"This is a hormone that has fascinated me. It's a small molecule that seems to be doing remarkable things. The variation we see in this hormone comes from a number of different sources. One of those sources is genes; many different genes can influence how much testosterone each of us produces, and I just wanted to share with you my fascination with this hormone, because it's helping us take the science of sex differences one step further, to try to understand not whether there are sex differences, but what are the roots of those sex differences? Where are they springing from? And along the way we’re also hoping that this is going to teach us something about those neuro-developmental conditions like autism, like delayed language development, which seem to disproportionately affect boys more than girls, and potentially help us understand the causes of those conditions."
Introduction by John Brockman
"I thoroughly enjoyed the evening last week," emailed Brian Eno. "A lot of interesting people got connected together and everyone told me they enjoyed themselves." He was referring the first-ever London Edge Reality Club meeting, featuring a presentation by Cambridge research psychologist Simon-Baron Cohen which Eno hosted at his studio in Notting Hill before an assembled group that included artists, curators, museum directors, writers, playwrights, scientists in fields such as biology, math, psychology, zoology, the editors and correspondents of Nature, The Economist, Wired, The Guardian.
Baron-Cohen held forth before this diverse group on his latest research on the properties and effects of the hormone testosterone, while showing its relevance to his earlier research in sex differences and autism.
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