Understanding Autism with Sir Simon Baron-Cohen (Professor, University of Cambridge)

welcome to the most days show the mission of most days is to measurably increase quality of life globally by helping people change their behavior the show is devoted to understanding how change happens we talk to authors neuroscientists psychologists Elite performers and leaders to understand the science of behavior change and the daily routines that transform lives today we speak with Sir Simon Baron Cohen about autism Simon is a professor in the Departments of psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge and a fellow at Trinity College he is direct ctor of the autism Research Center also in Cambridge he has published over 600 peer-reviewed scientific articles which have made contributions to many aspects of autism research he is Vice President of the national autistic Society he is co-editor-in-chief of the journal molecular autism and is a National Institute of Health research senior investigator he's the author of many books including most recently the pattern Seekers where he speaks the importance of autism to our creative and cultural history he also is a knight uh he was kned in the New Year's honors list 2021 this episode was a joy for me for a couple of reasons first Our Guest Simon is a standout expert on autism he's about As Good As It Gets In terms of his depth of knowledge on the subject and second although I have close connections with individuals who are autistic my understanding of autism was really limited prior to this discussion so talking with Simon provided me with a much clearer perspective and understanding I hope it does the same for you before we get started we want to let you know how you can support us at most days everything we do prioritizes the health and well-being of our members in order to successfully achieve this we rely on the financial support of members like you a business model dependent on advertising or some other third party that is not our members distorts incentives between pleasing advertisers and serving 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field of autism um so we had a nice family visit to Buckingham Palace if you've ever been to London yeah I have although I I've never been kned at Buckingham Palace um and what happens with the titles so you are a professor you are you know you you've got a doctorate you are you know your Ned and so is it sir doctor Professor I mean when you have to choose a title uh where do you go I didn't really like titles so I'm I'm hoping in this conversation we can just be on first name term these um these things come along if you know if you stay in a field long enough you get different kinds of recognition like phds but when we're just having a conversation I think we should just be you know at on the same level yes that that that sounds good so can we just start with the the the very basic question of first let's maybe let's define the nomenclature and so there is you know we can think about this is autism Asbergers like can you just talk about some of the terms that are used and how we might you know what is the right term to use how do you think about the nomenclature here yeah well there's a kind of difference between the two sides of the pond so I'm in the UK I guess uh many of your listeners and viewers may be in the US in the US a lot of people talk about autism spectrum disorder ASD in the UK we're less fond of that uh we just call it autism and maybe we'll come on to this but including the word disorder for some people is quite stigmatizing in some ways it's just easier just just just to call it autism but we used to have aspargus syndrome that was something that the American Psychiatric association brought in but that's now gone for a bunch of reasons so actually we have a very broad umbrella term ter autism or in the US ASD and that's meant to cover people who have difficulties with social relationships and communication um and people who also struggle with unexpected change and often also have sensory issues but within what we call autism there's a huge variation because some people have language difficulties you know they can they have a very small vocabulary other people have intact language some people have learning disabilities uh in the US it's called intellectual disability and some people don't so there's a real wide range and there's certainly a discussion or a debate about whether it would be more useful to have more fine grin categories or subgroups so so you don't have like you might see with something like anxiety you've got social and panic you've got different types of anxiety in autism we don't have that it's a broad spectrum there are varying levels of severity I'm assuming you know different symptoms and so those are going to be those are those will characterize the the experience at the individual level and there can be very different experiences but it's a catch all today yes so autism is a catch all but when you get your diagnosis the clinician can also specify is it autism with ADHD or Autism without ADHD is it autism with epilepsy or without so you can kind of you can add all of these extra they're called classifiers or specifiers to kind of give a more fine grained view but that's comorbidity right that's not a more fine grained view with in the autism spectrum itself I think that's a good point yeah so you know autistic people it's more it's more common to to have comorbid or co-occurring conditions you know like it's quite unusual just to have just to be autistic usually you're autistic with something else and sadly a lot of those extra co-occurring conditions are to do with mental health autism with anxiety or Autism with depression and then can we just before we get into it I feel like let's add address the the causes and maybe we start with with what it's not caused by I think it's worth addressing the vaccine myth and maybe maybe we talk about Andrew Wakefield and the and the origin of this but can you speak quickly as we get into causes about vaccines and the misconception that vaccines cause autism I mean starting off with the basic question of what causes autism there's now no question that autism is genetic so it runs in families geneticists are doing a lot of research in this space and over 100 genes have been associated with autism but these are genes that tend to be