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{PDF EPUB} the Essential Difference Male and Female Brains and the Truth About Autism by Simon Baron-Cohen His 'N' Hers

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{PDF EPUB} the Essential Difference Male and Female Brains and the Truth About Autism by Simon Baron-Cohen His 'N' Hers Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Essential Difference Male And Female Brains And The Truth About Autism by Simon Baron-Cohen His 'n' hers. Why do most men use the phone to exchange information rather than have a chat? Why do so many women love talking about their feelings and relationships? We may suspect profound differences between the sexes but do they stand up to scientific scrutiny? Simon Baron-Cohen argues that men's and women's brains are made differently: the female brain is hard-wired for empathy, and the male to understand and build systems. Take brother and sister Alex and Hannah. Alex's mother remembers that, as a toddler, he loved toy tractors and fire engines and would happily sit for hours prodding and pressing objects just to see what would happen. By the age of five he was obsessed with compiling football stickers. Music came later - naturally he drew up his own pop charts and stored his tapes in strict order - and in his teens he quickly mastered computers. His mother recalls that the interests just "seemed to come from deep within him". Alex, Baron-Cohen says, has a typical systemising, male or "S" type brain. Hannah's big passion was people. Even in her early years she loved making them laugh and smile. Hannah learned to talk earlier than her brother and plastered her walls with pictures of kittens and foals. As a teenager she also loved pop music, but rather than carefully cataloguing it, she would dance and sing in front of the mirror with her friends. "She's really good at asking people sensitive questions so that she can explore how they're feeling," her mother says. Baron-Cohen says Hannah has an empathic, female or "E" type brain. Hannah, Alex and their differences sound familiar, and no doubt worryingly stereotypical to some. So will later examples of sex-specific adult behaviour. Yet this is no light-hearted pop at sexual incompatibility. Baron-Cohen is one of this country's most respected psychologists and, as he soberly points out, both men and women evolved on Earth, not Mars or Venus. The inevitable charge that even discussing such issues encourages sexism is thrown straight back. Baron-Cohen says he would "weep with disappointment" if a reader concluded that all men have lower empathy or that all women have lower systemising skills. These are average men and average women under discussion. Gender politics dealt with, he turns to proving his idea and he is not short of evidence, much of it drawn from comparisons of male and female behaviour in academic journals. We learn that women consistently score better than men in tests designed to probe empathy while males outscore females on systemising, and that these differences can be seen even in one-day-old babies. This is, of course, classic nature versus nurture territory, and Baron-Cohen stresses the role that evolution and genes could play in determining men's and women's brain types, while playing down social and cultural influences. It is a compelling, sometimes convincing argument, but ultimately impossible to prove. It is also unclear whether decoding the human genome will really pinpoint genes that control empathising and systemising, as he asserts. Whether or not you agree with Baron-Cohen's approach, sexual politics, or science, the book's final and probably most controversial argument is a treat for those who simply enjoy a good idea. He suggests that people with autism (and the related condition of Asperger's syndrome) have an extreme version of the male brain: they are poor at empathising, while astoundingly good at analysing and understanding complex systems. As co- director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University, Baron-Cohen is on familiar ground here, and it shows. In a moving and inspiring narrative, we meet Richard Borcherds, a Cambridge colleague of Baron-Cohen who in 1998 was awarded the Fields medal - the highest maths prize around - yet who is terrified of talking on the telephone. We witness first-hand his diagnosis with Asperger's syndrome, and learn how Borcherds has found an environment in which his condition has not been an obstacle. Others are not so lucky, of course, but it is a paradoxical moment. Baron-Cohen takes 150 pages to build up an argument about what causes the condition, and then renders the cause almost irrelevant next to the effect. The book has been five years in the writing, partly because he deemed its subject too politically sensitive for the 1990s, and partly because he first wanted to float his ideas about autism at scientific conferences, where he says reaction has been largely supportive. This is his first attempt to present it to a wider audience and it is welcome, to this "S" type brain at least. SIMON BARON-COHEN. Simon Baron-Cohen, PhD, MPhil