Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, University of Cambridge

Scientific Talent and Autism: Is there a connection?

Various claims have been made that Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein had autism. How valid are such claims? And leaving aside these two specific giants in the history of science, is there any truth to the idea that autism and scientific talent are not wholly independent of one another? That is, that scientists as a group have higher rates of autism than one would expect from chance, or that people with autism have a facility for thinking scientifically? In this talk, I consider evidence from experiments with both scientists and people with autism spectrum conditions. The connection between autism and scientific talent is discussed in relation to a psychological theory (hyper-systemizing), an endocrine theory (foetal testosterone), and a genetic theory (assortative mating).

Key references:

Baron-Cohen, S, Knickmeyer, R, & Belmonte, M (2005) Sex differences in the brain: implications for explaining autism. Science, 310, 819-823.

Baron-Cohen, S, (2006) The hyper-systemizing, assortative mating theory of autism Progress in Neuropsychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry, 30, 865-872.

Baron-Cohen, S (2003) The essential difference: men, women and the extreme male brain. Penguin/Basic Books

Biography

Simon Baron-Cohen is Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the University of Cambridge and Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. He is Director of the Autism Research Centre (ARC) in Cambridge. He holds degrees in Human Sciences from New College, Oxford, a PhD in Psychology from UCL, and an M.Phil in Clinical Psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry. He held lectureships in both of these departments in London before moving to Cambridge in 1994. He is also Director of CLASS (Cambridge Lifespan Asperger Syndrome Service), a clinic for adults with suspected AS.

He is author of Mindblindness (MIT Press, 1995), The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain (Penguin UK/Basic Books, 2003), and Prenatal Testosterone in Mind (MIT Press, 2005). He has edited a number of scholarly anthologies, including Understanding Other Minds (OUP, 1993, 2001), The Maladapted Mind (Erlbaum, 1997) and Synaesthesia (Blackwells, 1997).

He has also written books for parents and teachers such as Autism: The Facts (OUP, 1993), Tourette Syndrome: The Facts (OUP, 1998), and Teaching children with autism to mind read (Wiley, 1998). He is author of the DVD-ROM Mind Reading: an interactive guide to emotions (Jessica Kingsley Ltd, 2003) that was nominated for a BAFTA award for Best Off-Line Learning.

He has been awarded prizes from the American Psychological Association, the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BA), and the British Psychological Society (BPS) for his research into autism. For 2007 he is President of the Psychology Section of the BA, Vice President of the National Autistic Society, and received the 2006 Presidents’ Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychological Knowledge from the BPS. His current research is testing the ‘extreme male brain’ theory of autism at the neural, endocrine and genetic levels.