55 Quotes by Simon Baron-Cohen

If you have high-functioning autism, you may well have a lot of autistic traits but if you've got a particular lifestyle where it's possibly an advantage to be leading a solitary lifestyle and be quite obsessive, you're clearly able to function and maybe even make valuable contributions in your work, so arguably you don't need a diagnosis.

It may be true in the case of autism that if you start off with a deficit in terms of empathy or mind reading, you've just got more time to devote to understanding the world by systemizing.

Everyone recognises that genes are part of the story but autism isn't 100% genetic. Even if you have identical twins who share all their genes, you can find that one has autism and one doesn't. That means that there must be some non-genetic factors.

Baby girls, as young as 12 months old, respond more empathically to the distress of other people, showing greater concern through more sad looks, sympathetic vocalisations and comforting. This echoes what you find in adulthood: more women report frequently sharing the emotional distress of their friends.

The E-S theory does not stereotype. Rather, it seeks to explain why individuals are typical or atypical for their sex.

Difficulty empathising translates into a whole set of hurdles. You might be last person to get the point of a joke, which can leave you feeling like an outsider. You might end up saying something that another person finds hurtful or offensive, when that was the last thing you intended.

There are people with Asperger's whom I've met who certainly would be very upset to learn they'd hurt another person's feelings. They often have very strong moral consciences and moral codes. They care about not hurting people.

The idea of a cure for autism is itself controversial. Some people with autism say they don't want to be cured, because autism gives them a different way of looking at the world.

It is possible that by studying autism we'll learn about the nature of talent. Supposedly there's no connection between scientific talent and autism, but if we look closely, we find a very basic connection.