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Professor Simon Baron-Cohen

 

Who are you and what do you do?
Professor Simon Baron-Cohen.
I am a clinical psychologist, and a research cognitive neuroscientist specializing in understanding autism spectrum conditions.

 

Tell us about your childhood - did you have the same interests?
I suspect my interest in how the brain makes us social was influenced by the younger sister being born with major brain damage, which virtually took away her language and her reasoning and self-help skills, but left her remarkably social and emotionally connected to others. Almost the opposite of autism.

 

Why do you do what you do?
Two reasons: I want to do research that might be of some practical help to people with autism and their families. And I want to do research where we will learn about how the mind and, therefore, the brain works.

 


How did you get in?
I started as a teacher in a small unit for autism in Barnet, north London. Just 6 teachers and 6 children. Full time for a year, and in the process of getting to know the children, I became intrigued by the dissociation between their social and non-social intelligences.

 

What's been the highlight of your working career so far?
Being able to move from psychology to neuroscience to endocrinology to genetics. I just love the fact that science has been multi-disciplinary and that one has to keep crossing discipline boundaries to go deeper.

 

What keeps you going through the hard times?
For every 5 studies that don't work out, there's one that does!

 

 

What was your last project/piece of work/title of last scientific paper?
The Essential Difference (Penguin, 2003)
Prenatal Testosterone in Mind (MIT Press, 2004)
The Exact Mind (Jessica Kingsley Ltd, 2004)
Mind Reading: the interactive guide to human emotions (DVD-RoM - www.jkp.com/mindreading)

 

Who inspires you?
Watson and Crick

 

What would you like to be remembered for?
That's for others to judge!