​​CRAIG

Hello, and welcome to Desperately Seeking Wisdom with me, Craig Oliver. This podcast is a chance to hear what well-known people and leading experts have learned from life, particularly in the difficult times. Today's guest is Sir Simon Baron-Cohen, one of the world's leading clinical psychologists. It's no exaggeration to say Simon has changed the way I look at life, helping me understand why different types of people behave as they do. His books grapple with the really big questions, blending science with philosophy and a dash of autobiography.

SIMON

But I just want to explain why I brought empathy into the discussion. And that's because if you ask people to explain why somebody did something bad, often they resort to a concept, which is evil. And, you know, the Nazis are sometimes described as the kind of most extreme form.

CRAIG

He questions the way we look at good and evil, asking if it can be shown that some people are unable to feel empathy, can we blame them for their behaviours? How responsible are they? And what responsibility do we have towards them? Get ready for one of the most fascinating and insightful podcasts of this series.

Simon, it's great to see you. I want to go straight in and start with your childhood because I think it gives us two major clues to understanding who you are and what you studied and what you do. I noticed in one of your books, Zero Degrees of Empathy, you dedicated to your mother, Judy, and the epigram says, ‘who gave her children and five grandchildren their internal pot of gold’. Can you just explain what you mean by that?

SIMON

Obviously, the phrase ‘internal pot of gold’ is a metaphor. But really, it's about what can parents and, indeed grandparents, give to young children that will give them resilience, right through their lives. And also help them to develop their empathy, their self-confidence, almost like a recipe for good mental health. And I think sometimes the importance of early years and the environment that parents can provide is underestimated.

CRAIG

And you sound like you're saying that, giving you that internal pot of gold, your mother was a wonderful woman.

SIMON

Yeah, I mean, before I get onto her, you know, this idea of an internal pot of gold, I took it from what's called attachment theory. This idea that an infant needs to form a secure attachment with a caregiver is a very old theory and it goes back to John Bowlby, who worked at the Tavistock clinic in London, and was actually at Trinity College as an undergrad in Cambridge, which is my college. But you know, this idea that the quality of your attachment to your caregiver, and the security of that attachment, kind of predicts a lot of things about how that child will manage and navigate all the challenges that come later. I was very fortunate that my mother provided that kind of environment where it's all about sort of the young child feeling loved. So that as you grow up, you've got the resources to also show love to others.

CRAIG

And later in the book, you pick up on the theme and you say that the ‘pot of gold’ is the valuable birthright we can give, and not having it can damage someone almost irreversibly. Such effects are not always evident in childhood, or even in adolescence and young adulthood, but can come back to bite the individual in midlife, like a boomerang to the back of the head. And that's so familiar, I think, to a lot of people who've been listening to this podcast, a lot of people enter middle age and a lot of the issues that were around in their childhood come back and bite them. So obviously, you're somebody who, you feel you got that pot of gold. What would you say to people who didn't?

SIMON

You know, I don't want to take away hope from people who perhaps had a more difficult start in life. It's not like, if you miss out on that early period, there's no opportunities to have a second chance. You know, but I think Bowlby, his big scientific contribution into the whole world of therapy really, is to really underline the importance of that early attachment relationship to a parent or a caregiver, or a grandparent for that matters, just whoever it is that is around for the young child. But I think, you know, just to answer your question for someone who's struggling, maybe because they had difficulties in childhood, particularly, you know, early experience of abuse or neglect - which is kind of the opposite of the secure attachment - you know, there are second chances in life, always. And it can be that, you know, you can find that opportunity for attachment with a partner, later in life. Even if it didn't come from a parent, you can find it in terms of building your self-confidence through other means. But I think what Bowlby did was really sort of highlight that, under optimal circumstances, you know, in the first year of life, first few years, but even in the first months of life, you know, that's what shapes your self-confidence, your self-esteem. And your resilience, you know, because we're all going to hit struggles at times, but it's about whether you can pick yourself up and bounce back.

CRAIG

So if people don't have that pot of gold, if their parents haven't helped them do that, that seems to me to be a huge insight that you've got. Do you feel that it's widely enough understood in terms of education, and institutions and organisations, in terms of helping people?

