Simon Baron-Cohen || How Autism Drives Human Invention

Simon is Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry and director of the Autism Research Center at Cambridge University. He's the author of six hundred scientific articles and multiple books, including The Science of Evil, The Essential Difference, and most recently, The Pattern Seekers, How Autism Drives Human Evolution The Pattern Seekers, How Autism Drives Human Invention. Simon, so great to chat with you today. Thank you very much for advising me. Oh, it's such a pleasure to talk to you. I feel

like we go way back to the Cambridge days. I remember Giddaly attending year lectures at Cambridge and sitting in the very very back bench, you know they had benches, and being like Wow, the great Simon Baron COVID. It was a fun time. Great. Well, yeah, I remember those times too, and it's good to sort of meet you again in the present. Here. I am still in Cambridge. Where are you? That's a good question. That's a good question. I'm in Santa Monica, California right now because I'm I'm

stranded due to COVID. So it's a whole story. But I'm a professor at Columbia in New York City. Great, you know during reg war programming. Sure, well, you know, I really enjoyed reading this new book years because I've been I've been, I've been reading all your books and kind of we'll at the evolution of your thinking on

this topic. In fact, that's that's how I'd like to start this conversation, is on what you see as some of the biggest core aspects of the evolution of your thinking about this topic from when you first started studying

it to now. Yeah. So I would say that the big change that's happened over the thirty thirty five years that I've been involved in autism research for me, that we it wasn't just me, but you know, the field was focusing on kind of the deficits is that autistic people have, which is maybe no surprise because that's part of how the diagnosis is made. So autistic people struggle with social skills, with communication, with adjusting to unexpected change, and you know, a lot of the research then was

just focused on the social difficulties. And maybe what's changed is that we were realizing that autism is more than just a disability. Autism involves thinking differently. And there's a kind of a new phrase that I'm sure we'll talk about, neurodiversity. These are individuals who process information differently, they think differently, and some of those differences aren't about disability, they're about

strengths and even talents. So kind of, you know, the second half of my career, as it were, has focused more on the strengths, on the positive aspects of autism, not just focusing on what they find difficult, but what they might do even better than the rest of us. So talents is a fascinating area. Let's double click for a second on even within our changing understanding of their

social deficits. Let's double click on that as well before we get to talent and creativity, because you know, as I'm more and more I dig into that literature, I see that a lot of autistic individuals are have a lot greater motivation to connect and to make friends and meet then maybe they were given credit for in the past, and maybe even they have you know, you know the difference between cognitive and affective empathy, you know, and how

maybe in certain aspects of empathy they actually aren't compaired. And I was wondering how you're thinking in terms of the social realm has changed as well over the years. Yeah, absolutely so. I think it's a myth or a stereotype

that autistic people don't want to socialize. I mean, that may be true of some, and we should be careful not to generalize, but if anyone, that's true of anyone, really right, Yeah, but I think I've certainly met autistic people who want friends but just have difficulty making friends, or if they may friends, maybe have difficulty keeping friends.

You know, So the motivation might well be there. But you raised this question about empathy, and you know, one kind of old view was that autistic people struggle with with some aspect of empathy. But what I think, what we now know is they don't struggle with all of empathy. So empathy is this kind of umbrella concept, and within empathy you mentioned, we can distinguish at least two components,

cognitive and affective. The cognitive part is being able to imagine someone else's thoughts and feelings, so it's the kind of recognition part, and it does involve a bit of an other leap of imagination because we can't directly see what someone is thinking or feeling, so there's an imaginative component to it. But the affective part is having an emotional response to someone else's thoughts and feelings, so it's

more the response element. And when it comes to autistic people, they seem to have more difficulty with the first kind of empathy, the cognitive empathy, maybe because they like facts and precision, and when you're trying to imagine another person's thoughts and feelings, we don't have a lot of facts to go on. That's why we have to be willing

to make that leap of imagination. You know, I wonder if Scott is feeling this, or I wonder if he might be thinking this, But it's speculative, it's not factual. But they don't seem to struggle with the affective part of empathy. So if you tell an autistic person, you know, Scott is feeling really sad because he just had a recent loss, you know, an autistic person, just like anyone else, will feel bad about that. Someone to sort of step

in and try to help or to give comfort. So they have the appropriate emotions once they know the information. But it's getting the information about what is someone thinking or feeling that they struggle with. Yeah, and you know, I'm very interested in the difference between artism and psychopathy, for instance, and you're in this book Evil and really diving into that. Could you please talk a lot about some of the differences, because I don't think serial killers

are really great at affective empathy. Is that right? You don't think what serial killers are amazing effective empathy? No, exactly. So, I mean serial killers would be like an extreme case. But even if we just thought about antisocial personality disorder, they don't all end up being serial killers. But of course most psychopaths are on Wall Street, not not serial killers. Yeah,

hopefully not for too long. But you know, some people have suggested that people with anti social personality disorder, which would include you know, psychopaths as we call them, they might be the mirror image of autistic people. So they may have very good cognitive empathy. That's how they can sort of so they can figure out what you might think, what you might want, what you might feel, and that may be how they can manipulate people and deceive people,

