Autism explained: What's sex got to do with it? Part two

"I am interested in knowing the path a river takes from its source to the sea. Strongly agree? Slightly agree? Slightly disagree? Strongly disagree?"-- from the Systemizing Quotient questionnaire.

Baron-Cohen is 45. He grew up in Golder's Green, a middle-class and strongly orthodox Jewish neighborhood in North London. His father worked in the family menswear business; his mother taught dance. His first cousin, Sacha Baron-Cohen, is Ali G, the notorious assault comedian and on-air deflator of pompous windbags. Simon, in contrast, seems like he would be polite even to windbags. He is around six feet tall, with narrow, sloping shoulders and short, sandy hair that is beginning to show a male pattern; on the day we met he wore a blue short-sleeve shirt over khaki pants and sensible black shoes. The photo on his book jacket shows him without his wire-rim glasses, but he looks more natural with them on. His voice is mild and measured. Nothing in his bland and tidy little office -- a Cezanne print, a few framed book covers -- provides any obvious clues to where he is coming from.

Baron-Cohen himself offers one: He grew up with an older sister who is severely disabled, both mentally and physically. Today she lives in an institution, is confined to a wheelchair and has a very low IQ. "Yet despite that," says Baron-Cohen, "as soon as you walk into the room, she makes eye contact, her face lights up. Even though she has no language, you feel like you're connecting to another person."

In other words, she is the opposite of autistic. Autism is perfectly compatible with a high IQ -- yet some degree of social disconnectedness, of extreme self-centeredness, has been a core feature of the disorder ever since it was first described in the 1940s and given a name derived from the Greek word for self. Baron-Cohen first encountered it when, fresh out of Oxford with an undergraduate degree in developmental psychology, he went to work teaching autistic children one-to-one at a small school in London. It was then he realized that autism is fascinating as well as sad. "I was struck by this dissociation between intelligence and social development," he says. "It became glaringly obvious that they are two different things."

Thanks in part to Baron-Cohen, that understanding of autism is now widely shared -- which is one reason the number of children diagnosed as autistic has risen so dramatically in the past decade. Autism was once almost invariably associated with a below-normal IQ, and its prevalence was said to be around 4 in 10,000. Nowadays, ten times that many children are diagnosed with an autism-spectrum disorder, many of them at the high-functioning Asperger's end. With the explosion in diagnoses there has been an explosion in research. Geneticists are looking for genes linked to autism, which surely exist; the disease has been known to run in families. Neuroscientists are looking for the anatomical or physiological irregularities in the brain that must result from the anomalous genes.

Baron-Cohen is engaged in genetics and neurobiology, too, as codirector of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University. But his background is in cognitive psychology; he seeks to identify the basic mental processes that are common to all cases of autism and that link autistic behavior to its biological roots. In 1985, while still a graduate student at University College London, he made a breakthrough discovery of one such process. With his advisers Uta Frith and Alan Leslie, he presented autistic children with dolls named Sally and Anne, and the following story: Sally puts a marble in her basket and leaves the room. Anne takes the marble and hides it in her own box. Sally comes back and looks for her marble -- where does she look?

To read part three of this article click here.