SIMON

Yeah, I think that the whole notion of the importance of a secure early attachment is very well understood by people in the world of therapy, psychotherapy and counselling. But I don't know how well understood it really is by parents. You know, many of us become parents, and we sort of, you know, we feel our way to try and be good parents, but even the conflict that might arise at home, between the adults or between the adults and the children, criticism, which can be absolutely toxic for a young child, you know, feeling undervalued, or not valued, or not heard, can leave a lasting effect on a child, It can affect your relationships with your peers as you're going through school, your ability to trust in intimate relationships, whether it's friendships or romantic relationships, right through your life. I think there's a role for education for parents in just what a huge responsibility it is to be a parent.

CRAIG

In a previous podcast, we spoke to an American neurologist and psychiatrist called Dr. Bruce Perry. And his big insight was that often we ask the question, what's wrong with you? But the better question is, what happened to you?

SIMON

That sounds right to me. It's important to focus on what was the person's experience. And trauma can come in all kinds of varieties, whether it's just being shouted at as a young child, or witnessing something traumatic. But all of those factors can undermine the building of a secure attachment, with really quite worrying consequences for later mental health.

CRAIG

And you spoke about your mother helping you have that secure attachment. I wanted to talk a bit about your father, and you know, he sounds like a positive influence on your life as well, but you tell a story in one of your books, that when you were seven years old, you come from a Jewish family, and he was talking to you about the Holocaust. And he said that there are people in the world who made lampshades out of Jewish people. That's quite an extraordinary thing to tell a seven-year-old, not because it isn't true, but because of the impact of such a statement. How do you feel about that sort of looking back now, because it's obviously had a huge impact on the way you look at things?

SIMON

Yeah, I mean, you know, he was born in 1930. And so he was nine years old at the beginning of the Second World War. So he was a child, going through the Second World War, you know, he was living in the UK, he was growing up in London, in Whitechapel, where he was born. He was evacuated out to Cardiff when the war started. But coming from a Jewish family, you know, he would have experienced trauma in a different way. Because Jews have experienced persecution for centuries in different forms. His grandparents were refugees from Poland and Russia in the 1890s, refugees from the pogroms or the attacks on Jewish communities in Central Europe. You know, and he grew up hearing the stories about what was happening in the Holocaust, luckily at a safe distance, because the UK was never occupied by Hitler, although that was, Hitler's plan was to roll out Nazi control right across Europe, and to eradicate every Jew from Europe. And we all know what happened. 6 million died in the Holocaust in the gas chambers. So I don't know that he should have been telling me that story at the age of seven, when I was seven years old. But clearly, he was carrying quite a legacy himself of his own sort of family trauma.

CRAIG

And later on, you discovered that he had a girlfriend whose mother had literally had her hands reversed by the Nazis, so that her little fingers were on the inside and the thumbs on the outside. Again, that's just such a horrifying thing to see and learn, sharing it with you. Or was it, was there a sense in which he wanted to try and make sense of it with you? Or what do you think it was?

SIMON

I think, in his generation, you know, there was almost a preoccupation about why could human beings act with such cruelty to any other human being, whatever, you know, minority group might be the target of the cruelty. You know, he was illustrating it from people he had met. So this was, you know, the mother of his girlfriend before he met my own mother, who had been in a concentration camp, and, you know, many Jews were killed in the camps, but some were subjected to human experimentation, which involved all kinds of horrendous cruelty. And the example that we've just talked about, you know, Nazi doctors, educated people, wondering what were the limits of surgery? You know, could they cut off someone's hands and sew them back the other way around? You know, it's almost like scientific curiosity, driving the interest to experiment, but maybe losing sight of the fact that the person you're experimenting on is a person, with feelings, with subjectivity. You know, I'm sure it influenced me to ask questions about the nature of empathy.

CRAIG

Well, I wanted to come on to that, because you write, another quote that I just want to read out, which is that ‘your mind is preoccupied by the same single objective, to understand human cruelty, a question that can gnaw away in one's mind all of one's conscious life’. Does it still game away at your mind, or do you feel that you've found some sort of sense of it and peace with it?

