Magnetic brain stimulation and autism

If this account is true, it's simply amazing.

NY Magazine: What It’s Like to ‘Wake Up’ From Autism After Magnetic Stimulation

... Though he wasn’t diagnosed with autism until he was 40, John Elder Robison felt isolated and disconnected throughout his entire youth and early adulthood. But in 2008, at 50, he took part in what became a three-year research project looking at brain function in individuals with autism spectrum disorders and exploring the use of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to help them.

TMS is a noninvasive procedure that uses magnetic pulses to stimulate nerve cells in the brain. During treatment, a coil is placed against the patient’s scalp and the TMS energy passes through the skull into the outermost layer of the brain. ...

The treatment left Robison momentarily crippled by the weight of other people’s feelings, and he spoke with Science of Us about his experience, which he also discusses in his recently released book, Switched On: A Memoir of Brain Change and Emotional Awakening. ...

Do you understand now what was happening?
TMS modified my emotional response to what you might call ordinary situations. I often put it this way: You might be crossing the street and you fall and you skin your knee. I’d say, “Come on, get up!” The very best advice I could give is come on, get going, this car could run you over. People would see my practical response as cold and emotionless. After TMS, I’d look at you and wince at your skinned knee. I never did that before. And I now realize that wincing at your skinned knee is the response most people have. I still have the autistic response, but I’m also aware of what you might now call the “empathetic response from personal experience.” People can tell you about something a million times, and it won’t mean anything to you until you experience it. That said, it’s important to understand that I always had the ability to feel your pain. Like, if you were my girlfriend and you got sick I’d be more worried about you than your own mother. I was always that way. But no matter how much I cared about you, if we were crossing the street, you fell down and skinned your knee, I would see your skinned knee and I would say “Come on, we gotta get going,” or I would say, “Here, I’ll get you a Band-Aid.” I would have a practical response. The way I responded is no reflection on how much I cared for you. I could care for you with all the love in the world and still I’d respond practically.

So you don’t feel you’d really lacked empathy before?
No. In fact, studies have shown that autistic people feel things more deeply, not less at all. It’s true that autism is described as a condition with communication impairment. And so, to be diagnosed with autism, you must have an impaired ability to speak, to understand speech, or to understand or convey unspoken cues.

So what exactly happened when you first stated noticing emotional cues?
It hit me all at once with an intensity that was absolutely scary. As I lay in bed, trying to fall asleep, the world started revolving. I became afraid I was having a stroke. I’d close my eyes and the world would spin like I was drunk, about to throw up. I don’t drink or do drugs. So for me to have the world spinning like that made me think there was something terribly wrong. And not only was the world spinning, I would close my eyes and I would have these really vivid, half-awake, half-asleep dreams that were a collage of things from the past and things that had just happened that day and they were just so real. The experience was so unsettling that I woke up and wrote a 1,500-word missive to the scientists describing what had happened. Then, finally, I was able to fall asleep.

The next day at work I looked at one of my colleagues and I thought to myself: He has the most beautiful brown eyes. That’s the type of thought I simply do not have. I don’t usually have any comment on your eyes because I don’t look in anyone’s eyes. For me to look in your eyes and say that they are beautiful is totally out of character. When I got to work I walked into the waiting room, as I usually do, and I looked at everyone and there was this flood of emotion. I could see it all: They were scared and anxious and eager, and never in my life had I seen something like that. I had to step out of the room because I didn’t know how to cope. It felt like ESP. Maybe in the past I used the logical part of my brain to look at people around me and carefully analyze. I figured out situations using logic. So I had that powerful ability but now the screen of emotion was turned on, too. ...

Neoreaction and the Dark Enlightenment

An essay on neoreaction and the dark enlightenment from The Awl.

See also Fukuyama and Zhang on the China Model , Is there a China model? and Power and paranoia in Silicon Valley.

The Darkness Before the Right

A right-wing politics for the coming century is taking shape. And it’s not slowing down.