including their victims. But they probably don't have great affective empathy, so they don't really care about their victims feelings and that's how they're able to commit the horrible crimes that they do. So that was the kind of topic of my previous book in the UK. The title the title of the book was Zero Degrees of Empathy, looking at how do people lose their empathy in different ways? I

think in the US they called Science of abel Yeah. Yeah, the American publishers thought that would be kind of, you know, better suited to American readers, But anyway, that was the kind of it was. It was all about how do we explain cruelty and how do we explain kindness too, in terms of these two different fractions of empathy. Yeah,

it was a really good book. And you know, this idea of this discrepancy between affect and cognive empathy among people on the autism spectrum it must be very confusing to them quite often to be able to feel something but not be able to cognitively attach and understand as maybe as readily and easily as someone else a neurotypical person. What it is their feeling like being able to label

aspects of emotional intelligence that I'm allowles to navigate the world. Yeah, I think that when when autistic people, again we're generalizing, but sure, but when autistic people feel concerned for another person, I think they know what they know what they're feeling, and when they want to rush out and help or stand up against an injustice, you know, I think they know what, they know what they're feeling. I think it's more, you know, the cognitive aspect of empathy might be very bewildering.

So if you're looking at someone's face and you can't be sure how to interpret it, so difficulties with interpreting facial expression or vocal intonation. You know, is he being sarcastic, is he being angry? Is he being bored? You know, all the different potential mental states that could be expressed if you've got trouble reading those things that other people can read very intuitively. You know, I think that's probably confusing.

And then the other way that we use cognitive empathy, or that it is used, is to predict people's behavior, to make sense of behavior, and to predict what people might do next. You know, so if we if we ascribe to another person this person may want to cheat me, we might sort of think twice about trusting them or you know, but with autistic people, often they might just take their take another person's words at face value, and it leaves them very vulnerable to exploitation in different ways,

thinking about the other person's motives for example. Absolutely, and there also tend to people and that i'spect them tend to say what's on their mind. You know, they don't like bullshit And can that be difficult in this in this world of wolkeness? You know, have you ever thought about that, like can it be difficult because people are just they just say, well, they want to understand things, you know, and maybe some of the things they want

to understand aren't politically correct. Yeah. So again, the kind of neurotypical world as we now call it involves a lot of you know, you're expected to be able to read between the lines and maybe not always say what's on your mind or kind of you know, find a nice way to say it which doesn't hurt the other

person's feelings whatever. But you know, all of this takes a lot of complex processing of how can I say something keeping in mind what the other person might feel or think, whereas a lot of a lot of autistic people i've might prefer just much more direct, sometimes blunt communication, but at least you know, and then and then they want to take people's words as a direct readout of what people are thinking, and they want and they want

other people to do the same with them. And you know, how how much easier would life be if we could just take people's you know, words at face value, much more kind of literal communication. But you know, that's not

the way the work, the real world works. People say that they're going to be your friend, but actually they may not mean it, you know, and it's it does leave to people very confused and and as I say, vulnerable, Yeah, I mean the more when I read your work and stuff, I start thinking, well, I have a lot of autistic like traits. It's possible to have autistic like traits right

and not be on the autism spectrum. Is that is that possibly in terms of personality characters, because when you start describing some of the stuff, it's like like you're just I feel like you're describbing me, but in a lot of ways. Yeah, So I guess another thing that's changed over the decades of research is that we now recognize autistic traits run right through the population, so we

all we all have some autistic traits. Yeah. We actually developed we developed a metric, an instrument for how you know, to measure how many autistic traits a person has. It's just a questionnaire. It's called the AQ, the Autism spectrum quotient, and it's a sort of bell curve in the population. So most of us have just an average number, and then people who who need a diagnosis of autism just tend to have a lot more, so they're kind of

shifted over to the right of the bell curve. And even then, you could have a lot of autistic traits and still not need a diagnosis, because it's always always about the fit between you and your your situation. So even if you have a lot of autistic traits, if they're not interfering with your life, if they're not causing any causing you to suffer, then you may not need a diagnosis, you know. Yeah, that's a that's a really

good point. So maybe we should dive into your new book because I wanted Wait, we did a good job there, I think laying the foundation and you know for this

your latest work, your latest masterpiece, The Pattern Seekers. So the main thesis of this new book is that the genes for autism perhaps drove the evolution of human invention, even going back seventy eighty thousand years ago, because you know, of course, you know, but my listeners may not know this, but there's this big bang of cultural explosion that we see, you know, in humanity that has been not fully explained yet. Jeffrey Miller has I bought this sexual selection right, you know,

and others have. People have their different theories about what it was. I'd love to hear your thinking on and how perhaps the genes for systematizing and autism might have played a role there. Sure, So, you know, in my book, I kind of look at invention and arguing that there's a link between. I think it's uniquely human the capacity for invention and autism, you know, and on the face of it doesn't seem like there should be a link.

You know, autism, as we've been describing as traditionally viewed as a disability. Invention is almost like the crowning achievement of our species. If you look around the planet, you know, what characterizes Homo sapiens seems to be are kind of unstoppable capacity for invention. You know, here we are talking through Skype, you know, an invention possibly invented by somebody who had a lot of autistic traits, a man in Denmark.