SIMON

I have to say it's still there. So I wrote this book, that I'm sure will go on to talk about, Zero Degrees of Empathy, back in 2011. And the idea there was to kind of understand how individuals lose their empathy under certain conditions, so that they can act in cruel ways. But even though, you know, that's more than 10 years ago, I don't feel that simply having an explanation for human cruelty - or human kindness, the flip side - I don't know that that takes away from the horror, really, of what happened to Jews and other minorities during the Holocaust.

CRAIG

And that's what I really enjoy about your work, or reading your work or why I find it stim— enjoy is probably the wrong word, but why I find it so stimulating, is because there's a scientific inquiry, but there's also the philosophical and a sort of dash of autobiography in there. So that you said, you said about the book, Zero Degrees of Empathy, yes, I do want to spend some time talking about that, and I want to talk about some of your other books too, but let's spend a bit of time on that book. Empathy is obviously a huge theme in your work, and in that book. First of all, explain to us what you understand by the word empathy.

SIMON

So I will come on to that in just one minute. But I just want to explain before I do, why I brought empathy into the discussion. And that's because if you ask people to explain why somebody did something bad, often they resort to a different concept, which is evil. They say, well, this person did something bad because they're evil. And, you know, the Nazis are sometimes described as the kind of most extreme form of evil. But we can think of many other examples. But as a scientist, I didn't really feel that was a satisfactory explanation. You know, the word evil either comes from a kind of religious context, when we think about, you know, the devil as almost like the opposite of the angels or God, for example. But it's not really a scientific explanation for human cruelty. So I sort of brought the concept of empathy in, and now to answer your question, I define empathy as having two components: the first is what I call cognitive empathy, which is the ability or the drive, to put yourself into someone else's shoes, to imagine what someone might be thinking or feeling. So that's the cognitive bit. Some people also think of it as the recognition part, I'm trying to recognise what you might be thinking or feeling. And then the second part of empathy is what I call affective empathy - it's having an appropriate emotional response to what someone might be thinking or feeling. So it's not just kind of recognising it, but responding appropriately. And as it turns out, in different clinical groups, these two aspects of empathy can become disconnected. So somebody could be very good in one aspect of empathy, but have trouble with the other. And I suppose, you know, the clearest example would be a psychopath. If you think of, you know, psychopaths, or people with antisocial personality disorder, they can be very good at knowing what someone else is thinking or feeling. That's often how they can manipulate them. And you know, but then the other side of empathy, affective empathy, may be lacking. And that's maybe why they're able to not care about their victims, and hurt them. So we sort of see an example in, you know, in a human group of these two aspects of empathy becoming disconnected. And, you know, I'm sure we'll talk about it, that I also do a lot of work in the field of autism, autistic people. And they seem to have the opposite profile to psychopaths, because autistic people, many of them struggle with cognitive empathy, with reading people, reading people's facial expressions, and imagining what someone else might be thinking or feeling. But actually, as soon as it's pointed out to them, either because the other person tells them what they're thinking or feeling, or they hear about it, they have the appropriate emotional response. So if they know that someone is upset or in pain, they want to do something about it. They want to act in ways to alleviate that person's pain or distress.

CRAIG

I suppose the next question is, you know, that often we dismiss people as a bit weird, or we dismiss people as evil. Explain to us how you've come to the conclusion that there's a reason behind it.

SIMON

I'm interested in both the biological and the environmental factors that might lead a person to have more or less empathy. Because those are measurable. They're factors that scientists can study. We can think about genetics. And we can think about other biological factors like hormones, and neurotransmitters acting on, obviously, the ultimate control of behaviour, which is the brain, and brain development. But equally, we don't want to just look at one side of the equation. Biology plays some role, but so do social factors. We started off our conversation today talking about the importance of quality of attachment between a parent and an infant. And we can think of that as an environmental factor. You know, there's all kinds of aspects of the early environment, which can affect how a child grows up. I'm not saying anything new here, but I suppose what the science has shown is that if you look at people who've had that insecure attachment, which is an experiential, an environmental factor, we know that they're at higher risk of delinquency - that was Bowlby's work - and we know that they’re are at higher risk of some personality disorders. There's one particular one called borderline personality disorder. These days it's also discussed as individuals who might have an emotionally unstable personality, people who can be very loving and caring one minute, but maybe lash out in a very vicious way, in a split second, when they feel threatened or feel stressed. And we know that 80% of people with borderline personality disorder experienced neglect or abuse in their early childhood,

