Personal Info

Sports Teams:Ravens, Wolverines

Most Influenced By:Guy Mckhann

Website: http://www.kennedykrieger.org

Interview Highlights

This is a condensed, lightly edited transcript of an audio interview. The full audio is available and highly recommended. The interviewee may post clarifications in the comments.

Adrian Bye: Today we’re here with Dr. Gary Goldstein, who runs the Kennedy Krieger Institute. Gary, can you tell us about yourself?

Gary Goldstein: From the career perspective, I’m a child neurologist. For the last 20 years, I’ve been the director of the Kennedy Krieger Institute, which is a full service training, care and educational program focused on individuals with developmental disabilities, their families and the community.

We have a biomedical approach and an educational approach. We do biomedical and other kinds of research, and we train physicians, psychologists, and therapists of many kinds in one of the major training programs in the country.

Adrian Bye: You are also involved with Autism Speaks?

Gary Goldstein: One of the disabilities I became interested in here is autism. My own investigations revealed that the amount of private support and philanthropy for autism at the time was smaller than for other significant pediatric disorders. I saw that the few foundations that were out there trying to get to the causes and the treatments of autism had resources that were much smaller than comparable organizations that were making more progress. I actually was involved in helping launch Autism Speaks.

Adrian Bye: It sounds like you wear some other hats as well? You’re a busy guy.

Gary Goldstein: Yes, the Institute and my own interests are broader than autism. Autism is sort of a latecomer for us. In the last 10 years we have really built up our autism program at the Institute. It’s about 20% of what we do now.

Adrian Bye: Tell us about what kind of autism work you do at the Institute.

Gary Goldstein: It’s broad. Rebecca Landa is the leader of our autism center. She’s well known for launching the concept of monitoring the newborn siblings of children born into a family where there is already a child with autism. The idea is, knowing that autism has a significant heritable component, these newborn children probably will be at higher risk than the general population. By watching them develop she could see the earliest signs of autism and then confirm later, as it evolves, if the child actually had autism.

A big emphasis here has been on early recognition, and then early and very early intervention. A lot of what she does centers on how early can you decide whether someone is at high risk for autism? What do you do about it? How do you alert pediatricians to the fact that this can be recognized in most cases by the age of two?

What is important about recognizing it early is there are behavioral interventions, now proven in controlled studies, that alter the severity and the presence of autism if you begin them in these early times.

Adrian Bye: If a baby was born that didn’t like being held very much, what kind of interventions would you do?

Gary Goldstein: When you engage a baby with a new object, the child who might have autism is equally interested in it as the other baby without autism, but what they don’t do is try to visually share the experience with their mother. You hand the baby something new or you put something in front of them that is interesting and they immediately see it, become interested, and then almost instantaneously look over at their mother as almost to say with their eyes, look at this, I’m excited, you’re excited, let’s do this as a team. Whereas a baby that is at risk gets engaged with the object and ignores that there are other people in the room. You can watch does this baby ever look over or how often does the baby look over to engage their mother in the game, in the toys. That’s just one example of shared attention.

I watched them do therapy in very small groups with toddlers. One of the games they play is there are four children sitting there and all of them have autism, all in their own world without being engaged with the therapist. You give them a picture of one of the other children sitting there next to them. When they look at that picture, and then they give it to the child whose picture it is, everyone gets excited. You keep doing this, every day. Keep doing this, and all of sudden you see these kids begin to engage as a group and begin to be more social.

It’s normal interactions but instead of just coming easily to these children, you have to really work at it, and you have to keep track of what you are trying to do. This is what early intervention is about.

Adrian Bye: It does sound like in some cases you’re fixing autism.

Gary Goldstein: Yes. Now there have actually been controlled studies and the outcomes are different for children who have the intense early intervention. The beauty of this is it’s not a drug that does this. We’re not putting these children on some psychiatric medication, and they get better. This is going on all over the country, it’s everywhere, and I think it’s going to make a big difference.

I think this is probably the most important advance that has happened because we don’t yet have a pharmacology for autism. There are psychiatric drugs that help with some of the psychiatric comorbidities that some people with autism have. But there aren’t medications that get to the core of autism, to the socialization issues, the secondary language issues and the repetitive behaviors of autism.

Adrian Bye: Would we want drugs to treat it?

Gary Goldstein: I don’t know that. I think that if it’s disabling. The traits of autism for some people are the source of their success. They are able to focus better than other people. They won’t get off the track, they believe something or they want to accomplish something, and they just won’t stop. That makes them successful.

If the track they are on is looking at a piece of string all day long, and they don’t want to get off that track, that’s a bad track to be on. If you are so focused that you can see patterns in stock prices and become a multi-billionaire because you’re a stock trader, I don’t know, is that good or bad? I think there are traits that give you some really unusual abilities, but to the extreme, it can be a disability. That is my own personal view of this. When we keep expanding the diagnosis, then you begin to see people, if they have these traits, that they actually use them to their success.

It’s very hard for people with autism to be successful in public relations and sales, but they can be very successful in the back room making things work. I don’t think those people have a disease. These are the traits that are part of what we call autism. I don’t think it’s a disability until you are not able to take care of yourself. We have children who are in our self-injury treatment program, who have autism, who are non-verbal, who are 10 years old, and the way they communicate is by banging their head on the wall. That’s not very good, and that’s very different than those who are hedge fund people.

Adrian Bye: Autism obviously comes with issues, but it does come with some benefits. Now the benefits come from things like intense focus at work and things like that?

Gary Goldstein: It’s kind of like a puzzle. If you give a 1000 piece puzzle to a four year old, what are they going to do with it? But what about a child that can actually see the patterns and puts this thing together? That isn’t just focus. The brain is wired differently. And it can be to an advantage, or it can be to a disadvantage.

One of the serious problems is the effect on social interaction. Some people thought maybe these people are introverted and happy this way, but what we are finding is that they are not happy, and there is social anxiety and a desire to be interactive with family and have friends. It depends how extreme that is, and if it gets to a point where you can’t participate in society, that’s incredibly disabling.

Adrian Bye: Tell us more about other aspects of the Institute.

Gary Goldstein: I have the broader view that, for this institute to contribute, we look at the child’s brain and at the developing brain of development. Maybe in some genetic or environmental way these vulnerabilities and exposures might be autism, but they might end up being attention deficit or they might end up being a learning disability. Some of those children have autism with those other problems and some don’t. We certainly understand differences in needs of the different populations, but we’re looking at the disorders of the developing brain as they get expressed. The same lesion in the motor system may lead you to paralysis, and if it’s more in the temporal lobe or further frontal lobe, it’s going to be socialization issues.

A lot of our work has to do with this whole concept of plasticity, the idea that neurons can make new connections continuously through life. The insights we get from children, who are paralyzed in the brain, from children who have autism, those are overlapping contributions. So, we’re not mixing everybody together, but we sort of see the challenge, the same gene. You look at these genes that are being identified as having some risk for autism, most of them don’t cause it, but you see them having a risk for other conditions that we see.

We get the broader view, because we’re not an autism center, we’re a developmental disability center. All comers. We’re very interested in the tools of modern imaging. We have an incredible research imaging center using MRIs to see not only how the brain looks but how it works. We have a genomic center, and we’re just beginning to have these tools to look at someone’s entire genome. We’re beginning to look at conditions, not necessarily autism to start with, but other disorders that are much easier to make the clinical diagnosis. That helps us look at all the children, including the ones with autism.

Adrian Bye: For those interested in funding research, I’ve looked at a lot of autism research and where I see it, the behavioral stuff is being underfunded, and that’s where the research should be going. I’m curious as to your thoughts on that?

Gary Goldstein: The challenge right now with the behavioral studies is dissemination. If you come to Kennedy Krieger or go to 50 other places in this country, there is some good behavioral intervention available. But when you add it all up, how many children can all of these 50 centers serve? If you look at the fact that it is 1% of all children, and there are 40,000 children every year being added to this collection. There are not 40,000 slots up there, there is at most 10%. So, how do we get from being able to serve 10% to 100%? How do we disseminate it, how do we make it more cost effective? We actually have something we can help with, but we are not applying it to as many children as needed.

Now, one approach has been, and this has been an Autism Speaks agenda, to get states to pass laws to pay for this stuff, and they’ve been marching about the country, getting laws changed. But the law itself doesn’t always translate into funding. We’re at that point. We have something to disseminate. I don’t know that it’s research money, but it’s dissemination money. Or maybe it’s too expensive what we are doing? Just because what we do works to the degree it does doesn’t mean it couldn’t be done more cost effectively.

Adrian Bye: You could make a whole series of training videos, and just put it on the web.

Gary Goldstein: How do you get that to the child? At scale? You can demonstrate these things, but every year there are 40,000 more. That’s a challenge and we’re thinking about how to do that.

The bigger challenge is whatever tools we have in genetics are being applied to this population.

Adrian Bye: Why do we need to understand the genetics of it?

Gary Goldstein: For diagnosis. If you might have diabetes, you get a blood test and it takes 5 minutes and $100. We’ve got a much more complicated way to make a diagnosis now, but even that would make a difference. If you knew which children were at high risk, you could begin these early interventions. We know that siblings are at high risk, but what about the other children? We think that if you could start at 6 months, it might be more cost effective to do that, but who would you do it to?

It would also help you hone in on the environmental triggers that may be more important than the genetics, but that link up together with the genetics. You could make better sense of the data, in the exploring and searching for environmental triggers.

Adrian Bye: We’re going to have to wrap up. Is there anything else you want to mention?

Gary Goldstein: The fact that autism merges with very high functioning, very productive and important people to society makes this particularly challenging. If it was limited to those that were non-verbal and were dependant, it would make it easier to get to the essence of it. But that isn’t the case. That is what makes this really challenging. We spend a lot of time here thinking about how to focus our energies and how to use the tools that we have available to us, and all the patients.

Personal Info

Favourite Books:

• Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
• Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
• The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus

Most Influenced By:David Perrett, Vittorio Gallese, Valeria Gazzola (Wife), Gerard Keysers (Father), Bas Kast (Friend)

Company Website: http://www.nin.knaw.nl/research_groups/keysers_group

Amazon Link: Book or E-Book

Interview Highlights

This is a condensed, lightly edited transcript of an audio interview. The full audio is available and highly recommended. The interviewee may post clarifications in the comments.

Adrian Bye: Today I’m here with Christian Keysers, who is a neuroscientist from the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience. Christian, thanks for joining us. Can you tell us what it is you do?

Christian Keysers: The big question that fascinates me is how people can understand other people. How do we go from seeing facial expressions of people to really feel what goes on inside of them?

Adrian Bye: Would you focus that primarily around mirror neurons?

Christian Keysers: I got interested in the topic through mirror neurons. I used to work in visual neuroscience, where the big question is how the brain puts the information that enters your eyes together to make you see the world. But then you very quickly get to the point where I see somebody smile, I can understand how the brain makes me see this smile, but how do I know that that person is happy? To try to find an answer to that, I moved to Italy, where the team in Parma had just discovered mirror neurons.

I joined the team two years after they made the first publications and observations. The team was studying the motor part of the brain, to understand how a monkey or a human can actually control his own action. The way you do that is that you put little electrodes in the brain of a monkey. The monkey is not aware that there is an electrode, and you can listen into what single neurons do while you actually interact with the monkey.

They quickly realized that the neurons were involved in relatively high-level aspects of actions, like wanting to take an object. Then, only by accident, they noticed that each time they took an object to present to the monkey, the neuron was firing as if the monkey had done the action. In the beginning, they didn’t even believe that it was real, that the part of the brain that was supposed to take care of your own actions would actually be involved in perceiving the actions of others.

Adrian Bye: What does a mirror neuron look like? Is this something you can actually see?

Christian Keysers: The methods we use don’t actually look with a microscope in the brain. What we do is we have these little electrodes, like antennas, that basically capture the firing.

They are just like any other neuron that is involved in programming your own actions. What makes them special is that they seem to receive the right input from the visual part of your brain to also respond when you see a similar action done by somebody else.

Adrian Bye: When you are testing for them, are you able to isolate down to a single mirror neuron or are you at a group?

Christian Keysers: What you do is you use electrodes that just take in signals that are incredibly close to the tip of the electrode, so when you hear something, you are sure it’s a single neuron. That is why we are so sure that it’s the same neuron firing when the monkey does something and when the monkey sees somebody else do something.

Adrian Bye: What happens to the monkey at the end of this?

Christian Keysers: We interact with these monkeys for years. We work, sometimes, six hours a day with them. They are really like pets. The implants are small, and the brain is not pain sensitive.

When you need to record from a monkey, you basically just listen in. Each time you hear a neuron, you stop and you try to find out what the neuron does. The monkey is not aware of that, so you just interact with the monkey. You give him a peanut or an apple or you try to get him to do things with his hand or his mouth, always listening to what the neuron does. Until you find the action that when the monkey does it, it always activates that neuron.

Then you know this is a neuron that is involved in breaking a peanut. While you are still listening to the neuron, you then take a peanut and break it yourself and you see whether that excites the neuron. If it does, you know it’s a mirror neuron. Then you can go stand behind the monkey and break a peanut to check whether the sound of breaking a peanut also does the job. And it turns out that it does.

Adrian Bye: When you move behind him and check the sound, was that the same mirror neuron that fired by sight?

Christian Keysers: Yes. That was one work I did in Parma, to establish the fact that mirror neurons do not only respond to the sight of other people’s actions, but also to the sound.

