In part the deluded perceptions stem from fixating on the wrong bits of data: college-age women tend to focus on the most attractive or the thinnest women around, so they compare themselves to the most extreme standard rather than to the true average—they mistake the extreme for the norm.
College men are by no means impervious to making a parallel error, though in a different realm: drinking. Those prone to reckless binge drinking judge themselves by the standards of the most excessive drinkers. This misperception leads them to believe they have to overindulge to fit in.
In contrast, those who perform such everyday mindreading more accurately avoid the error of taking the extreme as the norm. Instead they first gauge how similar the other person is to them. If they sense similarity, they simply assume the other person thinks and feels much as they do. A seamless social life depends on a continual stream of such snap judgments—mindsight on the run. We are all mindreaders.
THE MALE BRAIN
Temple Grandin was diagnosed as autistic in childhood. As she tells it, the other kids in school called her Tape Recorder, because the young Temple used the same phrases over and over again in every conversation—and there were very few topics she found interesting.7
One of her favorites was to go up to another kid and announce, “I went to Nantasket Park, and I went on the rotor, and I really like the way it pushed me against the wall.” Then she’d ask, “How did you like it?”
And once the other kids told her how they had liked the ride, Grandin would repeat herself word for word—over and over again, like a looping tape.
Adolescence announced itself to Temple as a “tidal wave of anxiety that never stopped,” another symptom of autism. Here her unique insights into how animals perceive the world—which she likens to the hypersensitivities of people with autism—helped her immensely.
While visiting a dude ranch in Arizona owned by her aunt, Temple saw a herd of cattle on a nearby ranch being run through a “squeeze chute” made of metal bars in an open-V that get progressively narrower as the cow walks through. At one point an air compressor closes the V, squeezing the cow and holding it in place while a vet goes to work.
Instead of being scared by the squeeze, cows calm down while in its tight grasp. Deep pressure like that, Temple realized, is calming—like a baby in swaddling. She immediately saw that something like a squeeze chute would help her, too.
So with the help of a high school teacher, Temple patched together a human squeeze chute out of wood and an air compressor, sized to a person down on all fours. And it works. Whenever she feels the need to calm down, she uses it to this day.
Grandin is unusual in many ways, not the least of which is her diagnosis of autism. Boys are four times as likely as girls to develop autism and ten times more likely to be diagnosed with Asperger’s. Simon Baron-Cohen makes the radical proposal that the neural profile of people with these disorders represents the utter extreme of the prototypical “male” brain.
The extreme male brain, he argues, has no clue when it comes to mindsight; its circuitry for empathy remains stunted. But that deficiency comes paired with intellectual strengths, like the mind-boggling laser-focused abilities of savants who can solve complex math problems at rates matched only by computers. Although mindblind, such hypermale brains can be gifted when it comes to understanding systems, such as the stock market, software, and quantum physics.
The most extreme “female” brain, in contrast, excels at empathy and understanding others’ thoughts and feelings. Those with this pattern shine at callings like teaching and counseling; as psychotherapists, they are wonderfully empathic and attuned to the inner world of their clients. But those with the ultrafemale pattern have grave difficulties with systematizing, be it applying directions to that fork in the road up ahead or studying theoretical physics. They are, in his word, “systemblind.”
Baron-Cohen devised a test to determine how easily someone senses what others feel. The test is called the EQ, for “empathy quotient” (not for “emotional intelligence,” as EQ now signifies in several languages), and women on average outscore men. Women also outscore men on measures of social cognition like understanding what would be a faux pas in a given social situation, and on empathic accuracy, intuiting what another person would be feeling or thinking.8 Finally, women tend to outscore men on Baron-Cohen’s test of reading a person’s feelings from their eyes alone (see Chapter 6).
But when it comes to systems thinking, the advantage tips to the male brain. As Baron-Cohen points out, men score higher than women, on average, on tests of an intuitive knack for mechanics; keeping track of complicated systems; “Where’s Waldo?” fine attention, detecting figures hidden among complex designs; and visual search in general. And on these tests people with autism outscore most men, just as they score the poorest of any group on tests of empathy.
Talking about a so-called “male” or “female” brain gets us into dangerous terrain in social politics. As I write, the president of Harvard University has raised a ruckus with remarks implying that women are innately unsuited for careers in the hard sciences. But Baron-Cohen would abhor any attempts to use his theory to discourage women from becoming engineers—or men from entering the ranks of psychotherapists, for that matter.9 For the vast majority of people, Baron-Cohen finds, men’s and women’s brains are in the same ability range for empathy and systems thinking; moreover, many women are brilliant in systematizing, while many men are superb at empathy.
Temple Grandin, perhaps has what Baron-Cohen would call a male brain. For one thing, she has published more than three hundred scholarly papers in animal science. A leading expert on animal behavior, Grandin has developed the designs used by half the cattle-handling systems in the United States. Those systems are based on her remarkable understanding of how to make conditions more humane for the thousands and thousands of cows who pass through them daily. Her expertise has made Grandin a leading reformer in the quality of life of the world’s agricultural animals.