CRAIG

I find this fascinating because in my life, I've experienced people who have borderline personality disorder. And I've often wondered, given the extremity of it, and also the things that have created that in them, it raises the question about responsibility, that if you are, if you basically have all of these things that come together that create this condition, to what extent is that person responsible for their actions and behaviour? And then that leads on to, is there a danger that we let people off the hook a bit, next?

SIMON

These are very important, kind of central questions, because obviously, when one person hurts another person, they may be crossing a line into committing a crime. And the criminal justice system is based on the idea of individual responsibility. You know, we have to find the person either guilty or innocent of the alleged crime. And we sort of, you know, central to that is this concept of free will, that the person knew what they were doing when they committed the crime. And if you know, if there's evidence that they committed it, then we punish them, it's all part of kind of the whole criminal justice system. But I suppose as a scientist, I'm coming in from a different angle, I'm not coming in from the legal angle. I'm trying to understand what were the drivers of that person's behaviour. And if it was their early environment, let's just start with that side of the equation. To what extent is the person responsible for their early environment? Well, I would say not at all, you know, children are not responsible for the environment they were born into and they experienced in their childhood. And if the other side of the equation, you know, their biology, their genes, the prenatal hormones that shaped brain development, you know, to what extent is the person responsible for those? Again, I would say not at all, we don't get to pick the genes that we inherit, or the levels of prenatal hormones that our brains may be exposed to.

CRAIG

That makes absolute sense to me. But I wonder if you take that argument to its logical conclusion, that we're just machines that don't have responsibility for our actions?

SIMON

No, no, I wouldn't take it all the way to that point. Because I think all of us need to take responsibility for our behaviour. So whether we've had a difficult childhood, or whether we've inherited a certain combination of biological factors, we have the notion of a self with self-control, we have to work on this thing called self-control. So I would sort of take, like a midway-position: I wouldn't blame the person for what happened to them as a child or their biology, but I think we do need to kind of build in a concept of responsibility that's all around self-control, and help individuals if they're struggling with self-control. We know that some people, for example, are very impulsive. Some people have very addictive tendencies, so that it's difficult to exert self-control, and to stop themselves doing something that could be hurtful. But nevertheless, the notion of self-control is something that we don't want to throw out. And there probably all kinds of techniques that we could be cultivating in schools, you know, with young kids, that, you know, helps them learn, like any skill, how to improve their self-control.

CRAIG

I think that makes a huge amount of sense. But I suppose it's, it requires a revolution in our approach to how we educate and approach as well, doesn't it, because it's not that prevalent in our schools.

SIMON

The school system is under pressure to focus on literacy, and mathematics, and other academic skills. But I think we're neglecting, if you like, the social and the more human aspect of child development and adolescent development, where there would be lots of opportunities to cultivate empathy, particularly in kids or young people who don't feel that they were valued as a child, but who need to have that affirmation, that opportunity to feel good about themselves as teenagers. And, you know, just picking up on this discussion about the criminal justice system. You know, I think where this is leading us is that although we put some people into prisons when they do bad things, you know, it's almost arbitrary as to whether they should be in a prison or in the health service, because we can start to think about behaviour, and in particular, you know, cruelty, we can almost think of it in medical terms. You know, you wouldn't be punishing somebody who's got diabetes, if you know their insulin levels, they're out of control. But why are we punishing an individual if their empathy is too low?

CRAIG

In the book you write, ‘if the unambiguously “evil” individuals felt remorse for their crimes and had been punished, would we try to focus on their good qualities with a view to rehabilitating them? My own view is that we should, no matter how bad the crime’. Can you just expand on that a bit?

SIMON

When we look at any person, it's unlikely that they lack empathy completely. Even the Nazis are often described as having been very cruel in their day job when they were working in the concentration camps, but then going home to their families at night, and reading bedtime stories to their children, and being perfectly kind to their partners. So you know, in one and the same individual, you might see an absence of empathy in one relationship, but the presence of empathy in a different relationship, which suggests that the person may have some capacity for empathy. And what we should be doing is cultivating that.

