Men and women have different brains. This notion has been the subject of increasing scientific analysis, media interest, and pulp psychology of the “men are from...” variety. Now, Simon Baron-Cohen (professor of psychology at Cambridge University) has drawn on 20 years of clinical and academic experience and attempted to summarise the research on this subject—an impressive proportion of which is his own—and its implications for the future.
Figure 1.
Simon Baron-Cohen
Allen Lane, £16.99, pp 263 ISBN 0 713 99671 4
Rating: ★★★
Baron-Cohen argues that there are three kinds of normal human brain: “empathising” (type E), “systemising” (type S), and “balanced” (type B, which is a meld of types E and S). With a reader friendly style and using fascinating data, he states his central claim that, on average, men have a type S brain, while the female brain is predominantly type E. There are exceptions, in that some men may have a type E brain and some women a type S brain. He goes on to consider the current (and evolutionary) strengths and weaknesses of these three types of brain.
He defines empathising as having a cognitive and an affective component—you perceive what another person might be thinking and you have an appropriate emotional reaction. Systemising is “the drive to understand a system and to build one.” Its aim is to “discover the causes of things,” allowing control of one's environment. At its extreme, the author argues, the systemising brain is autistic (what he calls the “extreme male brain”). This explains the islets of ability seen in some autistic people (despite their associated mental retardation) and the narrow, yet often profound, depth of focus in the enthusiasms of people with Asperger's syndrome (such as, probably, Newton and Einstein).
Some of the data that Baron-Cohen presents are depressingly deterministic. The author's own team followed up a group of infants at one and then two years of age. They discovered that the higher the levels of prenatal testosterone, the less eye contact the child made as a toddler (with a correspondingly smaller vocabulary). The implication is that by measuring testosterone one can predict a toddler's potential for empathy. What is new about this line of inquiry is that it opens up a possibility that autism may be connected to prenatal concentrations of testosterone (the research has yet to be done).
Baron-Cohen rightly concludes his exploration of this contentious subject by considering the ethical implications. We now contemplate a future where prenatal sex hormone levels could be altered, so as to avoid the possibility of autism or even a child with a “systemising” brain. Would this serve humanity? Quite rightly, Baron-Cohen defends the importance of brain variety, including the extreme male brain. “Without autism,” argues one of his autistic patients, “we might not have fire and the wheel.” Our difference is essential.