Greg McKeown:
Welcome. My name is Greg McKeown, and I’m your host, and I’m here with you on this journey to learn so that we can be utilized at our highest point of contribution.
Have you ever felt that you were neurodiverse in some way? Did you ever struggle with the traditional school system? Did you or someone you know, take away from school the worst of all possible learnings that you or they were unintelligent?
Well, today, I have invited Professor Simon Barron Cohen, the author of The Pattern Seekers, a New Theory of Human Intervention, to be on the show. This is part one of two interviews in which Simon takes from his 40 years of research at the University of Cambridge in order to help people who are neurodiverse, particularly people on the autistic spectrum, to be able to operate at their very best and for the rest of us to be able to figure out how to work with them so that we can draw the best from them. By the end of this interview, you will better understand how to utilize your neurodiversity and the people that you live and work with. Let’s get to it.
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Simon, welcome to the podcast.
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
Thank you very much for the invitation
Greg McKeown:
In pattern seekers. You ask a big interesting question, is there a link between autism and invention? Can you just unpack that question?
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
Sure. I mean, on the face of it, these are two very different things. You know, autism is a disability diagnosed on the basis of difficulties with social skills, social relationships, communication, and difficulties in adjusting to unexpected change. So, you know, why would that have anything to do with invention? And in my book, The Pattern Seekers, I talk particularly about generative invention, which is the, I think, uniquely human ability, not just to invent once, you know, in, in a one-off way, but to invent over and over again in different ways, you know, to innovate. You know, what I do is take the reader through, I think, a lot of evidence that actually autistic people have brains that are different. So this comes under the heading of neurodiversity. There are different kinds of brains. They’re different. And the autistic people have a particular aptitude and interest in patterns, special kinds of patterns, I call them if-and-then patterns, which are all around us in the world, and which comprise systems that autistic people are very interested in how systems work, how things work. And they have a fascination to analyze the patterns in the world around us. And I make the case that, actually, when it comes to invention, invention is nothing but being able to look for these rules or patterns that govern systems and then introducing changes in those rules, changes to the if, changes to the and or changes to the then.
So if I give an example, maybe it just makes it a bit more concrete. You know, if we think about the earliest musical instrument that’s ever been found, it dates about 40,000 years ago, and it was a flute made from a hollow bone from a bird. And we have to imagine the ancestor, the human ancestor that made it, would be thinking, if I blow down this hollow bone and I cover one hole, then make a particular sound. But if I blow down the hollow bone and cover two holes, then it’ll make a different sound.
So it’s this if-and-then it’s experimenting with patterns and whether we’re talking about inventing a piece of music or inventing a musical instrument or inventing anything like a vaccine. You know, we’re still inventing 40,000 years later. I mean, the evidence suggests we’ve been doing this between 70 and a hundred thousand years. In the case of Homosapians. And when we look at modern-day autistic people, they seem to have a particular aptitude at this if-and-then pattern recognition skill.
Greg McKeown:
I was just having a conversation with someone who was diagnosed with autism within the last six months. And a couple of things really struck me about that and your research. The first thing is how confusing her life has been as the modern world has tried to make sense of her, and as she’s tried to make sense of it with just all of the modern ideas, I won’t even say theories, just, you know, modern society and what stories it has given her about why she’s different and how that has made her life extremely challenging until this diagnosis.
And then the second thing is, I’m not sure I’ve ever met anybody as exceptionally brilliant at being able to articulate how concepts work with other concepts and to be able to operate at that level at many layers of sophistication. And you know, I think of myself as somebody who likes to extrapolate in that way, and to think about the complexity of the world. And it was just really rich to be able to sit with her and to talk and to go so deep and to watch somebody with her magnificent ability. Anyway, I just wanted your reaction to any of that.
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
Well, both of your observations are interesting. So, your first observation is actually, you know, receiving the diagnosis helped her in some way. It helped her to make sense of how she’s probably been feeling different all her life. I mean, you didn’t, you didn’t reveal to me or to our listeners how old this person is, but if she got her diagnosis in adulthood, it means she’s had a whole lifetime maybe of feeling different, but not having a label for it. Not having an explanation.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah. Like, let’s say she’s 17 or 18.