... Land’s case for democratic dysfunction is simply stated. Democracy is structurally incapable of rational leadership due to perverse incentive structures. It is trapped in short-termism by the electoral cycle, hard decisions become political suicide, and social catastrophe is acceptable as long as it can be blamed on the other team. Moreover, inter-party competition to “buy votes” leads to a ratchet effect of ever-greater state intervention in the economy—and even if this is periodically reversed, in the long-run it only moves in one direction. ... Rather than accept creeping democratic socialism (which leads to “zombie apocalypse”), Land would prefer to simply abolish democracy and appoint a national CEO. This capitalist Leviathan would be, at a bare minimum, capable of rational long-term planning and aligning individual incentive structures with social well-being (CEO-as-Tiger-Mom). Individuals would have no say in government, but would be generally left alone, and free to leave. This right of “exit” is, for Land, the only meaningful right, and it’s opposed to democratic “voice,” where everyone gets a say, but is bound by the decisions of the majority—the fear being that the majority will decide to self-immolate.

Anti-democratic sentiment is uncommon in the West, so Land’s conclusions appear as shocking, deliberate provocations, which they partly are. ... Pointing to Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, it argues that economically and socially effective government legitimizes itself, with no need for elections. And this view isn’t limited to the internet right. ...

This brand of authoritarian capitalism has a certain fascist sheen, but in truth it’s closer to a rigidly formalized capitalist technocracy. There’s no mass mobilization, totalitarian social reorganization, or cult of violence here; governing will be done by the governors, and popular sovereignty replaced by the market Mandate of Heaven. There is a strange sort of disillusioned cultural conservatism here as well, albeit one absolutely stripped of moralism. In fact, what’s genuinely creepy about it is the near-sociopathic lack of emotional attachment; it’s a sort of pure incentive-based functionalism, as if from the perspective of a computer or alien. If a person doesn’t produce quantifiable value, they are, objectively, not valuable. Everything else is sentimentality.

...

Capitalism, in this view, is less something we do than something done to us. Contra business-class bromides about the market as the site of creative expression, for Land, as for Marx, capitalism is a fundamentally alien institution in which “the means of production socially impose themselves as an effective imperative.” This means simply that the competitive dynamics of capitalism drive technical progress as an iron law. If one capitalist doesn’t want to build smarter, better machines, he’ll be out-competed by one who does. If Apple doesn’t make you an asshole, Google will. If America doesn’t breed genetically modified super-babies, China will. The market doesn’t run on “greed,” or any intentionality at all. Its beauty—or horror—is its impersonality. Either you adapt, or you die.

Accelerating technological growth, then, is written into capitalism’s DNA. Smart machines make us smarter allowing us to make smarter machines, in a positive feedback loop that quickly begins to approach infinity, better known in this context as “singularity.” ...

Somehow I ended up on this "map of neoreaction" -- without my consent, of course. Who are all these people? ;-)

Power and paranoia in Silicon Valley

Plenty of fear and loathing of the nerd rapture backed by powerful VCs in this Harper's article. Ungated version.

Discussed in depth at LessWrong.

... Be explorers; take advantage of this vast new landscape that’s been opened up to us in this time and this place; and bear the torch of applied rationality like brave explorers. And then, like, keep in touch by email.” The workshop attendees put giant Post-its on the walls expressing the lessons they hoped to take with them. A blue one read RATIONALITY IS SYSTEMATIZED WINNING. Above it, in pink: THERE ARE OTHER PEOPLE WHO THINK LIKE ME. I AM NOT ALONE.

... I talked to one of my roommates, a Google scientist who worked on neural nets. The CFAR workshop [[ Center For Applied Rationality ]] was just a whim to him, a tourist weekend. “They’re the nicest people you’d ever meet,” he said, but then he qualified the compliment. “Look around. If they were effective, rational people, would they be here? Something a little weird, no?”

... Were they really going to save the world? From what? “Imagine there is a set of skills,” he said. “There is a myth that they are possessed by the whole population, and there is a cynical myth that they’re possessed by 10% of the population. They’ve actually been wiped out in all but about one person in three thousand.” It is important, Vassar said, that his people, “the fragments of the world,” lead the way during “the fairly predictable, fairly total cultural transition that will predictably take place between 2020 and 2035 or so.” We pulled up outside the Rose Garden Inn. He continued: “You have these weird phenomena like Occupy where people are protesting with no goals, no theory of how the world is, around which they can structure a protest. Basically this incredibly, weirdly, thoroughly disempowered group of people will have to inherit the power of the world anyway, because sooner or later everyone older is going to be too old and too technologically obsolete and too bankrupt. The old institutions may largely break down or they may be handed over, but either way they can’t just freeze. These people are going to be in charge, and it would be helpful if they, as they come into their own, crystallize an identity that contains certain cultural strengths like argument and reason.” I didn’t argue with him, except to press, gently, on his particular form of elitism. His rationalism seemed so limited to me, so incomplete. “It is unfortunate,” he said, “that we are in a situation where our cultural heritage is possessed only by people who are extremely unappealing to most of the population.” That hadn’t been what I’d meant. I had meant rationalism as itself a failure of the imagination. “The current ecosystem is so totally fucked up,” Vassar said. “But if you have conversations here” -- he gestured at the hotel -- “people change their mind and learn and update and change their behaviors in response to the things they say and learn. That never happens anywhere else.” ...