CRAIG

I think that's a fascinating point. And it reminded me of when I was in Number 10, I had the privilege of going to Norway to see the Norwegian Prime Minister, and he was talking about a big problem that they were having at that time in their society was Anders Breivik, who you may remember set off a bomb in Oslo to distract the emergency services, he then went to the island of Utøya, he dressed as a police officer and killed 77 students. And then he received a maximum sentence of 21 years in jail. And there was this massive debate going on in Norway, about a system into had it gone too far in showing empathy to a mass murderer, and not enough attention on the consequences of their crimes, or the feeling that they should actually have punishment for the rest of their life. You can see the difference there, can't you?

SIMON

Yeah, and I was actually asked to comment on it in the Norwegian press at the time. Even if we might show compassion for what has led this person to behave in the way they have, doesn't mean that we should necessarily release them. So if they remain a threat to others, then they might need to be detained in a secure system, whether we're talking about the healthcare system, like Broadmoor Hospital, which is part of the NHS, but, you know, has people who've committed you know, rape and murder, or whether they're detained in a prison. So we have to think of prisons from multiple perspectives, because one is safety, for the general public. If someone is dangerous, they shouldn't be out where they could harm others. Another is the victim's families, who might - understandably - want some sense of justice, if they've lost a loved one to murder, for example. But prisons, as I think you're hinting at, can also be an opportunity for rehabilitation. That way, you know, we should always be trying to look for the good in people, not just sort of treat them as having done something bad and therefore throw away the key and just leave them there… if you like, demonised.

CRAIG

Personally, I agree with you, but I also know enough, having worked in the worlds of journalism and politics, that this is very much a minority view and a lot of people would find that, you know, quite obnoxious thing to say. They think, hang on a minute, you know, it should be all about the victim and very little to do with the criminal.

SIMON

And so you know, from our earlier conversation, the criminal always has a backstory. And one of my favourite charities is called the Forgiveness Project, which I find really inspiring. What they do is go into prisons, and work with people who've done terrible things, but often where either the victim or the victim's families want an opportunity to meet the perpetrator of that violence, an opportunity to let the perpetrator hear what they've been through. Not necessarily with a motivation to try to humanise this person, or to grow their empathy, but just to be heard, just to have an opportunity to share the pain that they've experienced. But actually, you know, part of the project, this charity's work, is that this can be an opportunity for rehabilitation, that someone who’s had, has shown very little empathy towards others, and maybe that's why they've ended up in prison, can start - quite late in life - to learn empathy, so that if they are released, there's an opportunity for them to be a different person, a better person. And even if they're never going to be released, because they've got a life sentence, they can nevertheless improve their own understanding of themselves and the relationships around them.

CRAIG

And that's so interesting, because this is a podcast ultimately about wisdom and what we learned from difficult situations. And that the concept of forgiveness and the forgiveness being not necessarily about the person being forgiven, but the person doing the forgiving as well, it's just an interesting theme that comes up time and again.

I wanted to go move on to saying that, you know, you completely convince me about the circuitry of the brain, and how it works in order to create somebody who might be a psychopath, or have different forms of disorder, or just a different, you know, neurodiversity, which is not a disorder, it's just a different way of looking at things. But what I'm interested in as well is, that explains the individual, but we've been talking a lot about evil and crimes, and whatever. And often, it's like entire societies that are taken over. So Cambodia in 1975, or Germany in the 30s, or Rwanda in the 90s, for example. You explain the individual - does that lead you anywhere to understanding why entire societies become corrupted with a lack of empathy?