You may remember the famous radio advert that Coca-Cola had for a while. They just open the Coca-Cola bottle, pour the drink, and then go “Ah”. It really made you long for something to drink yourself. The kind of mirror neurons that we found also respond to the sound of an action, like biting or drinking, and the fact that you share the actions that you hear can explain why these radio adverts can be so powerfully engaging.

The idea is that when you, for the first time, open a Coca-Cola can and hear this hissing sound, then the neurons in your brain that make you open the can will be active at the same time as the neurons that make you hear the hissing. Because they are going to be active together, every time you open the coca-cola can, you’ll get this strong association within the brain getting thicker connections between the motor neuron and the auditory neuron.

If you have done that a couple of times, and you then hear somebody else open the Coca-Cola can, you activate one of the two neurons and through the thicker connections, it will then activate the motor program that you used to cause the same sound. Therefore, it is this pairing or anchoring, between doing an action and seeing and hearing it, that will wire up your brain with mirror neurons that can activate the motor program if you see or hear the actions of others.

Adrian Bye: How do we learn facial expressions?

Christian Keysers: What happens in the brain is that when you see me smile, first you will activate part of your brain that you normally use to move your face in a similar way, the premotor cortex, and then that activates a part of the brain that is involved in feeling your own state. Through this double step of sharing the facial expression and then sharing the feeling behind it, you manage to really get what happens in the other person’s mind.

Parents have the tendency to imitate the facial expressions of their kids. If the kid is happy, and then looks up to his mother, he’s going to see his mother smile back at him. That gives him an opportunity to anchor, or associate in Hebbian learning, his happiness with the look of a smile. If he falls down and starts crying, the mother’s facial expression will look sad, and that will give him an opportunity to pair his own pain and distress with what the distressed facial expression looks like.

Our parents mirror our own facial expressions and that gives us the opportunity to associate this complex expression, which is a movement of the face a certain way or the tone of voice, with an inner state that we experience at that moment. Once this association has been built up, the next time you see the facial expression, you’ll have this recall of the rich emotional feelings that you had in the past.

Adrian Bye: Some of the recent research says that mirror neurons are not related to autism. What are your thoughts?

Christian Keysers: We were very interested in that as well. Part of our interest was triggered by the study that Mirella Dapretto had done. She found that if you look at the premotor cortex of children with autism and show them the facial expressions of others, you don’t see as much mirroring as you do in typically developing children. Then what we did was scan people ranging in age from young adults around 18 all the way up to people aged 50. We showed them the facial expressions of others and what we saw was, on average, they were doing just as much mirroring as typically developing individuals. But then when we looked at the different ages, what we saw was that the young adults were still mirroring less than their age matched controls, whereas the older patients with autism were actually doing more mirroring than the typically developing individuals.

The impression I got out of that is what may actually happen in individuals in autism is that because they’re not so interested as children in the faces of other people, they just don’t spend as much time staring at their mother’s face, for instance, and therefore, it takes longer for them to build up this association between their own inner feelings and what they look like on other people’s facial expressions.

Adrian Bye: You’re saying the motivation is missing?

Christian Keysers: Exactly. Because the motivation to seek these biological responses of others isn’t as strong, it just takes you longer to get the repetitions that would build up a mirror neuron. If it takes a hundred times to build up this connection and you’re really fascinated by faces, then in just a couple of months, it might be enough. If you’re more interested in other things, it may take you years to accumulate the same number of paired experiences. It will just take longer for this system to become fully wired up.

Adrian Bye: That disagrees with most of the current autism research.

Christian Keysers: I think one of the other related issues is the fact that there might be subtle differences in the synapses as well. The synapses are the part of the connection between neurons that can become stronger with experience, and it turns out that in some of the cases where we know what gene is different in subjects with autism, these genes often seem to code the plasticity of these synapses. That may also slow down how quickly you can wire up these mirror neurons, because those connections may be a bit more conservative and want a couple more experiences to wire up.

Adrian Bye: What about sociopaths and psychopaths?

Christian Keysers: What we found in autism is the system is actually relatively normal in the adult, it just develops in a different trajectory. When we looked at psychopaths, what we found was a bit different. If you take a psychopath and you put him in a scanner, and you make him feel a bit of pain, you will see the pain areas light up. Then you can show him a movie of somebody else experience pain and you will see that those pain areas do not light up. That would suggest they have a broken mirror system. But then we asked them to try to feel what the other person is feeling, and what we saw is that a psychopathic brain actually activates these pain areas in ways that look completely normal. It seems that the problem is not that they don’t have a functioning kind of empathy or mirror system, their thing is that they seem to have a gift to turn it on and off whenever they want to.

I think that is what makes them so fascinating. If you watch the movie Silence of the Lambs, in one second he’s eating the liver of his enemy with a nice glass of Chianti, obviously having turned off his empathy, and the next second he’s there watching Clarice, as she first enters the prison, and feeling exactly what she is feeling at that moment, her fear and everything, and being able to manipulate that, to make her do what he wants her to do.

On the one hand, they’re incredibly cunning and empathic, and on the other, they seem to lack empathy altogether. What we see is it is a very voluntary access to this system.

Where the system is really different from autism is that in autism it’s the capacity to empathize that is a challenge, and for psychopaths it’s more the fact that they have the power to turn it on and off so easily that they’re not going to socialize in normal ways.

Adrian Bye: Is there anything else you want to talk about?

Christian Keysers: In thinking about the mirror system, a lot of people jump to the conclusion of we have these systems that make us share the emotions of others, so that automatically makes us good, empathic and moral people. I think we need to be careful, because what this kind of mirror system gives us is the opportunity to share what goes on in other people. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that we will then go out and help them. If I see somebody sad, then I share the sadness, and I want to make him feel better, because that will make me feel better. But my own interests might take over, and I might just turn away to lose that emotion.

The mirror system gives us a real chance to feel what goes on in others, and that is a strong foundation for doing the right thing, but it still takes an additional layer of being willing to sacrifice to help others to create moral behavior.

One of the observations that I always find amazing is the Golden Rule. Basically, throughout the most varied religions, there is this basic rule to say “do unto others what you would like them to do unto you”. Now if you think about it, that is a very odd way of expressing it. What you should do to others is what they want you to do to them, right? That would be the best way to do something for them. But the fact that all these wise men expressed it in that way, think about how you would feel and that will help you do the right things for others, is really exactly what we find the mirror system to do for you. It allows you to feel in the place of that other person. I think that these forms of ethics that are done through the Golden Rule are so effective because they really embrace the biology of the brain and they take advantage of this capacity that we have to feel how we would feel in the state of other people.

Personal Info

Sports Teams:Washington Senators

Favourite Books:

• Narration and Knowledge by Arthur C. Danto
• A Grammar of Motives by Kenneth Burke
• Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen

Most Influenced By:Harrison White, Mitch Duneier, His Wife

Company Website: http://understandingautism.columbia.edu

Relevant Link: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Understanding-Autism/165198150171449

Interview Highlights

This is a condensed, lightly edited transcript of an audio interview. The full audio is available and highly recommended. The interviewee may post clarifications in the comments.

Adrian Bye: Today I am here with Peter Bearman from Columbia University. Peter, could you tell us about who you are?

Peter Bearman: I am a professor of Sociology at Columbia University and I’m the principal investigator of a project funded by an interesting and adventuresome instrument, produced by the National Institute of Health, called the Pioneer Award, that tries to fund and support research that wouldn’t otherwise get through the normal peer review process. I applied for support from the NIH to help understand the increasing prevalence of autism, and we were fortunate enough to get funding for 5 years.

I went to Brown University, and eventually to Harvard where I got my PhD. I wrote my dissertation on local elite social structure in England, on the eve of the English civil war. I spent 10 years at the University of North Carolina, where I worked on how to analyze life stories using network quantitative techniques. I also co-designed the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to understand the social context in which adolescents make decisions that have health consequences for them. I came to Columbia in 1998 and worked on a diverse set of problems before thinking I had something to contribute to understanding the increased prevalence of autism.

I run the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, which is designed to catalyze social science research at Columbia. I also co-direct a program, supported by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Health and Society. It is a post-doctorate fellows program that is designed to help people bring their attention to health related issues, especially to help us understand population health outcomes and disparities.

Adrian Bye: Can you tell us about the autism institute that you are running?

Peter Bearman: It is a project that is really funded solely by the NIH. It’s a small group of us. There’s me, and then over the course of the last 4 years, I’ve had 5 or 6 post docs, a couple graduate students, and a couple research assistants. We work on one particular data set that links every child born between 1986 and 2002 in the state of California. We have the birth records of every child born, about 500,000 kids a year, so we have 8 million children that we have data on. We’ve linked those data to another set, out of the Department of Developmental Services, in California, which identifies the vast majority of children in California who have been diagnosed with autism and are provided services through the DDS.

Adrian Bye: I read an article today from the Simons Foundation that 30% of the population shows some traits. What do you think of that?

Peter Bearman: Our project is focused on the increased prevalence of autism proper, not spectrum disorder. Even with that restriction, in our very brief observation window which looks at birth cohorts from 1992 to 2002, there has been an over 600% increase.

Adrian Bye: How do we know there is a 600% increase and it wasn’t people being diagnosed with schizophrenia and bi-polar instead of autism?

Peter Bearman: There are four types of explanations that have been preferred to explain this increase. One of those explanations involves diagnostic change or diagnostic substitution. The idea is that, prior to 1992, children who had symptoms consistent with autism diagnoses today would have been diagnosed for mental retardation. From our data, we can estimate that on the substitution pathway we can account for about 25% of that increase in caseload.

The other explanation people offer is that the increase arises from gene expression or gene-environment interactions.

A third class of explanations is environmental. That could be vaccines, viruses, pollution, high-tension wires, or television. I’m not saying it’s any of these things, I’m saying that people have argued that these changes in the environment have occurred, and that they could be causing autism.

The fourth class of explanations focus on social influence and increased awareness. There is a sociological process of increasing awareness of autism that allows parents to think about developmental processes and, therefore, come to recognize and seek treatment for their children.

Nobody has successfully identified a genetic driver of autism that accounts for more than a few percentages of the cases. There is a lot of theorizing that if genetics are involved then changes in the way in which people choose partners in the last 20 years would have brought together people who were on the spectrum and therefore are more likely to have children expressing autism or Autism Spectrum Disorder. That is colloquially called the “geek hypothesis”, which is that the transformation of employment relations has created opportunities for people with high skills in technology and engineering to meet. If that were true, it would lead to a very crisp prediction, which would be that you would see an excess of autism cases in areas where those people were residing. In the California data, it would lead you to expect an excess of cases in the Silicon Valley. It turns out that if you look at where children with autism in California are born, there are no autism clusters in the Silicon Valley.

There is a single cluster of autism cases in California, present every year, in northern Hollywood Hills.

Adrian Bye: What is the demographic of that area?

Peter Bearman: It is a cluster that arises independent of the fact that people who share certain characteristics are more likely to have children who have autism. The clustering reserve controls for the age of parents, the wealth of the community, and all the known predictors of autism at the individual and the community levels. It is a real cluster and it invites us to ask ourselves what causes that cluster?

One of those things could be that the people share exposure to a toxicant, and that toxicant causes expression as autism later. Another argument is that a virus is passed between people that affects developmental processes and therefore expresses itself as autism. A third idea is that parents are influencing each other in their own understanding of autism. They are learning how to interpret developmental symptoms in the language of autism, and they are learning how to navigate a system in order to get services for their children.

All of our work is at http://understandingautism.columbia.edu. What we can show is that there is a cluster, and then we can show that the cluster does not arise because of composition. It doesn’t arise because people are similar to each other in their risk status. It doesn’t arise because they share a toxicant. We do think it provides evidence to show that parents learn how to think about autism and then learn how to navigate in order to get services, and that contributes to increased prevalence.

If we step back and say 25% of the increased prevalence is diagnostic, and some of the increased prevalence, in our case we estimate it to be 16%, is associated with a unique increase in social awareness and social influence that operates at a very local level, that gets us to 40% of the increase. Our other work has tried to make sense of a couple of other phenomenon, one of which is genetics.

Adrian Bye: Are there any patterns around the order of birth in the family?

Peter Bearman: We just published a paper that shows that second and third born children who are born on very short intervals after a first or second born child are at greater risk for autism. That could either reflect nutritional deficiencies for the mother or it could reflect something in the socialization experience in the household.

One other thing is because we have every child born in California, we also have every twin pair born in California. We are able to ask, from a population point of view, what is the real heritability of autism? Our heritability estimates are much lower than the estimates that come from self-nominated or convenience samples arising from clinics. Our estimates are closer to 0.5-0.6, which put them in line with other developmental disorders. In addition, over the very short period of 10 years between the birth cohorts of 1992 and the birth cohorts in 2002, what we’re able to see is that identical twins are more concordant for autism, and fraternal twins are increasingly less concordant. There is really only one explanation for that diverging pattern, and that is the role of de novo mutations in developmental disorders.

Adrian Bye: That would talk to it being genetic, would it not?

Peter Bearman: It’s a form of genetics, but it’s not heritable in a Mendelian framework. A de novo mutation is a genetic mutation, but it is not a mutation that is given from parents. It also supports why it has been very difficult for geneticists to find genes for autism, because they are complex de novo mutations that are expressing themselves across the genome.

Adrian Bye: I see parents talking about putting their kids on a gluten free or casein free diet. What are your thoughts on that?