But anyway, you know, our whole environment, you know, you know, I've got my cup of juice here, and you know I have my pen here, and all the things around us are just kind of inventions. When you start looking at it that well, that's actually orange juice, Like what is that? If we were a little bit closer, maybe in the same room, I would share my juice with you. Thank you. Even during the Colvin aide So you know, my book, you know, first of all, addresses well what

is invention? What do we mean by invention? And I, you know, I take as my starting point the archaeological record, you know, when do we see the first signs of invention? And some people argue that because our ancestors before Homo sapiens, there was Homo habilis, homoerectus, even the Neanderthals. They were using stone tools. So do those things count as invention?

You know, they had they were using stone rocks like a hammer to crack a nut, or they were making their own axes out of stone to cut or to know, you know, to slice or to scrape in different ways. You know, so simple tools with limited number of functions. But do those counters as inventions? Well, I sort of see those is we could argue about whether those are inventions,

but there was. They seem to be quite limited. And then around one hundred thousand years ago to seventy thousand years ago, Homo sapiens is on the scene and we see this kind of explosion of new inventions. And just to give you a couple of examples, seventy thousand years ago, we see the bow and arrow, which I argue is

a complex tool, not a simple one. And we see other amazing things like the first jewelry, which was necklace of bead shells, and the first musical instrument, which was a flute made out of a bone, a hollow bone. And in each of these cases, you can sort of see a particular logic that must have been in the

minds of the person who invented it. And I argue that there was a new circuit in the brain, which I call the systemizing mechanism, which allowed us to it allowed us to look for these new patterns in the world. I call them if and then patterns. So if we take the bow and arrow, or the inventor of the bow and arrow, he or she would have been thinking, 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 if and then, you know. Or if we take this kind of first musical instrument, the inventor would have been thinking, if I blow down this hollow bone and I cover one hole, then I get a particular note. But if I blow down the bone and uncover the whole, then I get a different note. And what we're basically seeing is human beings experimenting, doing little experiments using this if and then logic. And my thesis is that this this derived from a new mechanism

in the brain. It's like a revolution in the human brain. That other species are our ancestors. And other species living today are bones or dolphins. No other species has got this kind of capacity for looking for these logical patterns if and then patterns. And that's what's enabled, you know, unstoppable. I call it generative invention. We don't just we don't just invent at once. We're generating non stop. You know, we've even invented a vaccine against COVID. I'm still doing it. Yeah,

connect the dats between that and autism. Sure, so autistic people when you give them little tests of this if and then reasoning, they score above average on these tests. When you give them questionnaires asking how interested are you in systems of one kind or another? Because the minimal definition of a system is these if and then patterns. Engineers call it input operation output, but they map onto

the same constructs. You know, you take the input, you perform an operation on it, and then you look look at the output. You see what you get and when you when you use those questionnaires, We've got one called this systemizing quotient, which just asks you how interested are you in how things are made? In what you know? How interested are you in taking things apart to see how what the components are in a system How interested are you in in numbers or in musical patterns or

in the weather patterns of the weather. You know, autistic people score much higher on those questionnaires, and so do people who work in STEM in science, technology, engineering, and math. So there are these little clues that autistic people may think in very similar ways that their systemizing mechanism may be kind of tuned to a higher level so that they're seeing these patterns much more than other people. They're looking for them, they're playing with the patterns, and they're

doing this at an above average level. Very interesting hypothesis. How do you do you think your hypothesis is better than the other hypothesis that are out there. For instance, I'll lay out a couple others. You know, some of argument language is the seed of consciousness that allowed for the but language is reduced in autism. They're you know, verbal communication. Another hypothesis is, you know, Previc has this

theory that the dopaminergic mind is what is responsible. You know that it's really that's the dopamine that's pumping that exploration drive, but you actually see reduced levels of that in people with autism. You know, in terms of that form of creativity. It's a schizop more schizotipy kind of form of creativity. So how do you reconcile that with

all those other competing theories. Sure we could take them one by one, but if we just take language, for example, because obviously one huge difference between modern humans Homosapiums and our ancestors and equally other living non human species is language. A language undoubtedly gave us all kinds of advantages over other species. But I don't necessarily see systematizing as incompatible

with language. So those if and then patterns that I think I needed every time you invent something, I think also are seen in syntax in language. So when we're trying to derive the rules of syntax, it's no different really to deriving the rules of music, or the rules of mathematics, or the rules of you know, how how your computer works. It takes that if and then logic. I wanted to mention that in this theory about what changed in the human brain seventy thousand years ago to

one hundred thousand years ago. I think there were two big changes. I've mentioned the systemaizing mechanism, but the other one we touched on earlier, which I call the empathy circuit, because when we look at these new inventions that suddenly appeared in the archaeological record, we can see them as evidence of systematizing that suddenly we modern humans could reason in using this particular logic. But I think we can also see them as evidence of the empathy circuit. So

take the musical instrument. You know, the inventor wasn't just thinking what happens when I blow down the hollow bone and cover one hole? How does the sound change? Not just thinking about the physics of the object, but they were probably also thinking what's going to be the impact on a listener? You know, how might somebody else us experience the sounds that I'm making? You know, might they

take the music that I'm creating as communicating? So that might be you know, pointing not just to the inventor having the capacity to systemize or to invent, but also to think about the experience of other people equally with the first jewelry, you know, so the first jewelry, which goes back seventy thousand years, somebody had collected some shells and drilled a little hole into each shell, so you

can see them systemaizing. If I take this shell and I drill a hole into each shell, and I insert a thread through the holes, then I can create a necklace. You know, so you can see the if and then logic. But equally, you know, why were they making this jewelry? Was it because as they were thinking about how they would be perceived if they wore it, that somebody else might perceive them as more attractive or a different social status.

