Greg McKeown:
Welcome. I’m your host, Greg McKeown, and I am here with you on this journey to learn so that we can operate at a higher point of contribution in our lives.
Today is part two with Professor Simon Baron-Cohen. In this episode, we go deeper into the challenges, but also the opportunities of being neurodiverse. If you have ever struggled with traditional schooling, if you have ever felt that your mind works differently from the people around you, if you work with people who would fit that description or live with people who seem to be somehow on the spectrum, this episode can be exceptionally valuable. As you will see by the end of this episode, you will discover how these differences, even though they may have kept you back until this point, can be the exact key you need to become unstoppable. Let’s get to it
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The reason I mentioned hyperacusis is because I think I have hyperacusis, and then you talked about sensitivity to clothing, and I’m highly sensitive to the clothing that I wear. I much prefer extremely soft, comfortable materials over other things, and maybe everybody prefers that. But it’s a huge difference to me in my, you know, what clothes I’ll pick out and so on.
Yeah, and I don’t know, at the risk of vulnerability, but also at the risk of maybe just being wrong. When I was talking to my friend that I’ve been talking about from the beginning, I walked away from that conversation thinking, I think I’m on the same spectrum as my friend. I felt a real connection because, I mean, the primary experience for me was I wanted to connect with her. I wanted to understand her. That was the driving intention. But one of the takeaways was I am talking to someone whose mind is more similar to mine than I imagined, and I think is rare enough that I am constantly, for example, in conversation with people just holding back enormously. And I’m not sure that I would have that reputation. I’m not sure that people would feel that, but for me, it’s a constant work to not just plunge into any number of extremely, you know, for me, deep, complex issues that I’m thinking about at any given time. And so I just wanted your reaction to this. Do you? Yeah. Does that sound naive to you? Does that sound plausible to you? Like, talk to me about that.
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
So it triggers a bunch of different thoughts for me. So the first one is that back in 2001, we developed a questionnaire called the Autism Spectrum Quotient, and you can find it online, but basically, you know, what we were trying to do was to take seriously this idea that we all have autistic traits. And so this is a measure, a metric of how many autistic traits each of us has. And it’s a scale that goes from zero to 50, and people with a diagnosis of autism tend to score pretty high. They tend to score above 32 out of 50. But actually, we’re all somewhere on that scale, just like height. We all have height. So we all have autistic traits, and it’s just a matter of how many, and you know, it turns out statistically that it’s a bell curve. It’s a normal distribution in the population.
So most of us are in the middle of the range, but people could be below or above average. And it may be that on this particular metric, you have a higher than average number of autistic traits. And so then the question becomes, well, do you need a diagnosis? And I think the kind of, the rule of thumb is you only need a diagnosis if you’re struggling. So
Greg McKeown:
Right.
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
Even if you’ve got a lot of autistic traits, if you are managing fine, you don’t really need a diagnosis. That would be my kind of take on it. Whereas if you’ve got, you know, a lot of autistic traits and you’re experiencing, I don’t know, depression or anxiety or unemployment or, you know, all kinds of other difficulties in your life, you know, then maybe autism becomes a kind of an available explanation for why you are struggling. And also your stepping stone or your passport to getting support.
But you know, just the fact that you identified with this autistic friend in terms of sensory issues, to me, it doesn’t come as a surprise because part of the kind of findings from research is that actually, these dimensions run right through the population then, you know, the spectrum isn’t just limited to people who have a diagnosis. The spectrum runs right through the population.
Greg McKeown:
Okay. So I’ve looked up your autism spectrum quotient test, the abbreviation, as you mentioned. I’m looking at it right now. 50 questions, as you mentioned. I am, you know, I prefer to do things with others rather than on my own or from, definitely agree to definitely disagree. And second, I prefer to do things the same way over and over again. If I try to imagine something, I find it very easy to create a picture in my mind and so on. I’m mentioning that, so, you know, we’ll put that in the show notes for everybody who’s listening.