Makes me wish I still lived in the Bay Area :-)  My MIRI interview.

He is a second Dirac, only this time human

Another historical letter sent by a reader. My understanding is that Feynman was not appointed at Berkeley because of Birge's anti-semitism: "One Jew (Oppenheimer) is enough," he is reported to have said.

CONFIDENTIAL

November 4, 1943

Professor R. T. Birge
Chairman, Department of Physics
University of California
Berkeley, California

Dear Professor Birge:

In these war times it is not always easy to think constructively about the peace that is to follow, even in such relatively small things as the welfare of our department. I would like to make one suggestion to you which concerns that, and about which I have myself a very sure and strong conviction.

As you know, we have quite a number of physicists here, and I have run into a few who are young and whose qualities I had not known before. Of these there is one who is in every way so outstanding and so clearly recognized as such, that I think it appropriate to call his name to your attention, with the urgent request that you consider him for a position in the department at the earliest time that that is possible. You may remember the name because he once applied for a fellowship in Berkeley: it is Richard Feynman. He is by all odds the most brilliant young physicist here, and everyone knows this. He is a man of thoroughly engaging character and personality, extremely clear, extremely normal in all respects, and an excellent teacher with a warm feeling for physics in all its aspects. He has the best possible relations both with the theoretical people of whom he is one, and with the experimental people with whom he works in very close harmony.

The reason for telling you about him now is that his excellence is so well known, both at Princeton where he worked before he came here, and to a not inconsiderable number of "big shots" on this project, that he has already been offered a position for the post war period, and will most certainly be offered others. I feel that he would be a great strength for our department, tending to tie together its teaching, its research and its experimental and theoretical aspects. I may give you two quotations from men with whom he has worked. Bethe has said that he would rather lose any two other men than Feyman from this present job, and Wigner said, "He is a second Dirac, only this time human."

Of course, there are several people here whose recommendation you might want; in the first instance Professors Brode and McMillan. I hope you will not mind my calling this matter to your attention, but I feel that if we can follow the suggestion I have made, all of us will be very happy and proud about it in the future. I cannot too strongly emphasize Feynman's remarkable personal qualities which have been generally recognized by officers, scientists and laity in this community.

With every good wish,

Robert Oppenheimer

"Stupid fools"

A friend sent me this letter from Feynman to Wolfram. Wolfram received a Caltech PhD in theoretical physics at the age of 20, before turning to other topics such as complexity and software development. Wolfram did not heed Feynman's advice: the next year he founded UIUC's Center for Complex Systems Research; then, in 1987, he formed Wolfram Research, the company responsible for Mathematica and, more recently, Wolfram Alpha.

I wish I had read this letter before taking my new job ;-)

CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
CHARLES C. LAURITSEN LABORATORY OF HIGH ENERGY PHYSICS

October 14, 1985

Dr. Stephen Wolfram
School of Natural Sciences
The Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton, NJ 08540

Dear Wolfram:

1. It is not my opinion that the present organizational structure of science inhibits "complexity research" - I do not believe such an institution is necessary.

2. You say you want to create your own environment - but you will not be doing that: you will create (perhaps!) an environment that you might like to work in - but you will not be working in this environment - you will be administering it - and the administration environment is not what you seek - is it? You won't enjoy administrating people because you won’t succeed in it.

You don’t understand "ordinary people." To you they are "stupid fools" - so you will not tolerate them or treat their foibles with tolerance or patience - but will drive yourself wild (or they will drive you wild) trying to deal with them in an effective way.