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
Yeah. So, you know, that’s a lot of years to be feeling, you know, I feel different to other people.
Greg McKeown:
Right.
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
I don’t feel like I fit in. I feel like I’m on the margins, and I don’t know why. So sometimes, a diagnosis can come as a huge relief. You know, that finally there’s a kind of explanation that this is, you know, that autism is basically a different way that the brain is wired up. We’ve been used to calling it kind of neurological, but that makes it sound very medical.
I think the new way of thinking about autism and about all of us is that we’re all different neurologically. All of our brains are different, and autism is just one variety of difference, if you like. But once you know that, you know, my brain works differently, you know, you can kind of accept who you are.
And then the other observation you made is, you know, that she’s got this remarkable talent at, well, in her case, analyzing concepts. And maybe the relationship between concepts is kind of taking things apart and really looking at the detail, and whether we’re talking about a concept or a network of concepts, or whether we’re looking at, you know, a computer in front of you and trying to understand how that works. Or whether we’re looking at the pond in the garden, which is a little ecosystem, but it’s still a system with all of its moving parts and trying to understand how that system works.
What I’ve noticed meeting lots of autistic people across my career is that different autistic people latch onto different systems, but what they are, what they show a strength in is analyzing systems. And sometimes you see it just in the play of a young autistic child where they become fascinated by the water coming out of the tap or the faucet, you know, where they playing with how you could make adjustments to it to change the flow of the water. Or they might become fascinated by their washing machine going round and round on its cycle, but it’s actually a system that they’re analyzing and becoming really expert in.
Or they may be watching the same Disney cartoon a hundred times because they’re really analyzing the sequence of information so that they can anticipate and spot every detail. And it’s this remarkable attention to detail and memory for detail. Often the tension to patterns that, I think, can sometimes translate into a capacity to invent, to think differently, do things differently.
Greg McKeown:
You’re not the first person to suggest that people who are artistic have, you know, some vague sense of special ability, but you are going more precisely than others in trying to identify in what way those differences can be exceptionally valuable. And just a more precise view of what’s really going on in that neurodiverse mind. Is this a fair way of expressing it? What am I getting wrong?
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
I think that’s a nice description, and thank you for that. You know, I would say that I’ve been sort of conducting autism research for now 40 years. So in the field change a lot over those decades. And I would say that at least for the first half of my career, both me but also other scientists were focusing on the disability side of autism. The aspects of autism that
Greg McKeown:
That don’t work, so to speak,
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
Are where the person struggles. Yes. Right. And maybe what we were missing was not just the areas where autistic people can manage, but sometimes where they actually outshine other people. You know, they have strengths that where they can actually perform at a higher level than other people. So there’s always been this paradox that autism is a disability, but also autism can include strengths or even talents. And I think, you know, the field and also the world is beginning to recognize autism is both a disability and a difference and that those differences have to be celebrated or should be celebrated.
Greg McKeown:
I felt something when I was speaking with this friend of mine, and we talked for a couple of hours extremely intensely and invigorating conversation that her future was exceedingly bright. That there was the possibility of her writing books and being, you know, superb. If she could somehow find a way, a space to be able to build her life around these abilities and somehow make the other challenges less relevant.
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
Well, now you’ve given me one more detail about this person, which is her age. You’ve told me she’s 16 or 17 or 18.
Greg McKeown:
17 or 18.
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
Yeah, so, so she’s a kind of a late teenager. And the real question is, if she had got the support at the earliest possible point in her life, where would she be today? But given that she’s been born into a society which often excludes autistic people or makes autistic people feel there’s something wrong with them, you know, there’s a real danger, and I’ve seen this in many cases, that by the time you get to 17 or 18 years old, you’re not only autistic, but you also have poor mental health, low self-esteem, low self-confidence, maybe feeling that you’re not accepted or included.
So, you know, we’ve ended up paradoxically again, with, on the one hand, this view that autistic people across, you know, 70 to a hundred thousand years may have made remarkable contributions to human progress. And on the other hand, in the 21st century, we seem to have structured a society where we don’t accept difference very easily. And we can even be creating poor mental health in people who don’t fit the majority.
