brain development. And that might be an example of an environmental factor. It’s the kind of heart the uterine environment that might also be affecting brain development to increase the likelihood of autism. But there may be other factors still to be uncovered. It’s not it’s not all genetics, that’s what I’m trying to say.

 

HR:

Well, I have to say in the appendix of your book, mad seekers, I, I took that test to try to see the cube in the diagram. I was trying a very long time. And I thought, wait til I talk to Simon. Don’t know what that makes me but it… (Laughs)

 

SBC:

But whereas when we give that test to autistic people, you have to find it’s like finding the piece within the whole, like, like seeing a jigsaw piece. You know, they’re they’re super quick, super accurate, and that kind of thing. And, you know, so we’ve just been missing the positive side of autism. For decades, we’ve been focusing on what they struggle with, not what they can actually do differently or even better than non autistic people.

 

HR:

Well, Simon Baron Cohen, thank you so much for spending time with us. It’s been very educational for me and inspirational. And we are all going to read this book because I just did, then I learned a whole lot. So keep up your great work, and I hope you’ll come back soon to different brains. Thank you.

 

SBC:

Thank you Hackie. I hope you invited me back.