To the Oxford Playhouse. My name is Marcus Otellini, the summoning professor for the public understanding of science here in Switzerland.
Welcome to this hour of Premier Events, University of Oxford for engagement in science at the public.
We're right back. Back at the Playhouse in the newly refurbished seats.
I'd be trying to work out some patterns so they are not completely fox me.
So I'll be the desk expansion of PI, but it's great to have such a one for audience.
Also like to thank the Common Law Foundation who financially make this possible as well.
And I think it's testament to the subjects that will be addressed tonight that this probably has been the fastest selling,
so many lecture I've been involved in because that the topic that we're going to be talking about is the subject of autism,
which obviously 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 great, fantastic speakers. Simon Baron-Cohen, who is our of the centre, the Autism Research Centre in Cambridge.
He's of Trinity College, Cambridge. And I first met him actually, because I think that's the moment.
We often kind of slightly joke about the importance of the kind of Asperger's autistic spectrum that it is the other departments in this university.
And I say, remember an interview a few years ago with one of my colleagues actually when I was at Cambridge,
Richard Dawkins, who was being interviewed by Simon Singh in The Guardian after he'd won Nobel Prize, the Fields Medal.
And he sort of confessed to Simon that, well,
I worked on this kind of scale of athletics and I scored five out of the six key indicate the science, but he's 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 Wolff, in fact, is vertical 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 why, why the science.
So, you know, it's actually a positive trait for us.
Mathematicians have a great message. Welcome to Simon Baron-Cohen.
Very much. It's a great pleasure to be back in Oxford. I was a student of some capacity as a good citizen.
Nostalgia. Well, getting off the train, coming back into this beautiful city.
I want to thank the organisers of this lecture.
Invited me to give a talk in this series.
It feels like 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 I notice it affects boys much more often than girls and boys 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 patterns.
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 the 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 2005, just showing you the number of cases per thousand being diagnosed.
So it's been a steady increase and some people have wondered what's driving this.
And in all likelihood, it's quite ordinary factors that we're just getting more aware of autism,
but we are getting better at recognising it that there are more services on the ground looking for it.
But also we've brought it into our definition of autism, particularly to include a subgroup called Asperger's Syndrome that Marcus just referred to.
So we've landed 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.
And 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 prompts 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.
And 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 two genders, it comes out to one in 68.
So it's no longer rare. It's actually very common.
I found the graph in a way shows you autism in a snapshot because it also shows that some people on the autism spectrum,
as it's called, also have learning difficulties that delay in development.
Well, 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 couldn't have autism without certainly 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 under this term, the autism spectrum was coined, goes back to 1998.
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. The Rich Abortions has taken a big hit on the autism spectrum questions.
So you can find it on the Web. You can place it and see how many autistic traits you have on the dotted 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 and the solid line on the right of the scores that people
who end up with a diagnosis shape the distribution of scores that they have.
And again, even within the clinic, you see a range of scores.
I should help you to read this by saying 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, that graph you may need to diagnosis,
but it's only when these trips are interfering with your ability to cope in life,
whether as a child or as or 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've got 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%, 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.
The reason we think that these days you can look at the genome and the picture on the top here shows you the human chromosomes,
23 pairs of chromosomes. But each little jumps 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 showing the time to change
on Safari World because almost every week in one of the scientific journals,
there will be a new report about a genetic discovering genes associated with autism.
When I last looked 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 gene in 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 are those ones that are found in the brain,
again, published in our high profile journals and the scientific world.
So I mentioned 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 that genetic identical one has one, doesn't mean that genes company 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, but I don't want to lose sight of that.
But when you have your diagnosis, it's because you really need it.
Well, we're struggling. And universities like optimism of students with autism who hopefully find their way to the disability resource,
will 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 they're tracking the next child in the family who's a genetic risk of autism.
And just looking at whether they showed the expected pattern of brain activity when they're looking
at a face or the eyes are either directed straight at the child or looking away from the child.