Greg McKeown:
And is the hypothesis that, for example, the traditional schooling system is especially poorly prepared to be able to notice, ascertain, and then help develop those distinctions.
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
So if we think about it, I mean the education system does its best, but it’s designed as a kind of one size fits all.
Greg McKeown:
Completely.
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
You know, that when you went to school, when I went to school, you know, we were expected to sit in the class of 25 other kids and you know, we’re expected to look at the teacher and listen to what he or she is saying, and you know, so all of that involves learning in a social context and learning from a person with facial expressions and language and gesture and so forth. But that doesn’t always fit the learning style of many autistic people. You know, a lot of autistic people might say, actually, I don’t learn very well by listening to a teacher at the front of the class with all the no, the background noise of 24 other kids.
And also maybe that’s a child who prefers to learn by doing those little experiments we were talking about. Or maybe learn from the internet or from books learning in a more solitary way.
Greg McKeown:
Right.
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
Which is just not possible in a noisy classroom. And then imagine that after 30 minutes, a bell rings, and you’re asked to switch from the topic that was being presented. Let’s say it was geography, to switch to something completely different. Let’s say it’s French and autistic people like to kind of follow one thing in depth. They don’t necessarily do very well when they’re told now it’s time to switch your attention because their kind of way of processing information is to prioritize depth over breadth. You know, that they really want to understand the system, whether we’re talking about a particular battle in history or whether we’re talking about, I don’t know what, what happens to polar ice caps if it’s geography. They really want to understand that one thing as well as they can, as perfectly as they can, all the detail.
So the kind of what’s called the neurotypical approach to learning and classroom design and teaching may actually be doing a lot of harm to some types of minds. And it’s no surprise that a lot of autistic kids, you know, they underachieve, many of them drop out of school by teens. You know, they found the whole experience of being at school miserable. That was their one chance at education, and the system failed them.
Greg McKeown:
And I want to sort of add one level of depth to this, which is for everybody listening to this conversation, whether the person listening is autistic or not, there’s a higher percentage of the people listening that are neurodiverse in some way. That the entire conversation is immediately relevant. This isn’t only for someone who’s autistic, or that is the parent of someone who’s autistic or the uncle. And that’s already a big percentage. I mean, there’s a lot of people that are directly affected and are working with people who are, have autism, but this broader question of being neurodiverse and that the way your brain is actually wired is less effective or that the system of education was less effective for you.
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
Yeah. So it’s a very kind of radical or revolutionary idea that we may have to rethink how we design schools and the whole education system so that it’s not failing a certain minority.
Some people say that autism is 2% of the population, but if you included all of the other ways, you could be neurodiverse. So people with ADHD, people with dyslexia, people with dyspraxia, people with dyscalculia, the list goes on. You know, it may be 25% of the school population or 25% of society. It’s a lot of people that we’re not making accommodations for.
Greg McKeown:
Well, and then we get out of this experience the deepest, least correct conclusions about ourselves at a foundational level. Something like, you know, you’re unintelligent, you are dumb, you can’t do this simply because a system is designed for some other kind of mind, some other kind of learning. And so I don’t know what the percentage of people are that come out that wouldn’t, we wouldn’t just say, well, they failed, but they still got a lesson that is disabling them. For arguably the rest of their lives. Oh, I just can’t learn. I can’t do this. Yeah, go ahead.
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
Well, Greg, I want to acknowledge that, you know, what you’ve just said shows your empathy for people who are being, as we said, failed by the system. You know, because their experience, the way they may interpret their experience is, there’s something wrong with me. I don’t seem to be able to learn. That’s entirely the wrong conclusion, but it’s an understandable conclusion. And if they ended up taking that message away from their schooling, that could have really long-term effects on their self-esteem
Greg McKeown:
There are two thoughts I have that are ringing together here. The first is that 30 years ago, I was just in the mathematics of that. I was at Sixth Form in England, and my sociology report was on autism. And I reached out to, I, it’s a curious question as to whether I may have reached out to you. I don’t have the list anymore, but I reached out to something like the top hundred experts in autism as well as I could identify it and wrote to them and heard back from many experts. So, so kind of people to do it when I think in hindsight in trying to understand in greater depth what the impact of autism is in our society. And I remember thinking about the Ripple syndrome and the idea that whatever the percentage is, the number of people impacted is far greater, but it’s limited by our awareness and our understanding and so on. And so, I wonder if you could just share the earliest origins for why you chose to invest what is now 40 years, effectively the totality of, your professional life invested in this subject.
