Girls, Boys And Autism

Andrew Bacalao has a good, sharp mind. At 13, he's a decent pianist, a devotee of Frank Lloyd Wright, a master at video-games and jigsaw puzzles. He remembers phone numbers like a Pocket PC, and he can dismantle a radio or a flashlight in the time it takes some people to find the power switch. But drop in on Andrew at home in Oak Park, Ill., and you quickly sense that something is amiss. "Can you look at her?" his mom, Dr. Cindy Mears, prompts, as a NEWSWEEK correspondent greets him in the living room. He stays on the couch, feet up, mesmerized by a handheld game called Bop It Extreme. Soon he's making soap bubbles and running outside to bang on the windows. Andrew does eventually talk, but conversation doesn't come easily. When his mom asks him not to burp, he tells the guest, "I'm going to unbutton your outfit." He's merely offering to take her jacket--and he seems to think his choice of words is just fine.

What do you make of such a kid? A generation ago, he might have been written off as a discipline problem or a psychopath--someone who insists on misbehaving even though he's smart enough to know better. But we now know there are different kinds of intelligence, which can crop up in unusual combinations. The world, as it turns out, is full of people who find fractal geometry easier than small talk, people who can spot a tiny lesion on a chest X-ray but can't tell a smile from a smirk. Most of these folks qualify as "autistic," but not in the traditional sense. Classic autism is a devastating neurological disorder. Though its causes are unclear, it has a strong genetic component and is marked by rapid brain growth during early childhood. Many sufferers are mentally retarded and require lifelong institutional care. But autism has many other faces. The condition, as experts now conceive it, is like high blood pressure--a "spectrum disorder" in which affected people differ from the rest of us only by degrees. The question is, degrees of what? Can autistic tendencies be measured on some scale? If so, is there a clear boundary between normal and abnormal? And is abnormality always a bad thing? What promise does life hold for people like Andrew?

Cambridge University psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen has a thesis that bears on all these questions. In a bold new book called "The Essential Difference," he de-fines autism as an imbalance between two kinds of intelligence: the kind used to understand people (he calls it "empathizing") and the kind used to understand things ("systemizing"). Though most of us have both abilities, studies suggest that females are better than males at empathizing, while males have a stronger knack for systemizing. By Baron-Cohen's account, autism is just an exaggerated version of the male profile--an extreme fondness for rule-based systems, coupled with an inability to intuit people's feelings and intentions. The truth may not be quite that simple, but the concepts of "E" and "S" offer a powerful new framework for thinking about boys, girls and autism. If Baron-Cohen is right, autism is not just a disease in need of a cure. It's a mental style that people can learn to accommodate. Sometimes it's even a gift.

It's no secret that autism affects boys more than girls. Males account for more than 80 percent of the million-plus Americans with autistic disorders. Are these conditions partly an expression of male thought patterns? Do boys live closer to the autistic spectrum than girls? Not in every case. But when researchers study groups of people--infants, toddlers, teens or adults--an interesting pattern emerges. Newborn girls gaze longer at faces than at mechanical mobiles, while boys show the opposite preference. By the age of 3, girls are more adept than boys at imagining fictional characters' feelings, and by 7 they're better at identifying a faux pas in a story. The disparity is just as striking when adults are asked to interpret facial expressions and tones of voice. Women rule.

Males aren't hopeless, though. They show a lifelong advantage on tests of spatial and mechanical reasoning. In fact they're nearly twice as likely as women to score more than 700 on the SAT math test, and four times as likely to become engineers. Social conditioning may account for some of that gap. It may also help explain the thrill that 2-year-old boys get from trucks, blocks and other mechanical toys. But there has to be more to the story. Consider what happened when psychologists Gerianne Alexander and Melissa Hines tried out six toys on vervet monkeys at UCLA's Non-Human Primate Laboratory. Male monkeys favored the boy toys (a ball and a car). Females spent more time with a doll and a pot. And the gender-neutral toys (a picture book and a stuffed dog) got equal attention from both groups. The findings suggest that sex hormones may sculpt our brains as well as our bodies, priming males and females for different styles of thought--what Baron-Cohen calls a "Type E" style and a "Type S" style.

It's not hard to see how autism fits into this scheme. In its classic form, the condition leaves people virtually devoid of social impulses. Autistic kids have trouble communicating, and games like peekaboo leave them cold. They seem to perceive people as unpredictable objects. Yet they often excel at systemizing. "Even young autistic children love to classify and order things," says Dr. Bryna Siegel of the University of California, San Francisco. "They're interested in categorical information." Siegel recalls a mother's story about taking her autistic son and nonautistic daughters to see "Finding Nemo," a movie about a clown fish who loses his mom and gets separated from his dad. "The little girls wanted to know if Nemo was scared," she says. "The autistic boy wanted to know exactly what clown fish eat."