Find a way to do your research with as little contact with non-technical people as possible, with one exception, fall madly in love! That is my advice, my friend.

Sincerely,

(Signed, 'Richard P. Feynman')

Richard P. Feynman

"In the land of autistics, the aspie is king"

I've often thought this to myself, but was amused to hear it attributed to a famous theoretician at Princeton the other day.

Pais: Pauli aspie?

From The Genius of Science, a portrait gallery of 20th century physicists by Abraham Pais.

So it came about that I met Pauli for the first time in Denmark, in early 1946, at a dinner party in Bohr's home. At that time he had already long been recognized as one of the major figures in 20th century physics ... I witnessed for the first time his chassidic mode, a gentle rhythmic to and fro rocking of the upper torso... "No, perhaps you don't know much, perhaps you don't know much." A moment later: "Ich weiss mehr" (I know more). That was said in the Pauli style, without aggression, merely an expression of a statement of fact.

More from Pais.

Autism and economics

Blogger and economics professor Tyler Cowen's latest book (Create Your Own Economy) is out, and it seems to be all about autism! If you don't believe me, here is an Editorial Review from Amazon:

In this provocative study of behavioral economics, Cowen (Discover Your Inner Economist) reveals that autistic tendencies toward classification, categorization and specialization can be used as a vehicle for understanding how people use information. Cowen spends a great deal of time dispelling autism's societal stigma, arguing that mainstream society is reaping benefits from mimicking autistic cognitive strengths. As stimulating as is the premise, the book often feels like its own long exercise in categorization, with each chapter an analysis of the human mania for classification (e.g., the obsession with ranking achievements and endeavors). According to Cowen, human brains are constantly absorbing bits of information that get smaller and are delivered faster as technology advances. The more information people receive, the more they crave—this shorter attention span is far from a flaw to the author, but a liberating mechanism that allows humans time to contemplate more ambitious, long-range pursuits. ...

Interestingly, Cowen says the idea for the book came from an email he received from a blog reader, who was convinced, based only on his writing, that Cowen was himself autistic :-)

In skimming the book (which isn't bad), I was surprised not to see any discussion about the prevalence of autistic economists -- specifically when it comes to their perspectives on human nature. (If you don't believe me, ask any non-economist social scientist.) [On further inspection, there is a reference to "economist nerds" in the context of the signaling interpretation of education, and a figure which notes that economists tend to be focus on the most "objective" kinds of human decision making, leaving aside important issues of psychology.] As far as I could tell, Cowen doesn't mention in the book that there is actually a heterodox economics organization called the Post-Autistic Economics Network (paecon), that publishes its own journal, originally known as the Post-Autistic Economic Review. Here's what's in the current issue:

How should the collapse of the world financial system affect economics? Part II

- Mad, bad, and dangerous to know
Steve Keen

- A financial crisis on top of the ecological crisis: Ending the monopoly of neoclassical economics
Peter Söderbaum

- Toward a new sustainable economy
Robert Costanza

- After the bust: The outlook for macroeconomics and macroeconomic policy
Thomas I. Palley

- A non-formal look at the non-formal economy
Sean Mallin

I'm all for cognitive diversity, especially on the geeky end of the spectrum! But to what extent are people like Cowen simply lumping all nerds together with high functioning autistics and people with Asperger's Syndrome?

For more on this topic, I recommend Simon Baron-Cohen's book The Essential Difference: male and female brains and the truth about autism.

Vernon Smith at Caltech

I've been fascinated by economist Vernon Smith since participating in paid economics experiments as a student at Caltech. Smith was the pioneer in this type of research. From the 2002 Nobel report on his prize:

Human decision-making deviates in one way or another from the standard assumptions of the rationalistic paradigm in economics. If such deviations from rationality and self-interest were small and purely idiosyncratic, they would on average cancel out, and economic theory would not be too wide off the mark when predicting outcomes for large aggregates of agents. Following the lead of Vernon Smith, early studies of alternative market mechanisms by experimental economists can be viewed as tests of the hypothesis of idiosyncratic deviations from standard economic theory. If deviations from rationality and self-interest were systematic, however, this would call for a revision of economic theory itself.

It's amusing that Smith, who is autistic, played a major role in promoting more realistic ideas about human behavior among economists! See article and video interview, MSNBC:

...now Nobel Laureate Vernon Smith has decided to speak openly about what he calls the deficiencies and the selective advantages of Asperger's.