SIMON

Yeah, I mean, I would maybe challenge the word ’entire’ societies, because even in Nazi Germany, and maybe it was also true in Cambodia, and in Rwanda, the other two examples you gave, but you know, there are people who are ready to jump in and join on the side of violence. But there are also people who join the resistance in these situations, and are kind of doing their utmost to protect individuals, not to harm individuals. But I think, you know, the bigger question you're raising is, when you have a big shift in society, as happened in the 1930s in Germany, is this just the result of your circuitry in your brain? Or are there some, you know, important social factors that contribute to that? Those brains are also exposed to propaganda. And they're exposed to ideologies of different kinds. And you know, these are not biological factors, they're social factors. As we know, in Nazi Germany, particular groups were being labelled as subhuman. The Jews were labelled as such, but so were people with learning disabilities. Once you've labelled somebody as subhuman, it kind of changes the way you see that person, you know, and even if you're an intelligent doctor, you might feel, okay, it's legitimate to perform experiments without anaesthetics on this group, because they are not human. So there's a sort of a shift that can happen psychologically, we know this happened in, you know, the years of slavery, 400 years of slavery, but where black people weren't seen as human, they were seen as subhuman. And that allowed even intelligent people, educated people, to see them as, see black people as objects who they could exploit. So, these are social factors and, you know, thankfully, societies change: slavery was ended, you know, Nazism was ended, but we always have to be kind of aware that ideologies can shift with political leaders. And with you know, from other directions - you know this from your own work inside politics, that you can easily shift the needle in the halls of power, which can have a trickle-down effect on people right through that culture.

CRAIG

And your conclusion is empathy is one of the most valuable resources in the world, yet we put little time into nurturing it. Just expand on that. It feels to me that in an increasingly polarised society and binary world, we're increasingly seeing our opponents as irredeemable, we need empathy more than ever.

SIMON

Yeah. I mean, you know, one area where I've thought about this is in the area of conflict resolution. Whether we're talking about conflict between two individuals, or conflict between two nations, often the conflict escalates, because one side dehumanises the other: they might blame the other, they might be triggered into rage, or feelings of revenge, wanting to hurt the other. And at that point, they've kind of lost sight of the other person as someone with feelings. And if you think about particular international conflicts, like in the Middle East, between Israel and Palestine, you know, it's a conflict that's run and run for 100 years. And all kinds of methods of conflict resolution have been tried, from legal to military, to economic boycotts, to political interventions, nothing has worked yet. We're actually sort of going through a period as we speak, of rising tensions in that part of the world. And some of my work has been involved in trying to look at whether empathy could be a new approach to conflict resolution, in any conflict. So I've been working with a different charity called Empathy for Peace, which is all about sort of looking at grassroots organisations, where you've got a kind of, you know, a dehumanisation has happened. Maybe Israelis feeling very negative towards Palestinians, or maybe the other way around, Palestinians feeling very negative towards Israelis, so that they can no longer see them as anything other than the enemy. And somehow, the human connection has to come back, if those conflicts are going to ever have a chance of ending. And, you know, I'm always inspired by the example of how did apartheid end. Obviously, lots of factors went into the end of apartheid, but one of those factors was the relationship between Mandela and de Klerk. It was a very personal relationship where it was based on respect for each other, listening to each other, trying to understand the perspective of the other. And once you've got that, you've got an opportunity for dialogue and an opportunity for change. So I think, you know, amongst all of the other methods that we should be trying, when it comes to conflict resolution, I think there's a space for any projects, any activities that could build opportunities for empathy. And in the Middle East, you know, I've come across, I describe this in my book, Zero Degrees of Empathy, you know, there's a project called the Parent Circle, where parents who've lost a child in that conflict, Palestinian parents and Jewish-Israeli parents, can phone each other across the enemy lines. The charity provides the opportunity for parents to connect through their grief. So kind of realising that the enemy actually is human, and that we can talk to each other, we can share each other's pain, and we can sort of see the perspective of the other group. I think there's a lot of potential, powerful chemistry there that needs to be kind of included when we think about conflict resolution.

CRAIG

We're going to move on but I do just want to say, what I love about your work is that you prove your case scientifically and then use that to build a profoundly thoughtful and empathetic argument for the world being a better place. And I think you conclude the book, Zero Degrees of Empathy, by saying, ‘empathy is like a universal solvent, any problem immersed in empathy becomes soluble’. And to which I can only say, hear, hear! I want to talk about your most recent book, which was called The Pattern Seekers. It's been described as an ode to autism, arguing that autistic people have been crucial to our creative and cultural history for the past 70,000 years. Why did you feel the need to write it?

