Autism vs Schizophrenia: Opposite Ends of the Spectrum? What Causes Them?

In this insightful episode, Malcolm and Simone delve into the fascinating world of schizophrenia and autism, exploring how these conditions exist on opposite ends of a spectrum related to the concept of "theory of mind." Malcolm shares his extensive experience working in schizophrenia research, explaining the various subtypes of schizophrenia and their symptoms. He then presents his groundbreaking theory that schizophrenia is caused by an overactive theory of mind, while autism is characterized by a deficiency in this cognitive ability. The discussion also covers the importance of medication for those with schizophrenia, the potential dangers of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and the evolutionary advantages of both schizophrenic and autistic traits in moderation.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] So what I think is happening with Schizophrenic is Individuals is that their theory of mind is basically hyper stimulated and activates when it shouldn't be activating.

And I think that this is what is happening with the auditory hallucinations. This happens when you see something like you know, applying a theory of mind to the way things are arranged in a store window.

Applying a theory of mind to like, world events, right? Like, oh, there's a theory of mind behind this that's directly relevant to you. Or a theory of mind creating a hallucination. Catatonia is the one counter example here, but what I suspect is really happening with Catatonia is they're just so overwhelmed with so many theories of minds operating at once that they basically become catatonic.

They're

Simone Collins: paralyzed by their thoughts. Yeah. I, that, that makes sense to me.

Malcolm Collins: So autism I think is literally defined by the exact opposite.

I think the core symptom of autism is a difficulty in running theory of minds of other people. And this is what creates problems in autism,

Would you like to

know more?

Simone Collins: Well, hello, gorgeous. I am [00:01:00] poking around the comments in our videos a while ago and I remember some people speculating on like what we sort of meant about like the autistic and schizoid spectrums and they implied that, that we were talking about something more cultural and not actually like autistic or schizoid.

And that is not true. So we should probably dig into what we're talking about more here when we're talking about people being on the autistic spectrum or being on a schizoid spectrum because they're very different things.

Malcolm Collins: This is, I should point out, this is not a cultural thing. This is shown in genetic data.

This is shown in diagnostic data. And we should probably establish our credentials here. I started one of my first jobs. I mean, I did, I have a few like origin jobs, right? Because I took a number of early jobs in various neuroscience fields. The three origin jobs was one was studying the evolution of human cognition and humanity at the Smithsonian.

And in creating an exhibit, the human origins display, I worked on that. [00:02:00] So some of the stuff I created is still on display at the Smithsonian. So that's one area. Another area is my brain computer interface work. So this was working on technology That allowed humans to control machines with their thoughts, similar to Neuralink.

The final area, and the area I worked by far the longest in, was Schizophrenia research. So this was understanding how this is specifically what I was looking at was, was going Through lots of patients and making sure that they were properly categorized. So this involved tons and tons of interviews.

Like I had to interview hundreds of people about like their deepest and keep in mind, not just because it's a prettier person, but also normal people about their deepest thoughts about the world, their lives, their daily routines, everything like that. Because we were like, wait, why were you. doing normal people.

It's because I wasn't working as a clinician. I was working as a researcher. And so we needed a control group and we needed a control group that was similar in economic status to our schizophrenia population. Now, schizophrenia population is typically not doing very well in society. You know, this is you, you know, lower income, lower middle income [00:03:00] group.

And so I really got to, to, to get a personal, like really. In your face, really high volume understanding of this section of humanity and the way they think and engage with the world. Both people within the schizophrenia population and not schizophrenia population. And I had to be really good.

Like, I had memorized the DSM at one point. People who don't know the things. Not

Simone Collins: just the schizophrenic

Malcolm Collins: diagnostic criteria. The whole thing. I could give you any, not, not memorized word per word, but I can give you any diagnosis in it with its broad, like specific diagnostic criteria. Now, it's been a long time since then, but I took a lot of pride on this at one point.

People who don't know, I might put a picture of a DSM on the screen because people who don't know what the DSM is might be hearing that, Oh, he memorized the diagnostic standard criteria. He, well, what is that? Why is that important? a monster book. It's like memorizing the encyclopedia. It's insane that I decided that that was a fun thing to do.

