My house. My name is Marcus DeSoto on the Simone professor for the public understanding of science here in all. Welcome to this icon of Premier events, University of Oxford for engagement in science at the public. We're bringing back you back to the Playhouse in the newly furnished seats. I've be trying to work out some patterns of the arrangement I thought I had is completely fox me so I'm probably the best extension of.
But it's great to have such a wonderful audience. I want to thank the Amador Foundation, who financially make this possible as well. And I think it's a testament to the subjects that we address tonight, that this property has been the fastest selling celebrity lecture I've been involved in, because that's the topic that we're going to be talking about is the subject of autism, which affects many people in our society.
But it's maybe I shouldn't say, unfortunately. And that's somehow I think the what we're going to be exploring. We have a very fantastic speaker, Simon Baron-Cohen, who's the director of the Centre of the Autism Research Centre in Cambridge. He's Trinity College. Cambridge and I first met him actually because I think a massive audience we often kind of slightly joke about we there are more of us on the kind of Asperger autistic spectrum than in any other department of its university.
And I do remember an interview a few years ago with one of my colleagues actually when I was in Cambridge, Richard Dawkins, who and he was being interviewed by Simon Singh in The Guardian.
All three won on Nobel Prize appeals enabled. And he sort of confessed to Simon that, well, I I've on this kind of scale of Asperger's in high school, I would point out that the six key indicators, which is kind of self-diagnosed himself and Simon picked this up and one of his books, which I really enjoyed reading The Essential Difference Exploring what makes an autistic brain slightly different.
What is the Defining Factor? Actually dedicated a chapter to exploring whether Richard was in fact Asperger's or not. And that's really at the heart of the talk today, because we're going to be exploring the question of autism and minds, what the science. So, you know, is it's actually a positive trait for us mathematicians. We just have a great welcome to Simon Baron-Cohen. Thank you very much. It's a great pleasure to be back in Oxford.
I was a student here some 30 years ago, so there's a nostalgia about getting off the train and coming back into this beautiful city. And I want to thank the organisers of this lecture. You're inviting me to give a talk in this series? It feels like I have an honour this afternoon. This evening. I'll be exploring this topic of autism. But its connection to scientific talent. So I thought I'd start just with an image of almost a stereotype of a child with autism.
Because sometimes a picture says more than words can. So what we see is a boy. And autism affects boys much more often than girls. And this boy is playing alone. And part of the diagnosis of autism are difficulties in social interaction and in communication. But you can also see in this picture that he's doing something intelligent. He's lining up his toys in a very precise way, but he's making consonants.
And those of you who live with autism, live with someone with autism, know that people with autism, love persons, they love order their universe. And what upsets me most is if someone comes along and disturbs that perfect order. But either way, what we're seeing is in some respects a disability struggling with socialisation. But in other respects, a mind that is very precise and very ordered. Here's one more child with autism.
And this child is playing with water and is fascinated by how the patterns of water droplets change as he blocks the flow of water with his hands. So again, we're seeing a child who in one context struggles. We shouldn't lose sight of the disability. But left to their own devices, they have a fascination with patterns.
And that's really the topic I want to discuss. Before I do that, a little bit about the background to autism, because this graph shows you that autism has been diagnosed increasingly, often year by year. The data here goes from 1996 through to 2005. Just showing you the number of cases per thousand being diagnosed. So there's been a steady increase. But some people have wondered what's driving this. And in all likelihood, it's quite ordinary factors.
We're just getting more aware of autism, but we're getting better at recognising it. There are more services on the ground looking for it, but also we've broadened our definition of autism, particularly to include a subgroup called Asperger's Syndrome. But Mark has just referred to. So we've added another subgroup and that will, of course inflate the numbers. That's the data up to 2005. And you can see that this next graph takes us a bit further from 2006 up to 2012, that increase has continued.
So you might be wondering, where is this leading autism is being diagnosed more and more. I think this is a good thing because the diagnosis, when it's done properly, is done for a reason, which is to help individuals who are struggling. So I think we're getting closer to recognising all of the individuals that need that support.
I don't think we're over diagnosing. But I suppose the other trends that comes out from these two problems is that in the old days, and this is when I started doing autism research, the condition was thought to be very rare. They used to say four in 10,000 children. Nowadays, if I go to the most up to date data, so this is 2014 published data from the states, from the Centre for Disease Control. The Americans regard this as a disease or a disorder.