Or were they making the jewelry as a gift for somebody else because they imagine somebody else might want it or appreciate it. So the jewelry itself can be taken both as evidence of the systemaizing mechanism and the empathy circuit being in place. So yeah, I was just going to say that. You know, when we go back to language as a kind of you know, a rival theory for why did you know, why did humans come to

dominate the planet? I think you can see language itself as a kind of it draws on both systematizing, that's the syntax element, and it draws on the empathy circuit. Because when we communicate, we have to be thinking about what does our listener need to know? You know, what is our listener, you know? Is my listener understanding my my communications? You know? Do I need to clarify my message? So empathy kind of is involved in language too, So I don't see language as a sort of, you know,

as a rival explanation. I think it kind of includes at least two of these big ingredients. And are you claiming that people the artistic people, by the way, is it people with autism or artistic people? Have you said have you settled that there isn't a right or wrong way to talk about autism? But from talking to the autism community, my reading is that the majority prefer to prefer what's called identity first language. So I'm an autistic

person rather than I have autism. So is the is the is there's the idea that artistic people don't have necessarily that high functioning empathy circuit that you're describing there, but they have the systematizing one. But it obviously there was more than just autism that that drove the evolution

of of humanity. And I think so. So I think listening what you're saying, I think we can come up with a meta theory that that the even allows us to incorporate schizotypal thinking in that form of openness to

experience and dopamine and the default mode brain network. So I'm really fascinated with the default mode brain network, and I've called it, I've called it the imagination network and been popular talks and things, and and I'm very interested in the idea that people autistic people tend to not have as default activation of their default mode network. So a lot of that kind of so your imagination is is is not as on call for them, so to speak,

but it seems like bold. So I think that maps onto what you're saying is both the kind of social imaginations implant as well as systematizing. Yeah, absolutely so, I think the default mode network. My understanding of the brain regions involved is that they do overlap quite a lot with what's called theory of mind or cognitive empathy. Right, So when you're when you're lying in the MRI scanner and your mind is just wondering, you know, for for

a typical person, often you're thinking about other people. When you're you're thinking about other people's thoughts about you, or you're thinking about your own thoughts. Either way, that might lead to an activation of these social regions of the brain. When we reflect on our own thoughts or on someone else's thoughts, it's likely to involve the same circuitry, this

ability to imagine thoughts and feelings. Yeah, and there's plenty of evidence that in autistic people there's underactivation of those regions, either when they're doing an explicit social task or even when they're just sort of in resting state as it's called, you know, just doing nothing, lying in the scanner. But you know, what we did was a big population study we call it the Brain Types Study, where we got over over half a million people to take part, so

this is described in the book. We had I think six hundred thousand people from the general population and then thirty six thousand non autistic people, sorry, autistic people, So six hundred thousand non autistic and thirty six thousand autistic.

So it's a very my big study. And they took this systemizing question, the empathy questioned, and also this third measure a Q, which measures autistic traits, and we saw some very interesting patterns that again kind of made us see links between people who are talented at systemaizing or talented at invention and autistic traits. Wow, This is absolutely fascinating. I think I'm really weird personally because I think I score two standard deviations above the meat on both autism

and schizotipy at the same time. And I'm wondering how that's humanly possible. But have you have your menyone who scores high in both of the questionnaires. It's a pleasure to you know, you may be the first. That's great. No, there's gotta be more. There's got to be more, because I have a very good social imagination as well as I really like when I when I meet some an

autisy person, I really feel comfortable with them. You know, I really feel like coming home in a way, you know that all the bullshit is you know, cut out of I can just we can just talk. But I also feel very at home with artsy you know, flighty like dreamers as well. Yeah, you know, yeah, So this is really cool being able to clarify some of this stuff because there's almost two separate literatures in now I'm

gonna put this way. Within the science of creativity literature, there tends to be much more of a focus on the dopaminergic But talking about inventions, you know, yeah, I mean I was, I was coming up, you know with you know, my pen is an invention. You've got a Lexa there, But there they all they were all made possible possible by that same systematizing circuit in the brain. You know, this if and then logic the person who programmed Alexa or you know, whether it's a a physical,

concrete system or a more digital one. So I think it's great that we had a little a little sort of auditory aim there. Good if we could tie it to the lesson plan of the day. But yeah, you know, I don't know if you look into the science of creativity literature, but that literature, you know, even like the creative Identity questionnaire, like so much for the creative questionnaires,

divergent thinking tests, it's all so much focused. I wouldn't say it's on autistic like creativity that you're talking about that kind of invention kind of thinking. I feel like it's focused more on openness to experience and and and more of like default mode network kind of creativity. So could it be that maybe this autistic form of the great strengths for creativity have gone neglected even in this in the creativity literature within psychology, that I would say

it has to a large extent. So let me check I understand your question. Have they these theories have been neglected in the creativity literature, right? You know? So I mean I think this, you know, I think this focus on if and then patterns could be very relative to understanding creativity because the point is that you can, you know, you can take any system analyze it in terms of if and then. But then you can start to play

with any one of these variables. You can change the input that's the if, or you can change the operation you perform on the input that's the end to get a different a different then a different output. And so just as as as a way of explaining how do we generate novelty, how do we generate new patterns? I think this could add to that literature. Equally, coming back to autistic people, I think the concept of divergent thinking,

what thinking out of the box. You know, it could be that autistic people have a certain advantage being sort of less sociable unless preoccupied by what do other people think. They're not following the crowds, they're not following conventions, they're not following what's fashionable, but they're kind of thinking things through from first principles, which may mean that they can come up with with a fresh way of looking at something.