But I really enjoyed it. I really [00:04:00] enjoyed understanding how humans think and how humans interact with each other. And so this was important to me. And then Simone is diagnosed with autism. Yeah, I'm just defective. Our kid is diagnosed with autism. One of our kids and our other kid, very likely by the time we get to him, it's going to be diagnosed as well.

Simone Collins: Oh yeah, no, no. Torsten is Almost certainly. He's, he's getting his evaluation in April because it takes a billion months to schedule these things, ha

Malcolm Collins: ha ha. But the point being here is that I have no antagonism towards these communities and I am speaking from a perspective informed. By research and actually what we were doing was this research was genetic testing.

So we were, so we needed to clearly separate them into these different groups so we could find out what genes were correlated with this. And

Simone Collins: there's similar research with autism in which actually we had our oldest son participate. Like the whole family did cheek swabs, you, me Octavian's younger brother and Octavian.

And we all sent them in. And fill out tons of questionnaires. So that, [00:05:00] yeah, this is something that happens with schizophrenia. It happens with autism. It happens with a lot of things.

Malcolm Collins: So let's, let's talk about, I'm going to start with the schizophrenia spectrum because it's the one that I think less people are familiar with.

A lot of people are familiar with the autism spectrum. But the schizophrenia spectrum, a lot of people are unfamiliar with. So, because this might surprise people, the, like, do you know, the schizophrenia spectrum goes from schizophrenia to what other common psychiatric condition?

Simone Collins: You mean at the other end of it? Like the opposite of it? Yeah, the other end of it. Autism? No. I mean, well, what's the opposite? I mean, schizophrenia, as I understand it, is like over modeling humans.

Malcolm Collins: This means that all of these conditions are linked, genetically linked.

Simone Collins: Oh, linked. Okay. Okay. So they're, yeah, they're linked.

Okay. So yeah. Okay. Okay. I'll

Malcolm Collins: give you a hint. It's the single most common psychiatric condition in the world, and it's particularly common in women. Borderline

Simone Collins: personality disorder?

Malcolm Collins: No, [00:06:00] personality disorders aren't on the schizophrenia spectrum. Well, the kind of are similar, but it's depression. Oh, depression is one end of the schizophrenia spectrum.

Schizophrenia is the other end of the schizophrenia spectrum. So let's go through broadly how this works. Okay. Yeah. Because all of these, there's. They, they share genetic components and they share sort of diagnostic components. And, and we're also going to talk about what causes these at the end of this, because I have a unique theory about what causes all of this.

And it's different from the mainstream community consensus, but it's right because I'm smarter than them. They would have gone into the real world and made money if they were as smart as me, but they didn't, they stayed in academia. So Let's, let's talk about this, this spectrum. So, at one end you have depression.

And then from depression you have sort of a spectrum from depression to bipolar. Where you have periods of mania. So bipolar

Simone Collins: is on the schizophrenic spectrum?

Malcolm Collins: Well, bipolar exists in two categories. You have bipolar one and bipolar two. We're not going to get, so so keep in mind, it's been a while since [00:07:00] I've done this.

Okay. So bipolar is clearly related to depression. Like you can see that, right? Like if you have the depressive episodes and manic episodes. Yeah, 100%.

Simone Collins: That's why I was surprised that you said depression was at the far end of the

Malcolm Collins: One of the two bipolars, I think it's bipolar one, the manic episodes are In part characterized by psychotic episodes, i.

e. hearing voices, seeing things, stuff like that. Delusions of grandeur. Delusions of grandeur, right? Like that's very Okay, okay, I'm starting to see. Or paranoid episodes sometimes too, right? Yeah, alright, alright. So you're having a level of a psychotic break there. Yeah. Then from there you have schizoaffective disorder.

Mm hmm. And honestly, it's been a while since I studied it, so I can't remember exactly, but I seem to remember that the diagnostic difference between bipolar one and schizoaffective disorder was really, really small. It was like the difference between like, just like the number of days you spent on specific parts of the [00:08:00] spectrum.