“I can switch out and go into a concentrated mode and the world is completely shut out,” he said in a recent interview. “If I'm writing something, nothing else exists.”

Smith says his capacity for deep concentration contributed to his ability to win the Nobel Prize.

“Perhaps even more importantly, I don't have any trouble thinking outside the box,” he said. “I don't feel any social pressure to do things the way other people are doing them, professionally. And so I have been more open to different ways of looking at a lot of the problems in economics."

CNBC: Did you feel like you seemed strange in the eyes of other people?

SMITH: Oh, yes.

CNBC: How so?

SMITH: Sometimes I'm described as "not there" in a social situation. You know, a social situation that lasts for a couple of hours I find it to be a tremendous amount of strain, so I've been known just to go to bed and read.

Perhaps most interesting to me, Smith was an undergraduate physics major at Caltech. The excerpt below is from Smith's Nobel autobiography. See also his recently published memoir, and this podcast interview on Econtalk.

...neither I, nor my parents, or anyone in my family, or any neighbor or friend, had any idea how to go about choosing a college. So, I went to the city library, found a book on choosing a college, and learned among other things that the 'best' college in the United States was Caltech. Being naïve and impetuous I decided that I should prepare myself to enter Caltech, as, without preparation, my 'C' average in High School would not even qualify me to take the entrance exam. A serious Quaker College, Friend's University, was located near my home in West Wichita. I enrolled in physics, chemistry, calculus, astronomy and literature courses for one year, earned top grades, and sat for the entrance exams for Caltech.

...Caltech was a meat grinder like I could never have imagined. I studied night, day, weekends and survived hundreds of problems, but what a joy to take freshman chemistry from Linus Pauling, hear physics lectures by J. Robert Oppenheimer on his frequent visits to Caltech, attend a visiting lecture by Bertrand Russell, and regularly see von Karman, Anderson, Zwicky, Tolman, Millikan and other legendary figures of that time, on campus.

I was majoring in physics, but switched to electrical engineering, which was in the same division (Mathematics, Physics and EE) as a senior. In this way I did not have to take the dreaded "Smyth's course," required for physics majors, but not EE, and received my BS on schedule in 1949. At the time I relished the unbending facts and mathematics of physics/engineering. Then, as a senior, I took an economics course and found it very intriguing - you could actually learn something about the economic principles underlying the claims of socialism, capitalism and other such 'isms.' Curious about advanced economics, I went to the Caltech library, stumbled upon two books, Samuelson's Foundations, and von Mises' Human Action. From the former, it was clear that economics could be done like physics, but from the latter there seemed to be much in the way of reasoning that was not like physics. I also subscribed to the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and one of the first issues had a paper by Hollis Chenery on Engineering Production Functions. So, economics was also like engineering! I had not a hint then as to how much those first impressions would be changed in my thinking over the decades to follow. ...

For micro I supplemented with courses Samuelson taught down the Charles River at MIT. After Caltech, Harvard seemed easy, and I got virtually straight A's. ...Graduate school is an endurance test, but was not that demanding for me after having survived the undergraduate meat grinder.

In his memoir he adds the following interesting comments (p. 123-124):

The first thing to which one has to adapt is the fact that no matter how high people might sample in the right tail of the distribution for "intelligence," ... that sample is still normally distributed in performing on the materials in the Caltech curriculum. The second thing you learn, if you were reared with my naive background, is the incredible arrogance that develops in conjunction with the acquisition of what you ultimately come to realize is a really very, very small bit of knowledge compared with our vast human ignorance. ... the difference between Harvard and Caltech: "At Harvard they believe they are the best in the world; at Caltech they know they are the best in the world."

Nerds!

I haven't read this yet, but am looking forward to it. (OK, maybe I just like the title and cover :-)

Here is the author's web page; he's a psychology professor at Bennington.

Q: Do other countries have this problem?

A: The idea that it is unattractive or unappealing to be intelligent is not a universal concept. Not in Asia, certainly not in India. There's no concept in India that being good at math and science and technology has negative social consequences. That's the reason there are so many Indian engineers.

Q: Why did this grow out of American culture?

