Tag Archives: gender

Autism, Camouflage, and Consciousness

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Does recent research into autism suggest real differences between male and female handling of consciousness?

Traditionally, autism has been regarded as an overwhelmingly male condition. Recently, though it has been suggested that the gender gap is not as great as it seems; it’s just that most women with autism go undiagnosed. How can that be? It is hypothesised that some sufferers are able to ‘camouflage’ the symptoms of their autism, and that this suppression of symptoms is particularly prevalent among women.

‘Camouflaging’ means learning normal social behaviours such as giving others appropriate eye contact, interpreting and using appropriate facial expressions, and so on. But surely, that’s just what normal people do? If you can learn these behaviours, doesn’t that mean you’re not autistic any more?
There’s a subtle distinction here between doing what comes naturally and doing what you’ve learned to do. Camouflaging, on this view, requires significant intellectual resources and continuous effort, so that while camouflaged sufferers may lead apparently normal lives, they are likely to suffer other symptoms arising from the sheer mental effort they have to put in – fatigue, depression, and so on.

Measuring the level of camouflaging – which is obviously intended to be undetectable – obviously raises some methodological challenges. Now a study reported in the invaluable BPS Research Digest claims to have pulled it off. The research team used scanning and other approaches, but their main tool was to contrast two different well-established methods of assessing autism – the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule on the one hand and the Autism Spectrum Quotient on the other. While the former assesses ‘external’ qualities such as behaviour, the latter measures ‘internal’ ones. Putting it crudely, they measure what you actually do and what you’d like to do respectively. The ratio between the two scores yields a measure of how much camouflaging is going on, and in brief the results confirm that camouflaging is present to a far greater degree in women. I think in fact it’s possible the results are understated; all of the subjects were people who had already been diagnosed with autism; that criterion may have selected women who were atypically low in the level of camouflaging, precisely because women who do a lot of camouflaging would be more likely to escape diagnosis.

The research is obviously welcome because it might help improve diagnosis rates for women, but also because a more equal rate of autism for men and women perhaps helps to dispel the idea, formerly popular but (to me at least) rather unpalatable, that autism is really little more than typical male behaviour exaggerated to unacceptable levels.

It does not eliminate the tricky gender issues, though. One thing that surely needs to be taken into account is the possibility that accommodating social pressures is something women do more of anyway. It is plausible (isn’t it?) that even among typical average people, women devote more effort to social signals, listening and responding, laughing politely at jokes, and so on. It might be that there is a base level of activity among women devoted to ‘camouflaging’ normal irritation, impatience, and boredom which is largely absent in men, a baseline against which the findings for people with autism should properly be assessed. It might have been interesting to test a selection of non-autistic people, if that makes sense in terms of the tests. How far the general underlying difference, if it exists, might be due to genetics, socialisation, or other factors is a thorny question.

At any rate, it seems to me inescapable that what the study is really attempting to do with its distinction between outward behaviour and inward states, is to measure the difference between unconscious and conscious control of behaviour. That subtle distinction, mentioned above, between natural and learned behaviour is really the distinction between things you don’t have to think about, and things that require constant, conscious attention. Perhaps we might draw a parallel of sorts with other kinds of automatic behaviour. Normally, a lot of things we do, such as walking, require no particular thought. All that stuff, once learned, is taken care of by the cerebellum and the cortex need not be troubled (disclaimer: I am not a neurologist). But people who have their cerebellum completely removed can apparently continue to function: they just have to think about every step all the time, which imposes considerable strain after a while. However, there’s no special organ analogous to the cerebellum that records our social routines, and so far as I know it’s not clear whether the blend of instinct and learning is similar either.