Peter Bearman: We have an interesting lens on what happens to children once they have an autism diagnosis. We have every child who is provided services through California, so there are thousands and thousands of children. We have annual evaluations of those children, so we’re able to see how those children are doing over time, and all children do slightly better. Conditional on diagnosis and service provision, as we observe them year after year, their evaluations improve and they become less impaired.

There is one group of children, around 12% of the population, that has a completely different trajectory. They are people we call bloomers. They show marked and extremely rapid improvement over the 2 or 3 years subsequent to diagnosis. They essentially improve so rapidly that they exit the population at risk, and cease to get services under the autism provision.

Something that some parents are doing is really making a difference. The problem is we don’t know what they are doing. So, we hope this will excite people into discovery that something is really working out there. There is a lot we don’t understand about treatment outcomes, and we do have the population data to show that the anecdotal accounts of some parents are actually observed.

We were able to show that from the three components of autism, social impairments, communication impairments, and repetitive behaviors, that the blooming is observable most markedly for communication, and then strongly markedly for social behaviors, and not at all for repetitive behaviors. The fact that blooming expresses itself differently across these three domains might point to the mechanism involved in this kind of rapid improvement.

Adrian Bye: What was the percentage of bloomers?

Peter Bearman: 10-15%. That’s significant because if we know what resources the parents are deploying, we could modify the treatment regimes in order to encourage more people to do that.

Adrian Bye: Have you started contacting those families to figure out what they are doing?

Peter Bearman: We de-identify our data, so we can’t reach out to them. Our hope is the work we do at the population level points to more detailed case studies that are clinical or service provision based. For example, the work we have done to identify a role for de novo mutations in autism now points to clinical testing. The work that we’ve done that identifies autism trajectories would point to service providers trying to look back over their records, and then figuring out what people have done. Then to neuroscientists to look at people in their practices to try to understand from brain imaging whether they can find correlates of blooming in the data structures they have. It would point again to geneticists looking at the history of developmental trajectories to try to identify whether there is a unique genetic signature for bloomers versus others.

Adrian Bye: What would be your best guess as to what is going on?

Peter Bearman: In terms of increased prevalence, I think we’ve explained 50-60% of it. We’ve got some explanation associated with age of parents, spatial clustering, increased social awareness, de novo mutations, and diagnostic change. Our next project is to try to understand whether reproductive technologies are playing a role in increasing risk. There are a lot of reasons to think there is a relationship there. One of the reasons is that with older parents the risk for having children with autism is actually mediated by reproductive technology. The second reason might be that shared characteristics that lead to infertility also lead to expression of children born with autism. The third is that the actual process by which ART is conducted either through hormones or through the actual in vitro process creates opportunities for de novo mutations. If ART is not related to autism, it means it is a safe procedure with respect to autism. If it is related to autism, then it becomes a very important factor that parents can think about as they decide on their family.

There is another class of issues that nobody is doing a very good job of, which is to understand the environment. Everybody is looking at environmental changes right at this moment. Saying here is the increased prevalence of autism, here is something that changed in the environment over that time period, and that is why we have these arguments about television. But, it’s very possible that the change in the environment happened a generation earlier, and would, therefore, express itself not in the children today, but in the mothers of the children today when they were in utero. We don’t really have a good way of thinking about the timing of environment, and we need methods that would allow us to think about the cross generational impacts of environments on children today.

Adrian Bye: Do you have any personal connection to this?

Peter Bearman: No. I work on problems that I think are really important. I’m a puzzle solver. I try to find problems that I think my unique skill set can help solve. Eventually, I’ll have contributed to this problem as much as I can and I will find another problem.

Personal Info

Sports Teams:Washington Redskins, NY Mets

Favourite Books:

• Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure by Paul A. Offit
• Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely

Most Influenced By:Her Mother, Her Daughters

Twitter: http://twitter.com/alisonsinger

Personal Blog: http://autismsciencefoundation.wordpress.com

Company Website: http://www.autismsciencefoundation.org

Interview Highlights

This is a condensed, lightly edited transcript of an audio interview. The full audio is available and highly recommended. The interviewee may post clarifications in the comments.

Adrian Bye: Today I’m here with Alison Singer, who runs the Autism Science Foundation. Alison, tell us about yourself.

Alison Singer: I am the founder and president of the Autism Science Foundation. We were founded two years ago to focus on funding for autism research. What I am most proud of is that we started funding science in our first year of operations, and we’ve increased our funding levels every year. In just two years of running the Autism Science Foundation, we’ve already funded just under $500,000 in scientific grants.

I’m very grateful for the tremendous support that the community has provided for the Autism Science Foundation. We couldn’t do any of this without our volunteers, our donors, and our friends in the media, particularly the social media. They’re the ones who make it all possible.

Adrian Bye: Can we walk through how this works?

Alison Singer: We believe that the greatest things we can offer our family members of autism are love and scientific research. When you think about it, research is what will help our children and our adults with autism to grow, improve and live the best lives possible. That’s really what they are entitled to, at the end of the day.
We raise money from the autism community, and from outside the autism community as well, and we use that money to fund all areas of autism research. We look particularly at what causes autism and how we can develop better treatments.

We have really focused in on funding young investigators. Pre- and post-doctoral students just beginning their careers in autism research, who have very new, very novel, and very exciting ideas for new ways to approach problems, and just need a little bit of money to get some preliminary data. Then our hope, and our expectation, is that they will take the preliminary data that is funded through our grants and they will leverage that into much larger NIH grants.

We think it’s very important to be building a pipeline of researchers. We’re not going to find the answers in five years. We need to be making sure that we are encouraging young scientists to study autism as opposed to studying other diseases. Sometimes, by being able to offer them a grant, pairing them with a well established scientific mentor, and encouraging their career, we are able to attract the best and the brightest into autism research. That’s what it is going to take. We need the smartest people working on these issues, because the issues are very challenging.

Adrian Bye: What are the types of people that tend to come and give to you? How much do they give?

Alison Singer: We have donors who have given donations from $5 to $50,000. Any donation is very welcome. What we are able to offer is the opportunity to pool funds and then have the grants evaluated by our scientific advisory board, which is comprised of the top autism researchers from around the world. That way we’re able to select the best studies and make sure that our funders are donating to work that is really going to have impact.

We encourage donors who are interested in rigorous research to take a look at what we’re funding on our website. What differentiates us from other autism organizations is that our focus is on funding the research and on disseminating the research, and that’s a critical component. A lot of research is being done now, and a lot of great information is coming out of the research that has been funded, but it doesn’t do anyone any good if people don’t know about it.

As new treatment protocols are being developed, families need to know about them, so that they can contact their school districts, or they can talk to teachers. We do that through our website, we do that through all of our social media activities, we do that by sponsoring conferences for parents and conferences for special educators.

Whenever we look at what we’re funding, we make sure that there is real value for families. As part of the application process, we ask the scientists to say how will the information that comes out of this study help real people? What we’re interested in, as a caring and family based access group, is how will this new science change people’s lives for the better? And how we can help people to know what’s going on in the scientific community, so they can implement the new evidence based interventions.

Adrian Bye: What is the typical grant size?

Alison Singer: Our pre-doctoral grants are between $25-30,000 and our post-doctoral grants are between $35-40,000, each year.

Adrian Bye: You review their application with your body of scientists?

Alison Singer: The Scientific Review Board, and the grant review committee looks at all the applications. They basically score them, and every year we get many more applications that score in the fundable range than we are able to fund. So often, great projects are left on the table unfunded. I consider that my personal challenge. I would like to get to the point where all of the grant applications that score in the fundable range are able to be funded.

We are now in the position in the autism research community where there is more great research waiting to be done than there is money to fund it. That is what motivates me from a fundraising point of view every day. I want to raise enough money to fund all the research that needs to be funded.

Adrian Bye: This is a personal thing for you, because you have a brother and a child on the spectrum.

Alison Singer: I have an older brother who is diagnosed with autism, I have my 14 year old daughter, Jodie, who is also diagnosed with autism, and I have another daughter, Lauren, who is 12 years old. I’m really motivated by all three of them, as well as by all of the families that I talk to every day.

Adrian Bye: Are they on the classical end of the spectrum?

Alison Singer: My brother has had a very challenging life. He was diagnosed in the 1960s, and my mother was basically told that he was autistic because she was a bad mother, and that she should try harder with her other child, which was me. When he was diagnosed, there were no laws to protect him or even send him to school. He never learned to speak, never learned to communicate in any way, and is severely challenged. I always wonder what his life would have been like if he had had access to early intervention or even had had the opportunity to go to school.

The message I always try to communicate to people is the learning window doesn’t magically close when children turn 3 or 5 or 21. My brother, he wasn’t even toilet trained until he was in his 30s. But now we’ve accomplished that, and he’s able to participate in a program where he delivers Meals on Wheels to homebound senior citizens, 3 mornings a week. He’s now a contributing member of the community, but he never would have had that opportunity if we had given up on teaching adults new skills.

Adrian Bye: The work that you fund, do you fund more on the low end of the spectrum or the high end of the spectrum?

Alison Singer: We fund the best studies. When the studies come in, we look for which are the most scientifically meritorious, and which are most likely to produce information that is of real value to families.

We have funded grants that look at language development, social functioning, and stereotypical behavior. We definitely need more research to understand what causes autism. Then, we need to start to move from what causes autism into how we can take what we’ve learned, and translate it into treatment. That is the area of autism research that is hugely promising. It is taking all of the genetics work that we have invested in over the last 10 years, and really using it in a scientifically rigorous way to develop treatments.

Adrian Bye: Why is there so much drama in autism?

Alison Singer: I think it’s because as parents we love our kids so much, and we love our family members so much. It’s very hard to accept that your child is going to struggle and have all these challenges. I think it’s natural to want to blame someone or something as being the cause, and sometimes that does come across as being very dramatic.

What we always encourage parents to do is to look at the data. You can’t be so focused on your anger that you lose sight of what the science is saying. We have to keep in mind, children with autism, like all children, develop. Autism is a developmental disability, so children are going to improve, and we certainly have to look for evidence-based treatments to encourage that and to move the process along more quickly. Some of the dramatic stories that you hear in the press about risky unproven therapies, that really have no history of efficacy and can sometimes do real harm to children. There is an opportunity cost here, especially when some of these therapies divert time and energy away from proven therapies.

One thing that I find interesting in our community is the huge placebo effect that we are now seeing in so many of the treatment trials. Parents will say that their kids are benefiting from a treatment, but often parents of kids on a placebo report even better outcomes than the kids that are receiving the intervention. Again, I think this is because we love our kids so much, and we want them to improve, but it really speaks to why it’s so important to have rigorous, double blind, placebo controlled trials of these interventions.

Adrian Bye: My understanding is for the vaccine area, there hasn’t been a proven connection after a lot of research. Which doesn’t mean there isn’t a connection, it just means that, after a huge amount of research, there hasn’t been one that has been able to be found. Is that accurate?

Alison Singer: You can’t prove a negative. You will never be able to fund a study that proves that something does not cause something. That’s just not how science works. When you look at the vaccine studies, you have to look at the mountain of evidence. We now have over 2 dozen studies.

You can look at this question in a scientifically rigorous way. You can say let’s look at children who got MMR, and children who didn’t, and see if there is a difference in the rate of diagnosis of autism. Let’s look at children who received vaccines that contained thimerosal, versus children who got less thimerosal in their vaccines. Let’s look at children who were vaccinated according to the CDC scientific schedule, and children who were vaccinated on a different delayed schedule, let’s see if there is any difference in their neurological outcomes.

The good news is that these are questions that can be answered by science, and fortunately, now they have been. Many times over. The question really becomes an issue of being willing to accept what the science tells us. All of the studies have come back showing that there’s no relationship between MMR and autism, between thimerosal and autism, and there is no difference in neurological outcomes for children who receive their vaccines according to the CDC schedule versus children who were delayed or who didn’t get vaccines.

Adrian Bye: Is it the same sort of response in terms of gluten and casein free diets?

Alison Singer: There are not as many studies of the gluten free diet, but there was a study presented two years ago, at the International Meeting for Autism Research. It showed that children with autism who were on the gluten free diet had no difference in neurological outcomes than children who were on a regular diet. What the studies have shown is that children who are on a dairy free diet have lower bone density. So, you are introducing some other issues by withholding gluten and casein.

What we have to do is look at these questions in rigorous ways. We are, and those are the types of studies that we want to fund. Those are the types of studies that hold real value for families.
When you look at a treatment intervention, or when you look at an intervention that families are already using, and test for efficacy, however that study comes out, we are providing actionable and usable information for parents. When you show that an intervention is non-efficacious that’s as valuable to families as showing an intervention is efficacious, because you will spare that family, and the person with autism, the time, the energy and the side effects of trying that intervention.

Adrian Bye: What are some other promising areas of research?

Alison Singer: The most promising area of research has to do with taking the genetics studies and transferring them into science based intervention. Another area that is incredibly promising is we are now moving into conducting intervention trials in the places where people with autism live, work and go to school.

We’re funding a great one in Philadelphia, where we’re testing a social skill intervention in a school at recess using the existing personnel. If it works, it can be rolled out across the country in a very cost effective way. You don’t have to hire psychologists, you can do these interventions with classroom aides. That’s the type of thing that has real world application. When you are studying interventions that are expensive, you have to sit back and say even if this proves to be efficacious, no-one is ever going to be able to use it. So, what is the value?

