Imagine if Bill Gates had been kept from becoming a successful business man. How would that have helped him. Your argument is utterly bizarre. Would he be happier if he had been forced to be unemployed?
If you love such a notion, go on the dole yourself, do not force other people onto the dole under some screwball notion that will help them.

You want to suppress people with such a condition from succeeding in life, and then claim that is helping them.

You seem to think that we should make all people with such conditions unemployed and then experiment on them.
Why? It is as ludicrous as making all black and gay people unemployed and then experimenting on why all of a sudden all black and gay people are unhappy, and frustrated about being banned from top jobs.
Firing such people and then analyzing why making them unemployed on them will do nothing but kill more of them.
You seem one of these people who read an article, and then comes to opposite conclusion of what the paper was arguing for.

http://www.nas.org.uk/nas/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=239&a=2371

I never said people with Aspergers could not be successful – I just said it needs to be in a field where reaching people on an emotional level isnt a requirement.

Matt – where did you get your degree – online?

There’s a video about the experiment here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZRVEVqvmbg

As above, that is exactly the theory

If you want to classify brains as ‘male’ or ‘female’, fair enough – as long as you recognise that very far from all men have what you’d define as a ‘male’ brain, and far from all women have a ‘female’ brain.

No, that’s not quite the way it works.

“Brains are organised on a male/female continuum”

Not even quite that. SBC has noted that the human brain seems to run along a continuum from systemizing to empathizing. We tend to regard systemizing behaviour as male and empathizing as female and thus the use of “male brain” etc. It’s also true that the distribution seems to show more men with the systemizing brain type than the empathizing.

No, this isn’t simply a social construct (although the use of “male brain” as a description may be) for we can actually see differences in the average male and average female brain. And when we look at those who are atypical (say, a highly systemising female) we see the same brain structures as other systemizers, not the same brain structures as empathizers whether male or female.

The mechanism in development is thought to be the bolus of testosterone that male fetus’ get and female don’t: or rather, don’t normally but if they do will develop the systemizing brain type. And if a male fetus doesn’t get that bolus at the right time then it too will develop the empathizing.

Autism (and the lesser cousin, Aspie’s) is, in this scenario, an extreme form of the systemizing brain.”Extreme male” if you prefer. Note that this can occur in either sex but is much more common in males. There are also “extreme female” types but this is very much less common (probably something to do with XX being more robust than XY).

Sure, you can reject all of this if you wish but that’s roughly the outline that our leading autism researcher thinks it all is about.

I hesitate to do this as I write there for money (I know, filthy lucre!) but there’s a set of SBC’s tests if anyone’s interested in where on the spectrum they might be.

http://eqsq.com/eq-sq-tests/

Note that the important numbers are not the absolute levels you get, but the difference between S and E.

Well congratulations, but could you answer the question I actually asked?

On second thoughts, don’t bother – I think we can all see where you’re coming from.

“Aspergers” = you are a bloke with a blokes brain

Funny, because I know plenty of blokes who clearly don’t have Aspergers. I also know some blokes who do. Yes, you could describe Aspergers as “indicative of a brain organisation at the far male end of that scale”, but you then seem to be confusing “extreme” with “typical”, or even “universal”. People who suffer the most severe form of Aspergers are almost completely unable to interpret facial expressions and body language – surely you don’t think that’s typical of men?

@ 59 No Neil, I have a psychology degree (a proper BSc, not the feminised BA) and have probably forgotten more about neuroscience than you will ever know.

Are Matt and “The Truther” saying that these criteria apply to all men?

Simon Baron Cohen, the leading autism researcher in hte country, would disagree with you their I think.

The only interesting point is that it brings into focus our general tabloidesque shock and horror at the idea of people not being “normal” – especially the man on the front page of our newspapers every day. Yeah, mental health issues can affect your job performance – so can having a cold, children, a bad day, a tendency to bore people to death or a Cliff Richard fixation… People are multifaceted and unfixed – there is no single tick box that can tell us if we’re “capable” or not, or likely to be in a couple of days time.

Mr Brown can be decried for a multitude of sins – by limiting the field to his mental health, think of all the fun we’re missing out on.