Simon Baron-Cohen on Autism and Asperger Syndrome

Could you give us a brief introduction to your work?

I’m the director of the Autism Research Centre. We look at people on the autistic spectrum who might have classic autism or Asperger syndrome, which is the so-called high-functioning subgroup, and we try to understand those people at multiple levels, from psychology – how their mind works – through to the neural level – how their brain works – right through to the biochemical and ultimately the genetic level. So it’s multidisciplinary. There are scientists working here with very varied backgrounds, working collaboratively.

Tell me something about the theory of mind, an area you have done a lot of research into.

This is now quite an old theory, about 25 years old. It’s the idea that people with autism might have a specific difficulty in imagining other people’s thoughts and feelings, putting themselves into another’s person’s shoes, or taking on another person’s perspective.

A lot of research at the psychological level points to that as a specific area of difficulty, either that people on the autistic spectrum are not developing that ability at the age that you’d expect it – by pre-school – or they are just not developing it at all, or they aren’t using the usual parts of the brain for this function. Whatever the particular manifestation of the problem, it has a big impact on their communication and their ability to socialise.

Your first choice, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, is a fictional first-hand account of autism.

The main character is a young boy with Asperger syndrome. He’s completely confused by the social interactions of people in his community and in his family, but he’s also very precocious in mathematics. The book describes, albeit fictionally, the disconnect between his understanding of systems – in this case mathematical, numerical systems – and his major difficulties in understanding people.

How accurate is the portrayal?

I think in fiction the writer has some licence to deviate from what is real – it’s a work of art, ultimately, for people’s interest and enjoyment, but I think that the character is very recognisable of many people with Asperger syndrome. I think the author has done a very good job.

There’s also an extra element in that this boy is a victim of domestic violence, and that’s certainly not typical of most children with Asperger syndrome, so if the reader is trying to figure out what’s causing what, it’s quite difficult to disentangle. Are his difficulties just the result of his autistic spectrum condition, or the result of early neglect and abuse?

It’s a book that I would recommend, because I think it has a very original style – it’s very engaging. The risk that this book carries is that people who read it might think that all children with Asperger syndrome have talents, which is not always the case – there’s a slight risk of misrepresentation. You could come away with the wrong conclusion.

In popular fiction, autistic characters are commonly portrayed as savants – someone who has an islet of expertise, despite developmental difficulties. But actually this is quite a rare condition, isn’t it?

Well, people are unsure what the actual proportion is. Savant syndrome certainly seems to be more common in the autistic spectrum than any other psychological or neurological group, so there’s definitely the link, but people argue about what the prevalence rate is among autism or Asperger syndrome, and it’s by no means universal.

Let’s move on to your second choice, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, a 1974 film by Werner Herzog. Could you tell me a bit about it?

I saw this film more than 30 years ago. It describes an enigmatic real-life character who turned up in a village in Nuremberg in 1828. He has no language and seems completely outside of human culture, and is taken in by the local doctor who tries to socialise him.

Part of the enigma about Hauser was his origins – was he abandoned, did he have an important family history? But the big question was, how could somebody be, as it were, outside of human society and find it so hard to develop language and to make sense of people?

Kaspar Hauser might be the first well-documented case of autism in literature, or even in history. Some people wonder whether autism is just a modern phenomenon, but here we have a very early account. The film (and the original book) raises very similar issues to those raised in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and shares a main character who is somehow detached from humanity. Like The Curious Incident, Kaspar Hauser also suffered neglect and abuse (of a different kind – he was reportedly chained up and isolated for the first 17 years of his life), so this by no means represents autism. Indeed, it could be more similar to the case of Genie, a so-called feral child who was also reared in isolation and never properly developed language or social skills.

It’s interesting that they have managed to make such an interesting film – and book, in the case of your first choice – with a central character who is so difficult to relate to.

I think that in some ways that helps the reader. It taps into the same fascination that anthropologists have with other cultures, but in this case it is a fascination with someone who is not part of any culture. There’s a sort of mirroring that goes on, because the character is so detached he is observing other people. Some people with Asperger syndrome describe themselves as feeling as though they came from another planet: they watch human interaction and they don’t quite understand it. They don’t feel that they can participate in it.