In a typical child we operate in, a 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 and for genetic reasons,
perhaps 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 ten years old,
and they presented children coming into the clinic either with a human face to the at or a geometric design.
And they simply measured how long the child looks tonight that the social stimulus, the human face or the non-social stimulus, the geometric design.
What they found was that if a child looks for more than 70% of the time after a long social stimulus,
the geometric design, the probability that that child has autism was 100%.
So when I read this article, 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, again, has a lot of attention to faces.
Faces are important in our department,
but these kids who go on to develop consciously 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 to two different groups. The autism group, the red dots,
the horizontal line going across the screen shows you if you're looking more at the geometric patterns rather than faces,
if you're off that line, you're looking more than 70% of the time.
That's geometric design. And 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 as mathematicians or those who love statistics in the audience,
we'll say that there's a wide range when it's a lot of kids who the red dots below the line, which means that they will be missed by this test.
So let's 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 towards the pencils than they are with that faces.
This is a study that came from Yale University where they used case tracking.
So this time what they're doing is putting the child in front of a computer while they're watching a movie.
And the computer can track what the person's if they're closely 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, really looking at the eye region of the face.
The red area in this image is where people with autism tend to look a lot 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, a typical person of attention when they are presented with such information.
So if we should be kind of developmental approach to thinking about children, child's 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 you're too lazy to go to apartments.
And what's called theory of Mind, 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.
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 games that leave the child with autism,
often feeling confused, stressed, and they prefer to just withdraw.
It's the more predictable ones of patterns. We're trying 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.
We asked them to pick which of these four words best describes what the person in the photo is 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 got that one right.
It's tough because all four words describe possible steps applied.
And it's tough because the black and white photo is not very high resolution.
It's tough because you've only got a fragment of information. You don't have the whole facial expression.
What you can see in the graph is that people with autism scored no on this test.
Those are the two parts. There's a fair amount surface left at that graph compared to typical males and females.
This was quite a large dataset because we collected the dinosaur wrong line when we asked people to take
that test whilst they're lying in a scanner for a brain scan so we can look at patterns of brain activity.
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 frontal gyrus.
We find reduced activity in the autistic brain when they're looking at these facial expressions,
just the eyes to try to decode what someone else is thinking or feeling.
So that's showing some of the disability in autism 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 thing 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 if you make to the house the emotion centre of the brain, 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 diseased,
but 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 person brings about lives.
So the graph on the left, which is where each chart is a child's and they have two brain scans during that, during that childhood.
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 group shown in blue or the autism green shirt in red differ in terms of like blindness.
But what you can say is that there is indeed a difference. So this is just showing the total amount of grey matter in the brain.
So again, just looking at some aspect of the volume of the brain and that 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 in typical development. 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 an observation at the national autism brain back.
But this study comes from California. They 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 or 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. It's a bit more evidence and frame 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.
I mean, a portion of this structure is actually smaller in children with autism.
So some bits are larger, some it's a smaller. A whole process 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, some of them are long range and some of them are short range.
And there's now a method we have 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, very different brain.
And back to the post mortem studies.
This is about the most detail 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 some doses.
But on the left, the same thing from a typical, 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 dots is a point of connection between one group and its neighbour, so called dendritic spiders.
And that means that and also some will 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 grey that seems to be developing faster.
It seems to be developing more nerve cells.
It seems to be developing more connections between cells.
And you can 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 Marcus mentioned, all sorts of things that's just bombarding your senses.
And in some environments that might be overwhelming so-called 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.
So if you ask people with autism to have a brain scan, so now they're not looking at the structure of the brain,
what the function of the brain brain activity and the way this experiment was done just to ask people to wear a blindfold headphones.
And you just look at the brain, see what happens when you play a sound through perhaps through the headphones.
What you find is that in the autistic brain, it's a correct response.
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 where taste or touch and 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 that requirement.
But we need to make reasonable adjustments to the environments in which they know so that they are autism friendly.
But it might also mean that this is an individual who is 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 about what's the evidence for this of here's a test score, added figures test.
Well, you have to find that case as quickly as you can in the overall design.