But you can see that the current figures are one in 48 points and one in 189 girls. So we're still seeing autism being more common in boys. If you average across the ten genders, comes out to one in 68. So it's no longer rare. It's actually very common. And the graph, in a way, shows you autism in a snapshot, because it also shows you that some people on the autism spectrum, as it's called, also have learning difficulties that delay in the development more generally.
They may even have language delay. And that's true both in the boys and the girls. There's a proportion who have learning difficulties as well. But you can have autism without any learning difficulties, without any delay in your development. So average IQ, even above average IQ. And that's really what creates this breadth of the spectrum.
So when this term, the autism spectrum was coined, goes back to 1988, we thought this was very interesting, the idea that there might be a spectrum of autistic traits and thoughts about how we could measure it. So Mark has just mentioned this questionnaire that Rich Apportions has taken and completed. It's called the Autism Spectrum Question. So you can find it on the Web. You can complete it and see how many autistic traits you have on the front line.
On the left bell curve shows that autistic traits are normally distributed throughout the population. We all have some. So there's a bell curve at the sideline on the right of schools that people who end up with the diagnosis shape the distribution of schools that they have. And again, even within the clinic, you see a range of scores. I should help you to read this by saying that along the horizontal axis, the x axis, it goes from zero 3 to 50.
And if you're scoring very high so you're shifted over towards the right of that graph, you may need a diagnosis. But it's only when these traits interfering with your ability to cope in life, whether as a child or as an adult, that you would need a diagnosis. Otherwise, these traits are just there and they might have some adaptive or positive characteristics. So what else do we know about autism? Well, the first thing is we know that it's partly genetic.
So here we put an image of a family where one of the children has autism. What we know is that if one child in the family has autism, the likelihood of another child in the same family also receiving a diagnosis is one in three. So although in the general population it's about 1%, it's as soon as you've got a family relative with the diagnosis, your odds of getting of getting diagnosed dramatically shapes up. And we think that that's to do with genetics.
Reason We think that these days you can look at the genome and the picture on the top pair shows you the human chromosomes, 23 pairs of chromosomes. But each little dots on the chromosomes is a genetic association that's been reported in the scientific literature. This is being constantly updated on the website that is shining down to a gender Safa age old.
Because almost every week in one of the scientific journals, there'll be a new report about a genetic discovering genes associated with autism. When I last spoke, there were over 400 genes that have been identified as linked to autism. So we know we're talking about a complex condition in terms of it being polygenic. And we know that these genes are literally found right across the genome, every human chromosome. You can see that a lot of these genes are expressed in the brain.
So this this image superimposes gene expression amongst some of those genes that have been identified as linked to autism. And those ones that are found in the brain that can be published in our high profile journals and in the scientific world. So I'm going to assume that autism is partly genetic. Not completely genetic, because you can have identical twins like these sisters.
One has autism and one doesn't. So the very existence of so-called discordant pairs of twins, even though they're genetically identical but one has a11, doesn't mean that genes can't be the whole story. There must be environmental factors that interact with your genetic predisposition. We don't have such a good handle on what those genetic factors are. But suffice it to say that twin studies just make it. They make the argument that environment must also be interacting with genetics.
So I've mentioned that autism entails disability. I don't want to lose sight of that. But when you have your diagnosis, it's because you really need it if you are struggling. And universities like Oxford have students with autism who hopefully find their way to the disability business and get extra support because of that disability. And that disability is very much in the realm of social interaction.
What we know is that there's difficulties or differences in ability to cope with the social world. Start very early. This is a study looking at brain activity in babies where there's already a child with autism. So that tracking the next child in the family has a genetic risk for autism.
And just looking at whether they showed the expected pattern of brain activity when they're looking at a face or the eyes either directed straight at the child or looking away from the child in a typical child's way, operating at the child's brain is exquisitely sensitive to whether they're being looked at or not being looked at.
We pay a lot of attention to faces, but we find that in children with autism or children who have a risk of autism for genetic reasons, that brain activity is different. It's reduced in response to changes in looking at someone else's gaze. So that's very early on, even as young as six months old. This study comes from California University of California at San Diego, where they took children.
At the earliest point, you can diagnose autism, which is about two years old, and they presented children coming into the clinic either with a human face to the past or a geometric design. And they simply measured how long the child looks at either the social stimulus, the human face, or the non-social stimulus, the geometric design.
What they found is that if a child looks for more than 70% of the time, the non-Social Social stimulus, the geometric design, the probability that that child has autism was 100%. So I when I read this of film, I was quite impressed that there might be a behavioural test that could be used to diagnose autism. So there's a little caveat here before I go into that. I suppose what we're seeing is that the typical child can pay a lot of attention to faces.