Adrian Bye: Is there anything else you’d like to talk about before we wrap up?

Alison Singer: I always like to encourage everyone, not just parents, to learn the signs of autism. Every parent knows the physical milestones, but it’s just as important to know the developmental milestones. All of the early warning signs are listed on the Autism Science Foundation website. Early intervention is still the best weapon we have against preventing the most debilitating aspects of autism from ever surfacing in the first place.

That would be my closing point. If you are a parent and you are concerned or you suspect, don’t wait, talk to your doctor.

Personal Info

Favourite Books:

• The Intentional Stance by Daniel C. Dennett

Most Influenced By:Jerome Bruner, John Bowlby

Twitter: http://twitter.com/sbaroncohen

Organization Website: http://autismresearchcenter.com

Interview Highlights

This is a condensed, lightly edited transcript of an audio interview. The full audio is available and highly recommended. The interviewee may post clarifications in the comments.

Adrian Bye: I’m here with Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, who is from Cambridge University and is pretty well known as an autism researcher. Simon has published a lot of books and has an interesting cousin named Sacha. Simon, thanks for joining us.

Simon Baron-Cohen: Thank you for having me on your show.

Adrian Bye: Tell us a little bit about who you are and where you come from.

Simon Baron-Cohen: I’m working at Cambridge University, and I am the Director of the Autism Research Centre. I’ve been here since 1994, and we’ve built up a very multidisciplinary group of neuroscientists, geneticists, developmental psychologists, and some clinicians too. I did my Ph.D. at the University College London with Uta Frith, who will be known to many of your listeners as a very eminent autism researcher.

Adrian Bye: Yes, I read her book. I guess you studied with her and with Tony Attwood.

Simon Baron-Cohen: Yes, I did, Tony was another one of Uta’s Ph.D. students.

Adrian Bye: Now, you take some fairly controversial positions, and you have this cousin who is an actor who takes fairly controversial positions. What is your comment on that?

Simon Baron-Cohen: It’s a fun question, but I don’t tend to really talk about Sacha, just because of wanting to respect his privacy. I respect his work, I think he does get into controversy largely because he is using comedy to try and expose some serious issues in society.

Adrian Bye: The biggest question I’ve been interested to talk to you about is the concept of empathy which you’ve brought down to the two better definitions, which is cognitive empathy and affective empathy. In your book on the origins of evil you marked autism and Asperger’s as both being cognitive empathy and affective empathy negative; and recently you’ve changed your feeling that Asperger’s syndrome may in fact be cognitive empathy negative, whereas affective empathy is positive.

Simon Baron-Cohen: The evidence for difficulties in cognitive empathy in autism and Asperger’s is quite well established. That part is more clear-cut, whereas the evidence for difficulties in affective empathy is less clear, and in my book I was suggesting that there might be difficulties in both in people on the autistic spectrum.

It’s too early to say what the status is of affective empathy in autism because there have been too few studies. Increasingly, I’m seeing evidence for intact affective empathy. I’m arguing that it’s not clear-cut in the case of affective empathy.

Adrian Bye: So, do you confidently put the check marks in affective empathy positive for Asperger’s?

Simon Baron-Cohen: I’ve seen some studies recently that affective empathy may be intact. There are some other ones which are suggesting the opposite. Currently I’m leaning towards saying that in Asperger’s syndrome affective empathy is intact; at least that’s to say it’s not clearly impaired.

Adrian Bye: How do you research something like that?

Simon Baron-Cohen: I might start from a clinical perspective rather than a research perspective. Often I meet people with Asperger’s syndrome, and if they hear about somebody else suffering they often get very moved by it and want to stand up and do something about it. To me that does reflect good affective empathy.

It could be that somebody has been unfairly treated at work; whereas many so-called neurotypicals would just turn a blind eye because it doesn’t directly affect their situation, someone with Asperger’s syndrome might stand up for the victim. Another example might be that they have heard that somebody’s pet cat has died and they’ll want to make some kind of gesture of sympathy. Hearing about other people’s situations often does trigger a heightened empathic response in people on the autistic spectrum.

Adrian Bye: Some of the experts here in New York said that’s not real empathy, that’s sympathy. I disagree and I’m interested that you make that distinction too.

Simon Baron-Cohen: I see sympathy as a subset of empathy, so empathy is all about identifying and responding to another person’s mental state. Sympathy is a subset because it’s about how you identify and respond to another person’s pain.

Adrian Bye: I was profoundly amazed when I got explained the concept of sympathy and empathy, but it feels like saying that those of us on the spectrum don’t actually feel things.

Simon Baron-Cohen: I would agree with you that that’s not an accurate description of people with Asperger’s syndrome. People with Asperger’s syndrome have feelings about other people’s suffering and state of mind. That’s why I wanted to make a very clear statement that affective empathy could be seen as intact.

The evidence for difficulties with cognitive empathy is stronger evidence-based. But affective empathy is a new area, and it is important that we have more research.

Adrian Bye: I think empathy is an awful word.

Simon Baron-Cohen: I see the term empathy as useful in picking out a human psychological process, but it’s a complex process and there are lots of parts to it. So, with language you can talk about syntax or vocabulary; there are lots of different components. Nevertheless, there is something valuable in having these overarching psychological constructs.

Adrian Bye: I can just tell you my story that I was diagnosed; it was pretty terrible and I actually started to become suicidal. I got through it and have re-evaluated my identity, but it’s been tough.

Simon Baron-Cohen: I think there may be people out there who have had a similar experience. I work in a clinic where people come to find out if they might have Asperger’s syndrome, but we always check if they want a diagnosis. Most of the people that we see have been having a hard time, and they are finding their way to a clinic to get an understanding of their difficulties. They want a diagnosis because they see it as a sort of passport to getting support and services and greater self-understanding.

Adrian Bye: You have two important concepts: we have talked about empathy and the other one is Theory of Mind. Could you give us a definition of Theory of Mind?

Simon Baron-Cohen: I would define it as the ability to attribute thoughts and feelings and intentions and emotions to other people different to your own. So, being able to separate your own state of mind from somebody else’s, keeping track of what they know and what they don’t know. That would probably these days also be called cognitive empathy. The evidence is that people with classic autism have severe difficulties in this area, so they may not stop and think whether other people believe the same as them. They have difficulty even trying to imagine what someone else’s point of view is.

That’s the case for classic autism. In Asperger’s syndrome the evidence seems to be that there are delays in this ability. Whereas for a typical child you see some evidence of Theory of Mind by about three or four years old, for kids with Asperger’s syndrome they often do come to understand other people have different perspectives but they may not develop that understanding until many years later than is typical.

Adrian Bye: About a year and a half ago I took a trip to North Korea. If we were in the countryside in northern North Korea, and I introduced you to let’s say a 22-year-old girl, how much Theory of Mind would you have with her?

Simon Baron-Cohen: You’ve described a very good situation because both you and I would be culturally outsiders. Nevertheless, the idea is that whether you are in your own culture or visiting someone else’s culture, Theory of Mind is constantly working; you are constantly trying to figure out what is she trying to say, what is her meaning, how is she understanding the situation.

Adrian Bye: So even with this North Korean 20-year-old girl, are you going to have much insight into what she’s thinking?

Simon Baron-Cohen: The best you can do is make inferences or speculations based on what you know about her background; but you can read the situation even non-verbally. Some people argue it’s based on this exercise of putting yourself into someone else’s shoes.

I suppose what the research does is to look at how developed is a person’s Theory of Mind and is it developed to the level that would be seen in somebody without a diagnosis? That’s where researchers have had to devise new methods for measuring Theory of Mind. We have developed a test where we had to look at photographs of people’s eyes to try and infer quite subtle information about somebody else’s state of mind just from their emotional expressions around the eyes.

Adrian Bye: I did that; some of those facial expressions are quite difficult. I want to move on because I really want to ask you about the topic of mirror neurons. What are your thoughts on mirror neurons?

Simon Baron-Cohen: There has been a lot of interest in whether mirror neurons can explain why the typical person develops empathy, and maybe why people in the autistic spectrum have difficulties with some aspects of empathy. In my book, I went through the evidence from the neuroscience about which parts of the brain are involved when we empathize with another person. Some of those regions in what I call the empathy circuit do contain mirror neurons, so I think that mirror neurons may well be important as part of understanding empathy. But, I am not sure that they are all they are hyped to be.

First of all, mirror neurons are proposed to explain things like imitation. You find that some people with autism despite the difficulties in social understanding can have excellent imitation. That is true even in classic autism where the person may develop echolalia; they can repeat what they have heard from someone else’s speech, so their imitation is very exact. If they had difficulties with their mirror neuron system you might expect that they wouldn’t be able to imitate other people.

Adrian Bye: It could be that there are multiple sets of mirror neuron groupings in the brain and depending on your severity of impairments more or less of them are not functioning right.

Simon Baron-Cohen: One of the challenges for research in this area is you have to specify exactly where are these mirror neurons. But this field doesn’t have a good consensus, so for some researchers there are large parts of the brain which involve mirror neurons and it seems to be something that is extending all the time. The danger is that if the whole brain involves mirror neurons then is it really giving us any explanatory power?

Adrian Bye: The mirror neuron guys would say Theory of Mind and empathy are just trailing indicators of problems with mirror neurons. How would you respond to that?

Simon Baron-Cohen: There are several ways to respond. One is that mirror neurons we should remember were first discovered in nonhuman primates, in monkeys, and yet monkeys have quite a limited Theory of Mind. They have got the mirror neurones, but itself that doesn’t seem to be sufficient as a prerequisite for developing a Theory of Mind that we see in humans.

Adrian Bye: But we know the mirror neurons exist in humans?

Simon Baron-Cohen: Even that statement we have to be a bit careful about because in the monkey research they have electrodes implanted into the monkey’s brain measuring whether a very specific neuron or a cluster of neurons fire. In the human case we don’t tend to do that kind of invasive research for obvious ethical reasons. We tend to use other kinds of technology like MRI and particularly FMRI – functional magnetic resonance imaging. That doesn’t have the resolution to look at individual neurons or even clusters of neurons. So, when people talk about mirror neurons in the human brain it’s not a very precise description.

Adrian Bye: But there could be a link between cognitive empathy and mirror neurons?

Simon Baron-Cohen: I would like to see a more imaginative and ethical way to test the mirror neuron theory in the case of autism. I think the term spectrum is really useful not just in relation to the autistic spectrum but also the empathy spectrum: it’s all about degrees and having a quantitative approach.

Adrian Bye: Quick question from WrongPlanet: one of the users wanted to ask me to ask you about empathy and motivation. Why is it that in some situations people can have temporarily increased empathy?

Simon Baron-Cohen: We have already said that empathy is quite complex; there are lots of factors that can influence it, including your current state. We know that people on the autistic spectrum often have quite a lot of sensory issues too. If you are overwhelmed by hypersensitivity, which is what a lot of people on the autistic spectrum report, tactile information may be uncomfortable, even their clothes may feel uncomfortable against their skin. We just don’t know how much it can interfere with somebody’s capacity to empathize.

Adrian Bye: Do you think though that people are being almost neurotic in finding the sensory issues that aren’t there?

Simon Baron-Cohen: Certainly I have seen people on the autistic spectrum, including people with Asperger’s, find it overwhelming. What I am also impressed by is that some people with Asperger’s and autism are aware of the difficulty and they take steps to think “how I can cope”, like wearing ear defenders.

Adrian Bye: Do you have anything you want to tell us before we wrap up?

Simon Baron-Cohen: One thing I would love to say is that this has been really nice to have a dialogue. I am not alone in saying that researchers encourage that. I am happy that we have had that opportunity.

Personal Info

Sports Teams:NY Yankees

Favourite Books:

• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
• Thinking In Pictures: and Other Reports from My Life with Autism by Temple Grandin
• The Complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome by Tony Attwood

Most Influenced By:Richard McCormick, Edward McNall Burns

Company Website: http://NormLedgin.com

Relevant Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRRNeAilrnM

Interview Highlights

This is a condensed, lightly edited transcript of an audio interview. The full audio is available and highly recommended. The interviewee may post clarifications in the comments.

Adrian Bye: Today I’m here with Norm Ledgin. Norm, can you tell us about your connections with the autism community?

Norm Ledgin: I have come to this late in life because it wasn’t until 1996 that my son was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. Immediately, I took an interest in the condition to the extent that I read everything then available. I think Uta Frith was the major work at that time. Tony Attwood was just bringing out his book on Asperger’s Syndrome. I went to listen to Temple Grandin. I read her book, Thinking in Pictures. At that time, there wasn’t a whole lot available.

I started to develop my book, Diagnosing Jefferson, beginning around 1998.

Adrian Bye: What made you decide to write that book?

Norm Ledgin: What made me decide was matching idiosyncrasies that I saw in my son with those that I was reading about in the Jefferson biographies. I was in the midst of reading the six volume biography by Dumas Malone. I was surprised that, although he mentioned the idiosyncrasies, he didn’t really look into any pattern or any relationship.

When I found 20 matches between my son’s behavior and Jefferson’s behavior, I became extremely interested in doing something about it. When I found 50 matches, I decided right then and there that I was going to write a book.

It was a two year project. I asked Temple Grandin to write comments for the book., but she wouldn’t do it until she saw a lot more detail. Because she’s so fact-oriented, she wanted to be satisfied that there was enough detail to attract her. She went through three drafts of mine before she agreed to become a part of it. I’m glad she was so insistent because it turned out to be a better book than it might otherwise have been.