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
Yeah. Well, it’s not the totality because here I am, I’m still doing it.
Greg McKeown:
So far, should I say I? I should have chosen a better word.
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
No, that’s okay. Because you know, what I’m fascinated with is how the field doesn’t stay still. You know, our understanding of autism has changed enormously over that period. Who we call autistic has changed over that period. But just to answer your question, I mean, I came into this field because I had the opportunity straight after I graduated, you know, from my undergraduate degree. I had the opportunity to work as a teacher in a school for autistic kids. You know, that was my kind of my um, opportunity to kind of meet autistic people. You know, this is back in the early eighties when the word autism wasn’t a kind of everyday word.
Greg McKeown:
Not at all.
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
You know, the unit I was working in was a kind of experimental unit. They didn’t really know what to offer these kids. So I had the privilege in a way to be in a very experimental school where they were filming all through every lesson to see what worked and what didn’t work.
Greg McKeown:
Wow.
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
To, you know, to see what might lead to a connection between a teacher and a child. It was one-to-one. So there were six kids and six teachers.
Greg McKeown:
Good grief.
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
But also, you could review those video films at the end of each day to see what had led to some kind of meltdown or shutdown in the child. You know, just to trying to understand what is this person’s experience. And I became fascinated with it, not least because, you know, it’s scientifically a puzzle. Why do you know, why do some individuals have brains that are very different? But also, it’s a real-world issue. We have to figure out what should society be doing and what is society not doing to make it comfortable for autistic children and adults.
But over those, you know, decades, you know, back then, most of the people getting a diagnosis didn’t just have autism, or it wasn’t just autistic. They also had additional, you know, co-occurring conditions like learning disability or language delay, or epilepsy. A whole range of things. And today, I think, you know, what’s really changed is the breadth of our definition of autism. You know, we now recognize autism in people who do not have a learning disability. You do not have language delays. It’s brought many more people into the category that we call autism
Greg McKeown:
Is the language correct to simply say high functioning, you know, high functioning person with autism? What would be the right language be now for people that don’t struggle with learning difficulties in the same way as, yeah, in the past?
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
Yeah. So I wouldn’t use the term high functioning because for many autistic people, that’s seen as potentially offensive. You know, because it, you know, the implication is that other people are low functioning, this kind of implicit or even explicit hierarchy where one type of autism is better than another. We want to, you know, move right away from any risk of stigmatizing one subgroup.
So, you know, the language that I use is, I say autistic people with or without learning disability because it’s just a bit more descriptive, a bit more…It doesn’t carry any value judgment. You know, an autistic person with or without language delay, or you know, that some autistic people have minimal language and other people do not. You know, so just trying to be very careful in our language so that we’re not inadvertently stigmatizing.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, that’s exactly the purpose of the question. What do you see as the primary benefit of this evolution of understanding about who’s autistic and so on? Like, why does that matter? Why is that progress in your mind?
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
Well, you know, until we recognized autism without learning disabilities, it may have meant that lots of people, perhaps like this 17-year-old we were talking about.
Greg McKeown:
Right.
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
They were, they were struggling in a neurotypical world…
Greg McKeown:
Right.
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
Without a diagnosis. And you know, many of them may have ended up with clinical depression because they didn’t know why they weren’t fitting in. Some of them may have ended up feeling suicidal cause they weren’t getting the right support. So diagnosis, I think, does matter in the sense that in an ideal world, diagnosis leads to support.
The real world, sadly, is still quite far away from that ideal. As you may know that for many people, even if you suspect you’re autistic and you go to your family doctor to get a referral to a clinic that can diagnose autism, often there are long waiting lists. You may be waiting for a year or longer to just to get your diagnosis. And even after you’ve got a diagnosis, often there are no support services. So, you know, if the government is listening to our conversation, Greg. You know, they need to put some funding into disability. But, and this is one particular disability because the funding that’s available, you know, whether it’s about educational support or whether it’s about support into employment or support to prevent the risks of isolation and loneliness. There’s a lot of different aspects that autistic people struggle with and they don’t need to be struggling with it if, in a civilized society, we’re creating the right support systems.
