181. Utilizing Neurodiversity with Sir Simon Baron-Cohen (Part 1)

Welcome, my name is Greg McEwen and I'm your host. And I'm here with you on this journey to learn so that we can be utilized at our highest point of contribution. Have you ever felt that you were neurodiverse in some way? Did you ever struggle with the traditional school system? Did you or someone you know take away from school the worst of all possible learnings? That you were they were unintelligent. Well today I have invited Professor Simon Baron Cohen, the author of The Patton Seekers, a new theory of human invention to be on the show. This is part one of two interviews in which Simon takes from his 40 years of research at the University of Cambridge. In order to help people who are neurodiverse, particularly people on the autistic spectrum to be able to operate at their very best and for the rest of us to be able to figure out how to work with them so that we can draw the best from them. By the end of this interview you will better understand how to utilize your neurodiversity and the people that you live and work with. Let's get to it. To get the most from this podcast I would encourage you to sign up for the one minute Wednesday newsletter. You go to gregmakewin forward slash one M W and can sign up for free there. And if you sign up now you'll get the first chapter of Effortless for Free. Simon welcome to the podcast. Thank you very much for the invitation. In Patton Seekers you ask a big interesting question. Is there a link between autism and invention? Can you just unpack that question? Sure, I mean on the face of it these are two very different things. Autism is a disability diagnosed on the basis of difficulties with social skills, social relationships, communication and difficulties in adjusting to unexpected change. So why would that have anything to do with invention? And in my book The Patton Seekers I talk particularly about generative invention which is the I think uniquely human ability not just to invent once in a one-off way but to invent over and over again in different ways to innovate. What I do is take the reader through I think a lot of evidence that actually autistic people have brains that are different. So this comes under the heading of neuro diversity. There are different kinds of brains. They're different and they're autistic people have a particular aptitude and interest in patterns, special kinds of patterns. I call them if and then patterns are all around us in the world and which comprise systems. And autistic people are very interested in how systems work, how things work and they have a fascination to analyze the patterns in the world around us. And I make the case that actually when it comes to invention, invention is nothing but being able to look for these rules or patterns that govern systems and then introducing changes in those rules, changes to the if, changes to the and or changes to the then. So if I give an example maybe it just make it a bit more concrete. Yes. You know if we think about the earliest musical instrument that's ever been found it dates about 40,000 years ago and it was a flute made from a hollow bone from a bird and we have to imagine the ancestor, the human ancestor that made it would be thinking if I blow down this hollow bone and I cover one hole then make a particular sound. But if I blow down the hollow bone and cover two holes then it'll make a different sound. So it's this if and then it's experimenting with patterns and whether we're talking about inventing a piece of music or inventing a musical instrument or inventing anything like a vaccine. You know we're still inventing 40,000 years later. I mean the evidence suggests we've been doing this between 70 and 100,000 years, the case of Homo sapiens. And when we look at modern day autistic people they seem to have a particular aptitude at this if and then pattern recognition skill. I was just having a conversation with someone who was diagnosed with autism within the last six months and a couple of things really struck me about that and your research. The first thing is how confusing her life has been as the modern world has tried to make sense of her and as she's tried to make sense of it with just all of the modern ideas I won't even say theories just modern society and what stories it has given her about why she's different and how that has made her life extremely challenging until this diagnosis. And then the second thing is I'm not sure I've ever met anybody as exceptionally brilliant at being able to articulate how concepts work with other concepts and to be able to operate at that level at many layers of sophistication. And I think of myself as somebody who likes to extrapolate in that way and to think about the complexity of the world and it was just really rich to be able to sit with her and to talk and to go so deep and to swatch somebody with her magnificent ability. Anyway, I just wanted your reaction to any of that. Well both of your observations are interesting. So your first observation is actually receiving the diagnosis helped her in some way. It helped her to make sense of how she's probably been feeling different all her life. I mean you didn't reveal to me or to our listeners how old this person is but if she got her diagnosis in adulthood it means she's had a whole lifetime maybe of feeling different but not having a label for it, not having an explanation. Yeah, let's say she's 17 or 18. Yeah, so you know that's a lot of years to be feeling you know I feel different to other people. Right. I don't feel like I fit in. I feel like I'm on the margins and I don't know why. So sometimes a diagnosis can come as a huge relief. You know that finally there's a kind of explanation that this is you know that autism is basically a different way that the brain is wired up. We've been used to calling it kind of neurological but that makes it sound very medical. I think the new way of thinking about autism and about all of us is that we're all different neurologically. All of our brains are different and autism is just one variety of difference if you like. But once you know that you know my brain works differently you know you can kind of accept who you are and then the other observation you made is you know that she's got this remarkable talent at well in her case analyzing concepts and maybe the relationship between concepts. It's kind of taking things apart and we're only looking at the detail and whether we're talking about a concept or a network of concepts or whether we're looking at you know a