Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [5]
What criteria do psychologists use to decide whether a given individual has an impaired Theory of Mind? In 1978, Daniel Dennett suggested that one effective way to test for the precense of normally developing ToM is to see whether a child can understand that someone else might hold a false belief, that is, a belief about the world that the chil
The first false-belief test was designed in 1983 and has since been replicated many times by scientists around the world. In one of the more widespread versions of the test, children see that "Sally" puts a marble in one place and then exits the room. In her absence, "Anne" comes in, puts the marble in a different place, and leaves. Children are then asked, "Where will Sally look for her marble when she returns?" The vast majority of normal children (after the age of four13) pass the test, responding that Sally will look for the marble in the original place, thus showing their understanding that someone might hold a false belief. By contrast, only a
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2: What Is Mind-Reading.?
small minority of children with autism do so, indicating instead where the marble really is. According to Baron-Cohen, the results of the test support the notion that "in autism the mental state of belief is poorly under-stood."14
But, apart from the carefully designed lab test, how do people with autism see the world around them? In his book An Anthropologist on Mars, Oliver Sacks describes one remarkable case of autism, remarkable because the afflicted woman, Temple Grandin, has been able to overcome her handicap to some degree. She has a doctorate in agricultural science, teaches at the University of Arizona, and can speak about her perceptions, thus giving us a unique insight into what it means to be unable to read other people's minds. Sacks reports Grandin's school experience: "Something was going on between the other kids, something swift, subtle, constantly changing—an exchange of meanings, a negotiation, a swiftness of understanding so remarkable that sometimes she wondered if they were all telepathic. She is now aware of the existence of those social signals. She can infer them, she says, but she herself cannot perceive them, cannot participate in this magical communication directly, or conceive of the many-leveled, kaleidoscopic states of mind behind it."15
To compensate for her inability to interpret facial expressions, which at first left her a "target of tricks and exploitation," Grandin has built up over the years something resembling a "library of videotapes, which she could play in her mind and inspect at any time—'videos' of how people behaved in different circumstances. She would play these over and over again, and learn, by degrees, to correlate what she saw, so that she could then predict how people in similar circumstances might act."16 What the account of such a "library" suggests is that we do not just "learn" how to communicate with people and read their emotions (or how to read the minds of fictional characters based on their behavior)—Grandin, after all, has had as many opportunities to "learn" these things as you and I—but that we also have evolved cognitive architecture that makes this particular kind of learning possible, and if this architecture is damaged, as in the case of autism, a wealth of experience would never fully make up for the damage.
Predictably, Grandin comments on having a difficult time understanding fictional narratives. She remembers being "bewildered by Rome, and Juliet: 'I never knew what they were up to.'"17 Fiction pressents a challenge to people with autism because in man
kind of mind-reading, that is, the inference of the mental state from the behavior—that is a necessary in regular human communication.
Whereas the correlation between the impaired