SIMON

Yeah, well, I've been conducting research into autism for 40 years actually. And for much of my career in that research, the focus has been on the difficulties that autistic people have, the disability side of autism. And there's been, I think, a bit of a neglect on what is these days called neurodiversity. The fact that autistic people aren't defined by their disability, but they are also simply different. They think differently, they process information differently, their brains are wired differently, We haven't really looked at their strengths, which sometimes equate to talents. In the book, I argue that one particular strength that many autistic people have is in pattern recognition. Hence the name of the book, pattern seeking, that autistic people seem to be drawn to identify patterns in the world. Not just any old patterns, but particular patterns that I call ‘if and then patterns’, that if I take something and do something to it, then I can see what happens. And that's the kind of, that's the basis of invention. That's how, I argue, human beings, modern humans, Homo sapiens, has been able to invent unstoppably for 70,000 - 100,000 years. And no other species, either living today or amongst our hominid ancestors have been able to invent so generatively.

CRAIG

It’s interesting, isn't it, because people who aren't neurodiverse, who fall into the category that previously would have been described as normal, it seems that for thousands of years we've basically looked at autistic people as just strange or incapable or that having something profoundly wrong with them.

SIMON

I mean, remember that autism was only first described in the 1930s or 40s. So it's a relatively short history. But you're right that for much of that time, since autism was first identified, or described, we focused on the things they struggle with, and kind of missing the fact that their different way of thinking may have been hugely important in human history. And this book tries to draw out the connection between autism and human invention. It describes research, because that's what I do. One example is that if you look at people who work in STEM - science, technology, engineering, or mathematics - we did a very big study of over half a million people. And if you look at how many autistic traits people have, it turns out that people who work in STEM have a higher number of autistic traits than people who do not work in STEM. And it's a finding that's been replicated across various different studies. On the face of it, you wouldn't expect a connection between the number of autistic traits and aptitude in what I call systemising: being able to understand systems or patterns, and rules to understand how systems work.

CRAIG

It's interesting, I was talking to a client recently, a business, that was basically saying that they are actively going out of their way to ensure that they have neurodiverse people on their staff, and create environments that they can thrive and flourish. And they were saying that there was an extraordinary statistic of the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people who are neurodiverse in this country, a very small percentage of them actually find work because they can't be in that environment. And I think in your book you use some of these, describes it as like putting a fish that's used to saltwater in freshwater, or vice versa. It's not surprising that they don't thrive because it's just not the right environment for them.

SIMON

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, the shocking statistic that the National Autistic Society have produced is that 85% of autistic adults are unemployed. And we know that unemployment carries all sorts of consequences for your independence, your autonomy, your mental health - you feel excluded from society. But I think what you're touching on is, even if you found the opportunity, as an employer, to give an autistic person a job, they may need some reasonable adjustments or accommodations to the workplace, so that that person can really work to their optimum level.

CRAIG

But I think what they were also saying was that there's an extraordinary resource that's just being wasted.

SIMON

Absolutely.

CRAIG

Because we don't create an environment to make it work, which goes to your point about how neurodivergent people have been at the cutting edge of technological advance.

SIMON

So you could look at it in a number of different ways: you could just think about, do autistic people represent an untapped part of the workforce? But that would be almost to monetize autistic people. So I don't really like that view.

CRAIG

That's the kind of world business tends to operate in, I'm afraid.

SIMON

Yeah. So I think, you know, for some businesses, that might be the appeal, but we have to be very careful that, you know, autistic people as a minority are not going to be exploited in some way. But, I mean that in a negative sense, obviously, because in the original universal Charter of Human Rights is the right to work.

CRAIG

Yes, I think to be fair to them, they are capitalists, but they are also thinking empathetically as well, a number of the people in the management, I think, actually were or are neurodivergent. And so they have been, just because of the nature of their industry, they've been much more alive to it. So it's quite interesting.