Interesting. Yeah. It could be different by like one day could make the difference between a diagnosis in one category and a diagnosis in another category, which I think shows that these two are very closely.

Okay. I went through and checked because I was like, I want to give you guys the full answer here. The core difference between the two is that with Schizoaffective disorder, the, Psychotic episodes occur outside of just the manic phase. And so when I was talking about like a one day difference, If you, for example, were experiencing a psychotic episode, just like one day outside of a manic period or a manic period with like one day longer than manicure gets normally are, it could change the diagnosis from bipolar one to Schizoaffective disorder.

So they're really only difference in terms of a matter of degrees, except when you're talking about extreme manifestations of each I E a person's who's in like extreme depression, also having psychotic episodes will be clearly Schizoaffective, but there's a lot, a lot of edge cases between Schizoaffective and bipolar one.

In fact, the educators are much more [00:09:00] normal than the extreme cases.

Malcolm Collins: And

Simone Collins: of course the DSM is. Famously arbitrary about many things. Many argue that it's more of a reflection of cultural values at the time and cultural norms than it is of, you know, actual

Malcolm Collins: conditions.

Well, this is very important to note that historically the DSM you know, had things in it like same sex attraction and stuff like that in the 1970s. And that was considered a psychiatric condition and it was taken out. And now, There's been a push, and I think it might have even been taken out recently, to take sadism out, because they, they're like, that's just a sexual preference.

in there? It's not still in there. It might still be in there, but yeah. Oh lord. Okay, so then from that, you then go into schizophrenia. Now, schizophrenia actually has a huge diversity of sort of ways that it appears in people. I think when people think about schizophrenia, they have this like, culturally primed assumption.

Simone Collins: Yeah, the homeless person on the street who's yelling to themselves.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I can just go over a few of the big ones here. Okay, so paranoid schizophrenia. It's one of the most common I saw. I think it might be one of the most common. Basically you assume [00:10:00] agency and like large forces of reality targeted at you.

That aren't targeted at you. So I'm trying to word this other than like you are paranoid. Because I think that's not a helpful understanding. It means that you will see something like a helicopter fly over your house and you will assume that it's flying over your house because you are in that house and it is watching you.

You will see you know people whispering to each other on a bus or something like that. And you will assume they must be whispering about you.

Simone Collins: It seems remarkably self centered. Like, you just assume that you must be the most important person in the entire world.

Malcolm Collins: Well, yes. And this is like the gang abduction hypothesis.

It's one of the conspiracy theories. I got to do like gang. I will, I'll edit and edit because I don't remember off the top of my head,

Gang stalking is what I was thinking of.

Malcolm Collins: but it's very likely paranoid schizophrenia that they're just talking about when they, when they talk about it. And this is another thing that I also want to note with people is a lot of people don't know how common.

Oh, I think I know who you're referring to. Okay. [00:11:00] Hallucinations are in the population and many of these types of schizophrenia symptoms. All humans experience this to some extent. Everybody sort of knows this feeling of seeing two people whisper and think, I bet they're talking about me. Like they must Not me, friend.

Simone Collins: So maybe autistic people don't feel this.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I typically categorize autism in the autistic spectrum as the exact inverse of the schizophrenia spectrum and we get into why. But the thing is, many of our viewers We'll have had this experience. And this is why I've always said that I'm much closer to the schizophrenia side of it than me.

This is the experience I have all the time. I'll see two people talking and I'll be like, are they making fun of me? Are they thinking about me?

Simone Collins: Are they, you know? And you spend so much time modeling other people where like, sometimes if we're walking and you're a little bit distracted, like I will see you like gesturing and I know that you're having an imaginary conversation with someone like, so, and you were constantly, I am, I've never, and a lot of people talk about conversation.

No, never. And, and I, you know, a lot of people I think can really relate to this because I hear a lot of people talk about how like [00:12:00] they imagine having this argument with someone and how it's going to go. And I've just never experienced this ever. So I think at least this will help people relate to it is like, okay, well, you're, you're being a little schizoid every time.