Adrian Bye: What were the things that started jumping out as you were learning about Jefferson?

Norm Ledgin: There was a reticence on my son’s part to engage physically, even though we tried on a number of occasions to give him hugs and to be close physically.

He also perseverated a great deal on topics that were of absolutely no interest to us, such as the details from various motels that he picked up from reading guide books. He seemed interested in memorizing the amenities available in one chain after another. Also, automobiles. I had to pick up various descriptions of cars from car dealers in order to satisfy his voracious appetite for detail.

These sorts of things jumped out at me as very much like Jefferson’s interests in rather obscure topics.

Adrian Bye: How do you get from memorizing details about motels to writing the Declaration of Independence?

Norm Ledgin: People who read the Declaration of Independence don’t see the same thing that I see in it. It’s a bill of indictment against George III, and the details of that indictment are enumerated very specifically. In that respect, I would say it falls into the fact-based syndrome that Jefferson exhibited.

Adrian Bye: In the book, you talk about a relationship with one of his slaves.

Norm Ledgin: Yes, with Sally Hemings. I refer to that as a very logical choice on his part, because she was the half-sister of his late wife. She was family, in addition to being technically his slave. She was also 3/4 white. When they connected in Paris, she made that choice freely because in France there was no recognition of slavery. She was a free person. She was 15 years old when they connected, but she was able to determine on her own that this was a relationship worth entering.

Partly because she had the example of her mother, Elizabeth Hemings. At the time his wife died, she exacted a promise from him on her death-bed that he would never remarry. In the room was 9 year old Sally. The unreasonable expectation would be that he would become celibate for the rest of his life. That wasn’t going to happen. Sally knew this, and Sally’s mother knew this. I believe that there was a lot of conversation about the possibilities for one of the daughters, Sally, to imitate what Elizabeth Hemings had accomplished with John Wayles, father-in-law to Thomas Jefferson. As a result, Elizabeth encouraged Sally to go to France five years later when they needed an escort for Mary, Jefferson’s second daughter.

The connection was based on her ambition, to some extent, and his need. The testimony to the success of that relationship was that it lasted 38 years, until he died. They had 8 children together, 4 of whom survived.

Adrian Bye: Was he taking a social risk by this relationship?

Norm Ledgin: Yes. In 1802, in September, in the Richmond Register, a series of articles was started by a man named James Callender. He began to expose the relationship. Of course, everyone expected Jefferson to deny it. Instead of denying it, he just didn’t talk about it at all.

In 1802, he was already president, and he had already decided that he wanted a second term. He was exposed, but he didn’t let it bother him, and even more significant, he continued the relationship until he died in 1826.

Adrian Bye: Is there any ambiguity as to the relationship actually existing? Do we have DNA evidence?

Norm Ledgin: I’ve met descendants of the couple. There’s no doubt in the mind of anybody who is looking at this objectively that this really happened. We have the DNA evidence to back up some of it. We also have the logic of the situation. At the time they connected, the opportunity was very much in front of both of them in Paris. The need was clear. The ambition by Sally that we can deduce from her experience in the Hemings family was present.

Adrian Bye: When they were together, did he have relationships with other women as well?

Norm Ledgin: According to his account books, which tell his whereabouts, and everything he spent money for, there’s no way we could regard either of them as having been disloyal. I think it was a romance that was very deep and profound.

Adrian Bye: What happened with her and her kids after he died?

Norm Ledgin: Her children had been freed by a promise that he had made back in Paris. Even though she was only pregnant with her first, they agreed that if she returned to the United States, where she would be a slave again, that he would free all children that they would have together.

Adrian Bye: Simon Baron-Cohen has looked at Einstein and Newton and whether they were on the autism spectrum. Have you looked into many other people?

Norm Ledgin: I had a book published called Asperger’s and Self Esteem, a couple of years after I wrote about Jefferson, and Einstein and Mozart were in there.

In the biography of Einstein by Walter Isaacson, he has a footnote that is critical of both Simon Baron-Cohen and myself for pegging Einstein with Asperger’s Syndrome. Isaacson said that it couldn’t be true because Einstein had a lot of friends. The fact of the matter is those friendships were pretty much one-sided. People with Asperger’s have a tendency to attract the attention of others. While there is a friendship established by such an attraction, it’s not always reciprocal.

The American Psychiatric Association, after I pointed that out in my Jefferson book, came out with a revision in 2000, saying that a lot of friendships may develop in mid-life, but they are usually one-sided.

I also put in people like Orson Welles and Bela Bartok, the Hungarian composer, and Oscar Levant, the pianist who popularized Gershwin’s music. Glenn Gould, the pianist whose biographer also happened to be his psychiatrist. Marie Curie, Paul Robeson, Carl Sagan and Charles Darwin.

Adrian Bye: People who look at this today would say: “this is crazy, the only way to make a real diagnosis is through parental interviews and interviewing the person”.

Norm Ledgin: They’re right. It’s not the diagnosis. It’s a supposition that they belong on the autism/Asperger’s continuum because their behavior fits the criteria that have been outlined by the American Psychiatric Association. There is no way to diagnose a dead person. There is only a conclusion you can come to based on what you know, especially on what you know of the earliest of their lives when they are exhibiting classic symptoms and haven’t yet begun to adjust things like eye gaze, etc.

Adrian Bye: Of the well known people from the past that you’ve looked into, who would be the ones you’re most certain of?

Norm Ledgin: Glenn Gould, the pianist. Paul Robeson, the singer. Oscar Levant, the pianist. Thomas Jefferson, the violinist. He was one of the top five violinist of his day before he broke his wrist. Mozart and Einstein.

Adrian Bye: Taking Einstein, for example, how would you have picked up on him?

Norm Ledgin: He was fixated. Classic fixations. Never did accomplish all that he wanted to in scientific research. He was very captivated by his own perseverating on various scientific subjects when he was a young man. He didn’t get along with his teachers because he was telling them how to do their jobs. He just didn’t go along with the formula of the relationship between student and teacher that was prevalent at the time. He was just different in every respect from his contemporaries.

He is a far more interesting personality than history has given him credit for being. We think of him as a super-intellectual who is so profound in his theories that the world couldn’t run any longer if we didn’t see it obeying the forces that he described. But, as a person, he had the classic quirks that you would associate with Asperger’s Syndrome in his relationships with other people.

I also have the same feelings about Mozart, who was bullied by his father and seems to have succeeded at two levels despite it. He was a child prodigy as a pianist, but later as a composer, and did less performing in later life. He had quirks out the wazoo, as we say.

Of the hundreds of the quirks that we can identify among various people with Asperger’s Syndrome, no two people are alike. One will have a set of 30 or 40 that we can identify, another one will have 80 that we can identify, and maybe only on 10 of those idiosyncrasies will they coincide. No two Asperger’s people are alike in that respect, which makes the entire syndrome an interesting study. But, if we go on the American Psychiatric Association, we can identify the condition. Notice I call it a condition and not a disability, because I look at it from the standpoint of Asperger’s having in fact enhanced some of the talents that were latent in these people.

Personal Info

Sports Teams:Dallas Mavericks

Favourite Books:

• The Magus by John Fowles
• Time and Again by Jack Finney

Most Influenced By:Robert Wicklund, Elliot Aronson

Website: http://www.uta.edu/psychology/faculty/ickes/ickes.htm

Interview Highlights

This is a condensed, lightly edited transcript of an audio interview. The full audio is available and highly recommended. The interviewee may post clarifications in the comments.

Adrian Bye: Today I’m here with Bill Ickes, who is a university researcher in Texas, and has written a book, Everyday Mind Reading: Understanding What Other People Think and Feel. I don’t tend to interview book authors here, but this book was just so incredibly phenomenal and can lead to such a profound understanding of empathy that I just had to get Bill here. Bill, thanks for joining us. Can you tell us about who you are and where you come from?

Bill Ickes: I didn’t set out with the goal of becoming a research psychologist. My first psych course suggested that maybe I needed to make a course correction, but I stayed an English major, and added psychology as a minor. Eventually, I realized that I did have strong research interests, and a lot of the ideas from the study of English Literature could be incorporated into psychology. In particular, I thought that it might be possible to treat the interactions of people in a laboratory setting as little mini dramas. Basically the concept is to put two people together, then eavesdrop on their conversations, and let their personalities write the script for them.

We spent about 10 years, after I got my PhD, studying effects of people’s personality traits on their initial interactions in the laboratory. Towards the end of that time, I began to realize we could extract a lot more information from these initial interactions. We had been looking at how much people look at each other, smile at each other, how close they sit on the couch, and so on. There was a whole other dimension of the interactions we weren’t tapping, and that was what was going on in the privacy of their respective minds.

That led us to videotape the interactions, making two copies instead of one. Then as soon as the interactions were over, we would tell them that there was more going on than they realized. We wanted to find out what they were thinking and feeling throughout that interaction. So, they are put in separate rooms, and they can stop the tape at all the points where they distinctly had a thought or feeling. They write down the content of each thought or feeling, using special forms that we provide them.

After a while, we were doing studies focused on the content of their thoughts and feelings. How the kinds of thoughts and feelings they reported were related to their personality characteristics, to their perceptions of each other as interaction partners, and so on. It wasn’t too long before I realized why don’t we take them through the tape of the interaction again and this time pause the tape at each of the points where their partner recorded thoughts and feelings, and tell them now it’s your job to make your best guess about what your partner was thinking and feeling at each of these points. In fact, we were asking them to read their interaction partner’s mind at each of the points where the partner had a thought or feeling.

Adrian Bye: What you were evaluating was the quality of the empathy?

Bill Ickes: The term we use, which is an inversion of an earlier term used by the clinical psychologist, Carl Rogers, is empathic accuracy.

After we have all their thoughts and feelings, plus their differences about the content of their partner’s thoughts and feelings, we can have our lab find accuracy points based on how closely the inferred thought or feeling matches the content of the actual thought or feeling. When you add up all those points, and divide by the number of inferences made, you get a measure of empathic accuracy or successful mind reading. The measure we use, varies on a scale from 0 to 100, where 0 is no idea what the other person was thinking or feeling, to a theoretical limit of 100, perfect empathic accuracy, which we never see in our research.

Adrian Bye: What was it you saw? 30-60%?

Bill Ickes: That’s right. If people get a general sense of the theme of the interaction and they apply other knowledge like general stereotypes that might apply to their partner, they can be somewhat accurate for those reasons, but not very. Accuracy at a base line only averages about 5%.

If you study several interactions between two strangers, their average empathic accuracy for that initial interaction is about 20%. If you put two close friends together, it goes up to 30%, which is a substantial improvement, but still far from that theoretical ideal of 100% accuracy. Married couples are comparable to best friends, and can be a little bit higher.

There seems to be an implicit upper limit on accuracy scores, around 60%. We just don’t see people scoring in the 80s, 90s, or even the high 70s.

Adrian Bye: Why do you think that is?

Bill Ickes: I’ve been giving it a lot of thought. There are a couple of reasons. One is because this kind of empathic accuracy depends on complex psychological inferences based on imperfect queues. People are not always telling you everything that is going on in their minds when you are talking to them, so it’s reasonable to expect less than 100% accuracy for that reason. But, I think that the more interesting and profound reason is that evolution doesn’t want us to be perfect mind readers.

Adrian Bye: You talk about that in your book, where you say we don’t want 100% accuracy because there needs to be things hidden to make relationships last.

Bill Ickes: I think the primary reason why evolution might have calibrated it much lower than 100% is that the prime directive in nature, according to Darwin’s theory of evolution, is making sure that your genes go on to the next generation. If you were 100% accurate in inferring everyone’s thoughts and feelings, and you were perfectly aware of their needs, you might try to divert your resources to them instead of to your children, and put your own genes at risk. Either your own direct genes, by giving away things that preserve your life to others, or your children’s genes, which, after all, are yours.

I don’t know how one would go about testing this evolutionary idea that nature has calibrated human empathy at this general level, but I think it’s a very plausible hypothesis. I encourage people to think about it and try to figure out ways to test it.

We obviously need empathy as a skill. People have to be good enough at reading other people’s thoughts and feelings that other people can’t lie to them repeatedly and take advantage of them. We have to be able to see bad things coming in our relationships with others. But, perfect empathy could be more of a curse than a blessing.

Adrian Bye: Did you do much research with people on the autism spectrum?

Bill Ickes: I have colleagues who have. I spent some time in Belgium, in 2005. I was at Ghent University, and there was a very active group lead by Herbert Roeyers there. He used our empathic accuracy methods to study the ability of high functioning Asperger’s patients to infer other people’s thoughts and feelings. In one of their studies, there were pairs of individuals, one with an Asperger’s diagnosis, and the other without, whose IQ scores were approximately the same, and were also the same age and gender. The research showed that the Asperger’s individuals did have more difficulty inferring thoughts and feelings when they viewed videotapes of interactions between strangers compared to the normally developing controls.

Other research showed that this difference in performance is reduced in a situation where the interactions are highly structured. If the interactions become more structured and predictable, people with Asperger’s have less difficulty making accurate guesses about what the people on the videotape are thinking and feeling. Where they have the most difficulty is where things are completely unstructured.

Adrian Bye: What do you mean by structured or unstructured?

Bill Ickes: There are different ways to structure the interaction. One way would be to turn it into an interview with prepared questions. Another way to structure an interaction is to organize it in terms of a game with rules. An unstructured conversation is when people just freely talk about whatever comes to mind.