The optimal pattern, says Baron-Cohen, is to have a “balanced” brain, one that has strengths in both empathy and systematizing. A physician with these abilities, for instance, would be able to render precise diagnoses and elegant treatment plans, all the while making patients feel heard, understood, and cared about.
Even so, strengths can be found at each extreme. While those with the most “male” brain have a high likelihood of exhibiting symptoms of Asperger’s or autism, they can excel in many fields if, like Professor Borcherds, they find a congenial setting to apply their talents. Yet the ordinary social world seems an alien planet to them, so that the most basic rudiments of interaction have to be learned by rote, if at all.
MAKING SENSE OF PEOPLE
“Oh! You’re so old!” was the first thing Layne Habib’s teenage daughter blurted out on seeing a middle-aged shopkeeper.
“Maybe she doesn’t want to hear that,” Habib whispered.
“Why not?” her daughter asked, adding matter-of-factly, “In Japan the elderly are honored.”
This exchange typifies their ongoing mother-daughter dialogue. Habib spends a lot of time coaching her daughter about the implicit social rules that keep interactions smooth.10 Like Richard Borcherds, her daughter has Asperger’s syndrome and so has little grasp of such niceties.
But with her daughter’s blunt frankness comes a refreshing clarity. When her mother told her she should wait for a pause to break off a conversation—rather than just saying “I feel like leaving now” and walking off—her daughter had an aha! moment.
“I get it now,” her daughter replied. “You fake it. No one could be all that interested in everything a person says. You just have to wait for the pause to come so you can leave.”
These disarmingly honest views have gotten Habib’s daughter in trouble over and over. “I need to teach her social strategies for getting along with people,” Habib told me. “She needs to learn the little white lies to use so as not to hurt a person’s feelings.�
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Habib, who teaches social skills to groups of children with special needs like her daughter, says mastering these rudiments helps them “join the world, instead of staying isolated in their own.” While members of the Dark Triad may scrutinize social rules in order to manipulate others, those with Asperger’s study them just to get along.
In Habib’s groups children with Asperger’s and autism learn to recognize the right way to join a conversation gracefully. Instead of just butting in with their favorite topic, Habib coaches them to listen first to get the gist, then to join in on the same subject.
This difficulty with navigating the interpersonal world points to a more fundamental difficulty in Asperger’s. Consider the following vignette:
Marie dreaded her trips to meet her husband’s relatives because they were so boring. Most of the time they all sat in awkward silence, and this occasion was no different.
On the way home, Marie’s husband asked her how she had found the visit. Marie said, “Oh, marvelous. I could hardly get a word in edgewise.”11
What prompted Marie to say that?
The obvious answer: Marie was being sarcastic, actually implying the opposite of what she said. But that seemingly self-evident deduction eludes people with autism or Asperger’s syndrome. To “get” a sarcastic remark, we need to perform a subtle social math, premised on the realization that what the person says is not what the person means. But for people with autism, their deficiency in mindsight means that the simplest social algorithm, like why a snub makes someone feel badly, remains a mystery.12
Brain scans of people with autism have found inactivity in a region known as the “fusiform gyrus face area” while looking at a person’s face. The facial fusiform area registers not just faces but whatever else we are most familiar with or fascinated by. In bird-watchers, this means the fusiform area lights up when a cardinal flies by; in auto enthusiasts, when a BMW drives up.
For autistic people, however, this area fails to activate when they look at a face—even the faces of their family—but it does activate while they are looking at whatever happens to fascinate them, such as the numbers in a phone directory. A simple rule of thumb has emerged in studies of those with autism: the less activation in the brain’s face-reading area while they look at someone, the greater their interpersonal difficulties.
Signs of this social deficit emerge as early as infancy. Most infants show activity in the brain’s facial fusiform area when they look at someone’s eyes—but autistic children do not. Autistic children show the fusiform activation when they look at a cherished object or even just patterns, such as the way they have neatly arranged their favorite videotapes on a shelf.
Of the close to two hundred muscles of the face, those surrounding the eyes are particularly fine-tuned to express feelings. While normally people focus around the eyes when looking at someone’s face, those with autism avoid looking there, so missing crucial emotional information. Avoidance of eye contact may be one of the earliest indicators that a baby will grow up to become autistic.
Largely indifferent to human interaction, people with autism make little or no eye contact with anyone, thereby missing out on the building blocks of human bonding as well as empathy. Though eye contact is a seemingly minor skill, it is crucial for learning the basics of relating to other people. In autistic people the resulting gap in social learning contributes to their massive failure to sense how another person feels and so what they are probably thinking.
Blind children, by contrast, make up for their inability to see faces by developing a keen sensitivity to the emotional cues in voices—made possible because their auditory cortex takes over their unused visual area (making some, like Ray Charles, superb musicians).13 The resulting hyperawareness of feelings expressed vocally allows for the normal socialization of blind children, while those with autism remain tone deaf to emotion.