SIMON

I certainly, you know, want to encourage companies and employers to reach out to autistic people or to make their job advert very clearly, welcoming neurodivergent people to apply, because there has been some inadvertent, perhaps discrimination against this group. But at the same time, I just wanted to underline that if we're serious about treating everybody equally, under the Equality Act, we should be offering them the opportunities to work, irrespective of whether, you know, whether they're autistic, whether they've got some other characteristics, we should be just offering opportunities for individuals to work.

CRAIG

We're coming to the end of the podcast, and you've been incredibly generous with your time. The one question we always ask at the end is if there was one piece of wisdom you'd pass on, what would it be? What would yours be?

SIMON

Well, in a way, this brings us full circle to the beginning of our conversation where we talked about that inner pot of gold, and I was encouraging maybe parents, particularly new parents, to really think about every moment that they're with their child could have a lasting impact on that child. So if it's an environment that's unstable in different ways, possibly traumatising in different ways, the parent is the adult in that relationship. And parents need to sort of really think carefully, what can I do to change the surroundings in which my child is growing up, in order to give that child the best chance for their future.

CRAIG

And I think that's a brilliant insight, brilliant piece of wisdom. And it's not to challenge it at all but it does feel like that means society needs to shift quite a lot in terms of expectation. We're recording this at the moment, for example, at a time where people are saying how difficult it is for parents, you know, two parents working, not saying one sex or the other shouldn't work, but you know, how hard that all is, and is society set up to actually help parents either to educate them, or to just create environments for them that are easier in order to make sure that the next generation is well looked-after?

SIMON

Yeah. I mean, you know, interestingly, the research shows it's not about the number of hours you spend with your child. And it's not about whether you're in a family which is, you know, one parent or two parent families. And it's not even about the gender of the parent. It's about the quality of parenting that the child receives. And, you know, when you go to antenatal classes, you know, a lot of the focus is all about how difficult the labour is going to be, and how you can get through the whole process of labour. But there's a great opportunity there to also talk to parents-to-be about, you know, after your baby's born, what kind of home, what kind of home environment do you want to create? Again, moment by moment, because if you have a lapse of concentration, it’s the child who’s the victim.

CRAIG

And so much of what you're saying I think is amazing in terms of wisdom in the sense that if we look at each other with understanding and empathy and understand that some of this may be environment, some of it may be neurological, biological, hormones, EQ, IQ, the whole lot, that you start looking at another human beings and saying that they're probably trying to make the best with often very difficult circumstances, things start becoming easier, we start becoming more forgiving each other, more understanding, and the world is a better place. It sounds like, it's in danger of sounding a bit like ‘hello birds, hello trees isn't everything wonderful’ but actually, in reality, when you know and understand others better, you're more likely to be empathetic and society is likely to go easier.

SIMON

Yeah, and just picking up on a point you made earlier, you know, parents are under a lot of pressure. So in a way, there's even more of a case for reminding parents that when you're tired, and it's very easy to kind of lose your patience with your child when you're stressed, when you're exhausted, and when you're working two or three jobs because of the financial crisis, you know, it's the child that's at the other end, the receiving end of that. So it's all about, again, we talked earlier about self-control, it's very easy for any of us to lose our self-control, and to lash out, to shout at our child or to hit our child, it happens, you know, we shouldn't pretend that these things don't happen. You know, but that carries a huge risk. You know, and it's in those moment by moment kind of interactions between a parent and a child, that you're laying down the foundation of whether you're going to end up with a child who's emotionally secure and capable of functioning and capable of being empathic to others or not.

CRAIG

That's a great way to end it. Simon, it's been fantastic talking to you, really appreciate it. And I think anybody who is listening to this should go out and buy your books and read them.

What an exceptional human being Sir Simon Baron-Cohen is. I'm so glad he agreed to talk to us.

CRAIG

Our next guest is Professor Azza Karam, Secretary General of Religions for Peace. She shares how she believes the core of all major religions is helping others.

Professor Azza Karam

I was brought up to understand service, and giving. And actually all faiths point to that. And I think that really is the axis around which we would be turning. And Religions for Peace is all the different faith institutions and communities around the world, represented through their senior-most representative.

CRAIG

If you haven't already subscribed to the podcast, please do, and why not leave a review. Desperately Seeking Wisdom was produced by Sarah Parker for Creators Inc. Until next time, goodbye.