So I think you've done a great service there in bringing that point to the fore, because you know, I may have been ensconsed in the creativity literature for twenty years or so, and just so much of it is a focus. You know, they do talk about connecting dots, but it's not so much focused with like pattern recognition ability as much as like openness to experience and artsy kind of you know, like for instance, reduced to lead inhibition, you know, that kind of having a low filter having

like you know. So I like that you're bringing this in to the discussion of invention and creativity. Not only bringing in, but you're saying it me have been the mean driving force of human invention. Yeah. So that big study I mentioned earlier, to six hundred thousand people, we were basically able to categorize the whole population into five types of brain I can ask you that. Yeah, so some people score much higher and systematizing than they do on empathy, so we call that type S, and other

people have the reverse profile. They score much higher on empathy and they doing so we call that type E, and each of those brain types is about thirty percent of the population. And then there's a middle group who are kind of equally good at systemaizing and seeing these patterns as they are reading other people's thoughts and feelings, so we call them type B for balanced, and that's another thirty percent. And then we have people who are at the extremes. So an extreme of type S is

someone who kind of sees patterns all the time. They're always looking for these patterns and playing with them, experimenting with them, but their empathy may just be average or below average, and that's where we see a lot of autistic people, but also that's where we see people in the world of STEM. So there's this kind of overlap

between people who are inventors and autistic people. And the big surprise for us was when we collected DNA working with the company twenty three and meters, we found that the common genetic variants that are associated with scoring high ends systematizing overlap to some extent with the common genetic variants that are associated with autism. So even at the molecular level, not just at the cognitive the molecular level, we were seeing an overlap between autistic people and people

who invent What are the genes? What are the genes called for? You do you know? So these are genes

that are they're called they're called single nucleotide polymorphisms. So these are genes that might be anywhere in the genome, but which come in different versions that so we might be carrying slightly different versions of the gene or the alleles, and each of these polymorphisms or common genetic variants has a tiny effect on behavior, which is why you need kind of large population studies to see how they're working

in combination. So there isn't a quick answer to say, look on chromosome seven or look on right because there are hundreds or even thousands of these things. But it's about, you know, do you carry a particular a combination. And what we found was that the particular combination that we call them hyper systemizers, carry overlaps. It's not a complete overlap, it was about twenty six percent overlap with the combination

that autistic people carry. So, you know, the fact that we find any association with genetics and pattern recognition, I think is quite important because it's telling us that natural selection may have shaped people to either be better or worse at pattern recognition. There may have been some advantages to a person who could see these patterns more quickly

and build new systems. And then the link with autism just suggests that maybe we need to rethink autism, that we should just see as a disability that they're car you know, the genes that make them autistic are also the genes that you know, have allowed human progress beautiful. So the natural next question is why don't monkey skateboard? Well,

thank you for that question. I mean, this is this is the title of a chapter in my book, you know, and I'm kind of curious when you look around at other species, we just don't see them experimenting, you know, with humans. You know, skateboarding is a great example of experimenting. If you watch kids out in the street, it might irritate you that they're kind of skating up and down a ramp and doing it for hours and hours and

they're trying to perfect a particular move. And it turns out there are at least one hundred and one different things you can do with a skateboard, you know, there's you know, we don't just do one thing with it. We're always experimenting to see what we can do with it, you know, and kids who go out to do this, they're not doing it because their parents told them, you've got to study harder to you know, to improve your skateboarding.

They're just up to experiment. And we just don't see this in monkeys, or in apes, or in you know, any other species really. So although that's a kind of like a ludicrous example, it is interesting that, you know, we could take a much simpler example, like in the playground. You know, we've humans have built a seesaw where we're playing with what happens to the seesaw when different people

are at each end and there are different weights. We're experimenting with with you know, with with physics effectively, and we just don't see this in other species. So to me, you know, what what this is shouting out is that

you know, other species don't experiment. We experiment with with medicines, you know, even thinking about you know, natural herbs as medicines, you know, and our ancestors were doing this long before modern science, experimenting with what, you know, what kinds of foods or things that we could eat or drink might heal certain ailments. But all of this is this if and then logic. You know that today we take an aspirin as a painkiller to to get rid of a headache.

You know, we know that that's derived from the bark of the willow tree, and that it's come from traditional medicine. That was you know, the result of playing with these these if and then patterns. You know, if I have a headache and I eat the bark of the willow tree, then my headache goes away. It's the same logic. We don't see monkeys experimenting with with medicine either. So why, well, I'm still not clear on. I mean, I don't expect you to have all the answers to all life's and

mysteries figured out. But what what? What cause? What allow enabled this ability? I mean, couldn't one argue it was the emergence of consciousness to a certain degree, or that even language enabled us to have this kind of scientific thinking. So again, you know, we talked a little earlier about you know that language would have been of huge benefit.