You have a pretend conversation with someone, right?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, or another way that's very similar to this is magical thinking which you see in this next type of schizophrenia disorganized Well, so disorganized a bit different. People have it they'll often talk weirdly where so symptoms include disorganized behaviors and thoughts alongside short lasting delusions and hallucinations.

They have disorganized speech patterns and others may find it difficult to understand you. People living with disorganized schizophrenia often show little or no emotions in their facial expressions, voice, tone, or mannerisms. And one of the things is even when we were talking was fairly like um, they would, they would construct sentences using words that were sometimes kind of brilliant in ways.

One of my favorite, which I've actually [00:13:00] adopted in my lexicon. Is we were talking with one of them about his like daily habits, like grooming habits and he goes, well, I'm no high genius, but and, and they would often use words like this where they had put together words in a way that a normal person wouldn't have thought to put them together, but immediate sense, like it makes so much sense.

You're like, that's the most perfect thing I've ever seen. Like, but other people don't like make that connection. Think about that when they're structuring their language, right? Like they don't think, oh, how do I, so their brains are literally functioning quite different from another person's brain in terms of how they're structuring this.

Now to the point you're making earlier and in paranoid schizophrenia, cause you also see it in paranoid schizophrenia, is a symptom you call magical thinking. Magical thinking would be like, you saw a display window at Macy's or something. And you assume that that window is meant to communicate something to you, or you see a commercial and you're like, that commercial is supposed to communicate something to me.[00:14:00]

Many people could argue our entire religious framework that you and I use as a form of magical thinking, where we're looking to Abrahamic texts to find out what are they communicating to us. So a lot of schizophrenic. Type behaviors and thoughts are very related to religious thoughts. You know, when somebody is looking at reality and they're looking for signs from God, that is in a way, a form of magical thinking, you are looking at things that do not have intentionality.

The way a store display is arranged or what's going on in a commercial, like it has a form of intentionality, but it's certainly not targeted directly at you and yet you are assuming and modeling that thing as if it had like a human brain. Or a human brain went into constructing it to send a signal to you.

In a beautiful mind. I don't know if you saw that movie. It followed somebody with schizophrenia who believed that he was finding patterns, puzzles of like code words put into newspapers. And he [00:15:00] was like a math genius. So he kept, whenever he would look at newspapers, he kept overlaying various like, Mathematical equations.

Oh no. The page and whenever one of them would lead to the page saying something, he would then be like, that must be a message meant for me. So implying intentionality where no intentionality exists. Yeah. Interesting. So that is, that is one thing you'll have there. Now another type of schizophrenia that a lot of people don't know is schizophrenia is catatonic schizophrenia.

So catatonic schizophrenia, have you ever seen a movie that takes place in like a

have you ever seen a movie that takes place in a psych ward and you've seen somebody like in a weird position like this? That's catatonic schizophrenia. And if you like move their hand, it's called like waxy, like that's the word, the technical term for it. They'll stay in this new position, like Gumby or something.

Gosh. And they can be stuck like that for very long periods. Doesn't it hurt?

Simone Collins: You'd think it would hurt.

Malcolm Collins: What would they describe it as? And again, this is something that I can kind of model in my [00:16:00] head. Have you ever felt these moments where you're so mentally overloaded, you're kind of frozen? Yeah, that's whenever

Simone Collins: I say, my name is Simone Collins and I

Malcolm Collins: am washing the dishes.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's different from this. This is sort of rebooting. She has this pattern of rebooting where she's like, my name is Simone Collins and I'm doing X, but she forgets where she is and what she's doing. No, this is like, Something has happened in your life or something like that, or you are so stricken with like an emotional context because like you're embarrassed you did something and you just realized you did it or something like that.

And you're just like, and you're just processing this for a bit. These people are sort of stuck in that processing moment. Because they're so overwhelmed. They're so overwhelmed with thoughts.

Simone Collins: Oh, and yeah, with, with like specifically their schizophrenic thoughts, perhaps with like modeling a lot of people and stuff, right?