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 and on the big picture.
And again, if you ask them to do that test whilst they're lying in a scanner, having a brand new study,
you find that that passive performance is actually accompanied by less brain activity in the visual cortex.
So the autistic brain is. So carried out on this task, the brain is doing it in the more efficient way.
So although we should think about autism as a disability,
we can design tests which also reveal talent as more evidence for people with autism preferring detail.
I have a big picture. This is actually a test that those of you who are in the field of psychology will recognise.
And it's the block design test which is part of the IQ test of a lot of children and adults are given.
We are asked to do is take the blocks down below and select which ones you need to make the design up about.
Okay, children with autism that adults with autism show their best performance on the subtext of the IQ pressure.
And it's suggested to us because they're very quick at taking apart the big picture and decide projects into its component parts.
They're very quickly looking for the detail, suggesting again that they have a talent for assessing 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 lessons you see, and there's no correct answer there.
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 results as a 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 point pass, 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.
But people with autism are quicker at picking up these these patterns of how some stimuli, some objects always occur next to or above other ones.
They're very quick. It's impossible patterns. So let's bring this back to life.
This is Derek, the Genie. He has autism.
Some of you may have heard him play it because he plays the piano and he plays publicly.
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 absorbed.
Reproduce it. And he goes around the world on tour performing requests such as numbers that people shout out in the audience,
which is why we've got the piano that 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 onto information where there are patterns to be found in the universe.
But he's very quickly changed and his autism is giving rise to his his talent.
So some of you will have come across a book that was published earlier this year, late last year called Mirage Tribes.
It's financial analyst called Steve Silverman and it won the Samuel Jackson Prize for non-fiction for it,
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 but may have had all the characteristics that you can see.
An image here of Henry Cavendish, the scientist who discovered hydrogen.
Who is somebody in our case, 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 the doors that perhaps he was hapless,
really what he was doing, his scientific experiments alone, but he hated social interaction.
Nevertheless, he made remarkable contributions to science.
And those of you who like to eat out, which is 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 for great people like this.
For me, 100 or even 1000 different ways for the brain to develop that were not so identical.
And you can actually see the image on the front cover of his book is already 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 of the animal kingdom.
And 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 the typical parsnips about evolution, 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 this.
And the reason I think it's so important 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 psychiatric illness and to think more about diversity in the population.
Minds differ. This poster is produced by the autism rights movement,
who quite rightly are asking for a difference to be recognised as just as any
minority wants to be recognised as different and to be respected is different.
So we don't expect all fruits to be the same. We shouldn't expect all lines to be the same.
But as they say, which if not less, was inferior, which is different.
They're asking for. You can see this slogan, Autism Acceptance,
which is a very different so of fear to the way the medical profession might previously have thought about autism,
which needed either education, treatment, cure prevention, the very medical model rather than acceptance and support.
This idea 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 clothing, but not very good.
It's another and from which we should take each other, each brain on its own merits, rather than expecting it to be something very different.
TIME People have arcades. I don't think I've had autism, he says.
I do not socialise because it distracts me from my work.
He much prefers the laboratory in physics, theoretical physics, the weather patterns and numbers.
And he liked being alone. He played the violin, but he also liked going sailing.
When he was a 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 pattern 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 speak about itself,
but it is interesting that some of the traits that we associate with autism are found in the biographies of some of these great, talented scientists.
So on the left here, we see the paediatrician, Hans Asperger.
So he's the doctor whose name is not given to one of the subgroups on the autism spectrum.
On the autism spectrum. And a quote from his clinical report, he said, For success in science.
A dash of autism is essential.
But I like this quotation because he is linking on the one hand, something that we think of as a disability, where on the other hand, talent or yes,
talent is also making the age 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 that. But again, I think this was a precursor to the idea of a spectrum.
It runs right through the population.
And I've included here Isaac Newton, again, biographies of Michael Flynn, which have received the diagnosis of autism.
So the discoverer of gravity, who 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 the release of the 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 say give them a questionnaire, asking them how interested they are in systems support, one kind or another.