The faces are important, but these kids who go on to develop autistic or receive a diagnosis of autism may be less interested in faces, more interested in patterns. But what's the caveats about this diagnostic test? Well, if you drill down into the data, you actually see each of these dots is a child. And they've been assigned into different groups on the autism graph of the red dots.
And the horizontal line going across the screen shows you if you're looking more at the geometric patterns rather than faces, if you're above that line, you're looking 70% of the time. That's geometric design. So you can see it's true. There's a lot more of those red dots above the line. So a lot of children with autism would get picked up using this behavioural test.
But equally those mathematicians or those who love statistics in the audience, we'll see that there's a wide range and it's a lot of kids who the red dots below the line, which means that they'd be missed by this test. So just to interpret some of these scientific findings with caution, but either way it's telling us that as a group, children with autism seem to be more biased.
So the thing that passes is that they are not faces. This is a study that came from Yale University where they used instructions. So this time what they're doing is putting the child in front of a computer whilst they're watching a movie, and the computer can track what the person is looking at once they're watching the movie. So the red and yellow persons that you see on Elizabeth Taylor's face as they're watching the movie Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
The yellow person is where the typical viewer is watching or looking, mostly looking at the eye region of the face, the red area, and seeing this image is where people with autism tend to look less at the eyes and more at the mouth whilst they're watching the movie. So again, we're seeing differences in how people with autism look at faces. They may not be showing the typical profile is the typical person of attention when they're presented with sensory information.
So if we took a kind of developmental approach to thinking about children, child development and social understanding, if you're not looking so much faces and if you're not really thinking about people as much as a typical child, that might mean that your delays in development, that what's called theory of mind, is being able to imagine what other people are thinking or feeling. You have to put yourself into someone else's shoes and take someone else's perspective.
And that's exactly what's found in autism. These children struggle to keep track of who knows what or what other people's motives are, and ordinary things like hide and seek, where there's an element of deception in which the typical child loves to engage in things that leave the child with autism, often feeling confused, stressed, and they prefer just to withdraw into the more predictable realms of patterns.
We tried to track what's going on in the brain, which is different in autism compared to a typical person when they're asked to look at the eye region of the face. So up above, we showed people photographs of the eye region and we asked them to pick which of these four was best described for the person in the photo, just thinking or feeling. So this is a tough test. All you've got is the eyes. The correct answer here is that she's a bit dispirited or a bit sad.
I can see some of you nodding, suggesting that you've got that one right. It's tough because all four words describe possible states of mind. It's tough because the black and white photo is not very high resolution. It's tough because you've only got the fragments of information that have the whole facial expression. What you can see on the graph is that people with autism still no on this test.
There's the two parts, the males and females over to the left of that graph compared to typical males and females. This was quite a large dataset because we collected the data online. When we asked people to tell you that test was there lying in a scanner for a brain scan so we can look at patterns of brain activity and we also see a difference in the typical population.
We see a lot of activity in a part of the frontal lobe, the left inferior function gyrus, and we find reduced activity in the autistic brain when they're looking at these facial expressions, just the eyes to try and decode what someone else is thinking or feeling. So that's showing some of the disability in autism. What we're also aware of is that when we look at the brain in autism, we don't see evidence that things are broken or disorders or dysfunctional.
We actually simply see difference. The autistic brain is just developing differently, and this is a field that I want to build on. So I'm going to show you some of these differences as part of the journey into understanding autism. So this study is looking at one particular structure in the brain, the amygdala. Some people think of the amygdala as the emotional centre of the brain.
It's deep in the brain, below the cortex. And this structure is larger in children with autism compared to typical children. So what we're seeing is a difference in the volume of a particular region of the brain. It's not a sign that anything is dysfunctional or disease. And this is why we should start challenging the perception or the label that autism is a disorder.
Because what we're seeing is difference. It's a bit more evidence for the idea that autism entails just a different pattern of brain development. So the graph on the left is where each child is a child and they have two brain scans during that during that transition. So what that means is you can track how the brain is growing. You're looking at brain development or brain growth.
You can join the dots to see if the typical grade shown in blue or the autism green zone in red differ in terms of where the brain is growing. What you can see is that there is a data difference. So this is just showing the total amount of grey matter in the brain. So again, just looking at this, that's an aspect of the volume of the brain. And that's this is quite early in development during the first five years of life.