computer in front of you and trying to understand how that works. All of we're looking at the pond in the garden which is a little ecosystem but it's still a system with all of its moving parts and trying to understand how that system works. What I've noticed meeting lots of autistic people across my career is that different autistic people latch on to different systems but what they show a strength in is analyzing systems and sometimes you see it just in the play of a young autistic child where they become fascinated by the water coming out of the tap or the faucet. You know where they're playing with how you could make adjustments to it to change the flow of the water or they might become fascinated by the washing machine going round and round on its cycle but it's actually a system that they're analyzing and becoming really expert in. They may be watching the same Disney cartoon a hundred times because they're really analyzing the sequence of information so that they can anticipate and spot every detail and it's this remarkable attention to detail and memory for detail often attention to patterns that I think can sometimes translate into a capacity to invent, to think differently, do things differently. You're not the first person to suggest that people who are autistic have some vague sense of special ability but you're going more precisely than others in trying to identify in what way those differences can be exceptionally valuable and just a more precise view of what's really going on in that neurodiverse mind. Is this a fair way of expressing it? What am I getting wrong? I think that's a nice description and thank you for that. I would say that I've been conducting autism research for now 40 years so all the fields change a lot over those decades and I would say that at least for the first half of my career both me but also other scientists were focusing on the disability side of autism. The aspects of autism that don't work so to speak. Where the person struggles. Yes. Right. And maybe what we were missing was not just the areas where autistic people can manage but sometimes where they actually outshine other people. They have strengths where they can actually perform at a higher level than other people. There's always been this paradox that autism is a disability but also autism can include strengths or even talents. I think the field and also the world is beginning to recognize autism is both a disability and the difference and that those differences have to be celebrated or should be celebrated. I felt something when I was speaking with this friend of mine and we talked for a couple of hours extremely intensely and invigorating conversation that her future was exceedingly bright. And there was the possibility of her writing books and being superb if she could somehow find a way, a space to be able to build her life around these abilities and somehow make the other challenges less relevant. Well now you've given me one more detail about this person which is her age. You told me she's 16 or 17 or 18 or 17 or 18. 17 or 18. So she's a kind of a late teenager and the real question is if she had got the support at the earliest possible point in her life, where would she be today? But given that she's been born into a society which often excludes autistic people or makes autistic people feel there's something wrong with them, you know, there's a real danger and I've seen this in many cases that by the time you get to 17 or 18 years old, you're not only autistic but you also have poor mental health, low self-esteem, low self-confidence, maybe feeling that you're not accepted or included. So you know, we've ended up paradoxically again with on the one hand this view that autistic people across 70 to 100,000 years may have made remarkable contributions to human progress. On the other hand, in the 21st century, we seem to have structured a society where we don't accept difference very easily and we can even be creating poor mental health in people who don't fit the majority. And is the hypothesis that, for example, the traditional schooling system is especially poorly prepared to be able to notice, ascertain and then help develop those distinctions? So if we think about it, I mean, the education system does its best but it's designed as a kind of one size fits all. Complete. When you went to school, when I went to school, you know, we were expected to sit in the class of 25 other kids and, you know, we're expected to look at the teacher and listen to what he or she is saying. And you know, so all of that involves learning in a social context and learning from a person with facial expressions and language and gesture and so forth. But that doesn't always fit the learning style of many autistic people. You know, a lot of autistic people might say, actually, I don't learn very well by listening to a teacher at the front of the class with all the not the background noise of 24 other kids. And also, maybe that's a child who prefers to learn by doing those little experiments we were talking about or maybe learn from the internet or from books, learning in a more solitary way, which is just not possible in a noisy classroom. And then imagine that after 30 minutes, a bell rings and you're asked to switch from the topic that was being presented, let's say it was geography, to switch to something completely different, let's say it's French, and autistic people like to kind of follow one thing in depth. I don't necessarily do very well when they're told now it's time to switch your attention because their kind of way of processing information is to prioritize depth over breadth. You know, that they really want to understand the system, whether we're talking about a particular battle in history or whether we're talking about, I don't know what happens to polar ice caps, if it's geography, they really want to understand that one thing as well as they can, as perfectly as they can all the detail. So they kind of what's called the neurotypical approach to learning and classroom design and teaching may actually be doing a lot of harm to some types of minds. And it's no surprise that a lot of autistic kids, you know, they underachieve. They give them dropout of school by teens. You know, they found the whole experience of being at school miserable. That was their one chance at education and the system failed them. And I want to sort of add one level of depth to this, which is for everybody listening to this conversation, whether the person listening is autistic or not, there's a higher percentage of the people