In an academic world where scholars regret seeing their cherished theories vanish into the knacker’s yard, Sir Simon Baron-Cohen is unusual in wishing people would retire one of his best-known coinages.
He may have his work cut out in trying to push back against the popularity of the term he coined in a culture now awash in woozy autistic patter
Baron-Cohen, one of Britain’s best-known autism experts, says he now regrets the language of his ‘extreme male brain’ theory of autism. He now thinks it may have caused as much bother as good in influencing how people talk about the condition.
This is not because of the underlying science, but because the specific words themselves have proved ‘open to misunderstanding’. The phrase he came up with is now ‘too broad to be useful’, he tells The Spectator.
The soft-spoken clinical psychologist’s change of heart arrives just as the research centre he founded in 1997 is being handed a record-setting new dollop of money.