One reason autistic infants avoid eye contact seems to be that it makes them anxious—when they look at eyes, their amygdala reacts wildly, indicating intense fear.14 So instead of looking at a person’s eyes, the autistic child looks at the other person’s mouth, which conveys little about someone’s inner state. While this tactic lessens their anxiety, it means autistic kids miss out on the rudiments of face-to-face synchrony, let alone mindsight.
This deficit in reading emotions, Baron-Cohen reasoned, may help reveal the underlying brain circuitry that operates smoothly in ordinary people but malfunctions in those with autism. So his research team compared people with autism and ordinary people as each lay inside the fMRI while a small video monitor displayed a series of photos of people’s eyes like those shown in Chapter 6. The subjects pushed a button to indicate their choice from two offered for what feelings the eyes were expressing, such as “sympathetic” or “unsympathetic.”
The autistic subjects, as expected, were largely wrong. More telling, this simple task revealed which parts of the brain are involved in this small act of mindsight. In addition to the orbitofrontal cortex, the key regions included the superior temporal gyrus and the amygdala—areas that, along with a few others, have surfaced again and again in similar studies.
Paradoxically, examining the brains of those who lack finesse offers clues to the layout of the social brain. Comparing differences between normal and autistic brain activity, Baron-Cohen argues, highlights the circuitry that underlies a good part of social intelligence itself.15
As we shall see, such neural capacities matter immensely, not just for the richness of our interpersonal life but for the well-being of our children, for our ability to love well, and for our very health.
PART THREE
NURTURING NATURE
10
Genes Are Not Destiny
Take a four-month-old baby, put him in his baby seat, and show him a toy he’s never seen before. Then after twenty seconds show him another one, followed twenty seconds later by another, then another.
Some babies love this onslaught of novelty. And others hate it, crying so hard they shake in protest.
Babies who hate it share a trait that Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan has studied for close to three decades. As toddlers, such children are wary of strange people and places—“inhibited,” Kagan calls them. Once they reach school, their inhibition shows up as shyness. Such children’s shyness, Kagan speculates, appears to be due to an inherited neurotransmitter pattern that makes their amygdala more excitable. These kids are hyperaroused by startling things and novel events.
Kagan is among the most influential developmental psychologists to have emerged since Jean Piaget first keenly observed the shifts in cognitive abilities that his own children went through as they grew up. Kagan has the deserved reputation of a first-rate methodologist and thinker, combined with the rare gift of writing like a humanist. His books, with titles like Galen’s Prophecy, suggest his fluency with philosophical as well as scientific issues.
So back in the late 1970s, when Kagan first pronounced that a trait of temperament like inhibition had biological causes, presumably genetic, many parents breathed a sigh of relief. The ethos of that time was that just about every problem a child showed could be traced back to some error in parenting. A shy child had been cowed by overbearing parents; a bully was hiding his shame, induced by belittling parents, behind a gruff exterior. Even schizophrenics were the product of “double-bind” messages that meant they could never please their parents.
Kagan was a professor in the Harvard psychology department when I was a graduate student. The suggestion by a scientist as eminent as he that biological currents rather than psychological ones were at work in shaping temperament came as a revelation—one quite controversial in some Cambridge circles, as I remember. I heard murmurs in the elevator of William James Hall, which houses Harvard’s psychology department, that Kagan had gone over to the biological thinkers—who were at the same time eroding the hold of psychotherapists over the treatment of disorders like depression, which they had the audacity to sugges
t might have biological causes, too.1
Now, decades later, that debate seems a quaint relic of a naïve age. The march of genetic science daily adds to the list of temperamental and behavioral habits that are managed by one bunch of DNA or another. Neuroscience, likewise, continues to discover just which neural circuitry goes awry in a given mental disorder, and what neurotransmitters seem out of whack when a child displays one or another temperamental extreme, from the “overly sensitive” child to the budding psychopath.
And yet, as Kagan always delighted in pointing out, it’s not that simple.
THE CASE OF THE ALCOHOLIC RODENTS
My best friend in third grade was John Crabbe, a wiry, brainy kid who wore horn-rimmed, Harry Potter–like glasses. I often rode my bike down the street to his place to spend lazy, pleasant hours playing marathon games of Monopoly. His family moved away the next summer, and I haven’t seen him for half a century.
But I found myself calling him up after all these years when I realized that the very same John Crabbe was now a behavior geneticist at the Oregon Health and Science University and the Portland VA Medical Center—and of all things, renowned for his studies of alcoholic rodents. He has for years done research on mice from a strain called C57BL/6J, who are unique in their voracious appetite for alcohol. Studying them holds the promise of clues to the causes and, one hopes, cures for alcoholism in humans.
This strain of alcohol-loving mice is one of a hundred or so that are useful for medical research, such as a susceptibility to diabetes or heart disease. Each mouse in a given inbred strain is, in effect, a clone of every other such mouse; they share their genes like identical twins. One virtue of these strains for scientific researchers is their stability; a mouse of a given strain tested in various labs around the world should react like every other such mouse. But this very assumption of stability was questioned by Crabbe, in a now-famous, simple experiment.2
Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships Page 17