The autistic brain is larger at each of those timepoints than the typical brain on average. So the brain in autism seems to be growing faster and larger than in typical toddlers. Again, not a sign of disease or pathology. Simply a different pattern of development. On the right side of this slide, we see evidence from a post-mortem study. So sometimes scientists have the opportunity to look in more detail at the brain because the next of kin are willing to donate the brain for research.
After tragically, someone with autism this time I'm actually here in Oxford is the national autism brain. This study comes from California. I have a brain bank for autism, too. And what they found was that the autistic brain is indeed larger and heavier, but it's also got 65% more nerve cells of neurones in the frontal cortex. So again, when you look at the fine detail, so called neuropathology of the brain, you see a difference in the way the brain is structured.
Not a sign of disease, but a sign of difference. There's a visual evidence of brain difference. This time we're looking at another structure in the brain, just coloured in green. It's called the corpus callosum, which is the connective tissue between the two hemispheres. Two halves of the brain. And a portion of this structure is actually smaller than children with autism. So some bits are larger, some of which are smaller. A whole pattern of development is different.
This is a very recent study where scientists have worked as a method of looking at connectivity within the brain, because we imagine that those neural connections in the brain and some of them are long range and some of them are short range, and there's now methods to be able to separate the short range and the long range. What you find is more of the short range connections in the autistic brain and more of the long range connections in the typical brain.
So again, what we're seeing emerging is that these are individuals with a very different mind mindset, a very different brain. Getting back to the post mortem studies, this is about the most detailed level that you can get, which is down to the individual neurone or the individual nerve cell. So now what we're looking at on the right is a neurone from a brain of someone with autism on the left. The same thing from a typical person. Typical brain.
What you should be able to see, even with the naked eye, is that the nerve cell from the person with autism has got more of those white dots up and down the nerve cell. Each of those white zones is a points of connection between one meal and its neighbour, so called dendritic spines. And what that means is that in autism we're seeing more connections between nerve cells than in a typical brain.
So far from this being a brain that is in some way disordered or pathological, this is a brain that seems to be developing faster. It seems to be developing more nerve cells. It seems to be developing more connections between nerve cells. And you could just try to imagine what would that do to your experience? It might mean that you're picking up more information than other people.
So in a lecture theatre like this, if you have autism, you wouldn't necessarily just be focusing on the talk, but you might be focusing on all kinds of information like the background sounds, the lights, the patterns of the colours of the seats, as Mark has mentioned, all sorts of things that's just bombarding your senses. And in some environments that might be overwhelming.
So full sensory overload, but in other environments that might just mean that you're taking in more data, you're able to see more patterns, more information than the typical brain is some evidence for that sensory hypersensitivity. If you ask people with autism to have a brain scan now, they're not looking at the structure of the brain or the function of the brain brain activity.
And the way this experiment was done, just to ask people to wear blindfolds where headphones and you just look at the brain and see what happens when you play the sounds through the headset, through the headphones. What you find is that in the autistic brain is a greater response to the auditory cortex just to hear in the sound. So this is evidence of auditory hypersensitivity.
And I think you could do this kind of experiment with the other senses, with taste or touch or smell or vision and find a greater response, so-called sensory hypersensitivity. So when we meet people with autism, we should keep that in mind. This is a person that might be very sensitive to their environment, but we need to make reasonable adjustments to the environments in which they learn so that they are autism friendly.
But it might also mean that this is an individual who's picking up much more information than the rest of us. So I'm a psychologist. And the implication for what I've told you so far is that these individuals, people with autism, might pick up more detail and maybe less of the big picture. They might be processing data. What's the evidence for this? Well, here's a test. It's called the embedded figures test, where you have to find that as quickly as you can in the overall design.
And what we find is that people with autism are super quick, super accurate at spotting the parts within the home. So their focus of attention is more on the detail than on the big picture. And again, if you ask them to do that test whilst they're lying in a scanner, having a brain scan, it finds that that passive performance is actually accompanied by last spring activity in the visual cortex. So the autistic brain is superior on this task, but the brain is doing it in a more efficient way.
So although we should think about autism as a disability, we can design tests which also reveal talents. Here's more evidence for people with autism prefer in detail. I have a big picture. This is actually a test that those of you who are in the field of psychology will recognise. It's the block design test, which is part of the IQ test for a lot of children and adults we are asked to do is take the blocks down below and select which ones you need to make the design up about.
Again, children with autism and the adults with autism show their best performance on the subtests of the IQ measure. And it's suggested that that's because they're very quick at taking apart the big picture and decipher into its component parts very quickly looking for detail, suggesting again that they have a talent at processing detail over and over the larger context. I'll show you a few more of these, just to give you a sense of it.