is a professor of developmental psychopathology in the departments of psychiatry and experimental psychology, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and director of the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom. He is best known for his work on autism, including his early theory that autism involves degrees of 'mindblindness' (or delays in the development of theory of mind), and his later theory that autism is an extreme form of the 'male brain', which involved a major reconceptualization of typical psychological sex differences in terms of empathy and systemizing. Education. Baron-Cohen earned degrees in Human Sciences from New College, Oxford, a PhD in Psychology from University College London, and an Master of Philosophy in Clinical Psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London. Research areas. Baron-Cohen's first research paper on autism was published in 1985, with Uta Frith and Alan Leslie.[1] It proposed that children with autism show social and communication difficulties as a result of a delay in the development of a theory of mind. Tested using the false belief experiment, this result has been replicated innumerable times. In his 1995 book Mindblindness (MIT Press), he suggested that an individual's theory of mind depends on a set of brain mechanisms that develop in early childhood, including the eye direction detector (EDD), the shared attention mechanism (SAM), and the intentionality detector (ID). Baron- Cohen singled out SAM as a key precursor to theory of mind, giving rise to the first early screening test for autism, the CHAT (Checklist for Autism in Toddlers).[2] This quick test is used at 18 months old to check if the child is showing behaviours such as pointing and gaze following as examples of shared (or joint) attention. Absence or delays in joint attention is one marker of risk for a later diagnosis of autism. The CHAT remains the only screening instrument for autism in infancy that has been tested at a population level, and a revised version of the instrument is under evaluation to detect Asperger Syndrome also. In 1994, with his colleague Howard Ring, he published the first evidence that theory of mind relied on the orbito-frontal cortex, and in 1999 they published further evidence that theory of mind was also strongly dependent on the amygdala, a key region in the brain involved in decoding and responding to others' actions and mental states. These studies also demonstrated that in autism there is under-activity in these regions, while the person is thinking about other minds. His later theory, outlined in his 2003 book "The Essential Difference" (Penguin/Basic Books), was the first serious attempt to link the fields of typical sex differences in psychology with the field of autism. He proposed that on average, females develop faster in empathy and on average males develop faster in systemizing. People with autism, he argued, show an extreme of the typical male profile in having a disability in empathy alongside intact or even superior systemizing. Much of the empirical work testing this theory was in collaboration with his colleague Sally Wheelwright (See also EQ SQ Theory.) In a major program of research, summarized in his 2005 book "Prenatal Testosterone in Mind" (MIT Press), with his doctoral students Svetlana Lutchmaya, Rebecca Knickmeyer, Bonnie Auyeung, and Emma Chapman, he demonstrated that foetal testosterone (FT) levels (measured in the amniotic fluid) inversely predict social behaviour (e.g., eye contact at 12 months old), language development (e.g., vocabulary size at 24 months old), quality of social relationships at 4 years old, and empathy at 8 years old. FT levels also positively predict systemizing at 8 years old. A single biological mechanism (FT) thus appears to influence both empathy and systemizing, in opposite ways. He is currently testing if autism is associated with elevated FT. This link remains to be fully tested. (See also Sexual differentiation.) His prenatal androgen (FT) theory of autism is not at odds with a genetic theory, and Baron-Cohen has argued that whilst people on the autism spectrum are strong "systemizers" (showing a strong attraction to systems, and a drive to identify lawful or regular patterns within a system, as a way of understanding and predicting systems), so are their parents. His most recent idea is that autism may be the result of assortative mating of two strong systemizing parents. Evidence for this includes the finding that both mothers and fathers of children on the autism spectrum have excellent attention to and memory for detail (as measured on the Embedded Figures Test), and that the grandfathers of children with autism, on both sides of the family, are more likely to have worked in the field of engineering (which demands good systemizing skills) As a psychologist, Baron-Cohen's work has had far reaching influences in the fields of developmental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, primatology, philosophy of mind, as well as clinical psychology and psychiatry.
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