How Autism Drives Human Invention with Simon Baron-Cohen [Video] || The Psychology Podcast

Today it’s great to chat with Simon Baron-Cohen. Simon is professor of psychology and psychiatry and director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University. He is the author of six hundred scientific articles and four books, including The Science of Evil and The Essential Difference.

[2:47] Simon’s evolution of thought on Autism

[5:19] How the social realm of Autism has evolved

[8:12] The difference between Autism and Psychopathy

[10:26] The role of affective vs cognitive empathy

[12:37] How to navigate Autism amidst cancel culture

[14:18] Having Autistic traits vs being on the Autism spectrum

[17:52] How Autism drives human invention

[22:11] The “systemizing mechanism” of the brain

[24:03] The role of “if-and-then patterns” in Autistic individuals

[26:41] Simon’s thoughts on language acquisition

[27:48] “The empathy circuit”

[37:28] The role of creativity in Autism

[41:19] The Brain Types Study

[42:43] The biological basis of creativity and Autism

[45:24] Why monkeys don’t skateboard

[48:12] Why language isn’t a necessary precursor to invention

[55:12] How Scott measured implicit learning and pattern-seeking

[59:28] Why Simon’s work has sparked pushback

[1:01:04] How to support Autistic people

[1:05:45] How we can nurture the inventors of the future

[1:07:18] Sex differences in Autism

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[courtneybrock]

As an autistic person, it makes me happy to hear the updates on empathy and theory of mind. I think it's really important to point out WHY we can't cognitively assume what someone else is feeling, and what types of things they tend to be. For example, complex lies and a manipulations. My brain doesn't understand the mental processes that someone experiences when they intentionally do this. Because I actually CAN'T do this, I can't recognize it. But I can recognize any thought process I'm able to have. If someone's been hurt or surprised and happy, I understand and can respond correctly to all of this. My brain goes through the same things so I can recognize it. I'm often considered overly empathetic and non judgemental, which puts a big old target on my forehead for manipulative types. It"s definitely a problem.

Though I have my "super powers" so you could call them. I lack the social awareness to care if someone is considered "important" or "superior." As a result, I end up in casual conversation with all sorts of industry professionals and have the opportunity to pick their brains with all my questions. I don't don't understand why I'm not supposed to approach them as an equal, and they're delighted to talk to someone who doesn't act weird around them.

I've recently discovered that my speciality is called "systems thinking." Most people think about autistic people and coding or computers. I actually study social systems, kind of like Jane Goodall and the Apes, regarding economics, geopolitics, trends in technology and adoption, and all sorts of other things, and find the connection points to determine a future outcome. I often tell people I sound nuts unless you've known me 5+ years so you've been around me long enough watch the conclusions I've hypothesized to play out. I work in long time frames, so it's hard. I was previously calling it "trend analysis, " but for a short female that looks young for her age, saying this made me come off as being "sweet but deluded." I don't know if "systems thinker" will get others to take me seriously, It'll probably still take people needing to know my for years and go...wait. She was totally right. Once people have known me long enough to see this happen one or twice, I end up the go to oracle.

I make pattern connections in social systems. I think that had lot to be with growing up an an autistic girl. I had NO IDEA what the girls my age were doing when I was small in the 80's. I understood finding frogs in mud with the boys, but I had no idea why the girls were sitting in circles and seemly doing nothing else. It confused me in my earliest years. It couldn't keep ignoring it, so I had to academically study the girls while eating my lunch in the bathroom until one day I could copy them well enough to sort of pass a "social turning test." At some point in 8th grade I could join a conversation without sounding like an alien. The strange thing this has resulted in, is my ability to rapidly understand interactions I'm watching and not part of, but that level of observation just will not transfer if the interaction involves me. All of a sudden I switch from observation brain to personal brain and loose all ability to understand motivations different than my own. I'm also my friend's least favorite TV "spoiler." I'll be half paying attention to something, and blurt out what going to happen while mostly relying on what I'm hearing vs watching. It's not always right, but it frequently is. And its much earlier than anyone I was watching the show with wanted to hear....whooops....What I think is interesting though, is I seem to come to these conclusions by being aware of a wide variety of social cues, with facial expressions often not playing an important part. It'll mostly come from things I'm listening to. Along with that, when I'm really carefully listening to someone, I'll turn to the side of them so my ear is facing their mouth. Because I'm not making eye contact, they'll think I'm not paying attention, but my response ends up being that my eyes can't hear and hearing seems to be the most important goal.