listening that are neurodiverse in some way, that the entire conversation is immediately relevant. This isn't only for someone who's autistic or that is the parent of someone who's autistic or the uncle. And that's already a big percentage. I mean, there's a lot of people that are directly affected and are working with people who have autism, but this broader question of being neurodiverse and that the way your brain is actually wired is less effective or that the system of education was less effective for you. Yeah. So it's a very kind of radical or revolutionary idea that we may have to rethink how we design schools and the whole education system so that it's not failing a certain minority. Some people say that autism is 2% of the population, but if you included all of the other ways, you could be neurodiverse. So people with ADHD, people with dyslexia, people with dyspraxia, people with dyscalculia, the list goes on. It may be 25% of the school population or 25% of society. It's a lot of people that we're not making accommodations for. And then we get out of this experience, the deepest, least correct conclusions about ourselves at a foundational level, something like, you know, you're unintelligent, you're dumb, you can't do this simply because a system is designed for some other kind of mind, some other kind of learning. And so I don't know what the percentage of people are that come out that wouldn't, we wouldn't just say, well, they failed, but they still got a lesson that is disabling them. Yeah. Or arguably the rest of their lives. No, I just can't learn. I can't do this. Yeah, go ahead. Well, Greg, I want to acknowledge that, you know, what you've just said shows your empathy for people who are being, as we said, failed by the system, you know, because their experience, the way they may interpret their experience is there's something wrong with me. I don't seem to be able to learn. That's entirely the wrong conclusion, but it's an understandable conclusion. And if they ended up taking that message away from their schooling, that could have really long term effects on your self esteem. There's two thoughts I have that are ringing together here. The first is that 30 years ago, I was just doing the mathematics of that, I was sick form in England, and my sociology report was on autism. And I reached out to, it's a curious question as to whether I may have reached out to you. I don't have the list anymore, but I reached out to something like the top 100 experts in autism as well as I could identify it and wrote to them and heard back from many experts, so kind of people to do it when I think in hindsight, in trying to understand in greater depth what the impact of autism is in our society. And I remember thinking about the ripple syndrome and the idea that whatever the percentage is, the number of people impacted is far greater, but it's limited by our awareness and our understanding and so on. And so I wonder if you could just share the earliest origins for why you chose to invest what is now 40 years effectively, the totality of your professional life invested in this subject. Yeah, well, it's not the totality because here I am, I'm still doing it. So far, should I say I should have chosen a better word? No, that's okay, because what I'm fascinated with is how the field doesn't stay still. Our understanding of autism has changed enormously over that period. Who we call autistic has changed over that period. But just to answer your question, I mean, I came into this field because I had the opportunity straight after I graduated from my undergraduate degree. I had the opportunity to work as a teacher in a school for autistic kids. That was my kind of my opportunity to kind of meet autistic people. This is back in the early 80s when the word autism wasn't a kind of everyday word. Not at all. And the unit I was working in was a kind of experimental unit. They didn't really know what to offer these kids. Right. So I had the privilege in a way to be in a very experimental school where they were filming all through every lesson to see what worked and what didn't work. Wow. To see what might lead to a connection between a teacher and a child. It was one to one. So there were six kids and six teachers. Good grief. But also you could review those video films at the end of each day to see what had led to some kind of meltdown or shut down in the child. You know, just to try to understand what is this person's experience. I became fascinated with it, not least because, you know, it's scientifically a puzzle. Why do, you know, why do some individuals have brains that are very different? But also it's a real world issue. We have to figure out. What should society be doing? And what is society not doing to make it comfortable for autistic children and adults? But over those, you know, decades, you know, back then, most of the people getting a diagnosis didn't just have autism or it weren't just. They also had additional, you know, co-occurring conditions like learning disability or language delay or epilepsy and whole range. And today, I think, you know, what's really changed is the breadth of our definition of autism. You know, we now recognize autism in people who do not have a learning disability. It do not have language delays. It's brought many more people into the category that we call autism. Is the language correct to simply say, high functioning, you know, high functioning person with autism? What would be the right language be now? For people that don't struggle with learning difficulties in the same way as in the past? Yeah. So I wouldn't use the term high functioning because for many autistic people, that's seen as potentially offensive. Yes. You know, because, you know, the implication is that other people are low functioning. This kind of implicit or even explicit hierarchy where one type of autism is better than another, we want to, you know, move right away from any risk of stigmatizing one subgroup. So you know, the language that I use is, I say, autistic people with or without learning disability because it's just a bit more descriptive. Yeah, it doesn't carry any value judgment. You know, an autistic person with or without language delay or, you know, that some autistic people have minimal language and other people do not. You know, so you just trying to be very careful in our language so that we're not inadvertently stigmatizing. Yeah, that's exactly the purpose of the question. What do you see as the primary benefit of this evolution of understanding about who's autistic and so