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.
Emotions are continually affecting our thought processes and decisions, below the level of our awareness. And the most common emotion of them all is the desire for pleasure and the avoidance of pain.
I wrote several articles criticizing psychoanalysis, but the analysts weren't listening to my objections. So I finally quit after practicing it for six years.
Had I left those images hidden in the emotions, I might have been torn to pieces by them.
Time perspective is one of the most powerful influences on all of human behavior. We're trying to show how people become biased to being exclusively past-, present- or future-oriented.
It's my belief that, since the end of the Second World War, psychology has moved too far away from its original roots, which were to make the lives of all people more fulfilling and productive, and too much toward the important, but not all-important, area of curing mental illness.
Delusional pain hurts just as much as pain from actual trauma. So what if it's all in your head?
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