uh they're called rare genetic variations like mutations they're not seen in every autistic person in fact they're often only seen in 5 to 10% of autistic people but genes also play a role in in terms of what's called common genetic variation so genes we all carry but which might um occur in particular combinations more often in autistic people you know there's lots of clues that autism is partly genetic it's not completely genetic because you can have identical twins where one is autistic and one is not and the fact that they share the same genes means that autism can't be 100% genetic so these days there's a lot of interest in identifying the non- gentic factors and some of them are beginning to uh be well established or replicated but vaccines doesn't seem to be one so you you mentioned that you know that for a while this goes back to the late 1990s there was this idea that the MMR vaccine was causing autism and I think it distracted research for at least 10 years uh whilst scientists had to kind of really test that question but actually at the end of a lot of research uh what it looks like is that autism is not more common in people who've had the MMR vaccine compared to people who who have not so I think we can rule that out as a cause of autism but we are learning about lots of other let's say environmental factors that that interact with the genetic predisposition uh one of them for example is the mother's weight during pregnancy when you're pregnant Every Woman gains weight but if you're gaining weight too quickly you might end up with a diagnosis called gestational diabetes and it looks like women who have that condition have an increased likelihood of an auti having an autistic child you know there's another one that we've studied called polycystic ovary syndrome so these are women who have irregular menstrual cycles and they have a late onset of puberty uh and cysts on the ovaries you know it's a hormonal condition and it turns out that if if the mother has that condition she has an increased likelihood of of having an autistic child so we're beginning to sort of see that there are there's the genetic predisposition and these factors that mostly occur during pregnancy which can interact with the Gen to increase the likelihood of autism but you know the the list is going to be a long list we're already really scratching the surface and on gestational diabetes I mean I when I when we look at the at the recent you know spikes in a autism and the increases in the diagnosis I just I I assume first and foremost with as it relates to mental health that this is just due to increased access to mental health clinicians and there's just more diag there's there's more diagnosing happening but I can't help but think I didn't know the the relationship to gestational diabetes is there a connection or or might we think there is one I would assume we wouldn't know this um for certain between the rise in obesity and gestational diabetes and um or no that's not a connection that anybody's going to make and that's a bad question I mean it's a great question but it's been found in at least four different countries that link I think so so whether it's you know whether it's mediated by obesity or whether I mean I think I think one theory is that in gestational diabetes you get disregulation of the hormone insulin there's also evidence now that autism is associated with elevated hormones like testosterone and estrogen again in the womb so during pregnancy and these hormones you know often Drive each other if one is high the other one is higher our group is now quite interested in in studying the role of hormonal differences during pregnancy whether it's insulin or whether it's the so-called sex steroid hormones like testosterone and estrogen just in contributing to likelihood of autism is it your sense that there is always a genetic predisposition meaning we're only seeing it in 5 to 10% we just haven't identified the other genes that are going to lead to autism or there are or it's you know it's 10% of the time it's genetic and 90% of the time it's it's some environmental Factor like you know the state of the mother's body and pregnancy I mean yeah what what's your sense of the role of genetics above the 10% where we're seeing that direct connection so just to clarify the the 10% related to what I call rare genetic variants so these are kind of big genes that have mutations and there only seen in about 10% but there's a lot of the genome which is not about rare mutations it's just about like the difference between people with blue eyes and brown eyes and these are called common genetic variants that you know where you have parts of the gene which come in different varieties and we we all carry these but in certain combinations they may predispose to different traits so I think the genetic component may be much higher than 10% in autism some people speculate it's like 60 to 90% And the environmental factors uh are interacting with against that background and it's it's often very hard to tease apart genetic and environmental factors they're they're interacting but I'm assuming it would be different than something like an anxiety or depression where I can I behave my way into autism meaning you know with depression I can live my life in a certain way that will lead to the diagnosis of depression and there's probably a genetic predisposition there but I can I don't know drink too much I don't exercise like I I live my life in such a way where I end up being diagnosed as having as having some form of depression I would assume that is not the case here I can't behave my way into autism it's the environmental factors the genetic factors but it's not something that I you know some certain set of actions after I'm out of the womb are going to cause me to get autism yeah no I think the consensus scientifically is that the causes of autism are prenatal when we look at the genes for example that are are at at work in autism they are mostly genes that are expressed prenatally whilst the brain is developing and when we look at the environmental factors like gestational diabetes polycystic ovary syndrome you know these are kind of changes in the hormonal environment prenatally that change the way the brain develops and we should say that the changes in the way the brain develops sometimes results in disability but sometimes it