The systems might be more chemical 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?
Because these very lawful systems that exist out in the world around us and people with autism that
score higher than people without weights in terms of a self-report that they're very interested,
they're drawn to the school systems. So we coined this word systematising.
And I want us to just go into this in a little bit more detail. And I see that there are systems all around us.
And when we systemise, what we're trying to do is identify the laws that come from 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 happens a way, manipulate the process, and then we observe the output.
We see the results of the experiment. And that's really what we call systematising.
And we do that in mathematics. So we might take as the input, the number three, we perform an operation, let's say the key of it.
We get the output, we always get the number 27. So that'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.
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 loop because engineers do this when designing systems,
but they're hoping that they're going to get the same result every time when they designed signed a new 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.
But it turns out that this notion of systemise goes back to the mathematician George.
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 supposed to be rational?
We're trying to use logic. 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 input.
And he said, we move on to the end and something happens, then we see the result.
But I think this perfectly maps onto the notion of systems inputs, operation outputs.
And George Paul 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 see in
the fields 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'll call if and we'll take.
So here's a very practical example that comes from Vince himself.
He's the co-inventor of the Internet who reports this problem 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 particles in one at a time, as you can see on the left, then you grinds,
you've got a certain outfit, the peppercorn comes out nicely around the 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 outfit,
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 my pepper,
which isn't. So that's to people with autism.
We've given them little tests of mechanical reasoning of this kind.
We went into secondary schools and came across and we tested children who are in the general population,
which 12 years old, giving them these simple mechanical reasoning problems that they'd never seen before.
And a 12 year old struggling with Asperger's syndrome, 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 wheel, this going anti-clockwise,
that's the input you're performing an operation on 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 be a pattern for the kids with with autism or Asperger's.
Saw this relationship very quickly compared to typical teenagers.
So you might ask, who's got the disability in my university?
We want to see this and little bit more to try to 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?
But you're right. What we found was that there are more students in the maths department with a formal diagnosis of autism in the humanities.
So again, this is showing us that there seems to be a link between minds that are predisposed to looking at patterns,
maybe have a challenge that puzzles, in this case, mathematical patterns and the likelihood of having autism.
We also gave that measured the autistics, the autism spectrum questions, just measuring autistic traits just to remind us, too.
And we gave that to scientists and those working in the humanities.
And 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 system lifesaver, might be adaptive in all sorts of environments.
For example, if you are good at systematising, good at spotting regularities in the world, you can apply it to nature.
You can use that if and when. Logic, if extreme.
And it tastes in this particular way and it might be a problem.
Interest Apple. 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, using the inputs, operation output logic,
if it's got a blackhead and it's got an orange or the sun, I suppose if it's totally black, I think that it might be appropriate.
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, the systematic nature.
So this comes from a website of roses called Sean Locke.
And I would describe him as an autistic capitalist.
He was looking at nature response things that other people receive.
So here he's also looking at the detail and he finds the birds camouflaged against the tree trunk, which is called a 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 Jacob Barnett, who'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.
So it's a great novel at a precocious age. So again, we're seeing an association between autism and scientific challenge,
where in one context we say he's got a disability that's in the playgrounds.
I'm going 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 got Asperger's syndrome, and he consistently wins the medals at the Chelsea Garden Show for his beautiful confidence.
So he's systemised in nature because he's learned the names and the properties of every plant that you find in Bristol.
But he knows exactly which soil they need to blossom and when they're going to come out at different times of the year.
And you can design the perfect garden. So although he's got a disability, he's also using his very different minds 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 works 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 or just when you do see talent in understanding systems,
so did the genetics of scientific or systematising talent.
And the genetics of autism might well be. Just today, 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.
Something we know from his. 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 code cracker is very quick at 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.
It's mathematically gifted and the existence of a child with autism.
The closer to home. This is Steve Shirley and Stephanie Shirley,
who has donated a lot of money to this university and hospice 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 and particularly in developing services and funding research.
