Extreme male minds and autism

The Essential Difference: male and female brains and the truth about autism by Simon Baron-Cohen

Another book on the holiday list. Why was I interested in this? Recently Asperger's Syndrome (AS), a form of high-functioning autism, has become the chic condition of choice for geeks worldwide. Yes, kids who in the old days were simply math or computer nerds are now self-identified (often with pride!) as having AS. Silicon Valley is full of these people. The rest of us are mere "neurotypicals" :-)

Baron-Cohen is head of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge, and a professor of psychology. He claims that male brains tend to be better at "Systematizing" (organizing or analyzing things which exhibit order), while female brains are better at "Empathizing" (understanding what others are thinking or feeling). A fair amount of experimental data (pretty convincing) is presented, which supports the claim that the distributions of S-ability and E-ability are different in the male and female populations. (Incidentally, the effect of testosterone on brain development is well known, leading to significant variations in the actual sizes of various areas of the brain between males and females.) Baron-Cohen also gives plausible evolutionary arguments for how this came to be - a bit better than the "girls were selected to be good mommies, boys to be good hunters" story, but you get the idea.

The novel part of his theory is that the autistic mind is an example of an extreme male mind - one that is obsessed with systematizing and very bad at empathizing. In a particularly amusing chapter he profiles a famous mathematician (Fields medalist) and some physicists (Dirac, Newton and Einstein) who he claims likely have or had AS. He even quotes a female physicist working at CERN saying that her male colleagues lack social skills and are arrogant obsessives :-) Well, what can I say, it is all true. But it doesn't mean we all have AS...

Not to be missed are the fun tests at the back of the book, which measure your S and E quotients!