There’s something you said that I think is intriguing, and I want to push on it for a bit. What you said is the diagnosis is only necessary if it’s keeping someone from doing well in some way. You know, it’s like the hygiene factor analysis almost saying, well, if it’s causing you problems, then you want to get a diagnosis so that you can address those limitations and challenges.
And what I’m wondering is, if that’s right, I mean, clearly, that’s right. But is it limited to that? Because if the spectrum is the way that you have increasingly thought about it and defined it as having an upside, then it seems logical to me that having a diagnosis could help even if somebody is functioning well. Because then it’s just about like any other strengths finder type analysis where once you understand these distinctions, you can utilize yourself better. You can design a life and a career that enables you to be utilized at a higher point of contribution. So I’m just pushing on that for a second.
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
So I think, I think you’re absolutely right that it’s a bit more nuanced than how I presented it earlier. So I suppose my argument for saying, let’s reserve the term autism for people who are struggling, is because we have to think about how does a government or how does a society allocate funding? And if funding is needed for extra services, extra support, you know, maybe it should be, well, if someone is having a difficult time, so so much so that they’ve gone to a clinic, then we should be providing help for that person. Whereas if it’s more of an identity, you know, I identify as autistic, but I don’t need any extra support, you know, is using the word autistic sort of to cover that other group of people in the population? Is it kinda taking away from who could potentially get resources?
Greg McKeown:
What you are saying is protect the term so that you can make sure that finite resources are utilized to help the most vulnerable people who have autism. That’s why you are thinking about it in that way. Unless you are suggesting that because there’s limited numbers of psychologists and psychiatrists available to be able to even do this diagnostic work. So that’s more true in the UK system than in some other healthcare systems. But if you sort of neutralize for that question for a moment, I mean, they could be diagnosed and then could design a life that is richer for themselves and for the people around them.
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
Yeah, I can, so I see where you’re going with this, and I completely agree with you. That the diagnosis of autism isn’t just to acknowledge the difficulties, it’s also to acknowledge the strengths. You know? So once you’ve got that diagnosis, you can focus on your strengths, and you can focus on what kind of lifestyle would best suit your makeup, you know?
Greg McKeown:
Precisely.
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
So that you could become unstoppable.
Greg McKeown:
Well, there you have it. There you have the title of the next book. Because surely that is one way of thinking about the progress of those 40 years that you’ve spent in this field is, and I don’t mean it’s the only, you know, the only continuum we could evaluate this from, but that the idea becomes more and more around not the disability, but the ability, unless I’m misreading this and you can correct me. The Pattern Seekers is partially about the idea that society has been propelled forward by people potentially who are either autistic or are on, who are certainly neurodiverse because they have to see things differently to the use case everyone else has.
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
Yeah, no, I think you’re right. This is the kind of logical extension, right, of the argument. And the person who comes to mind at the moment for me is Greta Thurnberg. Because if we’d seen her when she was aged, you know, 13, she had depression, she had an eating disorder, she was kind of dropping out of school, and it turns out also autistic. But she was using her remarkable attention to detail and ability to absorb information, particularly kind of patterns as we’ve talked about, but factual information to really focus on her topic, which was the environment and the climate crisis. And you know, in some ways knowing that she was different, knowing that she was autistic, I think maybe you could almost say she focused on the positive sides of that diagnosis, that autistic people, you know, they’re sometimes described as obsessional, meaning that they latch onto one topic and really don’t let go of it. They want to explore it as deeply as they can.
Autistic people are often, you know, whistleblowers when they can see that the system isn’t working. You know, they, you know, they believe in fairness to an extraordinary degree. And she was speaking up for her generation who were being robbed of a future by earlier generations of people who were, you know, destroying the climate. You know, I think she’s a nice example of, I think, what you are talking about.
