Empathy and Asperger’s Syndrome | Dylan Dailor | TEDxAllendaleColumbiaSchool

so empathy is this idea that we have and we love to talk about where we say that if everyone had empathy the world would be a much nicer place we don't understand each other and I somewhat like I understand the idea behind it when it relates to Asperger's syndrome I don't exactly agree with the general idea and so there are a couple questions I wanna make sure that all of you can answer at the end of this the first of which is what is empathy and the second of which is how does it relate to Asperger's syndrome and by the way when I refer to Asperger syndrome to myself I refer to it as myself as an esper Guillen it's the shortened way of saying person with Asperger's um so there are actually two types of empathy the first of which is called cognitive empathy and cognitive empathy is basically you're able to look into someone else's mind and understand why they're thinking the way that they do and then there's effective empathy which is I the example I like to give because kind of hard to explain is it's like that moment where you're sitting in a room and you just feel like there's this tension but you can't quite explain how you know and that's really what effective empathy is now I was like and I always like to say that I'm glad that I'm missing effective empathy and not cognitive empathy because if it was the other way around technically that would make me a psychopath or a narcissist so I'll take the loss of cognitive empathy so the there was an original route there's this original research done by a guy in England named Simon baron-cohen who is the cousin of the actor Sacha Baron Cohen and he wrote this paper that proposed that autism and Asperger's is based off of what's called the extreme male mind and he wrote early on in the paper that the the some of the findings were that autistic people and as virgeen's didn't have empathy but he also prefaced it right before and said but we couldn't separate cognitive and affective empathy the problem was the psychological psychological community saw the study and when they revised the dsm-5 and the ICD Allah 11 that's those are the current versions of the diagnostic criteria they wrote autism and Asperger's lack and empathy and they never specified which kind it was and then there was this new research that was done that said well they do have empathy it's effective empathy they're missing cognitive empathy they can't understand why people feel the way they do which create and then they talk about how it create and another study talked about how it creates this frustration because you are thinking because I mean you feel you feel what other people feel and then you can't quite understand why there's just like this disconnect this missing piece and you you know it's happened it may have happened to you before but you just don't quite get there and so that brings me to my other major point which is how do we fix this this problem I got share with you above a personal story when I I've been to five schools I'm on my fifth school I've taken three opportunities to sit down with my classmates and try and explain in the best way possible what odd some Asperger's is for me more Asperger's how it relates to me where I'm strong where I'm not strong and when I got to the empathy part I had a very not so nice group of classmates from 7th to 9th grade and they just latched on to the idea that I had no empathy which earned me the nickname the serial killer the future serial killer for all three years it was really it was frustrating and every single day I just I struggled because it just made me feel different and and I didn't understand I didn't quite understand why I was like I'm supposed to be the one with no empathy how do you not understand how I feel so I so I set out and I wrote a book to try and assure younger children it was actually based off of my first PowerPoint trying to show them that they're not there's nothing wrong with not having cognitive empathy yeah it's frustrating yeah you kind of go through life wondering why other people feel the way that you do or feel the way that they do and why you don't quite feel that way but it's not the it's not something that's going to set you up for life and then I realized that if I'm telling them that I have to fix the other problem which is on the other side by the way here's another little thing we also call everyone who not on the spectrum we call you on there or typicals um which is short for neurologically typical so I I I realized I got to go out and I gotta tell all the neurotypicals that it's okay to to think differently and I get and I sat down but I was trying to write this talk and I thought to myself now what what words can I tell people where they would understand what knew what the well I'm trying to say why why empathy doesn't matter as much and I thought about how people have described me through my life I realized that a lot of people have described me when they really get to know me they describe me I'm a nice person I do a lot of nice things I used to loan pencils to everyone I never got him back so I would you know I said don't I thought you know what don't look at you say and I like oh that's it so the point in the end that I just want every no difficult to understand is just act kind teach kindness tell kids to be kind empathy is too complex for some psychologists to understand as it turns out so I mean teaching these kids I learned it in first grade I learned they said Dylan put yourself into someone else's shoes which another funny little thing I don't quite understand idioms so they said Dylan put yourself in someone else's shoes I was like why would I do that those shoes my my shoes are clean I don't know about theirs so I mean the point that I just wanted to get across its kindness every kid I hope understands kindness you teach them to share you teach them to be nice to one another and empathy I think that we should just kind of leave it alone let the research play itself out let us learn some more about it and then talk about it in the adult population instead of with these little kids who don't understand and yeah that's the general amount of my presentation thank you very much I hope that you all enjoyed listening to me and my moderate amount of jokes so

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 261,438

Rating: 4.8971338 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Education, Activism, Empathy, Neuroscience

Id: TajItoz3ftI

Length: 7min 32sec (452 seconds)

Published: Tue May 17 2016

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This TEDx talk deals with that subject.

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