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Jan18
“Impaired” Theory of Whose Mind (ToWM)?
16 CommentsAccording to most scientific literature, an impaired Theory of Mind (ToM) is a core component of autism. In his 2001 paper Theory of mind in normal development and autism, Professor Simon Baron-Cohen explains his view of ToM impairment and its implications for autistic people:
“A theory of mind remains one of the quintessential abilities that makes us human (Whiten, 1993). By theory of mind we mean being able to infer the full range of mental states (beliefs, desires, intentions, imagination, emotions, etc.) that cause action. In brief, having a theory of mind is to be able to reflect on the contents of one’s own and other’s minds. Difficulty in understanding other minds is a core cognitive feature of autism spectrum conditions. The theory of mind difficulties seem to be universal among such individuals.” (Baron-Cohen, 3)
Every time I read this paragraph, my mind boggles at the dissonance between a) Professor Baron-Cohen’s view of autistic people and b) the profound diversity of experience of people on the spectrum. Let’s parse it one step at a time:
1. Having a normal ToM means the ability to reflect upon another person’s beliefs, desires, intentions, imagination, emotions, and other mental states.
I don’t remember a time when I didn’t reflect upon the mental states of other people. I have close friendships of many years duration with neuro-typical men and women. I have a wonderful marriage to a neuro-typical man, and I’m raising a well-adjusted neuro-typical daughter. I am fully aware that other people think differently than I do, sometimes painfully so. Therefore, I must have a “normal” ToM.
But I also have an AS diagnosis. Interesting.
2. Autistic people seem to have a universal difficulty with ToM abilities.
Uh oh. I must be really odd. I’m able to reflect upon the minds of others. Apparently, no other autistic person can match this feat. Just call me a lone ranger on the neurological spectrum.
3. Having a normal ToM is one of the core components of being a human being.
Oh, my. If you prick us, do we not bleed? Apparently not.
Now, I will readily admit that I cannot infer a person’s mental state by reading nonverbal cues. And while I can reflect endlessly upon the mental processes of neuro-typical people, I find certain of their characteristics unfathomable. Why do people enjoy socializing? What do they get out of it? Why are most people put off by discussion about serious matters? I haven’t a clue.
But let’s turn the tables for a moment. Let’s look at how unfathomable autistic people seem to the vast majority of neuro-typical folk. For many decades, scientists had no ToM regarding the mental processes of an autistic person. Guess how they found out? An autistic person wrote about it. She put it into words. She had to, because your average human being could not infer the mental state of an autistic person by translating his or her nonverbal cues. As Oliver Sacks wrote:
“In 1986, a quite extraordinary, unprecedented and, in a way, unthinkable book was published, Temple Grandin’s Emergence: Labeled Autistic. Unprecedented because there had never before been an ‘inside narrative’ of autism; unthinkable because it had been medical dogma for forty years or more that there was no ‘inside,’ no inner life, in the autistic. . .extraordinary because of its extreme (and strange) directness and clarity. Temple Grandin’s voice came from a place which had never had a voice. . .and she spoke not only for herself, but for thousands of others…” (quoted on www.templegrandin.com)
Wow. Temple Grandin wrote a book and the scientific community had a collective epiphany: “Eureka! We used to think autistic children were just empty shells! What a revelation!”
Who had the imperfect ToM for all those years? Who needed the nonverbal cues to be verbalized and explained? Who was mind-blind? It wasn’t just us.
So why do we on the autism side of the neurological spectrum get stuck with the label of having an impaired ToM?
And why are people on the neuro-typical side of the spectrum considered to have an unimpaired ToM, despite the fact that, prior to 1986, most folks had no idea that autistic people have an interior life?
The problem, of course, is that the scientific community has dubbed its own (neuro-typical) way of thinking “normal” and the autistic way of thinking “abnormal.” Thus, scientists have insisted upon interpreting an autistic person’s behavior the way they would interpret their own behavior.
For example, most doctors would consider an autistic person who does not speak in words to be “low functioning.” But what if the person were having a conversation without words? What if the person were using his or her sense of smell, taste, touch, sound, and sight to have a two-way interaction with his or her environment, an interaction that signals a vivid awareness of the richness and diversity of the sensory world? What if the person speaks through drawings, or paintings, or music? If an outside observer fails to properly read and interpret the signals that an autistic person provides, who has the impairment—the neuro-typical person or the autistic person?