So here the test is simply what message you see. And there's no characters they have. But people with autism tend to say, I see the latter age group, people who focus on the big picture might say they see the latter and both answers are correct. But really, the test is picking up on whether you preferentially detail or preferentially go for the big picture. Again, it's a simple test showing that the bias in autism is for the lowest level of detail. Looking at what kind of pass, I didn't say.
This study shows that people with autism are also better. They score higher on a test of spotting patterns as he presents information across successive slides. And you see how quickly people can predict where particular information is going to be displayed on the screen for people with autism are quicker. Picking up these these patterns of how some stimulate some objects always occur next to or above other ones. They're very quick assessments of a person's. So let's bring this back to life.
This is Derek. The power of a genie. He has autism. Some of you may have heard him play it because he plays the piano and he plays publicly. And he's also blind from birth. And he has learning difficulties. In fact, his mental age is something around the equivalent of a three or four year old. But he only needs to hear any jazz song played once it's been reproduced. And he goes around the world on tour, performing requests of jazz numbers that people shout out in the audience.
Which is why we've got the piano here, just in case is in the audience. But this is kind of another nice illustration of how the autistic brain and the autistic mind is focusing on persons in his case, that auditory puzzles he can't see. But despite that, his brain is latching on to information where there are patterns to be found in the universe. But he's very quick, intricate, and his autism is giving rise to his his talent.
So some of you will have come across the book that was published earlier this year, late last year called Nero Triumphs. And it's by a journalist, Steve Silverman. And it won the Samuel Jackson Prize for non-fiction, very deservedly, because it tells a wonderful history of autism about people with autism right through the centuries who may have not had that formal diagnosis and may have had all the characteristics that you can see.
An image here of Henry Cavendish, the scientist who discovered hydrogen, who Silberman argues very convincingly, probably had autism. He did his utmost to avoid people. He would go in one entrance of the house, ensuring that he didn't tell anyone going through any of the other doors at the house. He was happiest really when he was doing his scientific experiments alone, but he hated social interaction. Nevertheless, he made remarkable contributions to science.
Now, those of you who, like James, helped with the subtitle of Solomon's book, The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity. His book, one of the Reasons Why It's Done so well, is because it's almost a manifesto for this new concept of neurodiversity. The idea that there isn't a single way to be normal. There isn't a single way that the brain is probably 100 or even a thousand different ways for the brain to develop.
But we're not all identical. And you can actually see the image on the front cover of his book. He's really taken from the more familiar concept of biodiversity. We don't expect all biological entities to be identical. That's part of the richness of the forests and of the animal kingdom. And in the same way, when we think about human brains in any classroom of children or in any audience in a Oxford Playhouse, we should expect all of these brains to be different.
And this has implications for how we educate, for how we design our environments to maximise human potential. But it also has the implication that just because someone isn't showing their typical personal development, we shouldn't pathologize them. We should include them. We should make our society more inclusive for people who just think differently. So this notion of neurodiversity, it's actually been around since about 1998 when it first appeared in print.
The term is actually attributed to a person on the autism spectrum who first coindesk. You'll increasingly hear people talking about autism. And the reason I think it's because for us to say it's a revolutionary concept is it's forcing psychiatry as a as a profession to rethink the notion of a psychiatric illness and to think more about diversity in the population.
Our mind is different. And indeed, this poster is produced by the autism rights activists who quite rightly are asking for that difference to be recognised as just as any minority wants to be recognised and different and to be respected is different. So we don't expect all fruits to be the same. We shouldn't expect the lines to be the same. But as they say, we're different, but we're not. This was inferior, which is different, and they're asking for.
You can see that in autism acceptance, which is a very different social fear to the way the medical profession might previously have thought about autism, which needed either eradication in treatment, cure prevention, the very medical model, rather than acceptance and support. The signs are about neurodiversity. I think this idea has been around for longer than 1988. In fact, if you go back to the writings of Albert Einstein, what you see is a nice quotation.
If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will lift believing it is stupid as a fish. A very good one. Very, very good. That's another. And probably wish we should take each animal, each brained on its own merits rather than expecting it to be something very different. And Einstein and people have argued they also have had autism. He says, I do not socialise because it would distract me from my work.
He much prefers the laboratory in physics, theoretical physics, but it happens in numbers and he liked being alone. He played the violin, but he also liked going sailing. When he was in Princeton, he used to sail alone. That doesn't mean that there was anything wrong with him. It just meant that he had a different parcel of interests and he was a bit different. I would sort of take issue with this idea of trying to diagnose historical figures. He's not here to himself.
