Simon Baron-Cohen Quotes

Some people say video games rot your brain, but I think they work different muscles that maybe you don't normally use.

To solve the Cube, you need special skills and understanding. For example, pattern recognition is very important to solve the Cube.

Autistic people's disabilities are widely known, but one of their best-established strengths is their attention to detail.

If you've got good systemising skills you can apply them to systems you aren't familiar with, and look for patterns.

Concentration is the root of all the higher abilities in man.

Humans evolved brains that are pattern-recognition machines, adept at detecting signals that enhance or threaten survival amid a very noisy world. ... But there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science.

Excelling at chess has long been considered a symbol of more general intelligence. That is an incorrect assumption in my view, as pleasant as it might be.

People who think well, write well

A chess master can keep track of more choices than the number of stars in the galaxy within an instant, but these are people that have truly learned and mastered the choices that they have and how to deal with those choices over a very, very long period of training, so essentially what they're really doing is ruling out all the irrelevant choices and only zeroing in on the most relevant, useful choices at the moment.

What will a child learn sooner than a song?

People talk about curing autism. But if you got rid of all those traits, who's going to make the next computer?

Being smart spoils a lot of things, doesn't it?

Intelligence is not discernment and judgment or critical evaluation.

I'm not the smartest dude in the world. (After all... I picked a career in acting.)

Reason and the ability to use it are two separate skills.

If intelligence were a television set, it would be an early black-and-white model with poor reception, so that much of the picture was gray and the figures on the screen were snowy and indistinct. You could fiddle with the knobs all you wanted, but unless you were careful, what you would see often depended more on what you expected or hoped to see than on what was really there.

Every habit makes our hand more witty and our wit less handy.

Brains first and then Hard Work.

A good method of discovery is to imagine certain members of a system removed and then see how what is left would behave: for example, where would we be if iron were absent from the world: this is an old example.

Some autistic people have savant skills. All autistic people do not have savant skills. Autism is a very variable disorder varying all the way from Einstein, emollient scientist, just a little bit of the trait, many scientist and engineers, down to somebody that's going to remain nonverbal.

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.

The human brain is like a memory system that records every thing that happens to us and makes intelligent predictions based on those experiences.

Microsoft has long hired based on IQ and "intellectual bandwidth."

It's a skill that people are born with. Either you're a focuser or you're a multitasky person. I am a full-focus person.

The power to concentrate was the most important thing. Living without this power would be like opening one’s eyes without seeing anything.