on? Like, why does that matter? Why is that progress in your mind? Well, you know, until we recognized autism without learning disabilities, it may have meant that lots of people, perhaps like this 17 year old we were talking about, right? Right. They were struggling in a neurotypical world without a diagnosis. And you know, many of them may have ended up with clinical depression because they didn't know why they weren't fitting in. Some of them may have ended up feeling suicidal as they weren't getting the right support. So diagnosis, I think, does matter in the sense that in an ideal world, diagnosis leads to support. The real world, sadly, is still quite far away from that ideal as you may know that for many people, even if you suspect your autistic and you go to your family doctor to get a referral to a clinic that can diagnose autism, often there are long waiting lists. You may be waiting for a year or longer just to get your diagnosis. And even after you've got a diagnosis, often there are no support services. So you know, if the government is listening to our conversation, Greg, you know, they need to put some funding into disability, but this is one particular disability because the funding that's available, you know, whether it's about educational support or whether it's about support into employment or support to prevent the risks of isolation and loneliness. There's a lot of different aspects that autistic people struggle with and they don't need to be struggling with it if in a civilized society we're creating the right support systems. So I'm curious on that on multiple levels, but my own exposure to autism at an early age took place because my family provided respite care for children with a variety of disabilities, including autism. So we had a young man who lived with us almost full time for about three years in my early teenage years. And so that sort of experience and exposure, of course, changes your own understanding of how the world works and how people work. And so it's extremely valuable. And of course, this was also a government program. So I could see and can see even as you describe it, what can be done if the right support is given to the right individual. So I think, like hearing this story, you know, this was either one parent or both of your parents. Yes. Yeah. Both my parents. Yes. Yeah. So both of your parents, you know, kind of offering this opportunity for people with disabilities to come and live with you. I mean, that's kind of unusual, but again, in an ideal world, it wouldn't be the case that the person with the disability needs to leave their own family and come and live with your family. Yeah, for sure. I mean, there may be circumstances where that has to happen. If the original family is not coping, if the parent of this person with disabilities, you know, themselves is struggling and they need respite, I think that's the word you do. Correct. But in an ideal world, a compassionate society would be supporting people with disabilities to flourish and prosper in their own families. But we've got to think about it at multiple levels. You know, well-being is the result of multiple different aspects of your life, which include friendships, your leisure time, your time at school, you know, your aspirations, what you might wish to do after you leave school, just to make sure that each person has the best chance to fulfill their potential and isn't ending up as a majority of autistic people these days end up not just autistic, but also with depression or anxiety. So we're leaning in already to what to do. And I want to just go there more explicitly. So if someone's listening to this and they say, I think I might be somehow on the autistic spectrum without learning disability and just now, even as an adult, even mid-career discovering this, putting language to it, I think there is something inherently liberating about that moment because you suddenly say, oh, that's why I experienced the world I have. There's some opportunity in that correct diagnosis. What can they do to be able to take advantage of that neurodiverse mind? Yeah. Let's go to that question. Given the previous conversation about the lack of services, we need to be realistic. So now we're talking about someone who's just been diagnosed in adulthood. And so what can they reasonably expect? And one thing they can do is that when they go for a job, they could tell their employer, by the way, I'm autistic. And it doesn't cost much for the employer to say no big deal. In other words, to react with acceptance and respect for difference. So let's say you came to me, I'm your employer and you say, I'm autistic. I might say, well, Greg, that's absolutely fine. Tell me what we can do in our workplace to make things more comfortable for you. And it may be some quite minor adjustments. For example, you might say, well, I find it really difficult to concentrate with fluorescent lighting. For real example, that many autistic people find the flicker rate of fluorescent lighting is actually a relative. So we could just, you know, we could use a different kind of desk lamp. Or you might say, you know, well, actually, I find it much easier to work with my headphones on, noise canceling headphones, because then I can really concentrate because even background whispering from colleagues in an open plan office, you know, it's so loud for me because a lot of autistic people have sensory hypersensitivity. So these are kind of small adjustments that the employer could make. What's the medical term for that? Hypera? Yeah, it can be called hyperacusis, but that's just particularly for hearing. The more kind of general term I used was sensory hypersensitivity because it could also be visual. It could be auditory. It could be tactile. It could be, you know, olfactory taste. You know, the autistic people in all of their senses often experience the world more intensely, you know, so even like the t-shirt that I'm wearing, you know, for some autistic people, this t-shirt is comfortable, but that t-shirt is like sandpaper. So smaller accommodations could be actually really meaningful for autistic people. This 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. Remember to sign up for the One Minute Wednesday newsletter. Just go to gregmecuan.com and it's in the top right hand corner and you can join there now 155,000 people will sign up for the newsletter. It will reinforce your learning. It will help to make what's essential as effortless as possible. Thank you. Really, thank you for listening and I'll see you next time. ♪♪♪. ♪♪♪.