Adrian Bye: You said you found average empathic accuracy is 20%. Do you have a percentage of what they found in terms of Asperger’s?

Bill Ickes: They do in their research, and the percentage won’t vary greatly. People with Asperger’s, as I recall, didn’t fall much short, but it was enough that the difference was statistically significant. They are doing quite well in comparison to small children who aren’t very good at mind reading, but they aren’t doing as good as the average person.

If you look at people who have more severe cases of Asperger’s, or are in the range where a diagnosis of autism is made, then the deficit is more profound. Autism researchers suggest that the victims of extreme autism are effectively mind blind. They are incapable of inferring the specific content of other people’s thoughts and feelings. In fact, in some cases, clinicians have argued that their patients are unaware even that people have thoughts and feelings.

Adrian Bye: Another thing I found fascinating was your research into the empathy of abusive men.

Bill Ickes: The view we discovered was prevalent among maritally abusive men was that all women are constantly having very negative, critical, rejecting thoughts and feelings about men. Not only does this bias interfere with the men’s ability to accurately infer what a woman is thinking or feeling, but it seems to justify, in the minds of abusive men, that it’s ok to show contempt for the woman, to physically abuse her, because she deserves it.

We got a wide sample of married men who ranged from kind, loving husbands all the way to men who were both physically and emotionally abusive. We wanted to have non-abusive men in the sample to use as a control condition to compare men who don’t abuse their wives with men who do.

When both kinds of men view videotapes in which a woman is describing to a male therapist her problems in her marriage, at times when the woman gets emotional and distraught, the non-abusive men report that they feel sympathy for those points. To the degree that they report feeling sympathetic, their empathic accuracy is higher.

The abusive men act very differently. Those same points where the woman is highly emotional and distraught, the abusive men report they are feeling contempt for her and they are not nearly as accurate in inferring her thoughts and feelings.

Adrian Bye: You found that you can motivate people to have higher levels of empathic accuracy.

Bill Ickes: There is probably a limit to how much they will improve. In general, the research shows that women are easily motivated and try to do their best in inferring the specific content of other people’s thoughts and feelings. This is very consistent with the social stereotypes that women are supposed to be empathic. If you remind women of this stereotype, they try to put more attention and effort into it, and they do better.

Men, to motivate them, it took a different motivator initially. That was to simply pay them. They were given some practice trials, told to be as empathically accurate as possible, and to the extent that they were, they got paid actual money. If you really do your best, we’ll pay you more. It was sufficient to motivate these guys so that they could close any motivation gap between themselves and the women, and they wound up doing just as well.

You can extrapolate this to all the marriages and cohabitation relationships that the woman is thinking he is not very good at being sensitive to my thoughts and feelings and she’s wondering is this something he’s unable to do? No. The answer seems to be he’s perfectly capable of doing it. It just takes more to motivate him.

Adrian Bye: Have you tried testing psychopaths or sociopaths in terms of their empathy accuracy?

Bill Ickes: I’ve been at conferences where people have discussed this and agree that it’s a good idea to do. Interestingly, people disagree what the prediction should be. Some people argue that psychopaths should have very good empathic accuracy, because they are often exceptionally good at manipulating people. They seem to have real insight into what other people are thinking and feeling, so they can push all the right buttons to get people to do what they want. By that perspective, the problem with psychopaths is not a lack of empathic accuracy, it’s a lack of any sympathy for other people’s thoughts and feelings. Other people argue that maybe psychopaths do have a deficit in empathic accuracy. We’ll need to see the data to know what the answer is.

Adrian Bye: Could this come down to a gap in mirror neurons?

Bill Ickes: This is a special case by which the distinction between cognitive empathy and emotional empathy may turn out to be quite important. It may be different mirror neurons that are implicated in cognitive versus emotional empathy. Perhaps psychopaths have only a deficiency in regards to the ones that mediate emotional empathy. That is, they can infer other people’s mental states quite well, but they don’t have any sort of an emotional resonance or sympathy with the other person.

Adrian Bye: Is there anything that you’d like to talk about that we haven’t covered.

Bill Ickes: The potential application. One agenda that remains to be addressed is can you use the techniques that we’ve developed to identify people who are more empathically accurate than average, and then use it as a selection tool for occupations where that is an important skill?

Adrian Bye: If someone wanted to increase the empathic accuracy of their team, is this something they can reach out to you for?

Bill Ickes: They could contact me. There is information in the book, Everyday Mind Reading, about our research on feedback and its effect on empathic accuracy. We found that, in the single session in which feedback was provided, empathic accuracy for a particular target could be boosted on average of about 10%. 10% may not seem like a lot, but it can be a real advantage if you learn to do that consistently.

Personal Info

Sports Teams:Liverpool (UK Soccer Team)

Favourite Books:

• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
• The Vault by Ruth Rendell
• A Taste for Death by PD James

Most Influenced By:Grandparents, People With Aspergers And Autism, Brian Wilson From The Beach Boys, Wife And 3 Children

Company Website: http://www.tonyattwood.com.au

Relevant Link: http://www.youtube.com/user/TheAnMish#p/u/2/QKQeqVxh1VM

Interview Highlights

This is a condensed, lightly edited transcript of an audio interview. The full audio is available and highly recommended. The interviewee may post clarifications in the comments.

Adrian Bye: Today I am here with Tony Attwood. Tony has written the top-selling book on Asperger’s
Syndrome. Tony, thanks for joining us.

Tony Attwood: Thanks Adrian, I am delighted to be able to talk.

Adrian Bye: What I really wanted to ask you about firstly is can you tell us about your photography?

Tony Attwood: I have always enjoyed capturing the moment, people, scenes, whatever; and if I had more
time I would do photography, not in a professional sense, but for pure enjoyment.

Adrian Bye: Can you tell us a little bit about where you have come from? I talked with Simon Baron-
Cohen about this last week; both of you studied under Uta Frith in the UK.

Tony Attwood: At 19, I was a volunteer at a special school and I met two autistic children. I decided that is
where I am going to go, I’m going to one day become an expert in autism to help these children. I did my
clinical training Ph.D. with Uta Frith, and Simon Baron-Cohen was one of her students at the same time,
so it was a wonderful opportunity to be there at the beginning of many of the great theories of autism.

Adrian Bye: Can you tell me the difference between a psychiatrist or even an academic
and a psychologist?

Tony Attwood: A psychiatrist is someone who has done training in medicine so they know how to
diagnose appendicitis and things like that. A psychologist has studied psychology since undergraduate
level and has specialised in various branches. I am a clinician in the sense that I see people with autism
spectrum disorders for diagnosis and for treatment.

Adrian Bye: I had a very interesting interview with a researcher at Columbia University here at New York
and he said that they have 10-15% that actually leave the spectrum; they call them bloomers. He said
that they have run the data in a lot of different ways and there is something like a 50% lift that they are
seeing which they haven’t been able to account for. What would your thoughts be on that?

Tony Attwood: As a clinician I would endorse that. There are individuals I have seen that I have actually
removed the diagnosis from. One person was about seven and I saw recently him when he was about
21, and the clinical picture has changed; I officially crossed out the diagnosis. If you do a diagnostic
criteria on him today he would fulfil those criteria.

They may also have a successful career; and I think that is one of the most successful indicators of
successful outcome is a good job. They might also have colleagues; they may have family members or a
partner. So the outcome isn’t always as it was previously thought, that this person will have a constant
level of impairment.

Adrian Bye: In your book you close with a story of the child who was diagnosed in the beginning and at
the end he is the kind of dishevelled engineer who does pretty well driving his nice car and marries the
single mother with two kids. Would you still agree with that as a typical or great outcome?

Tony Attwood: It is true it is a possible outcome, but it illustrates a number of components within that little
story: that he has found the right job in engineering, and people now appreciate him for his intelligence
and problem-solving, not his ability to crack jokes. He has also found someone who was understanding of
him and compassionate; often those with Asperger’s are late developers in terms of relationships.

Adrian Bye: My feeling is that we should be able to take these guys further.

Tony Attwood: When I work with those with Asperger’s I’m trying to encourage them to accept who they
are; to be what I call a first-rate aspie, not a second-rate neurotypical. I say to that person, I would rather
help you explain yourself to others so they will know why you do things that are confusing or abrasive and
accept that you do that rather than expect you to be like everyone else.

Adrian Bye: What you think about the list in terms of diagnoses, do you agree with that?

Tony Attwood: When we look at autism spectrum disorders we know that there are a number of factors
that are associated. One of the ones that is becoming much clearer is in terms of it being associated with
older parents. In modern society people are starting to consider children in their 30s when they get their
qualifications and may not realize that that tends to be associated with a greater risk of autism spectrum
disorders.

Adrian Bye: Your thoughts as to why it would be increasing?

Tony Attwood: I don’t think there is going to be one factor. We have also known that there are
environmental factors and there may be particular toxins, or something that occurs in utero that affects
the development of the brain. There may be something that is occurring in our modern society in a toxic
effect that is affecting children.

Adrian Bye: A topic that I have been pretty interested in lately is mirror neurons. What are your thoughts
on that?

Tony Attwood: An interesting topic, it needs further research. It is that ability to absorb what somebody
else is going through in terms of movement skills but also in terms of emotions. Whether your own
circuitries spark off to duplicate those feelings of those thoughts and those actions, I think is something
that needs further research.

Adrian Bye: If that turned out to be correct, that would change a lot of how we view autism.

Tony Attwood: You have got to be careful in autism because there have been promises of cures for
decades. The family will say if I try this new holding technique or this new injection or this new hyperbaric
chamber or whatever it is that the entrepreneur is promising – but we haven’t found a cure.

Adrian Bye: I’m going to be interviewing Alison Singer who runs the Autism Research
Institute, and their focus is on facts and evidence-based outcomes. Have you heard of them?

Tony Attwood: Yes, and applaud what they do because it has got to be evidence-based. It has got to be
independent. The person who designed whatever it is can’t do it because you can’t be objective in that
situation. What I don’t want is then for there to be a delay before things are brought forward, so I think
there needs to be an adequate scientific system.

Adrian Bye: Have you found anything that you have seen that you think is promising?

Tony Attwood: A lot of my own work is in terms of cognitive behaviour therapy for emotion management.
What has happened is that within autism the autism studies and therapies are usually designed by
neurotypicals. What’s interesting is that there are a number of people with Asperger’s now that are going
into psychology and psychiatry. And I’m hoping that they will then design psychotherapy and treatments
by aspies for aspies.

Adrian Bye: One book I read about empathy they were talking about that they should be just encouraging
those with very high levels of cognitive and affective empathy. What would you say to that?

Tony Attwood: When people look at empathy within Asperger’s, the suggestion is that they lack empathy.
That is a gross insult to people with Asperger’s because they can be some of the kindest people I know.
The person with Asperger’s is not very good at reading subtle body language, so when a neurotypical is
in mild levels of distress there is an anticipation that the person with Asperger’s will respond with affection
or compassion or consoling. I think it is a question of reading the subtle signals.

Adrian Bye: That could point to mirror neurons couldn’t it?

Tony Attwood: It is a possibility, yes. I think some with Asperger’s syndrome and autism have what I call a
sixth sense for emotional atmosphere. In fact some – and I use the metaphor – have developed
behavioural characteristics like a cactus which has a very sharp and prickly exterior to protect a soft and
vulnerable interior. Some with Asperger’s in fact are emotionally very sensitive to emotional atmospheres,
they can sense when somebody is annoyed with them, critical about them or the atmosphere in a group. I
think they are using different channels than the usual one of reading faces or body language.

Adrian Bye: Maybe that sixth sense somehow develops through being in threatening situations; we get
an extra radar or something.

Tony Attwood: I think there is a lot of redundancy in the human neurological system. Those with
Asperger’s can be tuned into their senses – their auditory sensitivity, their olfactory sensitivity – and I think
sometimes they can be tuned into a sixth sense.

Adrian Bye: One of the things that I found very interesting from your books is the emotional thermometer.

Tony Attwood: The idea of a thermometer is a visual mechanism to indicate the severity of the
expression. It is a useful tool to have for someone who may have difficulty in finding the word, its
alexithymia, to precisely define the emotion. I also find it useful for other people to use the thermometer
so that the person with Asperger’s can understand when they have said or done something because they
may not be able to perceive those subtle qualities.

Adrian Bye: My feeling is that people on the spectrum are generally living at a much higher level of stress
than everyone else anyway.

Tony Attwood: Undoubtedly, and sometimes the exhaustion from that can lead to severe depression and
suicidal thoughts. Solitude is the cure because in solitude you don’t have to relate with anyone. You can
do what you want as long as you like.

Adrian Bye: Do you have many people that end up in acting?

Tony Attwood: A lot, yes. It is a coping mechanism; if you are not very good at socializing just watch them
as another species in a way. Those with ASD can be very good at detail, observing and absorbing the
persona and movements and actions of someone.

There is a gentleman that I know in his 70s with Asperger’s who is a successful theatre actor, and people
used to say to him how do you cope on stage? He said it is relaxing because I know what I’m going to
say, I know what is going to occur, I can relax in that situation. But many teenagers with Asperger’s say it
is as though I am in a play; all the other teenagers know the script but I don’t have that.

Adrian Bye: You had an interesting concept; you talk about super NTs, do you see lots of aspies marrying
Super NTs?