In one respect the study might be thought to open up a promising avenue for new therapeutic approaches. If women can, to a great extent, learn to compensate consciously for autism, and if that ability is to a great extent a result of social conditioning, then in principle one option would be to help male autism sufferers achieve the same thing through applying similar socialisation. Although camouflaging evidently has its downsides, it might still be a trick worth learning. I doubt if it is as simple as that, though; an awful lot of regimes have been tried out on male sufferers and to date I don’t believe the levels of success have been that great; on the other hand it may be that pervasive, ubiquitous social pressure is different in kind from training or special regimes and not so easily deployed therapeutically. The only way might be to bring up autistic boys as girls…

If we take the other view, that women’s ability or predisposition to camouflage is not the result of social conditioning, then we might be inclined to look for genuine ‘hard-wired’ differences in the operation of male and female consciousness. One route to take from there would be to relate the difference to the suggested ability of women (already a cornerstone of gender-related folk psychology) to multi-task more effectively, dividing conscious attention without significant loss to the efficiency of each thread. Certainly one would suppose that having to pay constant attention to detailed social cues would have an impact on the ability to pay attention to other things, but so far as I know there is no evidence that women with camouflaged autism are any worse at paying attention generally than anyone else. Perhaps this is a particular skill of the female mind, while if men pay that much attention to social cues, their ability to listen to what is actually being said is sensibly degraded?

The speculative ice out here is getting thinner than I like, so I’ll leave it there; but in all seriousness, any study that takes us forward in this area, as this one seems to do, must be very warmly welcomed.

Ungender me here

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miceMale and female brains are pretty much the same, but male and female behaviour is different. It turns out that the same neural circuitry exists in both, but is differently used.

A word of caution. We are talking about mice, in the main: those obliging creatures who seem ready to provide evidence to back all sorts of fascinating theories that somehow don’t transfer to human beings. And we’re also talking specifically about parental behaviour patterns; it seems those are rather well conserved between species – up to a point – but we shouldn’t generalise recklessly.

Catherine Dulac of Harvard explains the gist in this short Scientific American piece. A particular network of neurons in the hypothalamus was observed to be active during nurturing parental behaviour by females; by genetic engineering (amazing what we can do these days) those neurons were edited out of some females who then showed no caring behaviour towards infants. Meanwhile a group of males in which those neurons were stimulated (having been made light-sensitive by even more remarkable genetic manipulation) did show nurturing behaviour.

For male mammals it seems the norm is to kill strange infants on sight (I did say we should be careful about extrapolating to human beings); another set of neurons in the hypothalamus proves to be associated with this behaviour in just the same kind of way as the ones associated with nurturing behaviour.

One of the interesting things here is that both networks exist in both sexes; no-one knows at the moment why one is normally active in females and the other in males. If we were talking about human beings we should be tempted to attribute the difference to cultural factors (I hope that by now nobody is going to be astonished by the idea that different cultural influences could lead to different patterns of physical activity in the brain); it doesn’t seem very plausible that that could be the case for mice. It goes without saying that to identify a new hidden factor which sets certain gender roles in mice would inevitably trigger a highly-charged discussion of the possible equivalent in human beings.

So much for the proper research. Could we dare to venture on the irresponsibly speculative hypothesis that men and women habitually think somewhat differently but that each is fully capable of thinking like the other? I shouldn’t care to advance that thesis and the whole topic of measuring the quality and style of thought processes is deeply fraught scientifically and beset with difficulty philosophically.

There is, though, one rather striking piece of evidence to suggest that men and women can enter fully into each others minds; novels. Human consciousness is often depicted in novels; indeed the depiction may be the central feature or even pretty much the whole of the enterprise. Jane Austen, who arguably played a major role in making consciousness the centre of narrative, never wrote a scene in which two men converse in the absence of women, allegedly because she considered she could have no direct experience of how men talked to one another in those circumstances. Moreover, while she was exceptionally skilful at discreetly incorporating a view from inside her heroines’ heads, she never did the same for Darcy or Mr Knightley.

But others have never been so restrained; male authors have depicted the inward world of females and vice versa with very few complaints; that rather suggests we can swap mental gender roles without difficulty.

But are we sure? I suppose it could be argued that as a man I have no more access to the minds of other men than to those of women, so to a degree I actually have to take it on trust that the male mind is accurately depicted in novels. In some cases, certain allegedly typical male thought patterns depicted in books (Nick Hornby choosing a routine football match over a good friend’s wedding) are actually rather hard for me to enter into sympathetically. For that matter I recall the indignant rebuttal I got from a female fan when I suggested that Robert Heinlein’s depiction of the female mind might be slightly off the mark. Perhaps, then, none of us knows anything about the matter for sure in the end. Still I think nil humanum me alienum puto (I think nothing human alien to me) is a good motto and, I’m slightly encouraged to think, an attainable aspiration.