My answer would be, “Neither.” One can only use the word “impairment” if one accepts the categories of “normal” and “abnormal.”
My hope is that the conversation will evolve past these notions and toward an appreciation of neurodiversity in all its forms.
© 2009 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg
16 Responses to ““Impaired” Theory of Whose Mind (ToWM)?”
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[...] “Impaired” Theory of Whose Mind (ToWM)? « Asperger Journeys [...]
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There are so many things wrong with the theory of mind that are never even examined. To me, it’s an overgeneralization which has been accepted as a description. This isn’t unusual in any sphere of life, but it’s a major weakness of psychology, and it does a lot of damage to people like us because psychology is so widely accepted as a science, which it isn’t.
I always appreciate your insights.
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[...] “Impaired” Theory of Whose Mind (ToWM)? « Asperger Journeys [...]
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I love this post. I’m going to print it and keep it against the day anyone dares to tell me that my daughter has no theory of mind. Thank you for writing this jewel and for calling out the “all knowing” scientific community on their haughtiness.
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Catana and Erin,
Thank you both for your kind words.
Catana, can you speak to some of the other aspects of the ToM you find troubling?
Erin, I’m so glad to provide information that will help you advocate on your daughter’s behalf. If you have any other topics or issues that you’d like me to cover, let me know.
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I am very happy to find your blog.
I eventually would like to start a blog for my Aspie daughter. Because she is 14 and struggling with this fact that she loses friends and that she has something to do with it.
While visiting the psychiatrist years back, she pointed out to me that I have ADHD. I know that I real blank spots in this arena of ToM. I think that is part of the human condition.
I am a psychotherapist who works with adults, NTs. The problem/tricky piece is that we must communicate professionally with language and ideas. Words are symbols for what we experience, not the actuality.
And some people are prone to theorizing which can be helpful, but then they feel less anxious if they come to believe that their theories are truth or actuality. Feeling something is certain, is more comforting than leaving something open and ambiguous.
The really smart professionals know and realize this. Some people are more flexible than others. Me, while I’m generally more flexible, I am not always so good at conceptualizing theory, so it can be hard to communicate. This can be a real limitation. But then, everyone has some things they do better than others.
What is sad is all the people who have suffered because they have been so misunderstood. Some of this is changing. Thank goodness.
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John Dale Lyons January 26th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
There are many different types of minds, just as there are genders and cultures, etc. Why medicalize difference, and give a (pehaps unintended) value judgement about whose TOM is better than whose?
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John, I completely agree. One of the AS specialists in my area says that perhaps neurodiversity is the new multiculturalism. I like that perspective.
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Very articulate, strong response to Cohen’s work. I applaud your attention to resisting labels. I disagree with your interpretation of ToM though. I don’t wish to debate semantics for the sake of sophistry, but I do think there is a key distinction that I find important when i am working with children who are experiencing language delays or symptoms of ASD. In
In your article, you seem to be treating ToM as if it were a form of mind-reading ability. You are right to push back on the scientific community and to be wary of labels. But my understanding of ToM is not that you neccessarily can understand the thoughts of others. In this regard, we all bump into people from other cultures and subcultures whom we cannot totally understand. My husband is fluent in nerdy computer-code humor and I stare blankly as he exchanges jokes with some friends. Lost in Translation was a great film which depicted the many ways in which neuro-typ folks are so lousy at understanding one another. None of us are great mind readers, and this is the essence of the human experience; it certainly doesn’t make any of us less human.
In my experience ToM is not quite the same as this mind reading skill nor is it the ability to understand and respond to the motivations of others, but rather it is the meta-cognitive awareness of these inner thoughts. That awareness does at times make one reflective and then better at dealing with their desires and the desires of others. But even if a child believed that everything they thought was simply the truth, rather than their perspective, they could still work towards getting what they want, and sometimes figuring out that if they say “please please please” they get it more quickly. A person could also have a clear sense of their distinct thoughts and perspectives from others, and yet not be able to resolve the gap. As ToM develops, children begin to realize that the reason the world doesn’t always give them what they want is because others are aiming at their own separate goals. At first, understanding that desire is only THEIR desire is confusing for all young children. You will see young children fighting over a toy look puzzled. If they experience desire they can’t imagine why other people’s hands aren’t obeying their will and giving them the toy the same way their hands are trying to do.
