EPISODE 24 - Professor Simon Baron-Cohen
“We need carefully controlled trials to evaluate safety as well as benefits”
Professor Simon Baron-Cohen
In today’s podcast, I spoke with Simon Baron-Cohen. Professor Baron-Cohen is a world expert in the field of Autism research, and we had a wide-ranging discussion on this topic. The ways in which psychedelic compounds interface with different styles of cognition is a fascinating area, and the exploration of how psychedelic compounds are experienced phenomenologically by those on the spectrum is largely untilled scientific soil.
In today’s podcast We Discuss;
Simon’s first introduction to working with Autistic students as a teacher in the early part of his professional life,
Simon’s broad grounding in the intersection of social and biological sciences as an undergraduate,
Simon’s thoughts on Applied Behavioural Analysis, (ABA) and his desire to focus on the inner world of the Autistic person,
Simon’s postgraduate mentor, the developmental psychologist Uta Frith,
Simon’s first-hand experience of disability within his family through his sister’s condition (Sturge Weber Syndrome) and how this sensitized him towards a respect for neurodiversity and protecting the rights of disabled people,
Our shared repudiation of the notion that IQ is in any way related to ‘human value’,
IQ-based discrimination and how we need to examine our social attitudes in a nuanced and ongoing way,
The advantage of long from podcasts as a crucible for cross-disciplinary discussion,
Simon’s training as a Clinical Psychologist, and his early work in the diagnosis of Autism,
The dark history of the pediatrician Han’s Asperger and his collaboration with the Nazis,
Simon’s conceptualization of how to optimally ‘diagnose’ Autism, and the tension between the medical model and the social model of Autism,
Simon’s thoughts on Neurodiversity, and how to celebrate the differences whilst acknowledging the challenges entailed,
Simon’s book The Pattern Seekers, and the Stories of Jonah, and Thomas Eddison,
The link between savantism and Autism and the relative rarity of savantes within the Autism community,
The potentially soothing nature of repetitive phenomena for Autistic people,
The evolutionary emergence of the ‘If -And-Then’ systematizing mechanism/logic - which Simon traces back to between 70 - 100,000 years ago and which he argues is the basis of all invention,
The concept of generative invention and Simon’s theory that this is the exclusive preserve of Homo Sapiens,
The empathy quotient and systematizing quotient questionnaire,
Simon Baron Cohen’s work with 23 and me,
The Disability Resource Centre at Cambridge University,
the link between STEM and Autism,
Simon’s study demonstrating that autism rates were higher in an IT-rich region in the Netherlands,
Spectrum 10k, and the concerns amongst some members of the autism community,
Cognitive empathy vs Affective empathy,
Simon’s consultation with King’s College London as they investigate the therapeutic potential of psilocybin on autistic adults,
The process of seeking an autism diagnosis.
Simon Baron-Cohen
Professor of Developmental Psychopathology
image credit - Autism Research Centre
Sir Simon Philip Baron-Cohen FBA FBPsS FMedSci is a British clinical psychologist and professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge. He is the director of the university's Autism Research Centre and a Fellow of Trinity College. In 1985, Baron-Cohen formulated the mind-blindness theory of autism, the evidence for which he collated and published in 1995. In 1997, he formulated the fetal sex steroid theory of autism, the key test of which was published in 2015.
He has also made major contributions to the fields of typical cognitive sex differences, autism prevalence and screening, autism genetics, autism neuroimaging, autism and technical ability, and synaesthesia. Baron-Cohen was knighted in the 2021 New Year Honours for services to autistic people.