If we could talk to ourselves or talk to other people, we could pass on some of the lessons we'd learned, or we could do some of this hypothetical thinking through language. You know, I'm sort of struck that there are humans who don't have language as a result of a stroke. I mean, there are humans, you know, autistic people who have very minimal language, but they still can do some of this pattern recognition and playing with patterns to invent,

including with music. You know. So I'm not sure that languages is a necessary sort of precursor for invention. But I guess the other way you could look at this question is we know that monkeys and apes can can see patterns. And you know, we were talking earlier about your time in Cambridge when you were studying with the great Nick Macintosh, you know, and he was, you know, his field of specialty was about kind of association learning,

associative learning, particularly in non human animals. You know. So monkeys can do a hell of a lot, so can birds, and you know, many different species they can. They can use associative learning to see the relationship between A and B. So using the hammer A leads to the outcome B, which is to get the juicy inside of the nut. You know. But that's that's not necessarily going to give

you invention. Just being able to just be able to learn the association between two two items, if you like, or even doing that in sequence, you know, because monkeys and birds can often do associative learning across many difference taps, you know, so paired, you know, they're they're they're pairing lots of associations in a sequence. But it doesn't that doesn't add up to this if and then logic, which I think is the thing that gives us generative invention.

But where did that come from? How do we get that add on? You know? And I suppose that I suppose you know, there are two answers to this. One might have been that we're looking at an abrupt change in the human brain that was almost like a quantum leap. The other possibility was that, you know, we're looking at incremental changes. And I don't think there's a kind of there's any evidence to settle that debate yet. I don't

think I just have settled it. Yeah not today, But I mean, I just love I know that I can nerd out with you at a deeper level than maybe you know when you're on like the BBC or something, you know, like so like let's let's get into it, you know, there's there's some really interesting no offense to the BBC, but you know what I'm saying. You know, we're there, we're two psychologists talking shops. But you know,

there's two things I'd like to recommend. Gregory Feist's book, The Psychology of Science and the Origins of the Scientific Mind, a really great book. He tries to his own attempt to trace the evolution of modern day human you know, creativity through the emergence of scientific thinking. But also, Daniel Bohr wrote a really good book called The Ravenous Brain. Have you come across Daniel Boor? He's at Cambridge, so I think he's still at Cambridge. I certainly met him,

we worked together. We even published a paper together cool that was on synesthesia actually, which is something we haven't yet talked to. Yeah, I haven't read his book, so thank you for recommending it. Yeah, because I think it's relevant in terms of like talking about the prefront of cortex's ability to chunk information and consciousness and how that

allows you to see patterns. So that seems relevantle But you know, the work I did with Nick McIntosh now and realizing I just realized now is very relevant to your work, and I really wish to darn he was alive and we could have like an email thread gene on this, you know, but maybe maybe we could dedicate this podcast to his memory, because I think I think he was an inspiration to both of us, deep deep inspiration.

My grace meant. Yeah, he had a fantastic sort of again logical way of thinking problems, you know, through, but a real clarity of thought too. Plus plus he was just a real real nice guy, you know. So he had that kind of combination of of logic and kind of the kind of warmth of humanity. So you know, he died way too soon, but a very distinguished psychologist. Yes, thank you for talking about that. I think that that's

a good service. But you know, the research he was pushing the in direction in is to look at the distinction between implicit learning that we share with other animals that you were describing and and human intelligence. And that that was the topic of my dissertation that it was one of the advisors on. So we found it it

was dissociable. So there is something there in I'm not saying, so there might be something to you what you're saying that's not that's not what I meant, But I'm saying it might not be crazy after roll Simon beren Cohen. But I'll take that. My point is I'm not not saying that, I'm saying I'm excited that that that there's a there's potential linkage I hadn't really thought of before.

But the correlation between the ability to solve like Ravens advanced progressive matrices items which we know people in autism actually are better on average, and finding those patterns consciously there was almost a zero correlation with individual differences in unconscious pattern learning. Right, So can you tell me the paper your dissertation sounds great, and can you tell me

how did you measure the implicit learning or implicit associations. Well, we used a form of SRT learning, which is serial reaction time, and so we had people do keypresses and the eighty percent of the time would fall a certain pattern and twenty five or maybe it was eighty five, fifteen, fifteen percent it followed a different pattern, and unknown to people because during the debriefing they said, I had no idea there was a pattern. People's response times were getting

much faster when there was a unconscious pattern. But they had no conscious awareness of it. And we found there were individual differences in that, you know, like and it correlated what open is to experience and created in some forms of creativity, but it was wholly uncorrelated with Ravens. Right, and your listener's our listeners may be interesting to know that. But correct me if I'm wrong that this kind of implicit association learning or recognition of persons is something that's

widespread in the animal kingdom. Yeah, and put the learning is widespread. You had some mostly their their their main form of learning anything. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and yet you know, other animals don't seem to invent you know, that seems to be it's not the only thing that characterizes modern humans. But I think it's a big one. Yeah, I agree, I agree, I think it's I think it's a terrific point. I really do. You You made another really good point,