just results in difference and these days there's a lot of talk about neurodiversity that you know brains develop differently you know not necessarily better or worse just differently a bit like being left-handed or right-handed one is not better or worse they're just different uh but back to your question about lifestyle and sort of postnatal factors I think there's probably a lot of scope for the kind of experiences that you have postnatally which are going to influence your outcome particularly your mental health so for example if you if you get your diagnosis of autism early and you know you're in a world where people accept you for your autism they don't stigmatize you they don't bully you uh they don't exclude you you know your mental health is likely to be much better than someone maybe who got their diagnosis late uh or even whenever they got their diagnosis they experienced being bullied at school or being excluded at school and they kind of ended up on a a path where their their self-confidence and their self-esteem was just going down and down so that by the time they're a teenager you've got you know quite a severe case of depression and anxiety sometimes even feeling suicidal so the behavior and and the way in which you're accepted it's not going to change the underlying autism and the way that the autism manifests but it is going to have an impact on quality of life and the comorbidities the anxiety the depression and I I maybe this goes back to the beginning of the conversation um and I assume what you're saying around acceptance and neurodiversity um is probably related to the reason you don't like the term disorder because in some percentage of cases it's not a disorder it's a difference and we're all different and we're all unique in a bunch of different ways and this is just a way in which somebody's different but they're perfectly functional and they bring a unique you know they bring their unique selves to the world in the same way that we all do and so but you're also calling out there is a a percentage of cases where there is where you the term you're using is disability where there's a pretty substantial impact to somebody's ability to function normally maybe we want to be not use the word normal but but there's an impact to the ability to function so in what percentage of cases is that the case so I would say that um a person shouldn't get the diagnosis of autism unless there's evidence of disability so for me it should you know you're asking the percentage I would say it should be 100% if there's no evidence of disability then maybe they don't need the diagnosis because the diagnosis should be there to unlock support whether it's from your you know health insurance company or whether it's um you know your local family physician or whether it's at school in terms of special educational support but the diagnos should be there as a signal that you need extra support and if you've got challenges with social skills and communication it may well be that you need support but the reason I mention difference is I think autism isn't just a disability it's also a difference you know if you meet an autistic person you'll find some areas where they have challenges but maybe other areas where they have where they they have a different way of seeing the world a different way of processing information and sometimes those differences translate into strengths or even talents you know such as excellent attention to detail uh or excellent memory for detail those things are not disabilities and they can sometimes be a you know a stepping stone into a job or a a career or an academic interest because they're kind of spotting details that other people miss wouldn't you find that if somebody is if somebody exhibits traits of autism but it is not a disability that the diagnosis would help them understand themselves a little bit isn't there some utility in knowing what it is knowing the differences in communication Styles Etc and we need to take the stigma away from the diagnosis but isn't there some utility there the thing is we all have autistic trades so um you know we we developed um a questionnaire called the autism spectrum quotient the AQ and we we've given it to people in the general population and the surprise is we all have autistic traits it's like a bell curve in the population people with a formal diagnosis of autism just score a lot higher but you know you don't find people who score zero for example so then the question is if we all have autistic traits where are you going to draw the line in terms of who do you offer support for in terms of a clinical diagnosis if you're going to go to a pediatrician or a you know clinical psychologist or psychiatrist and say am I Autistic or is my child autistic probably they need to have a a certain threshold it's not just how many traits you have but are they interfering with your ability to function as you say and for me and that seems to be true for most psychiatric Di nooses you know it's not just having the traits it's also are they interfering with your ability to cope are you struggling in some way um and that's when you need the diagnosis but other people may have a different view you know if we take Elon Musk you know he's come out as autistic on a television show he kind of announced that he he is autistic it's not evident that he is struggling or that the autistic traits that he has are interfering in any way with his ability to function he's doing pretty well should we be kind of restricting the diagnosis to people who really need it yeah I mean it it feels like like anything else it's a spectrum we all experience um some traits on the Spectrum we've got to draw a line somewhere along that spectrum and say okay once it's beyond this line then it's it's hurting our ability to function and we need to we need to think about treatment basically because we have legislation which is all about equality you know equality for people with disabilities we try to en enshrine in our legislation that if you have a disability you have a right a legal right to have extra support but that's why we need quite a clear definition of what is a disability sometimes it's much easier to to pinpoint like if somebody's in a wheelchair with a physical disability they have a right to a ramp so that they can get up the step people who are designing disability inclusive