Where does the ‘extreme male brain’ sit in our better understanding of autism?

Check your subscription status, update your details and more. Where does the ‘extreme male brain’ sit in our better understanding of autism? Simon Baron-Cohen’s influential research helped pin autism as a particularly male condition.

As studies increasingly broaden our view of autism, has his perspective changed? If you were asked to describe an autistic person, you might find it easy to think of an example, whether a relative, a colleague or even yourself. Diagnoses for autism have risen roughly tenfold over the past few decades, and a suite of broader diagnostic criteria means it now seems simpler to recognise in each other or ourselves.

To the autistic stereotypes that dominated popular culture until recently – _Rain Man_’s numerical savant Raymond Babbitt or _The Big Bang Theory_’s idiosyncratic physicist Sheldon Cooper – are now added women, like the detail-oriented detective Astrid Nielsen and the fierce chess champion Beth Harmon in _The Queen’s Gambit_. It’s a world away from the early 2000s, when psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen proposed his “extreme male brain” concept of autism. Since it was first defined in the 1940s, autism had been considered a condition that largely affects men, a view that Baron-Cohen, the world’s most prolific autism researcher, cemented with his focus on autistic people who score particularly highly for systematic thinking and lowly on some aspects of empathy. **Read more** What if the idea of the autism spectrum is completely wrong?

But today, Baron-Cohen and other autism researchers find themselves at a crossroads. In recent years, the proportion of boys and men diagnosed with autism has markedly fallen compared with girls and women. Meanwhile, there’s growing evidence that autistic people may not lie on a single spectrum with extreme cases all at one end, but within multiple distinct subtypes.

So, where does this leave the ideas developed by Baron-Cohen in over 1000 highly cited papers and three popular science books? Receive a weekly dose of discovery in your inbox. We'll also keep you up to date with _New Scientist_ events and special offers. #### Mind ### What if the idea of the autism spectrum is completely wrong?

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