But it is interesting that some of the traits that we associate with autism are found in the biographies of some of these very talented scientists. So on the left here, we see the paediatrician, Hans Asperger. So he's the doctor whose name is now given to one of the subgroups on the autism spectrum. On the autism spectrum. And a quote from his clinical record, he said, For success in science.
A dash of autism is essential. So I quite like his position because he's linking, on the one hand, something that we think of as disability with, on the other hand, talents or yes, talent. He's also making this idea of coming up with this idea that you can have a dash of autism, that it's not that you either have this or you don't have it. But again, I think this was a precursor to the idea of a spectrum that runs right through the population.
And I've included here Isaac Newton, who are kind of biographies of Michael Flynn, would have received a diagnosis of autism. So the discoverer of gravity. But again, he had great difficulties with social relationships throughout his professional career. And if we focus on his social skills, we might have focussed on areas of difficulty. But if we actually just focus on what he was good at and we see the positive.
Let's leave that scientists behind because of the difficulty in ever validating why they needed a diagnosis. We've looked at people who have autism, who are living today to see whether they have a scientific interest, if you like. And one of the ways we've done this is to give them a questionnaire, asking them how interested they are in systems of one kind or another. The systems might be mechanical like a car engine.
They might be electronic like a computer. They might be natural, like the weather. They might be abstract, like mathematics. And in this questionnaire, we ask individuals with autism, the general population, How interested are you in these very lawful systems that exist out in the world around us and people with autism that score higher than people without faces? And in terms of a self-report that they're very interested, they're drawn to lawful systems.
So we coined this word Systematising, and I want us to just go into this in a little bit more detail. The idea that there are systems all around us. And when we systemise, what we're trying to do is identify the laws that govern that system. It doesn't really matter what the system is, but the process seems to fall into these three steps that you take the inputs. That's what you see around you. You then observe what happens when an operation occurs.
So some events happen as a way of manipulating the person, and then you observe the outcome. We see the results. And that's really what we call systematising. And we do that in mathematics. So we might take as the input for number three. We perform an operation. Let's say we cube it, we get the output, we always get the number 27. So there's a good example, simply a simple example in mathematics that each time you take the inputs, perform an operation, you should get the identical output.
And people with autism seem to like they seem to be fascinated by this kind of predictability we call systemise it. You can also see a feedback because engineers do this when they're designing systems, but they're hoping that they're going to get the same result every time when they design the new route of engineering. They're also watching to see what the output is, to see how they can refine that system, to get it to perform, to as perfect a level as possible.
And it turns out that this notion of systemise goes back to the mathematician George Poole. So in the 19th century, he writes a book called The Laws of Thought where he was trying to identify what do we do when we're trying to be rational, we're trying to use logic. And he came up with the idea that the way we think, the way we draw logical conclusions is what he calls taking something called the if if this is the inputs. And he said, we move on to the end and something happens.
Then we see the results. And I think this perfectly maps onto the notion of systemise inputs, operation outputs. And George Poole is rightly respected for having created the foundations of the computer age, because this is exactly what computers do and this is exactly what we do in the field of logic in trying to understand what constitutes logical thinking. Very simple.
But there might be circuits in the minds that we're going to just track these relationships, inputs, operation outputs, or what we will call if and. So here's a very practical example that comes from Vince himself. He's the co-inventor of the Internet, but who reports this problem that he encountered, which is called the peppercorn problem. We've all had this where you put the peppercorns into the grinder and sometimes they come out and sometimes they just get stuck.
So if you analyse the problem, which is what he does in terms of this input operation output, what you can see is if you put the peppercorns in one at a time, as you can see on the left, when you grind, you've got a certain outfit, the peppercorn comes out nicely around. If you put lots of peppercorns in at the input, then you get this constriction kind of bottleneck and you get nothing coming out.
So this is just another simple system that you can analyse in terms of these logical operations the inputs, the operation and the output, whether it applies to a computer or whether it applies to a household object where you're trying to figure out what on earth is wrong with black pepper. So that's for people with autism. We've given them little tests of mechanical reasoning of this kind.
We went into secondary schools and came back and we tested children who are in the general population, which obviously was giving them these little mechanical reasoning problems that they'd never seen before. And then 12 year olds, children with Asperger's syndrome and despite their disability, we found that they performed higher, better on this test of mechanical reasoning. So here the test is that you look at the real this going anti-clockwise.
