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.
Interpretation
Autism may lead to a unique perspective, allowing for a focus on systemizing the world rather than relying on empathy.
In this quote, Simon Baron-Cohen suggests that individuals with autism might initially experience challenges with empathy or understanding others' thoughts and feelings. However, this could provide them with the opportunity to invest more time and effort in analyzing and systemizing the details of their environment, ultimately leading to a different but valuable way of engaging with the world.
In practice
During a seminar on autism and cognitive styles, this quote can illustrate the strengths found within neurodiverse individuals.
When I first started in this field there were all kinds of stereotypes about autism, as if these were children from another planet, or children who had been brought up by wolves, that they weren't part of our population and were somehow separate.
Empathy is like a universal solvent. Any problem immersed in empathy becomes soluble. It is effective as a way of anticipating and resolving interpersonal problems, whether this is a marital conflict, an international conflict, a problem at work, difficulties in a friendship, political deadlocks, a family dispute, or a problem with a neighbor.
Brains come in different types and they're all normal.
Well, in the general population, we find differences between the typical male and typical female. For example, males seem to be more interested in systems and females seem to be more interested in people and particularly people's emotions.
Empathy is a skill like any other human skill - and if you get a chance to practice, you can get better at it.
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.
Though many schizophrenics become curiously attached to their delusions, the fading of the nondelusional world puts them in loneliness beyond all reckoning, a fixed residence on a noxious private planet they can never leave, and where they can receive no visitors.
Neurotic behavior is quite predictable. Healthy behavior is unpredictable.
If we think about emotion this way - as outside-in, not inside out - it is possible to understand how some people can have an enormous amount of influence over others. Some of us, after all, are very good at expressiing emotions and feelings, which means that we are far more emotionally contagious than the rest of us.
Our lives are determined less by our childhood than by the traumatic way we have learned to remember our childhoods.
There is zero correlation between IQ and emotional empathy... They're controlled by different parts of the brain.
I'm fascinated by the ways in which people express themselves, because their responses are often counter to what they're actually feeling. Like when they're frightened, they tend to freeze. When they're angry, it doesn't always come out as volume. There are wonderful contradictions in the way that people express their emotions.
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