But again, we're seeing this link between the parents who is excellent at Systematising and the likelihood of having a child with autism.
This leads to a prediction Might we expect autism to be more common in places like Silicon Valley,
which attracts people who are talented at systematising, people based because they could use information technology?
Computer science. Just understanding patterns of big data might be fine, but if they settle, then they have children.
We've seen elevated rates of autism in such communities.
Well, we conducted an experiment in a Silicon Valley closer to home.
So this is the map of Holland, the Netherlands, Silicon Valley, a long way away.
We went to Europe because there's a city called Owens Haven, which is the Silicon Valley of the Netherlands.
Eindhoven is interesting because it's got the same type of Institute of Technology.
It's also got the Philips Factory, which has been there for over a hundred years, attracting people who are good at systems.
So we've had several generations of people move into line in settling families.
We can look at the rates of autism amongst their children and we compared that to two other Dutch cities, Utrecht and Holland.
Looking at all the diagnosed cases of autism in these three cities.
The school population. But we can see that autism is more than twice as common in Eindhoven compared to these two other cities.
So this doesn't directly prove the link with parents because all we were doing was looking in the schools.
But it certainly suggests, again, that when you have communities which are enriched for talent and information technology,
we might find higher rates of autism. So I'm going to finish shortly.
I am 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 say 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 have been called calling systems.
And the idea is that we all fall somewhere in this space and that these are two directions of personality, if you like.
Some of us have some sort of empathy or better social skills and maybe one less skirt 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 reach this graph, is that if your 0.0 was in the centre of that graph,
it means you are absolutely average for the population on both dimensions.
And empathy is as good as your system, but you're just kind of in the average on both challenges as you go up.
That vertical axis of empathy is above average and as it goes down, it is below average.
Similarly, on the horizontal axis, as you go out towards the right system.
And as you go over to the left system, rising is below average.
So it could be plotted somewhere in this space.
What we've been finding is that in the white area of the graph of people whose system housing is as good or as bad as their empathy reduction,
a discrepancy between the two. The people up in the light blue areas have higher empathy and systemise, and so they're showing a kind of bias.
We actually find more females in the population but 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 in the population fall in that in that sense.
And what we're projecting is that in the red quadrant of this graph, down in the bottom right hand corner, we should find more people with autism.
So in the red zone, your system, I think, might be anywhere from average through to superior.
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 have for scientists. So each little blob on the graph is a person and we can see where that takes it.
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 overhanging the population seems to be a shift.
These are really just about groups.
You can certainly find individuals who are male or female and who are not part of the clout of that group, if you like.
And then we find more of these purple and red dots down at the bottom right hand corner.
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 you're going to have because you might be typical or atypical for your gender.
And if we try and do a count 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, it's just three of these profiles.
So in yellow women whose empathy is higher than their systems that we can see, 43% of women show that profile compared to only 12% of women.
So if we if we look at the of blood,
that's people showing the opposite of that systematising is at a higher level than the empathy that we find is 53% of men and is 21% of women.
So you can see as a group for comparing males and females, we're seeing differences.
Controversially, this is the KISS mentioned, the essential difference,
which is kind of trying to understand some of these groups differences of seeing on average between men and women,
boys and girls in the population, which may have relevance for understanding why autism is more common than boys.
That is that red number at the bottom of this table.
So this is the profile where your systemise is anything from average to above average, but your energy is below average.
So you show a big discrepancy between these two dimensions.
That's where we find about 60% of people with autism.
So the numbers that 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, Marcus Clarke, who is ten years old.
He loves puzzles. He's got autism.
He lives in California. And for him, passing is the Rubik's Cube.
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 it, and he's ranked in the top 100th Rubik's Cube in the world.
So despite just ability, if we saw him socialising with his group,
we also see under the right conditions a fascination, even a talent with passengers.
I'm just talking about him. I would say thank you for your attention.
All right. You said visit our Web site if you want more information about any of the studies that talked about it.
And then we can open it up for questions and discussion.
Thank you very much.