A: Historically, America is a place for men of action, for men who discover things, make things with their hands, have practical intelligence as opposed to book learning. Book-learning was suspect — the musty old European way, as opposed to practical, snazzy America. I think this tradition has never gone away.

The problem is that now it just doesn't work anymore. You can't do anything unless you pay attention in school. You can't invent things without knowing calculus. If you don't study math, it won't work. Benjamin Franklin was an American genius, a model of the American tinkerer, but the Ben Franklin model is not working anymore.

Q. Wasn't everyone talking about the need for better math and science education back in the days of Sputnik?

A: What's new is the sexualization of it. Kids live in such a sexualized world. ... (If you are called a nerd or a geek, it's) not just creepy or weird, you're labeled as someone who is never going to get laid. There's a lot more at stake because kids are so much more exposed to a culture that's all about being attractive, having sex early.

The nerds and the geek stereotype is that if you're doing well in math and science, you are completely unattractive to the opposite sex.

All the nerd and geek self-tests, what they ask you is: Are you good at science and math? Are you unwashed? Have you never had a date? You don't know anyone's phone number except your mothers?

Mamet on Asperger's, Ashkenazim and the movies

The excerpt below is from his book Bambi vs Godzilla. Is he talking about movie directors, or physicists? :-)

Trivia question: what do David Mamet, Greg Cochran, Steve Pinker and Gregory Clark (author of A Farewell to Alms) have in common?

Glengarry Glen Ross is one of my favorite movies; the scene below is an all time classic. PUT THAT COFFEE DOWN!

DAVID MAMET

I think it is not impossible that Asperger’s syndrome helped make the movies.

The symptoms of this developmental disorder include early precocity, a great ability to maintain masses of information, a lack of ability to mix with groups in age-appropriate ways, ignorance of or indifference to social norms, high intelligence and difficulty with transitions, married to a preternatural ability to concentrate on the minutiae of the task at hand.

This sounds to me like a job description for a movie director. Let me also note that Asperger’s syndrome has its highest prevalence among Ashkenazi Jews and their descendants. For those who have not been paying attention, this group constitutes, and has constituted since its earliest days, the bulk of America’s movie directors and studio heads.

Neal Gabler, in his An Empire of Their Own points out that the men who made the movies – Goldwyn, Mayer, Schenck, Laemmle, Fox, - all came from a circle with Warsaw at its center, its radius a mere two hundred miles. (I will here proudly insert that my four grandparents came from that circle).

Widening our circle to all of Eastern European Jewry (the Ashkenazim), we find a list of directors beginning with Joe Sternberg’s class and continuing strong through Seven Spielberg’s and he youth of today.

...There was a lot of moosh written in the last two decades about the “blank slate”, the idea that since each child is theoretically equal under the eyes of the law, each must, by extension be equal in all things and that such a possibility could not obtain unless each child was, from birth, equally capable – environmental influences aside – of succeeding in all things.

This is a magnificent and majestic theory and would be borne by all save those who had ever had, observed, or seriously thought about children.

Races, as Steven Pinker wrote in his refutational The Blank Slate, are just rather large families; families share genes and thus, genetic disposition. Such may influence the gene holders (or individuals) much, some, or not at all. The possibility exists, however, that a family passing down the gene for great hand-eye coordination is likely to turn out more athletes than without. The family possessing the genes for visual acuity will likely produce good hunters, whose skill will provide nourishment. The families of the good hunters will prosper and intermarry, thus strengthening the genetic disposition in visual acuity.

Among the sons of Ashkenazi families nothing was more prized than genius at study and explication.

Prodigious students were identified early and nurtured – the gifted child of the poor was adopted by a rich family, which thus gained status and served the community, the religion, and the race.

The boys grew and regularly married into the family or extended family of the wealthy. The precocious ate better and thus lived longer, and so were more likely to mate and pass on their genes.

These students grew into acclaimed rabbis and Hassidic masters, and founded generations of rabbis; the progeny of these rabbinic courts intermarried, as does any royalty, and that is my amateur Mendelian explication of the prevalence of Asperger’s syndrome in the Ashkenazi.

What were the traits indicating the nascent prodigy? Ability to retain and correlate vast amounts of information, a lack of desire (or ability) for normal social interaction, idiosyncrasy, preternatural ability for immersion in minutiae; ecco, six hundred years of Polish rabbis and one hundred of their genetic descendants, American film directors.

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!