Having already agreed a few days ago to interview Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, the 54-year-old director of the University of Cambridge’s Autism Research Centre, I was surprised yesterday when he asked to scrap the list of pre-approved questions so he could instead discuss a startling discovery he had made.
I was nervous, but also interested, so I settled myself comfortably to hear what the man who is named after the Ali G actor had to say.
“The facts of the matter are these,” Professor Baron-Cohen began, shifting uncomfortably. “Do you remember how I’ve often said that people with autism have less empathy than people with antisocial personality disorder? Well, I now believe I might have been wrong.
As one of the autistic teenagers I work with was leaving the centre, she saw a dog that had been injured somehow, and rather than coldly ignoring it as I was expecting her to, she took off her coat to cover it with before getting her mobile phone out of her handbag to call a vet, tears streaming down her face as she did so.
I was astounded merely to see this display of emotion, to say the least. Not to mention the fact that she displayed more empathy in that moment than most normal people do every day.”
After hearing this, I had a question which Professor Baron-Cohen answered willingly.
“Oh, yes. In fact, so many of the autistic girls I work with show so many subtle signs of femininity, which have all been pointed out to me, that I’ve had to throw out my favourite theory of autism as an extreme male brain altogether. Not that the results of hormone tests ever backed it up, anyway.”
At this point, I asked Professor Baron-Cohen if any of his other pre-conceived notions about autistics had ever been challenged in any way.
“Well, there was this one fourteen-year-old boy who showed almost complete deficits of Theory of Mind according to our tests which are all carefully drawn up and prepared, but while he was looking at a print of ‘Irises’ by Vincent van Gogh, I asked him why he thought the artist had only painted one flower white, and he said, ‘Because he felt isolated and was lonely, the only person like himself amongst a crowd of people who were all like each other.’
This from a kid who tested as having nearly zero insight into the minds of others!”
When I asked Professor Baron-Cohen if this meant he would be revising any of his other theories about autistic people, he answered, “Oh yes, the whole lot, in fact. Tomorrow, I’m going to take all of my existing books out of print and insist that their publishers destroy and recycle them.”
So there you have it, the greatest autism expert of the UK is shown to not be such an expert after all.
@ Jonathan: That’s what satirical news is; made up stories written with the intent to bring ridicule to their subjects, whoever or whatever they may be.
This article, and all those written by this author, are completely false and meant as jokes. See his bio… I don’t get it.
Should we then conclude that the lack of empathy of corporate CEOs is not due to autism? I suddenly feel like the floor has been ripped out from under me.
CEOs, who display lack of social and human empathy are thought to be corporate psychopaths, ie middle class psychopaths who get pleasure from squeezing the little people etc as opposed to their working class equivalents who inflict more physical pain on others. So says a Cambridge researcher in this area whose name escapes me .