Of course, none of this has made me any money. You'd assume it would. But I'm autistic and most monetary opportunities I've been offered felt illicit or wrong. I turned them down knowing doing so would mean I cared for others and could sleep well at night. I can make all the correct economic forecasts out there, but I'll stay poor as dirt. Such is me?

I'm also not much of an "inventor" but I can MacGyver the crap out of a room in an emergency. If something happens that throws everyone else into chaos, I can go into full robot mode and scan the room and review a catalogue of resources faster and calmer than anyone else in the room and get the problem taken care of it in super speed. Then I pass out for 3 hours. I've also been a creative artisan my entire life it's part of that MacGyver thought process. I can DYI just about anything and learn to do it at professional level in close to no time. If I see a really cool craft I want to make or build, I can reverse engineer how it was put together mostly by studying the image.

But yeah, as a criticism I think empathy works as a clinical word for your studies, but it's not what what the word means to people on a colloquial level. Being "non-empathetic" to most neurotypicals means "non-caring." That's about the furthest thing from the truth. I think there needs to be a way to re-explain theory of mind to the pubic as the inability to understand complex thought processes that they're incapable of producing on their own. Just going back to the complex lie example: If my brain doesn't understand how to put together a complex lie, I'll lack the ability to guess or suppose this is what someone else might be doing. When we say empathy, the public moves towards being caring and emotional. Really, theory of mind is a disconnect in neural connections in more of a mechanical way, no?

Oh, and the gender difference shouldn't be controversial. At least in young children. In educational psychology we know that children of different genders hit different developmental makers for language and socialization at different times, and their focus usually has different objectives. There is something biologically outside of of sociological social norms at a very young age. (I started out as a teacher before I was experienced too much sensory overload to keep going.) I couldn't have used those words until being diagnosed some 10 years later, but you know. They're definitely biologically separate at that age, though. Otherwise trans kids wouldn't know they were the wrong gender at that age. (but over here in America why can't separation gender from sexuality and somehow think this shouldn't be

I'd pull back on diagnosis based on gendered developmental markers around ages 7-8. That's roughly when gender seems to stop playing a part in the timing of development. But since diagnosis should happen prior to that, early age biological/gender developmental markers should be relevant. I mean, "high functioning ASD" didn't exist for girls in the 80's when I was a kid, but for the life of me, I could not understand what the kindergarten and 1st grade girls were motivated by. Also, this didn't end up having any effect on my gender identity. I grew up to love bows and frills and pink and purple and ALL the glitter.

But in those early years my social developmental markers matched the boys. I could understand, "find and collect frogs and the mud. I could not understand "sit in a circle and stay there." Those are different social and learning markers that are extremely diverse at that age. And really only then. As someone that studied educational psychology, it's worse not to talk about it. Now that girls are finally on our radar, we're going to keep missing diagnosing them and providing them with appropriate educational support if we we don't know what to look for at that exact age. Sure, it's definitely controversial to talk about who's going to be better at what before someone grows up and finds out for theirselves. That's not helpful to anyone. But if early age gendered developmental markers aren't controversial in education, they shouldn't be in neuro-different populations who have to go through the same phases of life.

[JenniferMeinel]

I have to comment on SBC's language discussion. He is 100% correct in saying language is compatible with systemizing. In college, I did so poorly in language that I got exempt of having to take a language to graduate. The replacement I had to take for the language classes was Intro to Linguistics and 4 classes on a culture. In that linguistics class, the teacher broke down language in a very systemizing way and used "The Jabberwocky" as his example to show how these systemizing concepts of linguistics could even be applied to something that people considered a nonsense poem. He made the poem make sense using the rules of linguistics. It was eye opening!

Lightbulbs went off in my head for the 1st time in my life and language finally made sense to me. Being autistic, my brain is very systemizing, so this linguistics class helped me breakdown language in a way that was never taught to me before. I then decided to try to take 2 years worth of Latin during 10 weeks of summer school and got all A's. I approached Latin like it was a math problem and everything just clicked. I did the same with Ancient Greek. It wasn't that I couldn't learn a written language (still can't do verbal), it was that it had never been taught in a way that my systemizing brain could understand. Since that time, I have been a big advocate of everyone taking a similar basics linguistic course, even in high school. How many kids out there are struggling like I did only because they've never been taught to view language in a systemizing way?