That's the person you're performing an operation on it and you're looking to see if you can predict what people do. And the answer for those of you who are struggling is that it will move back and forth. The kids with with autism or Asperger's saw this relationship very quickly compared to typical teenagers. So you might ask, who's got a disability? So in my university, we wanted to pursue this a little bit more to try and understand this connection between systematic thought and autism.
And we went since the maths department and we simply asked the question to the students, do you have autism or do right? What we found was that there are more students in the maths department with a formal diagnosis of autism than in the humanities. So again, this is showing us that there seems to be a link between minds that are predisposed to looking at passages, maybe at a challenge that passes in this case, like most passages and the likelihood of having an autism.
We also gave that measure the autistic to the autism spectrum questions just measuring autistic traits to see if this is one of those. And we gave that to scientists and those working in the humanities. And again, what you can see is that even if people in the sciences don't have autism, they just score higher on this measure of autistic traits, which is a quantitative measure that's distributed throughout the population.
So we're seeing another example of a link between scientific talent and autistic traits. So you can see how this this scientific ability, what I'm calling Systematising, might be adaptive in all sorts of environments. For example, if you're good at Systematising, you're good at spotting regularities in the world. You can apply it to nature. You can use that if and then logic if extreme and it tests in this particular way, then it might be a delicious novel.
So you can start classifying nature using this systematising principle, and you can do it by looking at the balance all around you. Again, when you're classifying anything else in nature, you're using the inputs operation output logic. If it's called a black and it's got an orange body, then it's all finished. If it's totally black, then it might be a black point.
So you're looking at nature in this very systematic way, and we find that people with autism are drawn to this kind of classification of nature as systematising nature. So this comes from the websites of a young man with autism called Sean Locke. I would describe him as an autistic capitalist. He loves looking at nature, response things that other people miss.
So here he's also looking at the detail and he finds the birds camouflaged against the tree trunk, which is called the Little Tree Creeper. And he's taking photographs of them so you can look at his website and see that his way of seeing the world is revealing the beauty of nature. This is Jake, the Polymath. He's in the States and he's frustrated by mathematics and physics. As a child, he was precocious in these areas, even though he has autism.
And he was admitted to his university at the age of ten to take a maths and physics course. Such a great level at a precocious age. So again, we're seeing some association between autism and scientific challenge, where in one context you say he's got a disability, passing the playgrounds, having to socialise with the other kids, but placed in another context it can really blossom. He's not the one who came to our clinic. And his passion is gardening.
He's got Asperger's syndrome. And he consistently wins medals at the Chelsea Garden shed for his beautiful carpets. So he's systemised in nature because he's learnt the names and the properties of every plant that you find in Britain, and he knows exactly which soil they need to blossom in, when they're going to come out at different times of the year. And he can design the perfect garden. So although he's got a disability, he's also using his very different mind to a fantastic effect.
So we think that there's this link between autism and scientific talent is genetic. Because if you look at the parents of children with autism or even the grandparents and you look at the occupations that they worked in, you saw the disproportionate number of them worked in the field of engineering. So this is a study just looking at fathers and grandfathers where there's a child with autism in the family.
What we found was that in earlier generations, you don't necessarily see autism, but you do see challenges in understanding systems. So did the genetics of scientific or systemise intelligence. And the genetics of autism might well be. I'll just say a few examples of people who have really made remarkable contributions. And this is Jim Simons, who is one of the world's richest people. Some of you know him and he's a he's got one of the largest hedge funds in the world.
He has a child with autism. He's also a mathematician and a coach cracker. He's very quick spotting the patterns in code. So he's used his remarkable ability to make money and he's giving it back in terms of philanthropy so that he now funds a lot of autism research internationally. But again, we're seeing this potentially genetic connection between the parents. He's mathematically gifted and the existence of a child with autism.
And closer to home, this is Steve, Shirley James, Stephanie Shirley, who has donated a lot of money to this university at Oxford for the study of mathematics and information technology. She is a mother with a child with autism. And in making her well, she's also she wants to give it back to the autism community, particularly in developing services and funding research.
But again, we're seeing this link between a parent who is excellent at Systematising and the likelihood of having a child with autism. So this leads to a prediction. Might we expect autism to be more commonly in places like Silicon Valley, which attracts people who are talented? At Systematising, people move because they could use information technology, computer science, just understanding patterns and big data.
What we find is that if they sample that, perhaps they will see elevated rates of autism in such communities. Well, we conducted an experiment in Silicon Valley closer to home. So this is the map of the Netherlands, Silicon Valley, a long way away. We went to Europe because there's a city called Eindhoven, which is the Silicon Valley of the Netherlands.