Greg McKeown:
Certainly, it reinforces this word that you have brought into the conversation of unstoppable. And so it’s the, something like the above-the-line elements of autism, what is possible, what could happen for somebody who has autism but doesn’t have a learning disability, for example. It seems worthy of our attention. And it seems plausible to me that there are absolutely like high level of probability that there are significant numbers of people even listening to this right now, and in society in general, who would fit that category because they wouldn’t have been diagnosed because of course, go back 40 years almost no one was being diagnosed, I mean, relatively speaking. And then because of the definition changes and the clarifications that you’ve been so articulate in describing, they, they also wouldn’t have been, and you think there’s a whole set of unstoppable people out there. But they don’t know it.
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
Yeah. And maybe this conversation that we’re having, and which I hoped would be kind of stimulated by the book, The Pattern Seekers, we started off our conversation, imagine if you’re autistic and you feel failed by your school so that you feel like you are unintelligent and incapable. But actually, now that there’s a word called autism that can describe me, and autism has not just disability, but difference in even talent. You know, I can focus on my talent, and I can prove to society that I am capable and I am unstoppable.
I’m kind of reminded of the documentary that’s on Netflix at the moment about Elon Musk. You know, Elon Musk fits the profile of an autistic person, and he recently came out as autistic, but you know, a lot of his projects have this kind of very recognizable style, you know, wanting to put the first rocket onto Mars.
He knew what rockets were, and he knew that some rockets could get out of the atmosphere and maybe rockets could, could get as far as the moon. But you know, just thinking one step further, it’s just, it’s the same technology, but you just have to make, you know, some tweaks to the technology to get it, get the rocket to go even further. But just kind of not letting go of that idea until you’ve cracked the problem where you’ve solved the puzzle and the term autism for him, it’s not like he’s, see, he needs extra services or extra support, you know, but he’s using it to his advantage and not consciously, he’s just, he’s living it. You know, that project after project are new ideas that he wants to pursue in using the skills that he has, which is kind of engineering skills.
Greg McKeown:
If you go back to the big question with The Pattern Seekers, is there a link between autism and invention? I mean, that’s framed in a particular order. One could ask the same question, tweaked slightly. Is there a link between invention and autism? I mean, it’s the same thing, right? But to frame it just that difference in order says, yeah, well, of course, if you live in an age when invention is valuable, invention is on the increase that the demand for invention is, you know, skyrocketing. Then people who have an ability to seek patterns, seek depth of understanding singular focus y you know, to to, to an obsessive degree. I mean, my goodness, none of that’s literally none of that is going to help you in a traditional school setting. It is going to be at the very best neutral.
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
Well, yeah, but let’s just take that one step further because, at the very worst, it could be really damaging.
Greg McKeown:
Yes, exactly.
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
Because what conventional, what mainstream education does is it’s expecting people to conform to a particular sort of average. You know, we want all kids to learn 10 subjects, and we want all kids to be able to switch from one subject to another every 30 minutes, you know, and some kids are just not built that way, and they could end up really damaged by that system, as we talked about.
Greg McKeown:
This connects the dots back to an idea I’d had previously but want to get back to now. I ended up doing graduate work at Stanford University, and there got to know Carol Dweck, who, of course, is well-known to, I’m sure, everybody listening, but the thinker and researcher behind the growth mindset, you know, the view that intelligence can grow and is not fixed. And that exposure to those ideas and to her was something close to healing for me. A completely connected and accelerating because I realized I had a variety of fixed mindsets around intelligence that I didn’t know looked there. And I see that for people everywhere now is if you’ve gone through a traditional school system, you almost certainly do have fixed views of intelligence, even if you did well because you just learned that there was a particular way to do well. And you don’t know that there’s all these other ways of learning and growing yet. And so, it can be damaging, I think, for people across the range.
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
I agree with you that, in a way, all of our discussion today is about how do we make space for different kinds of intelligence. And the conventional mainstream educational system is measuring intelligence according to whether you can, you know, learn in the format we talked about earlier, which is a classroom and, you know, pass exams and end up with certificates of your grades. But a lot of autistic kids or autistic people either get pulled out of school because their parents can see them really struggling. They may end up home-educated.