environments will put in those wheelchair ramps so what is the equivalent in the case of you know developmental disabilities should we be designing classrooms and workspaces which can accommodate people's disabilities so that they have you know equal access to those spaces and what do we know about um the darwinian advantage of people who are high in in traits of autism that's a really interesting idea so we talked about autism involves both disability and difference some of those differences may be very positive you know that if you've got for example excellent ability to recognize patterns which many autistic people have that could have had an impact in your success uccess in life you know if you think about engineers for example they need to be able to recognize patterns or understand how things work and what we see is that you know a lot of autistic people if they go to college may study subjects like engineering computer science math you know just kind of understanding how the world works and you could imagine that people who can apply that in the real world may become very successful you know you're occupational success May translate into your reproductive success that's what you're really what you're getting at whether you find a mate and pass on your jeans H how would you speak to some of the common conceptions of like are iq's on average higher among people with with with high traits of autism can you speak to maybe this this perception of of savants and people who are who are high in traits of autism being Sant so I think what we now know is that about a third of autistic people have an IQ below average so they would they would be said to have uh autism with learning disability or intellectual disability and the other 2/3 have an IQ in the average range or above and then there's a then there's a subset of autistic people who are Savant as you said estimates vary but actually quite interestingly it's doesn't go hand inand with IQ so you could be a musical Savant you know somebody who can play any song on the piano after hearing it just once or you could be an artistic Savant you know who can just look at look at a view and reproduce it almost with photographic quality just using a pencil or a mathematical Savant someone who can do very rapid calculations for example these things are not necessarily tied to IQ they're often called eyelets of ability you know that someone has a talent just in a very specific area and that and Savant abilities are more common in autism than in other disabilities do we know why not yet we're beginning to uh do some research into this uh we're just conducting a study at the moment inviting autistic servants to come and have an MRI scan to see if we can see differences in the brain between uh autistic people with a savant ability and those without and what is the overlap the other way is it a high percentage of people who are savants are are autistic like do we see the same overlap either way or there's a whole bunch of savant who who are not autistic yeah it tends to be that if you're a savant you have a very high likelihood of of also being autistic and so and and would it typically show up in the I don't know maybe maybe Rainman is not a good example but but it reminds me of Rainman which is a movie who's it Tom Cruz and sea Penn where the main character is like incredible with numbers but very awkward kind of lacks a bunch of a bunch of skills in a whole bunch in in other ways is is that a good representation I think it was Dustin Hoffman Dustin Hoffman yeah it's been criticized because if you're trying to portray like a representative picture of autism you know a lot of autistic people do not have those seront abilities so sometimes it almost um invites criticism from parents or from the autism Community saying well this misrepresents us it's kind of stereotyping us as if we all have these amazing talents when it may only be seen in a in a minority so I think we just have to remember that if we're talking about media representations or portrayals of autism there are lots of different types of autistic people and we need to make sure that we're not just kind of disproportionately focusing on certain types of autism because maybe it's more Sensational people are fascinated by somebody who can do rapid calculation but not everyone's like that and it can it can distort the picture of autism how is it diagnosed and at what age is it typically diagnosed how it's diagnosed is usually you go to a CL a clinician who will conduct an interview both with you and your parents if you're under 16 years old um and it takes a couple of hours and um you know the the the interview is looking for evidence of Social and communication disabilities but also these quite narrow interests sometimes called obsessional interests which are another characteristic of autism and maybe distress at when things change unexpectedly when you're not allowed to enjoy your usual routines because autistic people love predictability and like strong routines it's an interview it's observation there isn't a kind of biological test like a blood test or anything that would diagnose autism and then to your question about when what age is it diagnosed I guess the earliest age is about 18 months to 2 years old but actually a lot of people don't get their diagnosis till way later and actually what we see is that boys tend to get diagnosed earlier than girls and there's a whole question at the moment about whether girls are hiding their autism it's called camouflaging where more girls feel maybe a social pressure to hide their autism to act as if they are sociable and communicative but actually under the the surface they're finding it really difficult it's causing a lot of anxiety um but either way often it means that girls get their diagnosis only in their teens or even in their adulthood but we actually find a lot of people get missed in their diagnosis sometimes we call this The Lost Generation the people who kind of missed out on getting a diagnosis in their childood and for many of them they had a miserable time they felt that they didn't really fit in at school they experienced stigma and discrimination they maybe dropped out of high school without achieving their real potential and many of them feel I mentioned this earlier but suicidal something like two3 of autistic people have felt suicidal and