[drblaneyphysics]

at 26 minutes in, interviewer says 'language is reduced in autistics', but i would say not so, e.g. for aspergers I observe indisputably that language is more precise and full of more technical and nuanced words.
also at 26:20 "dopaminurgic urges to explore, drive invention, but in autistics the dopaminogenic urges are less, and in autistics the invention style is a more skizotypy type of creativity" -- but I would say more precisely:
1. Neurotypicals tend to invent with dopaminurgic phenomena, e.g. the inventive drive is to get that reward...
whereas in my broad career experience, aspergers invent with more of a passion driven by oxytocin/seratonin -- or said another way,
2. aspergers invent via the heart and a sense of responsibility to humanity, or said yet another way depending on your area of study,
3. for the metaphysicists, the neurotypical inventor is mostly from solar plexus/3rd ray level, whereas for the asperger it is from the heart and/or throat (4th ray, 5th ray) level, and in rare cases 6th ray.

at 40:40 I think the "creativity excercises" that people do to lower inhibitions (to be more creative) is an excercise in 'opening up the default mode netowork' . Many drink alcohol to do this, or do those creativity excercises... but autistics are reported to already have their default mode network naturally more 'open' as shown in MRIs, and are therefore more conscious of the incoming data including incoming inner insights.
Thank you for letting me share my thoughts on this, in an effort to expand our understandings :D

[johnridolfo]

Hi I wanted to say thank you for this conversation it helped me to understand myself a little better and I was wondering if you had any advice or coping mechanisms for someone with a combination of executive disfunction and pathological demand avoidance which took a long time to figure out and alot of obsessive self observation because they are both fairly similar and can be almost impossible to tell the difference between the two on your own which is why I relay on channels like this because iv been studying this stuff my whole life unofficially due to lack of opportunity and resources but iv been thiinking and studying my whole life trying to figure out why I'm so different from everyone and how I can adapt to it and I know a big piece would be haveing a reliable support system which iv never had although I do try but I live in Vermont and there is like nobody who know about autism or even mental health in general and if they do know anything about it they usually know more than I do not that I think I know a whole lot ok enough rambling thank you for everything you do and I wish this podcast was more popular

[tomreichardt]

Making jewelry by drilling and shapeing shells is just a kind of stone-age figit spinning for people who need to stim.

[AznDudeIsOn]

I'm curious about the existence of autistic people that used the brain circuits related to systematic understanding to understand theory of mind. On the surface level it just seems like they're inexperienced with using the "if and then" model for understanding others. And if given the experience they could develop some of that psychopath-like cognitive empathy while toning down their affective empathy.

Like im curiosu about the existence of more people like what scott describes at 35:20

[remasteredretropcgames]

@ 24:13

Remember the congressional serial mutation inductees comment? I know in now obsolete architectured compute shaders serial means one at a time really fast. Mutations are a slow process but with instincts not intellect driving reproduction I get it.

[CHGLongStone]

Seems pretty clear that autism is an evolutionary response to complexity pressures. Ie. Population groups pass the Dunbar limit and the low level limbic responses useful for familial groups hit the limits of their efficacy.

[LouiseIngram-hdyc]

This explains a lot, I thought. Was simply 🦇💩 crazy, now I know.

[quidnick]

Simonn completely evaded the question of woke people exploiting the neuro-atypical.

[Hollis_has_questions]

I’m an Aspie (formerly Asperger’s syndrome before it was subsumed) and I consider myself very fortunate for it. Until I self-diagnosed (long story), I loved the way I think but I really struggled in NT society (long story). That was over 25 years ago. Now I love the way I think but I’m careful not to overwhelm NTs, to include them in conversations, to consider their ways. I’m possibly the happiest Aspie living.

Y’all haven’t mentioned the two words most important to me … so far (first hour): Curiosity and Questions. I also have rethought K-12 public school education in an essay that I call My Ideal Educational Toolkit. The essay is too long for YouTube or Twitter, but it’s on my Facebook page. That’s basically what I use Facebook for: essays about ideas, mostly. I’m happily hyperlexic and would be someone y’all would like to talk with. I’m certain of it.

[jarfuloflove]

Great episode. But boy did it get cringey when Sacha Baron Cohen was brought up!

[vaultsjan]

Russian trolls follow Simon Baron-Cohen?