Simon Baron-Cohen Quotes

When you've grown up always knowing that there's something that seemed to be different about you from most people - and not being able to understand until my mid-forties that what we were talking about here was autism - I've had to learn an awful let about myself and what I can and can't do and what I can or can't cope with.

Most people assume that autistic people are not capable of empathy.

I have a condition called Aspergers Syndrome, which is like a mild form of autism It means I don't interact properly in certain social situations.

Autism does exist on a spectrum, and there are so many manifestations of it, so many kinds of expressions of it. And every case is particular.

The first meaning of 'cognitive' for us is that observations of others are made phenomenologically: i.e., by attempting to take the role of the other, to see things from his or her conscious viewpoint.

My theory is that the female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy, and that the male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems.

And I'm autistic, which means I can be hyperfocused but also all over the place at the same time. I think I'm very lucky to have found cooking because it's the one area where a brain like mine really thrives.

In the person with autism, the brain may already be seeing the part and be less distracted by the whole, and in the person without autism the brain may have to set aside its picture of the whole to analyze the detail.

Emotion-enabled wearable glasses can help individuals who are visually impaired read the faces of others, and it can help individuals on the autism spectrum interpret emotion, something that they really struggle with.

If we think about the autism spectrum as involving a very strong drive to systemize, that can have very positive consequences for the individual and for society. The downside is that when you try to systemize certain parts of the world like people and emotions, those sorts of phenomena are less lawful and harder to systemize.

Part of being a sentient human is the ability to anticipate others' mental states - to say "Fred's going to hate this but Jane would love it."

Many doctors are drawn to this profession (psychology) because they have an innate deficiency of insight into the motives, feelings and thoughts of others, a deficiency they hope to remedy by ingesting masses of data.

I think a brain can be made "more thinking" or made "more emotional." At what point does this become abnormal? Autism in its milder variants, I think, is part of normal human variation.

Social thinking skills must be directly taught to children and adults with ASD. Doing so opens doors of social understandings in all areas of life.

There's a saying within the Asperger community: if you've met one person with Asperger's syndrome, you've met one person with Asperger's syndrome ... Within this condition, beneath this label, the variety of personality, of humor, of behavior, is infinite.

We all think that we are uniquely complex, that no one can see what we are thinking - yet we also believe that we have the rare ability to read others. This fascinates me at the moment.

Kids don't talk like adults, but kids on the spectrum don't necessarily fall into the same patterns of speaking or have the same interests as other kids their age.

Imaginary friends are one of the weirder forms of pretend play in childhood. But the research shows that imaginary friends actually help children understand the other people around them and imagine all the many ways that people could be.

The habit of common and continuous speech is a symptom of mental deficiency. It proceeds from not knowing what is going on in other people's minds.

Emotions are messy and hard to figure out. Hard to know where you start and the next person stops. Even as an adult, that's a hard thing to know. As a kid, it can be really confusing, because it's all new and you're trying to sort of make your map.

The thing about being autistic is that you gradually get less and less autistic, because you keep learning, you keep learning how to behave. It's like being in a play; I'm always in a play.

I think humans are just hard-wired to process people's faces and understand meaning and expression at such a more granular level than other types of communication.

Having two children with autism, it makes you really think about how we do relate to each other.

Play is a uniquely adaptive act, not subordinate to some other adaptive act, but with a special function of its own in human experience.

As a parent with a child with autism, it's been really tough to experience your child having autism.