No one talks seriously of curing autism, but researchers have begun to chart the dynamics of the condition. And as Cambridge University psychologist Simon Baron-Co-hen shows in his new book, “Mindblindness” (171 pages. MIT Press. $22.50), their work offers fascinating insights into the mind’s essential makeup.
Scientists sometimes think of the mind as an all-purpose learning machine, equally receptive to any kind of information. But if that were the case, you wouldn’t expect it to fail in such discrete ways. The fact that an otherwise healthy person can be mindblind suggests we’re wired for certain forms of social awareness. And from an evolutionary, perspective. that makes perfect sense. “As members of an intensively. . . cooperative and competitive species,” the evolutionists Leda’ Cosmides and John Tooby write in a foreword to the newbook, “our ancestors’ lives depended on how well they could infer what was on one another’s minds.”
Baron-Cohen breaks the mind-reading faculty into several components, which emerge stepwise during early childhood. By the time they’re 9 months old, children the world over play peekaboo, suggesting an awareness that other eyes can see. By 18 months, they start pointing and gesturing to direct people’s attention. And by the time they turn 4, they display a “theory-of-mind mechanism,” an awareness that other people are capable of different mental actions, such as pretending or believing or misunderstanding.
Autistic kids follow a different trajectory. They may learn to read the direction of a person’s gaze. But they don’t point as toddlers, and as Baron-Cohen and others have now shown, they never develop a working theory of mind. In one classic experiment, researchers presented children with a scenario in which a character named Sally places a marble in a basket and leaves the room (chart). While she’s gone, a second character moves the marble from the basket into a box. Asked where Sally would look for the marble on her return, even retarded kids realized she would think it was still where she left it. But the autistic children consistently said she would look in the box. They couldn’t distinguish between the situation and Sally’s likely perception of it.
In one test after another, the same pattern emerges. Suppose two characters approach a box. One of them looks inside while the other simply touches it. Three out of four children with Down syndrome can tell which character will know what’s inside, yet two out of three autistic kids fail that test. The reason becomes clear when you ask an autistic child what brains do. Baron-Cohen has found that most 5-year-olds know that brains are for thinking, dreaming, keeping secrets and so on. But when he asks autistic kids the same question, they say nothing about mental activity. The brain, they say, is what makes people move.
Like the visually blind, the mindblind can learn to compensate for their perceptual lapses. Temple Grandin grew up, despite her autism, to teach agricultural science at Colorado State University. In his book “An Anthropologist on Mars,” the neurologist Oliver Sacks describes how Grandin has learned, through rote study, to navigate in the world. She now manages to write books, give lectures and live on her own. Yet she’s still unable to play a successful round of peekaboo, and the concept of romantic love is utterly beyond her. Her story is a stirring triumph of will, but it reveals how lost we would be if we had to learn everything we know.
To test children’s awareness of other perspectives, researchers present a scenario in which Sally places a marble in a container, a second child moves it, and Sally later returns to look for it.
Most children easily surmise that she’ll expect to find it in the container where she left it.
Autistic children assume that since they know the marble’s in the box, that’s where Sally will look.
SOURCE: SIMON BARON-COHEN, DIAGRAM: BLUMRICH – NEWSWEEK