Greg McKeown:
So I’m curious about that on multiple levels. But my own exposure to autism at an early age took place because my family provided respite care for children with a variety of disabilities, including autism. So we had a young man who lived with us almost full-time for about three years in my early teenage years. And so that sort of experience and exposure, of course, changes your own understanding of how the world works and how people work. And so it’s extremely valuable. And, of course, this was also a government program, so I could see and can see, even as you described it, what can be done if the right support is given to the right individual.
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
So I think, you know, like hearing this story, you know, this was either one parent or both of your parents.
Greg McKeown:
Both my parents, well, yes.
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
So, both of your parents, you know, kind of offering this opportunity for people with disabilities to come and live with you. I mean, that’s kind of unusual, but in, again, in an ideal world, it wouldn’t be the case that the person with the disability needs to leave their own family and come and live with your family.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, for sure.
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
I mean, there may be circumstances where that has to happen if the original family is not coping, if the, you know, the parent of this person with disabilities, you know, themselves is struggling and they need respite, I think that’s what you think. That’s the word you used.
But you know, in an ideal world, a compassionate society would be supporting people with disabilities to flourish and prosper in their own families. But we’ve gotta think about it at multiple levels. You know, well-being is the result of multiple different aspects of your life, which include friendships, your leisure time, your time at school, you know, your aspirations, and what you might wish to do after you leave school. Just to make sure that each person has the best chance to fulfill their potential. And isn’t ending up as the majority of autistic people these days end up not just autistic but also with depression or anxiety.
Greg McKeown:
So we are leaning in already to what to do. And I want to just go there more explicitly. So if someone’s listening to this and they say, I think I might be somehow on the autistic spectrum without learning disability and just now, even as an adult, even mid-career discovering this, putting language to it, I think there is something inherently liberating about that moment because you suddenly say, oh, that’s why I’ve experienced the world I have, there’s some opportunity in that correct diagnosis. What can they do to be able to take advantage of that neurodiverse mind? Let’s go to that question.
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
Given the previous conversation about the lack of services, we need to be realistic. So now we’re talking about someone who’s just been diagnosed in adulthood, and so what can they reasonably expect?
And one thing they can do is that when they go for a job, they could tell their employer, by the way, I’m autistic. You know, and it doesn’t cost much for the employer to say no big deal. In other words, to react with acceptance and respect for difference. You know, so let’s say you came to me, I’m your employer, and you say I’m autistic. I might say, well, Greg, that’s absolutely fine. Tell me what we can do in our workplace to make things more comfortable for you. And it may be some quite minor adjustments.
Greg McKeown:
For example?
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
You know, you might say, well, I find it really difficult to concentrate with fluorescent lighting. This is a real example that many autistic people find. The flicker rate of fluorescent lighting is actually aversive. Hmm. So we could just, you know, we could use a different kind of desk lamp, or you might say, you know, well actually, I find it much easier to work with my headphones on noise-canceling headphones because then I can really concentrate. Because even background whispering from colleagues in an open plan office, you know, it’s so loud for me cuz a lot of autistic people have sensory hypersensitivity. So these are kind of small adjustments that the employer could make.
Greg McKeown:
What’s the medical term for that?
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
Yeah, it can be called hyperacusis, but that’s just, particularly for hearing. The more kind of general term I used was sensory hypersensitivity because it could also be visual, it could be auditory, it could be tactile, it could be, you know, olfactory taste. You know, the autistic people, in all of their senses, often experience the world more intensely. You know, so even like the t-shirt that I’m wearing, you know, for some autistic people, this t-shirt is comfortable, but that t-shirt is like sandpaper. So small accommodations could be actually really meaningful for autistic people.
Greg McKeown:
What is one idea that stood out to you today? What is one thing you can do differently in the next 24 to 48 hours? And who is somebody you can invite to be with you on this journey, to listen to the podcast, and to be able to help you in implementing these ideas in your life so that you can live a life that really matters?
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Thank you. Really, thank you for listening, and I’ll see you next time.