Yes.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. Undifferentiated schizophrenia is what I was thinking of. This is where you have signs of a few different things. I was thinking undifferentiated schizophrenia when I was thinking disorganized schizophrenia. It's very specific and that's easy for me to catch. [00:17:00] Undifferentiated does sound

Simone Collins: like a catch all.

It's

Malcolm Collins: just like you see a lot of different symptoms from different categories. Residual schizophrenia. Oh, yeah. I have to say, I don't remember seeing patients who had something called this, but yeah, this is they had a history of schizophrenic psychosis but only experienced the negative symptoms such as slow movement, poor memory, lack of concentration and poor hygiene.

So this is actually a really important one to talk about. So every time you have a psychotic break in schizophrenia these things get worse. The, the, the things I just noted there slow movement, poor memory, lack of concentration, poor hygiene. What is happening when you have a schizophrenic break is your brain is basically being flooded with chemicals that can be thought of as analogous to the sort of exogenous chemicals that you take when you're on drugs or something like taking a ton of hallucinogens.

And this is a big mistake that a lot of people, especially like bipolar people I know make, where they're like, I'll just tough it out, right? Like it's more natural. It's like it's not natural. Your brain is not supposed to be doing this. The chemicals that are flooding your brain, especially if they're causing psychotic episodes, are causing the exact [00:18:00] same damage as hallucinogens, if not more.

And you will suffer the same long term consequences of a hallucinogen addict. Or more slow speech, poor memory, poor hygiene. And so a lot of people are afraid of taking drugs, you know pharmaceuticals that lower the symptoms of these sorts of conditions on the schizophrenic spectrum and you really shouldn't be.

You will have permanent, it gets worse, and we saw this with schizophrenic patients, every time they have a break, they permanently get worse

Simone Collins: after that. Yeah, I remember one of the first things, like, first mental health stances that you gave to me that I thought was really interesting when we were really early in our dating was that, like, sometimes it's just so, so, so important to take medications for a mental condition because Your current chemical state with your brain is super, super not natural and causing a lot of damage like it is.

No, don't find some natural. Don't think through it. Don't therapy through it. It's not going to fix it. There is. You are high right now and [00:19:00] you need to fix it, which I, yeah, I'm glad you're pointing

Malcolm Collins: this out. Yeah. Well, some people, and this goes, you know, when we talk about our psychology and psychiatry thing and stuff like that, and are just tough it out stance was a lot of this stuff we were talking about, like wimpy stuff, like, I'm sorry.

I don't mean to say this. This is going to be very offensive to potential. You can see our all trauma is self inflicted video for more understanding of this. But a lot of the data shows us a lot of like, what modern psychology calls problems like trauma is self inflicted when you're talking about something like psychotic episodes or a major depressive disorder.

This is no f ing joke. You should take this seriously. You should take your medication, and the number one way you're gonna die is stopping to take that medication. And we saw this with our patients all the time because another thing I did is I collected brains from the M. E. So I knew people who had worked this for a while, and when the M.

E. I was able to read their brains. Oh my

Simone Collins: god, did you collect brains from people that you'd interviewed? Yeah, yeah,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. So that's so tough. That is how people die. They stop taking their medication. Oh my god. So well, another thing is people will be like, but with depression, you have [00:20:00] medication increases suicide risk.

Yeah, it does, but it doesn't really matter that it does. Okay, so I need to be more explicit here. So the reason why it was major depressive disorder, because one of the things major depressive disorder is associated with is like a lack of motivation and a lack of ability to motivate yourself. Drugs that lower that.

But you still remember it having happened recently, you still are horrified by it, and you are still in it. slightly depressed state. Well, now you just have more motivation and more agency. And you are doing what you feel you know, needs to be done to release you from this state, but it is not that the drugs aren't working.

They lead to suicide, not because they make you more depressed, but because they give you more agency. But we've got to keep going here with, with some of these.