Tony Attwood: I call them extreme neurotypicals rather than super NTs. They are a group of people who
are very talented in understanding the thoughts and feelings perspective of others, so they can get into
the aspie mindset. Some teachers will say if you haven’t got any friends you should just try harder,
whereas the extreme neurotypical teacher will say it’s not just trying harder, he is actually confused and
needs guidance.

Adrian Bye: What about if someone has an employee who they suspect may be on this spectrum or a co-
worker or something like that, how would you suggest handling that situation?

Tony Attwood: That is an interesting question because I can guarantee that those who are reading or
listening to this will know someone not only as a neighbour or someone they knew at school but
somebody in their workforce.

There are a number of factors: first of all don’t ridicule, don’t reject, try to understand. The chances are
that they are going to be exceptionally good at at problem solving, but they can be abrasive to others by
being too forthright and not into the teamwork, not into the bonding, not into the group type things.

And not to push somebody into areas that they feel uncomfortable with; and giving them a bit of guidance
in some of the social situations and what is required. Also making sure that others do not gossip about
that person and acting as their advocate at times to say he may not give you much eye contact but what
he is doing is he’s looking away to really concentrate on what you are saying. As far as he’s concerned
he’s interested in the problem that you are presenting to him and he is trying to think of a solution. The
fact that he doesn’t give you eye contact is irrelevant to solving the problem.

Adrian Bye: So, you are suggesting similar things that we are talking about within personal relationships,
you could almost apply some of that in business as well.

Tony Attwood: Indeed, because those with Asperger’s have particular talents. I mean some of them can
be phenomenal entrepreneurs in the information technology area – but I’m not going to go into diagnoses
of various famous people. They can have a degree of originality, of single-minded determination and an
ability to be creative in a way that others will say “thinking outside the box”, and those with Asperger’s will
say, “what box”?

If you look after your aspies they can be extraordinarily loyal, helpful, determined, but their downfall may
be in the interpersonal side, in which case the team or the group of people that they are working with
need to understand. One of the issues that can occur with Asperger’s is the difficulty when they are
promoted or transferred to management. That is a totally different area to what they may have entered in
terms of problem solving and product design, but now they are responsible for a team. And that is office
politics, it is egos, it is upsetting people.

Adrian Bye: What you are describing is the Peter Principle, are you familiar with that?

Tony Attwood: Yes, of being promoted to the state of incompetence. That is the problem because they
are so good we will make them in charge of this department. They’re not going to cope with that because
people come to them with their personal problems and they want to solve practical problems.

Personal Info

Sports Teams: New York Mets, New York Giants

Favourite Books:

• The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
• Why Don’t Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom by Daniel T. Willingham
• Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson

Favourite Entrepreneurs: Matt Blumberg, Anthony Casalena

Twitter: http://twitter.com/ceonyc

Personal Blog: http://thisisgoingtobebig.com

Company Website: http://www.firstround.com

Interview Highlights

This is a condensed audio transcript. The full source audio is provided if needed. The interviewee may post corrections in the comments.

Adrian Bye: Today I’m talking with Charlie O’Donnell. Charlie is one of the central figures in the New York technology scene of the startups in Manhattan. And so I’m really interested to talk with Charlie. Charlie, thanks for joining us.

Charlie O’Donnell: Thanks for having me.

Adrian Bye: And you’re also obviously working with First Round Capital.

Charlie O’Donnell: Yes, yes. I’m an EIR, which technically stands for entrepreneur-in-residence, but I think it more realistically stands for entrepreneur-in-recovery.

Adrian Bye: OK. Actually, tell us what you’ve been doing before you got involved with First Round, before you got involved in the stuff you’re doing in the tech scene. What were you doing like five years ago?

Charlie O’Donnell: Well, five years ago is pretty much around the time where I got started with the tech scene. Like a lot of people in New York, I was basically in the finance industry.

I grew up here in Brooklyn and basically had my eyes set on sort of Wall Street, because that’s generally major from a career standpoint. I was working for the General Motors pension fund, investing in private equity and venture capital. But most of the venture capital we had done was Boston-based or Silicon Valley.

And late ’04, two guys with an early-stage fund came to pitch us. That was Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham with Union Square Ventures.

Adrian Bye: I’m really interested in the other side of VC. How does that work? You’re the first person I’ve talked to that knows the other side. Do guys like Fred come and pitch you?

Charlie O’Donnell: Yeah, it’s interesting. I have worked on every level of this. It’s really actually fascinating. When people talk about is venture capital going away? Fund returns aren’t really that good. What does it say for the asset class?

I think you need perspective on that. And a couple of things. One, I don’t thin venture is an asset class. You could aggregate a whole bunch of funds and, sure, their performance somewhat loosely correlates with each other.

But the reality of venture capital as a collection of funds is that the best-performing funds always do well. The asset class on the whole doesn’t really perform that well compared to the pubic market. I mean, if you just literally took an index fund of every single venture capital fund and every deal done, it’s actually not that great. The real separation is your ability to pick managers. The tough thing is judging who the right people are

So I spent two years at Union Square and really, really got to enjoy working with early-stage entrepreneurs, and at some point just almost couldn’t help myself in terms of jumping across the table. And I wound up spending a year at one of their portfolio companies, a company called Dotcast, as a product manager, where I got a really great opportunity to work with technical teams and help launch a product.

Their advice to me was even if you plan on continuing on the venture capital side, you should really know what it’s like to work at a startup. And so I got some fantastic operational experience.

What I was really passionate about was this idea that was kicking around in my head related to careers and career information. I do a lot of career mentoring, and what I really see as sort of the problem in this area is lack of information. People, it’s not that they don’t know what they want to do, they don’t know what’s out there. People don’t realize that you could be a physics major and work in a hedge fund. Or you could be an anthropologist and go work for a marketing agency.

But there are people who have actually done that. And if you just had good information about what everybody wound up doing and where the wound up going, it would be pretty helpful.

Adrian Bye: You could be like a career adviser at college.

Charlie O’Donnell: I certainly thought of that, and was good friends with one of the career directors at one of the local universities. And I inquired about a job and she said, “Trust me, you don’t want it.” She said, “Do you know what the salary is? Trust me, this is not going to be interesting to you.” So the reality was the salary was the signal of how important most universities consider that function, and unfortunately it’s not very.

Adrian Bye: So are you planning a startup to do exactly that? To do that on a scale in the world, right?

Charlie O’Donnell: Exactly. It’s what I want to do. That was the beginning of my entrepreneurial efforts.

Adrian Bye: So you raised money. And I say, you did actually pretty – you made like New York City’s best angle round for your startup. You had like everybody investing in you. How did you do that, and then what happened next?

Charlie O’Donnell: Yeah, we had 21 angel investors. These were all savvy venture professional, to there wasn’t a lot of term sheet wrangling or legal nitpicking. A relatively friendly round from a term perspective.

And like what I tell a lot of entrepreneurs, go to the people who you know. 18 or 19 out of 21 investors that we had were first-level connections, people that I’d worked with while at USV or had just had known from the tech scene.

My and my partner actually, how we wound up with a lot of those, my co-founder Alex Lines, when we started out we probably took, I don’t know, probably 45 or 50 meetings. Not for pitching for investment, literally for feedback. Sometimes for feedback on the idea and sometimes for feedback from two-person co-founding teams to literally ask them, “How do you make decisions between the two of you?

Adrian Bye: And so how did that company do?

Charlie O’Donnell: We hung around for about two years and change. So basically the plan was to leverage data that we had crawled off the web to paint a picture of what career paths looked like, and create some interesting analytical and directed applications around it.

And so we decided we were going to raise about $350,000 to get a prototype sort of off the ground. And then raise a real venture round to kind of turn that into something of a business. Everybody kind of nodded their heads around the table and said, “Yeah, sounds good.” We executed on that prototype. I think for a group of first-time entrepreneurs, I think it came out pretty well. And we had some positive feedback.

But the timing for our venture round, we were looking for venture capital money in October of 2008. And that didn’t set up too well. Most of the early-stage investors were kind of closed for business. The reality is, our project was something that really needed six engineers and not two-and-a-half. So we kind of lost momentum at that point.

Adrian Bye: Do you think if you would have had more money, you would have made it?

Charlie O’Donnell: I think if we had more money we would have gotten a lot more done. I think it was a combination of two things. It was certainly a bigger project as specced out than what we could have put together in our angel rounds, but certainly we could have executed better.

And you always sort of imagine that there are things you could have done better in hindsight, but it was a bigger project than what a small angel round could do. Somebody asked me the other day what I think of the whole lean startup movement. And I said that’s good for some ideas and it’s good if it fits the nature of how you work as an entrepreneur. But there are some ideas that need six engineers hacking away at something for 18 months before they discover where the real value is.

It’s not going to be very lean. It’s not a $20 million startup, but a lot of time, especially when you’re dealing with data and analytics, there may not be an obvious sort of customer until you make the technological or computational discovery. So certainly more money would have helped. I certainly take responsibility over – I probably could have been a better product manager and set shorter-term milestones.

I think one of our biggest missteps was leaving potential revenue on the table, in the job space. If you put together a pool of profiles or resumes, it’s monetizable. It’s kind of an old, boring business that everybody else does, but there’s a way to make money off it it.

And it wasn’t a way to make money that we were most interested in, so we didn’t think we had to worry about it. But no one every thinks the stock market is going to crash until it crashes. Had we maybe taken some of that focus and put it towards maybe getting some early revenues, maybe we could have lasted a little bit longer or hired another couple of engineers.

Adrian Bye: Do you think if you’d have been doing that company during like 1999, would it have been easier for you to raise your next round

Charlie O’Donnell: Yes, I think so. Well, I mean, certainly in that kind of funding environment. It’s funny, because in 1999, we probably wouldn’t have that the technology that would have allowed us to do the crawling and the natural language processing. But certainly as inexpensively as we were able to do it. And the other thing which was critical to what we were working on, we were crawling profiles off the web. There are upwards of 20 million resumes floating around online that we were analyzing.

So we literally had like, other than the sort of engineering costs, we didn’t have a cost to acquire resumes for analytical purposes. They were just out there; Google was telling us where they were. And I’d spoken to a couple of people at volt.com, and they had looked into the idea of doing something similar years ago, but there just literally weren’t enough profiles around. And the technology wasn’t there to sort of analyze them anyway.

Adrian Bye: So basically you went out again, you tried to raise money, you couldn’t. So you were like, OK, we’re just going to have to shut this down and go out of business.

Charlie O’Donnell: Yeah, we topped off our angel round a little bit, a local fund here. It was a little bit sort of see if we can possible raise, and we stretched it out. We made it last until September of ’09. Some pretty lean times.

But eventually we made the call and said we really need to work on this full-time and see if we can sell it. In hindsight, one of the lessons learned is that selling is a full-time process. Trying to sell your company or sell the assets.

Right now we’re seeing a number of talent acquisitions in the market, but very few IT and technology acquisitions. And when those happen, it takes a while, because you have to show somebody the value of the IP. Sometimes there’s integration work to be done.

We didn’t necessarily realize that it would almost be a full-time job, and found in incredibly difficult to facilitate a sale while we were working full-time at other jobs. And actually when you’re doing something like algorithms, you quickly learn that potential acquirers don’t just want the code, they want the person who wrote the algorithm.

Adrian Bye: You said you were working full-time somewhere else while you were doing this startup, were you?

Charlie O’Donnell: No, no. It’s just the point that we stopped working on it full-time was the point and which we looked to try and sell the assets, and that’s just very difficult while you’re working on other things.

Adrian Bye: Oh, right. Were you able to make a sale?

Charlie O’Donnell: We did not find somebody who was just willing to take the code as-is. Because we had all needed to take full-time jobs, and weren’t necessarily willing to go work at a potential big acquirer for a year if it wasn’t any kind of a viable exit.

Our angel investors said to us, “If all this is going to be is trying to get half or three-quarters of our capital back and force you guys to go work at monster for a year.” They’re like, “Don’t worry about it. It’s not worth it.

Adrian Bye: And I guess if you raised $350,000 across 21 angels, they’re only giving you, what, $10,000 each or so.

Charlie O’Donnell: Yeah. I mean, $10,000 or $20,000, obviously nobody likes to lose money, but it’s not as if we had people writing million dollar checks.

Adrian Bye: OK, very cool. And you also run a pretty cool New York newsletter for those interested in the New York scene. Do you want to just give the name and have people go sign up?

Charlie O’Donnell: Yeah, sure. Although what do I even call it? It’s “This Week in the New York Innovation Community.” There’s a link to it on my blog, which is at thisisgoigntobebig.com. And it largely comes out of the fact that I have to be out there and networking and learning, so I kind of take a loot at all the events for the week and try to figure out what I’m going to go to. People started asking me what the cool things to go to were, so I about nine months I decided to send out what’s going on in New York, what’s the stuff worth going to.

Adrian Bye: I didn’t realize that was your pitch, as someone who really has his ear to the ground of what’s going on. In fact, that might be a good place for people out of town to watch as well. If you want to come to New York and you want to see what to go to, look at that Charlie’s going to. Because I know there’s a lot of stuff in the newsletter. Is there a filter where like, OK, if there was only one thing this week, this is where you’re going to go to?

Charlie O’Donnell: Sometimes I’ll pick out the events of the week. If there’s no sort of clear-cut winner, I won’t put anything. But occasionally I’ve done that. It comes from I know most of the other people who throw events, and know who really goes out of their way to put something on that’s quality. Or just like has the best network of people, so they get the best speakers.

