Empathy is a skill like any other human skill - and if you get a chance to practice, you can get better at it.
Simon Baron-Cohen
My theory is that the female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy, and that the male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems.
It is possible that by studying autism we'll learn about the nature of talent. Supposedly there's no connection between scientific talent and autism, but if we look closely, we find a very basic connection.
Empathy is about two people - two people meeting, getting to know each other and tuning in to what the other person is thinking and feeling.
With the right support and reasonable adjustments, autistic people make wonderful employees.
Autistic peoples' excellent attention to detail means they may make fewer mistakes, and their narrow focus may mean that they are not satisfied until a task is completed.
The E-S theory does not stereotype. Rather, it seeks to explain why individuals are typical or atypical for their sex.
It may be true in the case of autism that if you start off with a deficit in terms of empathy or mind reading, you've just got more time to devote to understanding the world by systemizing.
I'm not satisfied with the term 'evil.' We've inherited this word... and we use it to express our abhorrence when people do awful things, usually acts of cruelty, but I don't think it's anything more than another word for doing something bad.
Genes are thought to contribute a certain amount to the cause of autism but it's not 100 per cent. It might be about 60 per cent genetic. So there are going to be environmental factors that mediate the impact of autism.
If you have high-functioning autism, you may well have a lot of autistic traits but if you've got a particular lifestyle where it's possibly an advantage to be leading a solitary lifestyle and be quite obsessive, you're clearly able to function and maybe even make valuable contributions in your work, so arguably you don't need a diagnosis.
People with autism flourish in domains where the information is consistent and predictable, and struggle most in domains where the information is ambiguous and unlawful.
Autism typically means a person may not be fully aware of the consequences of their actions, or understand the consequences of their behaviour on others.
Empathy is a necessary step for truth and reconciliation.
If you have a child with autism, and he or she has good intelligence, with no delay in language learning maybe there is an advantage to autism as well? Maybe it gives them a better understanding of mathematics, or science? After all, the essence of science and the essence of autism is to notice patterns that others have not noticed.
Hundreds of studies of various cultures have proven that, on average, boys play more than girls with constructional toys like Lego and toy cars, and girls play more with dolls.
Maybe because I had a sister with a disability I was already sensitised to and fascinated by people who think or develop differently.
Brains come in different types and they're all normal.
What we want is that one day every workplace will be diverse - we already encourage that with gender and ethnicity, but the next frontier is neurodiversity and it will become ordinary. People won't think twice about it.
Baby girls, as young as 12 months old, respond more empathically to the distress of other people, showing greater concern through more sad looks, sympathetic vocalisations and comforting. This echoes what you find in adulthood: more women report frequently sharing the emotional distress of their friends.
Difficulty empathising translates into a whole set of hurdles. You might be last person to get the point of a joke, which can leave you feeling like an outsider. You might end up saying something that another person finds hurtful or offensive, when that was the last thing you intended.
If we think about the autism spectrum as involving a very strong drive to systemize, that can have very positive consequences for the individual and for society. The downside is that when you try to systemize certain parts of the world like people and emotions, those sorts of phenomena are less lawful and harder to systemize.
There are people with Asperger's whom I've met who certainly would be very upset to learn they'd hurt another person's feelings. They often have very strong moral consciences and moral codes. They care about not hurting people.
People with psychopathy are very good at reading the minds of their victims. That's probably most clearly seen in deception.
I think it's particularly clear in borderline personality disorder (BPD) that there's a strong association between early environmental deprivation and neglect and abuse and later outcome of BPD.
The idea of a cure for autism is itself controversial. Some people with autism say they don't want to be cured, because autism gives them a different way of looking at the world.
Well, in the general population, we find differences between the typical male and typical female. For example, males seem to be more interested in systems and females seem to be more interested in people and particularly people's emotions.
Everyone recognises that genes are part of the story but autism isn't 100% genetic. Even if you have identical twins who share all their genes, you can find that one has autism and one doesn't. That means that there must be some non-genetic factors.
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.
Among both individuals with high-functioning autism or Asperger and their parents, many are superfast at spotting details. You hardly have time to get the experimental materials out on the table before they've spotted the target.
In the person with autism, the brain may already be seeing the part and be less distracted by the whole, and in the person without autism the brain may have to set aside its picture of the whole to analyze the detail.
When I first started in this field there were all kinds of stereotypes about autism, as if these were children from another planet, or children who had been brought up by wolves, that they weren't part of our population and were somehow separate.
I'm hoping that autism is going to get to that same point, where it becomes quite ordinary to say, 'I have autism,' or 'I have Asperger's syndrome,' and that there will be many more resources available to make life easier for people on the autistic spectrum.
I try to keep an open mind.
Because people with autism are also strongly obsessional, meaning that they pursue their current interest to extraordinary detail and lengths and in great depth, they can develop 'tunnel vision' that prevents them from seeing the bigger picture, including the repercussions of their current actions.
Autistic people's disabilities are widely known, but one of their best-established strengths is their attention to detail.
Like any skill, systemising occurs on a bell curve in the population, with some people being faster at spotting patterns than others. Autistic people are often strong systemisers. Indeed their attention is often described as 'obsessive' as they check and recheck the patterns of a system.
We've done fMRI scans of people taking the 'Reading the Eyes' test, and what we've found is that the amygdala lights up in trying to figure out people's thoughts and feelings. In people with autism, they show highly reduced amygdala activity.
Autism doesn't seem to have a seasonal component, unlike some forms of depression.
A diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome can be useful to help a person understand why they have had difficulties.
We have found fathers and grandfathers of children with autism are more likely to be engineers.
I suspect that among parents or siblings of a person with autism there are higher rates of talents in systemizing.
In general it's good to give children as wide a choice as possible, and there is no harm in encouraging children to play with 'typical' toys for the opposite sex. But whether they should be trying to change children is a more ethical decision; I think we should be supporting a child's interests, whatever they are.
If you've got good systemising skills you can apply them to systems you aren't familiar with, and look for patterns.
Inspiring children at an early age is key, and perhaps we need to put technology in a more social context.