Simone Collins: We can also just talk more about like, so like the, the differences between the autistic and schizophrenic spectrum and why we talk about it a lot because

Malcolm Collins: I didn't get to the final thing that I want to say here. Okay. Speed it up though. Okay. Okay. Well a lot of people have psychotic, like episodes, like they're more common than people think.[00:21:00]

So a quarter of humans will hear like, like hallucinatory voices at some point in their life. They will hear somebody talking to them. That's not there. This is very common. Auditory hallucinations within schizophrenia, by the way, if you're talking to somebody who's like faking schizophrenia, if they're talking about visual hallucinations and not audible hallucinations, they're probably faking it.

Because audible hallucinations are the number one symptom, visual hallucinations are actually pretty rare. Okay. So, so that's, that's just sort of worth noting. So like these symptoms in these things in schizophrenia, like these moments of catatonic schizophrenia, these moments of paranoid schizophrenia, these moments of magical thinking are something that a lot of people can empathize with.

And so we can see that a lot of people have this level of this sort of in the background running within them. Okay. So you wanted to get to the, what would you want to Well,

Simone Collins: we have theories as to why autism and schizophrenia exist and We, we describe a lot of people as being on these spectrums because.[00:22:00]

We think that a lot of people have moderate versions of them that give them advantages in society. There's a reason why genetically, because there's a high genetic basis for these conditions, that things like autism and schizophrenia provide advantages

Malcolm Collins: in moderation. We need to talk about these two spectrums because they're pretty different from each other.

Simone Collins: Yeah, but I'm just, I want to get to that because that's the juicy part. Well, you're just reading

Malcolm Collins: through lists. It's not really, but okay, I'll talk about the quote unquote juicy part. So the autism spectrum is basically a spectrum from having autism to not having autism. The schizophrenia spectrum is a spectrum, it can almost be thought of as like a conal spectrum.

It's a spectrum of one. iteration of a psychiatric condition to another iteration of a psychiatric condition. And then within that sort of like line, you can think of a spot on the other side, which is a completely mentally healthy individual and like a conal radiant going to that line. And you can be anywhere On that spectrum of like depressed or manic depressive to a completely normal person [00:23:00] or schizophrenic to a completely normal person.

So you're talking about these two sort of, one is a conic spectrum and then one is the autistic spectrum. My intuition from what I've seen about these two spectrums is that if you are drawing like a conal line and you have like an average person at like the center of where this line is drawn for right and then you have the schizophrenia spectrum of psychological disorders and you drew a line.

Like from the center of that cone out in the exact opposite direction, that would be the autistic spectrum. I, I am not aware of ever seeing comorbidity between autism and schizophrenia. In my experience. And it's because I think that they are exactly the antithesis of each other. And this is the part that you probably find interesting that you want me to talk about.

Which is my theory of what's causing schizophrenia. The common thing in all of these. So I need a little background knowledge before I do this. Okay, we're going to talk quickly about trans magnetic stimulation. So trans magnetic stimulation is a device. It's like a little figure eight sign [00:24:00] paddle that you put on your head and it can be used to either a hyper activate or sort of turn off sections of your brain using.

Transmagnetic simulation. And this can be useful in a lot of experiments and stuff like that. Like there's cool things you can do where you can have somebody like looking at letters and then you put it on their head and all of a sudden they don't know what they're looking at. They're like, I, I understand their letters, but I don't know what they're saying anymore.

So you can literally like turn on. Now, a lot of experiments have been done with it. It's like

Simone Collins: disrupting a radio signal essentially. Right. I mean,

Malcolm Collins: metaphorically. Not at all, but no. Okay. I think of it that way. It's not important exactly how it works for this conversation. Now it's also important to note with this, that I do not think TMS is safe.

And I think that in the future we will talk about TMS in the same way that we talked about experiments that use hallucinogens in the seventies today. I do not think we have good evidence that this is a safe thing to do given the severity of what people are doing with it. But anyway so, so TMS so, One thing you can do with TMS is hyper stimulate parts of a person's brain.

Simone Collins: Oh, so you can't, [00:25:00] you, you can hyper, you can like turn up in addition to turning down. It's like a

Malcolm Collins: volume down. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Neat, okay. And when you hyper stimulate them, like you're lowering the amount of signal that's needed to create an action potential within them. Don't need to go into what this is.