Signs in my ASD kiddos that ToM is difficult show up in their language. For example, it takes them a long time to move through the stage of learning pronouns. Unlike names which are the same no matter who points and says them (I point at your shirt and say “shirt”. I point at my shirt and say “shirt”), pronouns reflect the perspective of the speaker. So I point at myself and say “my shirt” and you point at the same shirt but you’re not allowed to say “my shirt”. Up until about age 5 children also have a hard time remembering that they might know information that the rest of teh universe doesn’t know. They provide little background info when they begin talking about “the place that has that cool black stuff….” because they don’t understand that others haven’t seen or visited all the places they have. I remember a shy girl sitting on her dad’s lap reading a book. We sat across the room from her and she pointed to the pictures that we couldn’t see and commented on them to us as though we could. This young gal hadn’t fully developed her sense of how our experience might be different than hers.
ToM is useful. It is not, however, a binary condition. Children all have some sense of their individuality and while we can help them expand their sense of other people’s “minds”, you are right to assert that we must balance that by deeply valuing their uniqueness.
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Erica, you raise some interesting points.
While there are autistic people who cannot understand that others have thoughts and feelings different from their own, I believe that Professor Baron-Cohen paints with too broad a brush. Autism is a spectrum disorder. People on the spectrum have various levels and areas of ToM ability, and those abilities can change over time. Speaking for myself, I don’t remember ever feeling that other people’s thoughts were just like my own. It was very clear to me from a young age that quite the opposite was true. Many others on the spectrum have had the same experience.
In terms of an inability to “resolve the gap,” I would hesitate to lay the responsibility for doing so on the shoulders of people with an ASD. Building bridges is a cooperative process. It’s important that neuro-typical people reach across the divide and understand our thought processes and modes of communication, just as we have to learn how the rest of the world thinks and communicates.
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Rachel – wow, seriously? I can ask you to cover topics? Thanks! I’m trying
hard to understand how my daughter thinks. I don’t ever want her to get the
idea that she’s broken, or needs to be fixed, or needs to conform or submit
to someone’s ideal of normal, etc. I want her to believe in herself while
learning to navigate the NT world, if that makes sense. But the social stuff
is hard for her (already, she’s 5 and it’s only going to get worse).
So I guess right now I’d like to ask, how did you navigate friendships
when you were young? How about family relationships? With all the ways
you were different from other people, how did you find empowerment and
confidence? Is that too many questions?
Thanks for being open to
questions. I love the way you write, it’s very articulate, thoughtful and
very easy to follow. -
Erin, these are all really great questions. I will put them on my list!
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I have a theory that Theory of Mind is a complex built on the basic
monkey-see, monkey-do thing that happens in neurotypical brains somewhere between fifteen and
thirty-six months of age – when the stream of information from eyes and other senses
mediated through the hippocampus to behaviour is established. Based on successful
establishment of the behavioural loop, “normal” perceptions of self, other, and the
world at large begin to form.The difference in aspergers is that the connection from perception to behaviour
doesn’t work like that. Thus there’s no behavioural substrate for ToM and……every bloody thing in the development of personality and social relationships
works differently. Not only differently between NT and AS, but differently for
every aspie. -
thank you thank you thank you.
the ToM deficiency is an aspect of AS that has not yet sat well with me. though i definitely have problems understanding NT’s and their motivations, as you said, there has never been a time in my life that i wasn’t trying to work out what the hell they were thinking. it was almost a survival strategy! i’m not good at it, but the idea that i don’t think about the minds of others could not be further from the truth. in fact, on bad days/weeks/months/years, i have ended up in dysfunctional circles when i spend TOO much time and energy trying to figure people out. my mother can relate stories back to early childhood about my over-sensitivity to the metal state of others.
i would never presume to contradict Professor Baron-Cohen, but this theory does not square with my life experiences. -
Oh I adore you. I’ve been worrying about this theory of mind thing. I convinced myself I didn’t have one, but surely I must. I can put myself in other people’s shoes … I just can’t spot when I’ve pissed someone off.
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