Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [4]
But why do we need this newfangled concept of mind-reading, or ToM, to explain what appears so obvious? Our ability to interpret the behavior of people in terms of their underlying states of mind seems to be such an integral part of what we are as human beings that we could be
understandably reluctant to dignify it with fancy terms and elevate it into a separate object of study. One reason that ToM has received the sustained attention of cognitive psychologists over the last twenty years is that they have come across people whose ability to "see bodies as animated by minds"2 is drastically impaired—people with autism. By studying autism and a related constellation of cognitive deficits (such as Asperger syndrome), cognitive scientists began to appreciate our mind-reading ability as a special cognitive endowment, structuring our everyday communication and cultural representations.
Cognitive evoluionar this adaptation must have developed during the "massive neurocognitive evolution" which took place during the Pleistocene (1.8 million to 10,000 years ago). The emergence of a Theory of Mind "module" was evolution's answer to the staggeringly complex challenge faced by our ancestores, who needed to make sense of the behavior of othe
In his influential 1995 study, Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and a Theory of Mind, Simon Baron-Cohen points out that "attributing mental states to a complex system (such as a human being) is by far the easiest way of understanding it," that is, of "coming up with an explanation of the complex system's behavior and predicting what it will do next."4 Thus our tendency to interpret observed behavior in terms of underlying mental states (e.g., "Peter Walsh was trembling because he was excited to see Clarissa again") seems to be so effortless and automatic (in a sense that w engaging in any particular act of "interpretation"5) because our evolved cognitive architecture "prods" us toward learnin
Baron-Cohen describes autism as the "most severe of all childhood psychiatric conditions," one that affects between approximately four to fifteen children per 10,000 and "occurs in every country in which it has been looked for and across social classes."6 Although, as Gloria Origgi and Dan Sperber have pointed out, "mind-reading is not an all-or-none affair .. . [p]eople with autism lack [this] ability to a greater or lesser degree,"7 and although the condition may be somewhat alleviated if the child receives a range of "educational and therapeutic interventions," autism remains, at present, "a lifelong disorder."8 Autism is highly heritable,9 and its key symptoms, which manifest themselves in the first years of life, include the profound impairment of social and communicative development and the "lack of the usual flexibility, imagination, and pretence." It is also characterized—crucially for our presen
by a lack of interest in fiction and storytelling (although one should keep in mind
here, and I will address shortly, the important issue of degree to which people within the autistic range are indifferent to storytelling).
One immediate, practical implication of the last two decades of research in ToM is that developmental psychologists are now able to diagnose autism much earlier (e.g., the standard age for diagnosis used to be three or four years, whereas now it is sometimes possible to diagnose a child at eighteen months11) and to design more aggressive therapeutic techniques for dealing with it. Moreover, cognitive anthropologists are increasingly aware that our ability to attribute states of mind to ourselves and other people is intensely context dependent. That is, it is supported not by one uniform cognitive adaptation but by a large cluster of specialized adaptations geared toward a variety of social contexts.12 Given