But if you hyper stimulate, like, the parts that, like, you turned off, like, remember when I was talking about seeing letters? You can hyper stimulate those parts, and they'll look at letters, and they won't be able to help, but say the letters they're looking at. So, they will look at an A, and they'll say, A, B, like, they can't stop from doing it.

Because basically when you add this little bit of extra stimulation, i. e. like the visual stimulation of seeing it and processing the letter, it accidentally triggers the pathway that's tied to talking about it. So what I think is happening in schizophrenic patients is the pathway that's tied to a human theory of mind.

So let's talk quickly about a theory of mind. A theory of mind is what I do. So I model people, right? Like when I am Seeing you, and I am trying to predict you, like another person, not Simone, I never really predict her because I don't need to. She just [00:26:00] tells me what she thinks, it's really nice.

This is part of being autistic, okay? So they, they, they, I, I am emulating, like, emulating a video game or something like that, or emulating another operating system. I'm emulating their mind within my mind. Like I have a little model of their mind running in my mind whenever I'm talking to someone.

And that model helps me predict how they are going to react to the things I'm saying. And, and kids take a while to develop this. One of the famous experiments around this is you get a kid to draw a shape that you're looking at from like, Their perspective, you're like, can you draw this shape from my perspective and there's a certain age.

I think it's like four or five or something where kids can start realizing. Oh, they're not seeing the shape from my perspective. I need to draw it from their perspective, like their eyes are somewhere else in relation to the shape when contrasted with my eyes. When this takes a while to do right.

Well, we can also like summon theory of minds when we're doing things we can. Create a theory of mind of like a person who we had an argument with and then [00:27:00] continue to have that argument with them with this modeled iteration of them inside of our own brain. And then that's when you win the argument, of course.

And you're like, gosh, why didn't I see that in the real, like you're basically replaying tons of scenarios with them afterwards. Whereas I just

Simone Collins: go home and I'm like, man, they were weird. Yeah. Like,

Malcolm Collins: But then another theory of mind that you can do is you know, you can Sort of imbue like an animal with a theory of mind, right?

Like you can interact with your dog and then theory of mind your dog as if it was a human. Or if you're from like one of the more mystical religious traditions, you can theory of mind a waterfall, right? You can be like, oh, that must have a theory of mind, right? Like it's doing this now because it's angry with us.

You can theory mind the sky. Like, so theory of mind is just like a classic thing that humans do. It's part of a lot of religious traditions, we'll talk about that later or it can be used by them to create significance where no significance exists which is a sin, I'm sorry, that's just like, we'll go into this later in some of our tracks, but, theory of mind so what I think is happening with Schizophrenic is Individuals [00:28:00] is that their theory of mind is basically hyper stimulated and activates when it shouldn't be activating.

And I think that this is what is happening with the auditory hallucinations. I think that's why auditory hallucinations are the most common. Is Essentially, they are running models of other people when they shouldn't be running models of other people and they can hear these models of other people that they're running in the background.

This is why, you know, one of the most common is just like hearing whispers because they're not running full models. It's not like fully running. It's just like barely rumbling in the background. It's running in their mind, but they're not. It's not fully breaking into their consciousness. There's other people.

They're seeing like full theory of minds. Well, this becomes relevant because almost every symptom. Schizophrenia can be explained by a theory of mind operating when it's not supposed to be operating. Yeah, like on overdrive. Yeah, so this happens when you see something like you know, applying a theory of mind to the way things are arranged in a store window.

Applying a theory of mind to like, world events, right? Like, oh, there's a theory of mind behind this that's [00:29:00] directly relevant to you. Or a theory of mind creating a hallucination. Catatonia is the one counter example here, but what I suspect is really happening with Catatonia is they're just so overwhelmed with so many theories of minds operating at once that they basically become catatonic.

They're

Simone Collins: paralyzed by their thoughts. Yeah. I, that, that makes sense to me. I mean, they're

Malcolm Collins: basically running like five consciousnesses simultaneously. Like,

Simone Collins: yeah. It's like when you are running too many programs on an older computer and it just like stops.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. That's basically what's happening. So autism I think is literally defined by the exact opposite.

