http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/baron-cohen.html
|
Think Different? Autism researcher
Simon Baron-Cohen on "mindblind" engineers, hidden pictures, and a
future designed for people with Asperger's. Interview by Oliver
Morton Sally has a marble. She
puts her marble into the box, and then she goes outside. Anne comes in, takes
the marble out of the box, and puts it in her basket. When Sally comes back,
where will she look for the marble? By the age of 4 or so,
most children who watch this scenario played out by puppets - including
children with Down's syndrome and other developmental problems - know the
answer. But some do not. They do not understand that what they know and what
Sally knows are different, that Sally has a mind of her own. The children who
expect Sally to look in the basket, because they know that's where the marble
is and can't believe that she doesn't, are the ones likely to be diagnosed
with autism or its relative, Asperger's syndrome. Simon Baron-Cohen, a
tall, soft-spoken clinical psychologist at the University of Cambridge, has
spent two decades studying autism - how to help the people disabled by it and
what the syndrome tells us about normal minds. Baron-Cohen is interested in
the brain and in genes (his group at Cambridge is collaborating with
geneticists in new studies of Asperger's syndrome), but his key interest is
in minds: their workings, their malfunctions, their origins, and their care. From the beginning, his
work has been centered around what's called a theory of mind - that is, an
innate ability to understand other people as having feelings, intentions, and
pictures of the world that are not the same as our own. A theory of mind is a
basic requirement for empathy or, for that matter, deceit. And according to
an approach to autism that has become increasingly influential in Britain
over the past decade or so, a theory of mind is what people disabled by
autism and its related conditions lack. They are, in Baron-Cohen's nicely
coined word, "mindblind." More recently, Baron-Cohen has looked at
another aspect of the autistic mind: a proclivity for systemizing - for
understanding and constructing rules-based systems to explain our experience.
To understand the social world, such rules are a poor replacement for a
theory of mind; to understand the natural world, they are very useful. It is another focus of
his research, though, that has made Baron-Cohen an occasionally controversial
figure. In 1997, he and his colleagues looked for and found some evidence of
a link between autism in children and a propensity for engineering in their
parents. Further work with students at Cambridge has suggested that
engineers, mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists have a way of
thinking that is quantifiably "more autistic" than that of their
peers in the humanities, arts, and social sciences. To some, this sounds like
a medicalized stigmatization of nerdiness. Others fear that linking children's
disabilities to their parents' inclinations is a new way of blaming the
parent. Baron-Cohen rejects this. He argues that linking the styles of
thinking that society has come to value is helpful, not harmful. Minds come
in different shapes just as bodies do, and we must learn to accept that.
Indeed, we must learn to value it. Wired: How common is autism?
Baron-Cohen: Current studies suggest that
the incidence is about 1 in 200 children for all disorders in the autism
spectrum. That's much, much higher than the textbooks quote: Textbooks say 4
in 10,000. Why the gap? It's probably due to
growing public awareness. Also, we're now looking for children at the higher
end of functioning, children with autism who have normal intelligence. In the
past we tended to look in special schools or in child psychiatric clinics for
children with learning disabilities and a range of other problems; nowadays
we look in the community at large. Is there a
danger that broadening the definition of autism might trivialize the problems
of those with profound disabilities, equating a severe disorder that requires
lifetime care with something much milder? A PhD student with
Asperger syndrome might be just as disabled as a person with learning
disabilities and classic autism. Both may end up in need of considerable
support, though of different kinds. The people being diagnosed at a rate of 4
in 10,000 needed more clinical support than the 1 in 200 diagnosed today. But
I'd be hesitant to say that those cases were more severe. Autism spectrum
disorders are linked to other problems: Most of the people we see in our
Asperger clinic for adults also suffer from clinical levels of depression. At
any point on the spectrum, a diagnosis of Asperger is only given if the
symptoms are causing a significant impairment to how someone functions. So
"mild" cases, which don't really interfere, should not be diagnosed
at all. You argue
that people with autism lack an innate capacity to draw inferences about what
others know or think or feel - a "theory of mind." Is this ability
separate from the ability to think about the world in general? One of the papers I've
written with colleagues describes three individuals who have Asperger
syndrome. One won the Olympiad in physics and math right through his teens,
and when presented with a physics or math problem he could solve it very,
very rapidly. Yet he couldn't decode facial expressions of emotion in
photographs. The second was a professor of mathematics, the winner of the
equivalent of the Nobel Prize for math, the Fields Medal. No difficulties at
all in abstract reasoning, but given photographs of facial expressions that
somebody without any mathematical ability could read easily, he performed
significantly below the average level. The third example was a computer
scientist who could write programs without any effort at all, but again, just
looking at a face, he couldn't tell what a person was feeling. It can't be a
general problem that's affecting the mind as a whole. It must be a specific
deficit. Contributing editor
Oliver Morton (oliver@dial.pipex.com) wrote about
the search for
extrasolar planets in Wired 9.06. Page
2 >>
|