which I'm glad you made in your book. You said, when we acknowledge the debt, we owe autistic people and make our society more inclusive and autism friendly. This will benefit society, lead to innovation, and enable autistic people to lead more fulfilling and sex and successful lives. I'd love to. I'd love you to elaborate a little bit on some ways we can make the workplace and even education more

autistic friendly. But before I before do you get into that, there's something that fascinates me, and that's that you're you're actually a little bit controversial in certain circles of the neurodiversity movement. It always bogs my mind trying to wrap my head around it. Why do you get some pushback when you make like you'll make even some things that sound to me just like just like wonderful, like autism friendly, inclusive, but you'll get actually pushback. You know. I guess you

can't please everyone in the world. It's something I've learned as I forget older. But what is some of this potential Why are you potentially controversial? So we talked earlier about empathy, and I think some autistic people have reacted negatively to the idea that they have any difficulties in empathy. And yeah, a lot of my work, but also the work of others, has documented, you know, difficulties with cognitive empathy or theory of mind. So there is a bit

of pushback about that. When we did that big study with thirty six thousand autistic people. You know, they did score lower on the EQ the empathy questioned. They've scored higher on the systemizing question, but that empathy piece is still there. And you know for some autistic people that that might that might feel stigmatizing, and I, you know, I apologize for that. It's not the intent. The intention is not to stigmatize. You know, we're just measuring and

we're documenting what we find. But you know, that might just be one example. But you know, back to your kind of bigger point, which is, you know, if if this theory has any merit, that autistic people right through the last seventy to one hundred thousand years have been the individuals who have been more than you know, been above average in systemaizing, in playing with these if and

then patterns to come up with new inventions. So if we kind of owe them this huge debt, you know, when we look at what's around us today and then look at their situation today, you know, I personally find it really heartbreaking. So we published this study back in twenty fifteen looking at suicide rates or suicidality in autistic adults, and what we found was that two thirds of autistic

adults had felt suicidal. One third had attempted suicide. You know, this is kind of way above the rates you'd see in the general population. And if you kind of look at their situation, the majority of autistic adults are unemployed. So despite these talents that we've been talking about, they're not finding jobs. They're not having that sense of being

valued by the sety we need. The unemployment for anybody is bad for your mental health because it makes you feel that you don't have a purpose, that you're excluded. It makes you more isolated, you don't feel you belong you know, and maybe no surprise that the majority of autistic adults have depression and anxiety. So, you know, I sort of see that on the one hand, we've got this kind of amazing sort of realization that autistic people

have been contributing enormously to human progress. On the other hand, at least with modern society, we seem to have left them out to kind of languish with high levels of suffering. So my you know, the book is also a kind of call to action that it's time for these things to change. We need to redesign the way we hire people and redesign the workplace, redesign the educational settings, you know, to make them more autism friendly, because it's otherwise it's

a form of discrimination towards towards a group with disabilities. Oh, I agree, And you've even proposed maybe two tracks to education, Is that right? Yeah? So if we think about school, and you know, a lot of autistic people drop out of school, and you know, leave school with no formal qualifications, even though they've got good intelligence, because they find school sort of it's a painful place to be. You know that the mainstream classroom is very social with twenty five

other kids or thirty kids. There's a lot of whispering and chatting, and you know, for an autistic person, that can be overwhelming and confusing and stressful. And then you know, mainstream education sort of expects you to switch subjects every thirty minutes. I don't know how it is in the States, but over here, you know, you have a lesson and then the bell rings and then you move to another lesson.

You know, and you know, for an artistic person who likes to just do one thing at a time and to go into something in great depth in a systematic way, really trying to understand the patterns in any subject. The idea of having to kind of interrupt their learning after thirty minutes and switch to something totally unrelated again is just it's counter to how they learn. So one suggestion is that we should be rethinking even you know, early education.

We should be looking at kids as they come into school at age three or four and using that classification we talked about earlier. If a kid has more of a systematizing brain type S, maybe they're going to benefit from learning in small groups and in a more hands

on way, doing experiments and observation, you know. And if they've got more of a type E brain, you know, where they can navigate the social world much more easily, maybe that's fine for them to be in the mainstream, noisy classroom where they're learning from a teacher, you know. So these are just kind of suggestions really that we shouldn't assume that the educational system is kind of well suited to everybody that one size song, you know, neurodiversity

is the norm. That's to say, there are many types of brains. We shouldn't assume that, you know, that the way we've designed schools so far is optimal for all kids. Love it any further reflections on how we can nurture the inventors of the future. Well, so, now if we

think about, you know, the world of employment. You know, I think a lot of companies are beginning to realiz is that that having a team that's made up of, you know, of people who think differently to each other, means that we don't just get the result where everyone is agreeing with each other. We need disagreement. We need we need new fresh ideas. And you know, having an autistic person in your team may just mean that you know, they're thinking, I'm sorry to use that cliche, out of

the box. They're thinking differently and that is the source of innovation, but also doing it now that we can see they're doing it using this very systematic kind of logic. If and then thinking, so, you know, that could be you know, if we can hire autistic people, it's good for the individual gets them, it's inclusion, it's potentially good for the company in terms of productivity. You know, we shouldn't just see this as kind of a chat charitable thing to do for autistic people. I think it could