In my book, I talk about one autistic boy who was being described as unintelligent by his teacher and who was unhappy at school, and his mother pulled him out of school and just let him learn in the way that suited him. And that boy grew up to be Thomas Edison, the inventor of the first electric light bulb. But who was failing at school? I mean, so how do we, you know, luckily he broke through, but there are lots of autistic people who become overwhelmed by their depression and their low self-esteem and end up suicidal. So, you know, we are wasting a lot of human talent.
Greg McKeown:
It makes me angry. I mean, it just makes me furious really to hear that story. And to think of it, I mean, I’ve been to Thomas Edison’s house in Florida where he spent his summers, and Henry Ford stayed right next to him, built a house there so that he could be close to him and you know, learn from each other and grow from each other. And you think that system had to be constructed around them to be able to tap into, you know, the exceeding capability and opportunity that was within them and the factory-based traditional school? I mean, I’ll tell you my own experience, Simon, with this, is that I did okay at school. Like at high school, I did okay, but I always wanted to understand things in depth. I would get books on the subjects that weren’t in the curriculum and go to the library and try to study them.
And I’ve had the sort of naive idea that if I really understood things deeply and then I would get A’s, and it took me maybe till university to learn, oh, getting A’s is just a game. And once I realized that literally, I barely haven’t had an A ever in anything since. It’s just a little game. And it’s not complex, it’s not a complex game. You just do exactly what they tell you to do. Again, you pass your test and get A’s, or even, you know, even better than that, the vast learning of my life, which is crescendoing now, it’s not in Diminuendo, it’s in crescendo. I feel almost a renaissance of learning right now is not happening in a classroom. It’s happening outside of it. And that’s, I’m not trying to knock classrooms for the sake of it. I’m just saying there’s a whole world outside of it. And for people listening who learned that they were X because of their school experience, that can last with you and limit you for so long, and it doesn’t need to. And I want to try and get to what they can do to break out of that mindset, that limit mindset and move forward.
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
You know, the education system, we keep coming back to it just because, because kids only get one opportunity, really. And if it’s an unhappy experience, it can do a lot of damage.
Whether we’re talking about privately funded schools or whether we’re talking about state schools, we have to, first of all, recognize that not all kids have the same learning style. So we need to be creating pathways through the school for kids who have different learning styles. And some kids are going to be learning much better out in the forest. You know, an example, an example is, you know, on television at the moment is Chris Packham, the wildlife documentary maker and TV presenter who is also autistic. He clearly learns best from just walking through nature, where he can see every twig and see every animal and plant. He’s absorbing all this information from nature and putting it all together to understand the, you know, biodiversity.
And, you know, someone like that may not learn very well just from textbooks or just from, you know, a conventional classroom. So I don’t have all the answers yet. I’m just saying the first step is recognizing that our school system is failing a significant minority of kids. And the second, you know, the second kind of component to that is, you know, at what cost it’s at the cost of the individual’s mental health, but it’s also at the cost of society more broadly. Because some of those people are really going to be thinking not just differently but innovatively.
Greg McKeown:
Jordan Peterson used a phrase, he said, “It’s an ethical crime to not utilize the potential that’s within you.” And I thought that phrase, an ethical crime speaks to something in this conversation that there’s an ethical crime to not be able to tap into these rich abilities, these more unusual abilities in, as you already described, as many as 25% of the population cause of basically our factory based education system. Right. That those people have not learned. Yeah. But it was the system. It isn’t just you, it. It isn’t that you were doing something wrong. It’s that that system of necessity must optimize around a collective decision, but that you, individually outside of that school program, can unlearn some of the poorest lessons you gained from it. And I just think that in a world that is in such need of invention and reinvention and human capability, this seems like an ethical crime. Your reaction.