I think the core symptom of autism is a difficulty in running theory of minds of other people. And this is what creates problems in autism, like not being able to recognize emotions as easily, or not recognizing when people aren't interested in something that you're talking to them about. And as Simone says, her as an autistic person Simone, I, I want to be clear, it is not normal to not have arguments with people in your heads.

That is something that normal people do. It

Simone Collins: is something that a schizoid [00:30:00] person would

Malcolm Collins: say, isn't it? Right? No, but that is, and this is what we talk about with me being more towards the schizoid side and her being more towards the autism side. Like we are both opposite sides of exact opposite sides of the spectrum.

Where I run theory of minds too frequently and too easily, but I am uniquely good at it. And I think. That people are like why would like schizophrenia exists because it existed about equal rates across populations and it exists likely because people like me have a genetic advantage over people not like me.

I mean, one of the

Simone Collins: things so yeah, anyone in a social, like any living in a society, civilization, a tribe, a city is going to be to have an advantage if they're able to play the game of chess better, you know, to model other people's next moves, to anticipate them, to think what they're thinking, because then it is easier to get ahead and to have an edge.

But then I also think that maybe the reason why people carrying autistic traits have continued to perpetuate is that Sometimes being free of that burden enables you to think more [00:31:00] systematically in a way that makes you useful to society as an inventor, as a builder, as a producer. And so then that's why those genes have also been carried on.

It's just a worker, like they, you know, you get the work done because you're not so busy. Socializing and thinking about people and modeling people and trying to play games, which is frankly not very productive. I mean, you see this in like other contexts where like there was that one famous study of I think a travel agency building somewhere, a company in Southeast Asia that had people at the office and people at work from home and work from home people were more productive, but they didn't get promotions.

So it was really interesting. It was like, well, working in an office is good. If getting ahead is what matters. Having people work from home is good. If getting stuff done is what matters. And you kind of need both people in society, right? You need people who are capable of getting ahead and amassing power and amassing resources and wealth.

And you also need people who are good at just getting things done. That's why these two things on

Malcolm Collins: a spectrum, we have to worry. Are we washing out our genes? Like was my unique genius being able to model

Simone Collins: that [00:32:00] my autism is overpowered your,

Malcolm Collins: it does in our kids. I'll say that.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And we, we can't tell yet with our daughter.

Who's around like 16 months now. With our two sons, though, it is extremely clear

Malcolm Collins: there. Well, autism appears more in males than females, so. It

Simone Collins: manifests more in a diagnosable way. I mean, this is why I wasn't diagnosed until

Malcolm Collins: our son was diagnosed. Remember when who was it, Diana Fleischman was on our show, and she was saying that in women oh, no, no, it wasn't, this was, louise Perry, she is saying that women like you're a woman with a 70 IQ has a better ability to model the emotional states of others than a man with a 120 IQ. Yeah, I

Simone Collins: think that was Diana.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. No, it wasn't Diana, it was Louise Perry. Okay. Yeah, it was in the episode on feminism or whatever. Anyway, so the Very interesting is is I think that that's what's causing that is because women have this naturally higher emotional intelligence that it often gets high hidden in them when they have lower ability to model other people.

Anyway. I love you to death, [00:33:00] Simone. It is remarkable how many low hanging fruits there are within the sciences. And people are like, well, why don't you like test them and prove them and stuff like that? Why don't you stay in the community? Because this would have been my entire career. This one theory would have been 30, 40 years of my life just proving out.

And I've been able to have like a panoply of other theories in the field of sexuality because I was able to do independent research on that. I'm able to have theories in the field of theology, which I'm really interested in because, you know, like if I had trapped myself in academia, I wouldn't be able to live the life of a gentleman scientist, which I much prefer.

Academia is collapsing anyways, right? Anyway, I love you to death Simone. I love

Simone Collins: you too and I'm glad you shared your thoughts on this because it's super interesting. So thank you. I love your beautiful mind.

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