Simon Baron-Cohen
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
Professor Simon Baron-Cohen is the director of the Autism Research Centre in Cambridge, in the United Kingdom.He is a Professor of Developmental Psychopathology in the Departments of Psychiatry and Experimental Psychology in Cambridge, and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
He is a renowned psychologist and has proposed several seminal concepts in understanding autism and in developmental behavioural neuroscience, that include theory of mind, eye direction detection, empathizing and systemizing as personality dimensions, and extreme systemizing as a possible feature underlying the autistic brain. He has also discovered that fetal testosterone is correlated with traits that in autism are extremes of normal variation (such as eye contact or language development).
Baron-Cohen is a psychologist interested in the developmental psychology of theory of mind. He brought together findings from primate behavioural literature and philosophy of other minds to suggest, along with Uta Frith and Alan Leslie, that autistic children might be exhibiting a theory of mind impairment.He also suggested the existence of an 'Eye Direction Detector' module in the brain, that enables human beings to attribute mental states and complex emotions to others. He is strongly influenced by the cognitive neuroscience approach to psychology, but also writes books aimed at providing information about complex neurological problems with profound psychological consequenses, such as autism and Tourette's Syndrome to carers, health professionals and others.
He has written five books, among which Mindblindness(1995) is a classic and has edited three.
In Baron-Cohen's recent book The Essential Difference(2004) he argues there are innate differences between male and female brains. Female brains are predominantly wired for empathy, he claims, and male brains are predominantly wired for "understanding and building systems". Autism is described as an extreme version of the male brain, which helps explain why it is more common among males.
In addition to autism, Baron-Cohen is also one of the pioneers in the empirical study of synaesthesia, and has written a book on it.(Synaesthesia, 1997)
External links
- Bio on Autism Research Centre website (http://www.autismresearchcentre.com/arc/staff_member.asp?id=33)
- Excerpt from The Essential Difference (http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4649492-111414,00.html)
- Uta Frith (http://www.icn.ucl.ac.uk/dev_group/people.htm)
- Alan Leslie (http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~aleslie/)