about onethird have attempted or planned suicide again our research is beginning to Pivot towards addressing these this crisis in mental health amongst autistic people particularly because there's a kind of unfolding tragedy in the autism community that is not really being talked about very much these very high rates of suicidality and this is the just the mismatch between like what is normal and then the way that the person is and the person feeling like there's something wrong with them and that's why we come back to you know neurodiversity reducing stigma let's get rid of the term disorder yeah exactly because I think if you feel that when you get your autism diagnosis first of all it's no big deal it shouldn't be something that you should feel embarrassed about uh or ashamed about C certainly you shouldn't feel like you are less than other people or inferior in some way you know you should you should feel different and it should be absolutely fine to ask for support so that's the disability aspect but if you feel kind of welcomed and even celebrated and respected for your difference that's going to feed into your self-confidence and your self-esteem very differently to if you feel that there's something wrong with you and that you're in some way broken which is the kind of concept of disorder maybe I'll start with empathy but can you speak to how somebody with autism what is their relationship with empathy and how is that different than somebody who you know who does not have autism so empathy is also a very broad concept we tend to distinguish between cognitive empathy uh which is sometimes also called theory of mind and it's all about the ability to imagine what someone someone else is thinking or feeling we distinguish that from affective empathy which is whether you can experience an emotion that's appropriate to somebody else's thoughts and feelings and what we find in our research is that autistic people struggle with the first kind kind of empathy imagining what another person might be thinking or feeling unless they're told but once they're told they don't you know they they're they're very um able to experience an emotion that's appropriate so if they're told that somebody just lost their job or that their dog died you know they can feel sad for the other person they can feel sympathy they can want to go and help the person autistic people do have empathy but they struggle just with one aspect of it which is cognitive empathy and that's why they may sometimes struggle to read people's facial expressions or understand their tone of voice uh or read between the lines of the conversation they often prefer conversations which are very explicit very direct rather than sort of uh maybe hinting or using a very subtle language what this reminds me of I mean people you know people without autism um aren't necessarily that great at this and the way in which we tend to screw it up is I think there's a lot of projecting of our own insecurities or whatever into how somebody else is responding to something or somebody's body language or whatever and often those are totally wrong if I'm somebody with autism am I like free of that piece of it am I basically like not doing that whole insecurity projection dance and um and that's part of the gift or or no you know everybody's doing that well when we measure empathy we use another questionnaire called the empathy quotient or the EQ actually again we find a bell curve and you know there are individual differences so uh you and I might score differently on that same instrument uh but equally you could get you could take two autistic people who might score at different points some autistic people will worry Have I said the wrong thing have I inadvertently offended somebody have I put my foot in it have I been socially clumsy other people may be quite oblivious to that and they just you know go you know just keep pursuing their their goals without worrying about what other people are thinking or feeling there's lots of variation and individual differences well it feels if you do have that individual difference it feels like a superpower to me and then can you speak to the differences in in communication style people with Autism are communicating a little bit differently and it feels like an understanding of that can be helpful it relates to empathy you know so so when we communicate often we're thinking about is the other person really understanding what I'm trying to say do I need to clarify my my message change the wording a little bit do I need to soften the message so as to avoid hurting other person's feelings you know so there's a lot of kind of empathy running in the background when we're communicating you know for some autistic people they prefer much more direct factual communication you know so if the communication is about I don't know we're going to meet at the train station at 3:30 that's nice and clear particularly if you specify which train station so nice and you know factual information whereas the question like how are you might be much too vague and open-ended autistic people may have a preference for certain kinds of communication rather than others and again you know if we think about the Practical implications of this it may be that a teacher at in school has to be thinking about what what kind of language will will best suit this kind of student an autistic student versus uh a neurotypical student and then how is is it um how is it treated the word treatment itself is kind of controversial because the word treatment often comes from medicine where we think about if you have a disease then you need a treatment whereas within this kind of neurodiversity framework we shouldn't automatically assume that everything about autism needs treating some of it just needs acceptance or respect for difference but I think there are things that people want help with and sometimes it's parents that want the help you know so if a child for example is experiencing a lot of anxiety parents may be looking for different kinds of intervention for their child's anxiety and there's a range of different intervention programs that are offered but I I I probably prefer the word intervention rather than treatment treatment may medicalize it too much for some parents they might choose speech therapy because their child is having a harder time you know developing language