Autism - the extreme male brain?

What brain type do you have? Take the empathising, systemising, autism spectrum and 'mind in the eyes' tests

“I was sick to death of my attention wandering onto the reflection of every element of light and colour, the tracing of every patterned shape and the vibration of noise as it bounced off the walls. I used to love it. It had always come to rescue me and take me away from an incomprehensible world, where, once having given up fighting for meaning, my senses would stop torturing me as they climbed down from overload to an entertaining, secure and hypnotic level of hyper. This was the beautiful side of autism.”

“Autism makes me hear other people's words but be unable to know what the words mean. Or autism lets me speak my own words without knowing what I am saying or even thinking.”

- Donna Williams (1994)

“It was ages before I realised that people speaking might be demanding my attention. But I sometimes got annoyed once I realized that I was expected to attend to what other people were saying because my quietness was being disturbed.”

- Jolliffe et al (1992)


What is autism?
Autism is a developmental disorder that affects roughly 0.6% of the population and has serious effects on a child's ability to develop language, communication and normal patterns of normal social interaction

Symptoms of autism
Lorna Wing (1981) described autism as involving a “triad of impairments”, consisting of:

1. Abnormal social interaction, which seems to be based in difficulties in empathising – the ability to see the world from the point of view of others and understand their thoughts and feelings

2. Impairments in verbal and nonverbal communication. People with autism find it hard to understand things like irony, metaphor and figurative speech – they are over-literal

3. Lack of pretend play/restricted range of interests and insistence on sameness
For a long time autism has been characterised with reference to these three areas of impairment.

However, there are many other symptoms that frequently occur in autism and which also require explanation, for example regarding perceptual abnormalities and imitation difficulties.

An extreme form of the male brain?
One explanation for autism is that it is an extreme version of the normal male brain profile

Baron-Cohen has argued that sex differences in psychology should be understood in terms of two key axes, those of empathising and systemising.

Systemising is defined as the drive to analyse, understand and construct systems, where a system is anything that takes an input and delivers an output according to certain precise rules.

Empathising, on the other hand, is the practice of predicting and explaining the behaviour of others by putting oneself in their shoes and understanding their minds.

On these definitions, systemising helps us to understand and control the physical world whilst empathising helps us to understand and control the social world.

Baron-Cohen (2002) has shown that in the general population men are better systemisers than empathisers, whilst women are better empathisers than systemisers.

The extreme male brain theory of autism holds that autism is a condition where an individual has an extreme male brain profile: he is very poor at empathising but has a strong drive towards systemising.