In general, the Tech Meetups are great. Tikva Morowati runs the Ignite, and those are phenomenal. Therese’s a bunch of really great meetups. The New York Gaming Meetup that Brad Hargreaves runs. There are a couple of hacker events actually run at Meetup’s headquarters. So it’s a pretty thriving community and it’s a lot of high-quality stuff.

Adrian Bye: Cool. OK, why don’t we wrap it up there. Charlie, thanks so much for your time.

Charlie O’Donnell: No problem. I appreciate it.

Adrian Bye: Cool.

Personal Info

Sports Teams: none (anyone except the bears!)

Favourite Books:

• Real Magic: Creating Miracles in Everyday Life by Wayne W. Dyer
• Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose by Tony Hsieh

Favourite Entrepreneurs: Tony Robbins, Richard Branson, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Michael Dell

Twitter: http://twitter.com/chrisknight

Personal Blog: http://christopher-knight.com

Company Website: http://ezinearticles.com

Interview Highlights

This is a condensed audio transcript. The full source audio is provided if needed. The interviewee may post corrections in the comments.

Adrian Bye: Today, I’m talking with Chris Knight, who runs EzineArticles. Chris is based near Chicago. Maybe you can come on and tell us a little bit about EzineArticles and what you have been doing

Chris Knight: Yeah, we are in the Midwest and we have a great college educated workforce and a great work ethic. The business began in November of 1999, and what we were doing back then is we were aggregating websites that were providing value to email newsletter publishers or Ezine publishers.

EzineArticles.com was originally designed to be a matching service between email newsletter publishers who need supplemental content that they can run it in their own newsletter free of charge and then experts in every walk of life, every business and non-business niche, and a person can come to our site and ethically, legally and for the license take up to 25 articles per site per year to use and run to their newsletter audience or to their website.

And the benefit, of course, for doing that is that the expert gets exposure to a likeminded niche market who might want that content. Everybody who has a website has the same problem. We all need traffic in order to make our Internet businesses work. So, that’s really the niche that we are trying to fill.

We are trying to deliver that high value traffic, but once someone has read your article and they have seen Adrian and what he can do and what his expertise is, well then when they visit your website, they are really warmed up to you, they already know something about you. Either they shared part of your skill with them and delivered value first.

Adrian Bye: So, you basically started off doing like general Internet marketing stuff, EzineArticles is one of multiple businesses you were running. You did that from 2001 through to about 2005. By then, contextual advertising had caught up and then you are like, “Well, maybe, we should put some more effort into this.” And then, did you basically read upon your other stuff and focus 100 percent on EzineArticles and sell or shut down the other businesses?

Chris Knight: Slowly, year by year, the other sites – some of them are still going. In fact, we integrated some of them into EzineArticles. For example, BestEzines.com is just an email newsletter directory, and we created PressExposure.com and that also is one of our sites that is a little known I guess, but if you send a press release to us, of course, we can’t accept it, but we will deflect it to PressExposure.com.

Adrian Bye: So, you had like a big active team of people reading every day?

Chris Knight: We have right now 80 people full time and we have plans for more.

Adrian Bye: You have 80 full time people who read everything that gets posted twice?

Chris Knight: Yes.

Adrian Bye: You are also paying a lot more than if you like; I mean, I’ll just say because it is going to sound funny, but why not have all that done in China?

Chris Knight: Good question. Here are 60 million people who can speak perfect English yet don’t have any of the cultural references to the bulk of the content coming in. The bulk of our content is English right now – and we are only English right now. And they speak perfect English, but yet they don’t have starting our life, they don’t have our pop culture. When we first make a joke, they don’t get the joke. That’s the same for India, same thing. It is not our culture, it is not their culture

Adrian Bye: So, you are just basically – you have gotten really good at SEO and like your good friends at Google and Yahoo as good as you can be basing a website, and that’s it. You get your traffic in, the people submit their articles and then you provide reporting and results to the people who submit articles, so they can see where the traffic is coming from.

Chris Knight: In fact, one of our goals was to – this is going back to 2005 now. In 2005, our Google delivered traffic was like 92 or 93 percent of our traffic and we thought, “You know what, this is really dangerous. We can’t do business like this.”

We created a plan. It was a multiyear plan and we said, “We’ve got to figure out a way to attract traffic in order to bring the total search engine delivered traffic to us to below 50 percent.” And here, our total search engine traffic delivered to us is below 50 percent, and we did that through RSS, we did it through email alerts. Like, right now, a person can come to our site, they can find you and they can subscribe to your alerts, which means, let’s say, you publish an article with us tomorrow, we will send an email tomorrow to anyone who is interested in seeing new articles by Adrian Bye.

So, we did a huge email-based ways to drive traffic. In addition, we also have, I think, a little over 10 million Twitter members that are following our members and we allow our members to automatically tweet from their account when they have new articles. And so that’s a significant exposure because that also then syndicates to FriendFeed and Facebook and different other sites that people syndicate from – LinkedIn, for example.

So, when a person tweets an article, then it goes back through that path and then it comes back to us, which then goes back to them. So, we put a lot of effort into getting traffic without the search engine. So, as much we still appreciate them and we do. It is only half the traffic.

And the biggest innovation that we have had is, we have created a system where we have full time people in our team that are title writers. And what we do is we comb through the tens of terabytes of data of referral logs that shows which keywords and key phrases are being used to find content. We correlate that with traffic and what we know from our history.

And then we have designed a system that helps accurately predict which article titles will pull the most traffic in the future, and we provide that through our article title suggestion tool for free for all members, and then they can come to the tool, they can put in a search word in their article title suggestion tool, and they can find out here is five or ten article titles that we believe if you write an article for will give you higher percentage of traffic than if you picked the title yourself.

What the headlines are based is, it is specifics basis backed by data, by extreme amount of data and then it is also human reviewed to make sure that, “Well, just because someone searching for this weird stuff, there is lot of search terms that wouldn’t make up an appropriate title,” which is why we have to then rewrite that data using the knowledge we have based on our traffic

And we have been doing this now for almost not quite a year and very soon we will be publishing what the actual differential is. And I think it is going to show significantly that we are going to try to prove that you shouldn’t make article titles up yourself.

You can do that, but eventually I will prove to you that we know better how to get you higher return on your time, so that if you know you just want to write about entrepreneurship or you want to write about skiing or you want to write about whatever your niche is, we want to give you the ability to search our titles and then find and write based on what the market is looking for, based on what they are currently searching for in volume.

Adrian Bye: I’m interested to know about your thoughts on contextual advertising and how well that works for you. And I mean, obviously, it is working pretty well. What kind of stuff you have tried, what’s worked and what hasn’t and all that sort of thing?

Chris Knight: We run a couple of hundred concurrent tests on a continuous basis and so our objective is how can we deliver not only the most targeted ads, but how can we deliver the fewest number of ads per article to get the maximum yield from that article without distracting from our members getting their maximum yield from the traffic. So, we monitor those 200,000 clicks going out the door everyday to our members and we want to continue to see that rise in proportion to the traffic.

But, we also wanted to see, when sometimes an article will get a huge ad clickthrough, but it will be a low member clickthrough, or the reverse happens where a member will get 30 percent clickthrough rate on a continuous basis and the ads won’t perform the same.

So, we look at not only the geotargeting of it all, but we’ve tested images, as well, and those failed in a lot of respects. We find that our members are very text oriented. Some things that people could test or they can see what we’re doing. We have a relationship with Google and others that allows us to test things that don’t work. Usually, we see them six months before the rest of the market sees, and those partnerships are important.

But, I’m not what sure. Are you looking for do this and you’ll improve your AdSense? Is that what you’re saying?

Adrian Bye: Yeah, you, obviously, know a lot about monetization of content. So, I’m interested to see basically what you’re running as Google AdSense, because that’s basically the gold standard.

Chris Knight: That is still the gold standard. I think that it’s the perfect alignment for what we’re doing today. However, if you had a niche site that only had one specific category of topics, then it might be a supplement. A lot of people think AdSense is supplemental advertising. It’s for when you have nothing else to fill and you run AdSense. And that makes good sense.

I think that if we didn’t have 700 different markets that we’re in, that AdSense wouldn’t be as great of a player with us that it is today. Because the real money, I think, in advertising are the display ads, the image ads, the video ads. The ads that are not text have a lot greater revenue per thousand impressions.

We don’t run a lot of those because, well, we’re largely text based and we’re speed obsessed. We want to deliver a fast user experience, and display ads don’t deliver that.

If I wanted to maximize my revenue yield though, and we were not a general site in all these different markets, we would deal with AdSense as much as we are

Adrian Bye: So, what you’re saying is that Google’s model is powerful because they have the most advertisers. And because they have the most advertisers, they’re going to be able to generate the overall highest cost per click. So, that means their overall model of what they’re doing with AdSense is extremely defensible.

Chris Knight: It is.

Adrian Bye: You’ve done a lot of testing. I’m looking at a page right now, “Why Choose an Old Town Kayak?” I’m seeing, I think, 16 ads on the page. Google will run between, what is it, 10 and up to maybe 13 ads on a search result. So, if you’re running 16 on one page, this is more than Google runs. Do you get higher revenues with more ads?

Chris Knight: Yes, generally more ads mean more revenue. But then, there’s also user experience.

Adrian Bye: Right.

Chris Knight: We determine and measure user experience by bounce rate and do they keep coming back? And then for us in our business, we have to make sure that is that member in that kayak article, are they still getting a two to twelve percent clickthrough rate? Are they still getting our site average or greater? And if they are, then 16 ads? OK.

Adrian Bye: The typical clickthrough rate is two percent. Is that clickthrough to the article source?

Chris Knight: Yeah, the average article receives a two to twelve percent average clickthrough rate. Like I think yours were at six percent, so you’re right smack in the middle. It’s everywhere in between there. Some get as high as 17 to 30 percent. Some get as low as one percent. If your clickthrough rate though is below one percent, then perhaps you’re not doing something right.

Adrian Bye: You’re saying at six percent I was average and that’s it?

Chris Knight: Yeah, well, you’re above average probably for some people. We have a lot of people at one to three percent.

Adrian Bye: So, what are the ones that are doing 12 percent or a 20 percent clickthrough?

Chris Knight: Some of those topics are anti-aging or weight loss, some of the mobile cell phone ones. Some of the categories are about sexuality. Again, we don’t have porn, but we have sexual education things. Dating has some of the higher CTRs.

So, it really depends on the niche that you’re writing in. The best article content in a niche that doesn’t have a traditionally high CTR, it doesn’t matter.

Adrian Bye: When you say CTR, what are they clicking on? Because on “Why Choose an Old Town Kayak?” I don’t see a link to that guy’s site. There’s “article source,” which goes to the EzineArticles link. Is there normally a link to their site as well somewhere?

Chris Knight: Every article has usually a self-serving link, at least one if not two. We usually recommend up to two. If it doesn’t have a self-serving link in there, you’re on a rare article.

Adrian Bye: I’m going to another one now. I’m on “How to Sharpen Your Boat Building Skills.”

Chris Knight: At one point, we had several hundred thousand dead links on our site. A year ago, we said, “You know what, it’s not a good user experience to deliver a user to a dead link.”

So, we built huge systems in the back end to help our members figure out if they have dead links and then giving them the chance to correct them. Over time, if they don’t correct them, eventually we unlink them, with proper notice to the member.

Adrian Bye: OK, so I’m seeing what they’ve done is put the keyword. So, at the end of this one, “for more information on small boat design, check out the info available online.” So, this is the URL. So, you’re then tracking clickthroughs to that link. So, you’re giving them the keyword text and then it’s clicked through to that link.

Chris Knight: Yes.

Adrian Bye: We’ve talked about a lot of stuff. Is there anything that you want to tell us about which we haven’t covered?

Chris Knight: Get started. It’s a free membership, right? Love to have everyone.

In fact, our positioning, if I can leave people with a thought, is that we want them as free members to our site to think of EzineArticles.com as what could become their largest non-search engine referrer of free traffic, and traffic that doesn’t just come when you buy it; meaning, comparing us to buying clicks, this is traffic that comes year after year after year, because we keep on getting people who say, “You know what? That article I wrote for you in 2005, it just netted me two hundred grand in landing me a speaking gig” or a consulting gig or a commercial or something that works with their business. So, it’s evergreen content that delivers traffic year after year after year after year.

So, it’s something that they should think of this as a long-term strategy. Do you advertise your business once or do you advertise your business every month, every quarter, every year? Well, when I look at writing and this whole article marketing concept that we do, it’s something you want to do on a continuous basis, not just once, because those who do it just once, really aren’t going to see the spoils from fully engaging the concept.

And then once you get the traffic coming, because you’ve submitted let’s say a 100 or 250 articles, it’s really difficult to stop that traffic. In fact, that’s the point where you start saying, “OK, let’s talk about your multiyear future so that you start thinking about how to rewrite your own URLs so that when you change your business, you continue to trap that lost traffic.”

Adrian Bye: Yeah, right.

Chris Knight: Because it happens. People are doing something different today than when they started with us, even if that’s two years ago. You don’t want to deliver your good name out in the market and then send them to a dead site because your business failed or because you changed what you’re doing. So, we want to help people to recapture that value.

Adrian Bye: Right. Cool. Well, Chris, thanks very much for doing the interview.

Chris Knight: I appreciate it. Thanks, Adrian.