Growing evidence for the extreme male brain theory of autism

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yes. me too.
I also note that the people I am always drawn to are honest, comparatively readable with a what you see is what you get demeanour. the only time since schol i have been around groups long term was in rehab 7 times. I felt safest with the up front and loud people who spoek their mind. anyone who it was deemed operated out of manipulation and underhand strategeis i tried to keep away from.

I am still lousy at reading this stuff. But i mention sraightforwardness as a prerequisite for associating with a person because it simply MAKES SENSE for some of us.

Yes, I definitely like people who are honest and straightforward and "what-you-see-is-what-you-get". I tend to shy away from more questionable people. Though I haven´t noticed one gender to be better at this than another...(though I guess my friends that are women have never been overtly or typically "female"). I have mostly gay male friends, and feel particularly comfortable with them (though I am heterosexual).

I have a question: has anybody read "Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain"? I saw this on Amazon recently, and I thought it could be interesting. Does anyone recommend this book?

Articles like that point me to that I'm atypical for ASD or so. My auditory processing is faster and more accurate than that of other people except in regards to language. Yet I can think of a couple of other autistic people who seem to have generally delayed hearing.

Ol' Simon, he be getting to be quite the celebrity these days, so he probably got some extra money, since celebrities usually do, and he's probably all worried about how to invest it in a collapsing global economy, since everybody else is too...

I think I know what he's gonna do. One industry that did fine during the last great depression was Hollywood, since everybody wanted to go to the movies to forget their troubles for a while, and Simon's already got some connections there I bet, because of his cousin Sasha...

Be the perfect opportunity for him to cash in on his insights about extreme male brains. He's gonna produce some extreme male movies about auties and aspies.

He's probably on the phone with Dustin Hoffman right now about doing the sequel, "Rainman's Rampage."

Or maybe he'll start with a spinoff, "Mozart and the Whaling Captain" about some bearded Norwegian aspie in a yellow rain hat who stands out in an arctic ice storm shooting exploding harpoons at a Greenpeace boat to prove his manhood. He rescues the survivors and some PETA pacifist falls in love with him because he's such an extreme male.

The most extreme male movie genre is action films, so I'm sure he won't pass that up. I'm thinking maybe Woody Allen as the tough cop called out of retirement because he's the only one who can rescue the hostages on the top floor of the Empire State Building.

Westerns are often extreme male too. Hmmm...

So, I just did a test to see if I had more of a male or female brain. I don´t know if it was THE Baron-Cohen test, as I couldn´t get the page. Whatever...I did appallingly badly on almost all the parts- worse than the average man or woman! So I´m feeling quite depressed. Parts of the test were timed, and I panicked. (I hate timed tests). My spatial skills were appalling. My empathy score was only 3. When I had to think up matching words (timed), I got only 1 word right in each category! I don´t seem to be much of anything, man or woman...

What´s strange is that I was supposed to do a physical task to determine which side of my brain is dominant. When I did it, they said my left brain is dominant- (which is more likely "male"). However, I am left handed and an artist (i.e., should be right brained), so what was that???

Oddly enough, I did remarkably well on the reading the eyes test. This was one of the few parts of the test that was not timed, so I was more relaxed. I felt like I guessed on about half of them, but at least I had time to make logical guesses.

I was also supposed to choose which men I found more attractive. This was very hard for me, as they all looked the same. I was told I preferred more "masculine" faces, with a square forehead or defined jaw...however, I was not looking at the forehead or jaw, I was just avoiding the faces with thick lips, as I prefer thinner lips.

Does anyone really give credence to these tests???

Well...if so, I guess, like I would have suspected, I seem to be more "neuter". I only seem to be a "woman" by default- i.e., I did badly on the spatial tests. (Of course, I did even worse on the word part and the empathy)...Strange.

Depending on how one measured, the overall premise might still hold true because my understanding is talking should be processed very fast. So if you process talking slowly, this would very probably produce a significant measurement that might be sufficient to counter faster processing elsewhere.

If we constructed a measuring system that weighted processing of particular audio stimuli correlated to the functionality gap created by particular audio processing differences, then this would make a processing gap with talking a very significant measurement (as would be predicted by the fact that in typical brains, processing of talking is heightened compared to processing of most, [if not all other] audio stimuli).

Fascinating posts.

I agree that AS tend to over-systemise. I certainly did, causing system crashes, but since I stopped social over-systemising life has been much better, with no crashes (see unlearningasperger.blogspot.com).

I believe AS sensory inputs often seem deafening because AS brains have been seeking maximum information from those inputs all their lives, as they try to make sense (systemise) the social interactions, and thus have wound the volume control up to maximum (see theory section on my blog). The question is how can we make these sensory inputs less deafening; does anyone have any ideas? Sometimes I literally turn my head at an angle when I'm talking to someone, but even then everything that's going on can be hugely 'clanging'.

Very best
JC

Wrongplanet includes some people who feel Simon B-C has distanced himself from his systemising and extreme male brain theories.

He told me (21/3/09) that
- he is continuing to test the extreme male brain (EMB) theory that autism/AS is an extreme of the Type S brain. the Type S brain is where systemizing is stronger than empathy. in his terminology, the Type S profile is described as S>E, and the extreme Type S is S>>E (i.e., systemizing is intact or above average, whilst empathy is below average).
- he wishes to clarify that this theory says nothing about sex drive, violence, or machismo. (these male-linked characteristics may be more related to current testosterone, whereas S and E appear to be related to foetal testosterone).
- finally, he told me that believes the EMB theory is still relatively young and that in science it often takes many years for enough data to accumulate to evaluate a theory. For example, he is only now beginning to test the neural correlates of S and E using neuroimaging, and to test if at the neural level the brain in autism/AS is an extreme of the neurotypical brain.


Do others have any comments on current research and theories out there - particularly in relation to autism/AS as a problem of too much systemising, and/or of inability or too much pain in empathising?

Best wishes
JC
http://unlearningasperger.blogspot.com

Supposedly, females have faster speech processing than males anyway. Never mind that some females are SLOW, and the worlds fastest talker, last I knew, is MALE. Still, some females CAN talk FAST!

BTW I can talk fast sometimes under stress, but generally speak at a normal rate. Sometimes I am slow to react, but I can react fast, etc... I HAVE understood even some foreign language stuff spoken at over 3 times the speed.