Wit and wickedness: is it all in the brain?

Abstract

Simon Baron-Cohen has a justified reputation as one of the world’s leading authorities on autistic spectrum disorders. He is not only a prodigiously productive and imaginative researcher but also a brilliant popularizer who has done as much as anyone to communicate the clinical and scientific understanding of autism to the world at large. This is not, however, without its hazards, the most striking of which is the Freudian slip of seeing the world beyond the clinic through clinical eyes.In The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain (2003), he argued that people with autistic spectrum disorders, most of whom are male, are like men only more so. His reasons for suggesting this are tenuous to say the least. One of the most striking features of autism is a ‘mind-blindness’ expressed as an inability to see things from another’s point of view, and to tap into, or empathize with their emotions. Many people with autism, however, will have preserved, or even enhanced, abilities to engage with the physical world, particularly in the sphere of logical reasoning. While they feel utterly at sea in social situations, they are at home in the world of facts and logic and material objects. Isn’t that ‘just like a man’, who may be good at maths and not notice that you are on the verge of tears? And how unlike a woman, who will indeed see the expression on your face but not be particularly interested in your pitilessly detailed account of the specification of the latest car that has taken your fancy.