Eindhoven is interesting because it's called the Eindhoven Institute of Technology, and it's also about the Philips factory, which has been there for over 100 years, attracting people here with goods and systems. So we've had several generations of people moving to wine tasting, settling, having families, and we can look at the rates of autism amongst their children.
And we compared that to two other Dutch. This is Utrecht and Holland, looking at all the diagnosed cases of autism in these three cities. What's the school population? But what we can say is that autism is more than twice as common in 87 compared to these two other cities. So this doesn't directly prove the link with parents because all in all, we were say it's looking in the schools.
But it certainly suggests, again, that when you have communities which are enriched for television and information technology, we might find higher rates of autism. So I'm going to finish shortly. I just trying to bring this together that I've talked a bit about the social difficulties in autism.
And this is a model which is trying to integrate the social difficulties that you might think of in terms of empathy, being able to take someone else's perspective, understand what they might be thinking and feeling on one dimension. So that's the vertical axis, the y axis with another dimension, which is what I've been calling systems that. The idea is that we all fall somewhere in this space and that these are two dimensions of the personality, if you like.
Some of us have sort of better empathy or better social skills, and maybe we're less good at spotting patterns and particularly doing mathematics. But others might have the opposite profile. So this space is the whole population and what we have been finding in our research. Let me just help you raise this graph. If you're at 0.0 was in the centre of that graph, it means your absolute the average for the population on both dimensions. Empathy is as good as your system.
You're just kind of in the average of Congress I mentioned as you go up that vertical axis, your empathy is above average and as you go down, empathy is below average. Similarly, on the horizontal axis, as you go up towards the right, you'll systemise coverage as you go over to the left. The system, I think, is below average, so everybody could be plotted somewhere in this space.
Finally, is that in the white area of the graph are people whose system systematising is as good or as bad as their empathy. They don't show a discrepancy between the two. The people up in the light blue areas have higher empathy than the systems and especially the kind of bias we actually find more females in the population that fall into that white blue zone. In the pink area on the graph are people who share the opposite profile, people whose systematising is at a higher level of empathy.
We find more males of the population fall in that in that sense. And what we're projecting is that in the right quadrant of this graph, down in the bottom right hand corner, we should find more people with autism. So in the red zone system, Isaac might be anywhere from average three to superior, but your empathy might be below average.
So what we find, if we actually go out in the population, give people measures of empathy and systemise it and plot where they fall, or you can see lots of data points. This is what we love for scientists. So each little blob on the graph is a person and we can see where they're located. And you might be able to see that there are more yellow dots up at the top left hand corner.
These are women in the population, more of the green dots in the centre of the graph and the remainder of the population. It seems to be a shift, but these are really just about groups. You can certainly find individuals who are male or female in terms of who are not part of the cloud with that group, if you like. And then we find more of these purple and red dots down at the bottom right hand corner. And those are people with autism.
So just eyeballing the data, you can see that the population discusses that your gender seems to have something to do with where you might fall, but actually your gender doesn't predict what kind of mine have because you might be typical or atypical for your gender. And if we try to account of all those dots that we were just looking at in terms of these different profiles, what I've tried to pick out to save time is just three of these profiles.
So in yellow and women whose empathy is higher than their system, we can see 43% of women show that profile compared to only 12% of men. So if we if we look at the blue number, that's kind of the opposite of that. Systematising is at a higher level than the empathy that we find, 53% of men versus 21% of women. So you can see as a group for comparing males and females, we're seeing differences.
Controversially, this is the book that Mark is mentioned called The Essential Difference, which is kind of trying to understand some of these group differences we're seeing on average between men and women, boys and girls in the population, which may have relevance for understanding why autism is more common in boys and girls, that right now we're at the bottom of this table. So this is the profile where your systematising is.
Anything from average to above average for your average is below average. So you show a big discrepancy between these two dimensions. And that's where we find. About 60% of people with autism. So the numbers don't fit the model perfectly. But the numbers are certainly in the direction predicted by the middle. So I'm going to finish just by telling you about this child. That's Paul, who is ten years old. He loves puzzles.
He's got autism. He lives in California. And for him, he passes through that kid. He not only solves the three by three Rubik's Cube very fast, but he can do the four by four, the five by five, in fact, he relishes. And he's ranked in the top 100 Rubik's Cube in the world. So just so it's just ability. If we saw him socialising with his group, we also see under the right conditions a fascination, even a talent with passengers on the stock van.
I would say thank you for your attention and invite you to visit our website if you want more information about any others I've talked about and then we can open it up for questions and discussion. Thank you very much.