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
Yeah, I mean, I wouldn’t blame the individual. I don’t think the individual has committed an ethical crime. They haven’t fulfilled their potential. But I do think that, you know, we as society, we vote for governments that will, you know, create systems, whether it’s healthcare systems or educational systems or workplace cultures. We may be committing that ethical crime, but certainly, our leaders who have the taxpayer’s funds available can be allocating them so that we’re not failing children.
Greg McKeown:
Can you share with us what you think an individual can do? Right. Which is not to neutralize what you just said about what governments and institutions and systems can do, but what can individuals do who are listening to this having a breakthrough moment?
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
Yeah. You know, given that we’ve talked about how many young autistic people may leave school without qualifications, not because they’re unintelligent, but because they didn’t fit into that, you know, that educational system. It means that if you are an employer and you are looking at hiring somebody, you know, open your mind, think about, I want to be an inclusive employer. I don’t want to be inadvertently discriminating against certain kinds of people, otherwise, all I’m doing is perpetuating exclusion.
Greg McKeown:
Right.
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
You know, so, so when you write your job advert, think about, you know, do you have to require that the person has a university degree or has a high school qualification? Or are you just looking for someone who can do the job that you need doing? And maybe modify your selection process? Because at the moment, you know, when, typically, when we hire somebody, we put them through an interview, and we expect them to have great social skills, make eye contact, and speak fluently. But isn’t that potentially discriminating against people who have disabilities with social skills but who might be very capable of doing the job that you need doing?
I think it probably applies to almost every sector of employment that autistic people could be in the workplace, but at the moment, 85% of autistic adults are unemployed. So, that suggests that there’s some kind of, let’s call it, systemic discrimination against them. Because, you know, many autistic people, the majority of autistic people, do not have learning disabilities. They could be doing all kinds of things in the workplace, even if they have a learning disability. We could be opening our minds as employers to be thinking, “What reasonable adjustments can I make so that I’m not excluding a whole section of society from the world of work?”
Greg McKeown:
I really love that suggestion. And it just reminds me that if you believe, as we keep saying we believe that the educational system is A, B, and C, then it follows naturally and logically that the next part of the system is also likely to have the same assumptions, the same basic system in place and the need for unlearning.
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
And if we were going back to the 1950s, we’d have noticed all of our colleagues were male. You know, we didn’t have gender diversity in the workplace, you know, but now we’re conscious about gender diversity and you know, we’re conscious of ethnic diversity, but somehow we’ve kind of left neurodiversity behind so that people who are neurodiverse are still being excluded from the workplace.
So, that just means that once we become conscious of it, we have to start changing our kind of, you know, how we do things. Changing our culture to ensure that we’re not even unconsciously discriminating. Because none of us want to think of ourselves as people who discriminate in the sense of, you know, of creating inequality. But we may be doing it unconsciously.
Greg McKeown:
Yes. And I think this still keeps pulling me back beyond the systems to the individual. And it could be we have a difference of opinion about it, but I don’t think so. I think it’s just where we’re putting the emphasis. But I just, I have within me this feeling that an individual listening to this, that there’s an empowering message.
I’ve worked with hundreds literally of organizations, but government and non-government, over the last 25 years. I mean, it’s not like I’m unsympathetic or unaware of the power of systems to influence and affect us. And with all of that, if we overemphasize that side of it, then an unintentional consequence, I think, is to disempower the individual to feel I can do something about this and I don’t have to wait until in power to behave to improve my life. And I know that we’re, I’m sure, we agree on that.
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
We do agree. And I’m going to take you back to your parents. Because you know, when your parents took in, you know, maybe kids, maybe teenagers with disabilities, they were doing that as individuals. You know, they were making choices to give somebody an opportunity. We can all do that even within our current workplaces or wherever we find ourselves in our leisure as well. We can be consciously reaching out to people that we can now recognize have been excluded to make sure that, as individuals, we’re not perpetuating that exclusion.
Greg McKeown:
Professor Simon Barron Cohen, thank you for being on the podcast.
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen:
Thank you.
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.