be good on both sides. And I think it's good for society because you know, we're we are meant to be a civilized society where we don't just leave people out to waste away. That's a great, really great point. To what extent do you think some of the sex differences that you find in certain STEM fields is attributable to the sex difference in autism and systematizing interest as opposed to to straight up sexism and discrimination. I know

that's a awarded question. Yeah, yeah, well, I mean this is another one of those areas which has been controversial, so to say the least. But but there's got I mean, there's this, There is a huge sex difference in systematizing, right, yeah,

there is. So so I published another book back in two thousand and three called The Essential Difference, which was looking at empathy and systemaizing but in terms of gender, you know, suggesting that these are two dimensions, two psychological processes where we do see sex differences on average, and there's you know, depending on how you want to measure it, whether it's questionnaires or performance tests, you do see that on tests of empathy, on average, females tend to score higher,

and on tests of systematizing, on average, males seem to quit higher. You know, the differences aren't huge, but they're statistically significant. We saw that, particularly in that big study with the six hundred thousand you know that, and you know, so it raises this question, is that also why autism

is more common in males than in females? And I think probably historically we've overlooked a lot of autistic females, you know, So that's kind of a criticism of of clinicians and of clinics and the methods that we use that we haven't been sort of recognizing autism in females.

So there may have been under diagnosis there. But even if you account for the underdiagnosis, because a lot of that seems to be shifting a lot more women and girls are coming forward for a diagnosis, there still seems to be a bias towards males in terms of autism. So more, you know, more males get diagnosed, and it may be that we need to look at, you know, partly biological factors for that. And again we're in the territory of controversy that that's you know, the psychotic podcast

is not antithetical to the area of contract control. How did you phrase it? Controversy I would say controversy, but I feel like either way you said, it is much more elegant. Well, I mean at the I mean I'm interest in the truth the tales. At the tales, it's really truly striking, isn't it. Just the systematizing proportion of

males in the extreme right tale of the distribution. Yes, so we were talking about the extreme of type S and the extreme of Type E, so the hyper systemizers or the hyper empathizers, And yeah, the sex difference, the sex ratio is quite striking. It's probably at least two to one, so twice as many males than females at the extremes of systematizing and vice versa, twice as many

females at the extremes of empathizing. So that's not the whole story, but it just seems to me it's got to be part of the story if we're having an honest discussion. Yeah, exactly, And I think, you know again, we need to sort of be measure and balanced in how we think about these sex differences, because some of it is going to come down to culture, the way we raise our kids and the way boys and girls are exposed to different kinds of influences, but some of

it may reflect pre natal biology. And I know that to some people that's a kind of a red rag to a bull, you know, the idea that any sex differences might have any any biological component, whether we're talking about genetics or hormones. But a kind of more balanced view would recognize that both may be, you know, interacting. Culture and biology may be interacting to produce these outcomes. Sure, and you know, just recognizing that isn't that also the

core of the whole nerdiversity movement. I mean, the nerd diversity movement is not saying it's not the neural cultural movement or the culturally that anyway whatever, I'm trying to be clever, But the point is, it's neuro diversity, right, It's a biological component that we want to appreciate. There's something in neat to a human that makes them who they are, and we want to acknowledge and honor that. Yeah. Absolutely.

The other thing that's important to kind of mention, just before I know we're getting close to the hour, is about sexism. You know, you did, you did raise this question, and I think what the what the science tells us is that you you can't infer anything about a person in terms of their brain based on their gender, because the science is only ever sort of done on groups. So you can, you can compare females and males on

average and see these differences that we've talked about. But you know, a person's gender doesn't tell you anything about whether they might be great at pattern recognition or great empathy because an individual may be typical or atypical for their sex. So to kind of so to pre judge somebody in an interview based on their gender, are they suitable for this job in STEM, for example, would be sexist and would be discriminating. But that's not what That's

not what we as scientists are doing. I hope none of them, none of the science, none of the science justifies sexism. That's that's for sure. They're they're separate domains. My last, my last question today is really quite frankly, the elephant in the room. Are you related to soft American? I am so. He's my cousin, my first cousin, So obviously we're working in quite different fields, quite different fields.

I appreciate his work. So that's just to kind of, you know, settle that when we are related, but his work provides a fasting insight into human eater. I mean, do you do you do? You do? You do? You find him funny? I find his work funny. Yeah, I find his work interesting and sometimes quite psychological. So sometimes what he's doing by using deception is bringing out people's prejudices.

And I sort of see that what he's doing through comedy is a form of social psychology, when so just go out into the wild and look at how people behave you know, sometimes you can sort of set up situations so that people reveal their prejudices, for example, and I think some of Sasha's work has done that very effectively. Indeed, you're still in touch with him, sure, Yeah, I wonder if you ever like send him any big peer reviewed papers and he's like, oh, this is very relevant too.

How I can trick someone? So, as I say, our work is very different, but we're a very close family. Sounds great. Well, Hey, I just want to thank you so much for coming on the Psychology Podcast today and for the really truly important work you're doing and raising awareness about autism and it's linkages to creativity. Thank you very much. Well, it's been a fun conversation. Really nice to see you again after all this time, and thank you for inviting me on. Thanks for listening to this

episode of the Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in on the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology podcast dot com. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show, and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.