might be social skills opportunities so that if the child is struggling to socialize in the playground at school maybe they want to go to a much smaller group where um for example they're playing with Lego we call these Lego clubs because autistic kids often love the toy Lego but where there's an opportunity to kind of socialize whilst you're playing with Lego in small groups so these are of different types of intervention programs that might give the child confidence in learning to communicate and socialize whilst they're doing something that they enjoy like playing with Lego or playing with uh computer games or whatever but with something that they feel confident in doing and are there pharmacological interventions in cases where quality of life is being interrupted for reasons that don't have to do with you know stigma and lack of acceptance I mean I think for the co-occurring conditions like ADHD there are medications like rellin you know if someone has got um if they're already struggling with depression or anxiety certainly by adolescence and and for adults uh medication may be offered but there aren't really medications for the autism itself there's an argument that there shouldn't be you know that autism it's just it's just part of being different disability needs support but it may not need medication you know we could think of different kinds of supports some of them are kind of accommodations for the person like if the person finds the world too noisy maybe they want to wear headphones when they're in the classroom or in their you know if they if they're if they're working they may say do you mind if I wear my headphones that's an accommodation or an adjustment we could make which just makes the world more comfortable for an autistic person person without having to start playing with that biology yeah I mean it's a longer conversation you know that that's refreshing to hear since I you know I personally believe that so many of the medications we prescribe don't need to be prescribed they're prescribed too casually whatever there just a whole host of of issues with the medications that we prescribe for for mental health would you say that that's true on the on the far end of the spectrum like isn't at some point on the autism spectrum we would be looking for I don't think you're going to like this word but like a cure or some way to dampen the severity of the of of of the impact on the quality of life like somewhere on the far end of that Spectrum so I would use words like treatment and cure for the co-occurring conditions that cause distress and anxiety is a very good example you know some autistic people will say I'm happy being autistic but my anxiety levels are through the roof and if I could take something that would bring down my anxiety that would make life much easier for me so you know I think there might be some things where we would welcome a treatment or even a cure the same would be true for something like epilepsy maybe gastrointestinal pain GI pain which is very common in autistic people so I think it's not about treating the autism it's about treating the symptoms or the co-occurring conditions that cause distress whereas you know treating or curing autism itself for some people that becomes dangerously close to Eugenics that you're trying to eradicate autism when autism is part of the person we started out this conversation saying autism is partly genetic you know it's it's in your makeup it's part of who you are and it's not all negative you know autism also includes strengths and even talents um so we don't want to kind of eradicate or cure or prevent autism but certainly we want to have treatments or or supports or interventions for anything that's causing distress yeah and my question came from a place not of um kind of the the typical um person who lies in kind I don't know the middle of the Fairway of the autism spectrum but more in the very severe cases where is there's doubtedly it seems related to the autism an impact on quality of life and on yeah you know just ability to function and you know and the goal of course is improving quality of life wherever you are on that Spectrum whether you've got co-occurring conditions um you know including physical disabilities you know some autistic people struggle with motor coordination and even even walking through to language uh learning you know you know some autistic people have self-injury at very high rates you know banging their head against the wall of you know if they if they're unhappy and clearly distressed we would welcome anything that could alleviate distress and improve quality of life well thank you so much for the work that you do if I am somebody who you know wants to better understand myself and a lot of this is resonated or I want to better understand um somebody who might be in my life or if I just want to be a part of the solution related to acceptance and and neurodiversity where should I go what what would you recommend well in terms of um a good website for learning more about latest research there's a website called Spectrum news which I think is excellent it's well funded it's run by journalists covering stories about new discoveries new studies uh but it's very accessible but there's lots of websites out there if you just need practical support I would say you know most importantly for parents and for autistic people themselves you know find a support group so that you realize you're not the only one you know that actually once you realize there's lots of people we haven't talked about it but the prevalence of autism is now 1 in 36 so if you're at home alone and thinking you're the only one who's struggling one in 36 is like it's now very common so go out there and meet other people and you'll get some support yeah there's someone in every classroom kind of with um with autism well Sir Sir Simon Baron Cohen thank you so much for the time thank you for the work that you do thanks Brent I've really enjoyed the our discussion the most Day show is recorded in Boulder Colorado produced by Patrick adino music by Patrick Lee and hosted by Yours Truly Brent Franson founder and CEO of most days [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: The Most Days Show

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Length: 45min 43sec (2743 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 13 2023