Customer Reviews

Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind

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There are many books about autism and Asperger's syndrome, but they are all superficial. This is the only one that goes to the source of the problem itself: The brain at the hardware level.

What our consciousness 'sees' is not reality itself, but the output of battalions of highly specialized neurone co-processors that interpret reality in a distorted way engineered by Natural Selection to maximize our chances of surviving and reproducing.

We are blind to the existence of these unconscious perception mechanisms, and we confuse their perception of reality with reality itself. This is the reason why autism has been a mystery for so long, because it is not possible to understand autism without even knowing that these perception instincts exist.

Everything about this book is superlative. Autism is *very* *difficult* to understand even for us autistics, let alone Neurologically Typicals. This guy has the ability to explain autism with concepts that make things rather easy to visualize. Concepts so befitting that leave me wondering how he manages to invent them.

Let me give one example: As a kid, I didn't see people like objects, but I didn't quite see them as people either. They were there, but they were not very important. That is as far as I can go explaining how it was for me. The only thing I can add is that I am not giving you anything more than a faint idea of how it really was.

What does Simon Baron-Cohen do? He introduces the concept of "skinbags." Bags of skin that move and talk like people but that are not quite people.

"Skinbags" is precisely what people were for me. They moved and talked, but they had no feelings. It was not that I believed that they had no feelings; it was that it never crossed my mind to consider the possibility.

The book makes you realize right from the start that nothing really exists as we imagine it. Not even color exists. Color is only an invention of Natural Selection... "that allows us to identify and interact with objects and the world far more richly that we otherwise could." Bats could very well use colors to "see" ultrasound reflections the same way we use colors to "see" electromagnetic waves.

The warmth of a smile and the anger of a stare do not exist either. You feel them only because your unconscious perception mechanisms interpret a smile as "warm" and a stare as "angry" and feed the appropriate feelings into your consciousness.

It must be really wonderful to be able to look at a girl and *feel* the warmth of her smile. When I look at a girl smiling I feel nothing. No warmth, no nothing. Those perception mechanisms are burned out in us autistics, or for some reason they do not reach our consciousness, maybe because of a faulty wire someplace.

I read almost every book there was in the Library system, and I began to really understand autism *only* after I read "Mindblindness."

Baron-Cohen presents a well thought out theory of autism firmly based on his own experimental evidence, as well as that of others. In brief, Baron Cohen postulates that autistic children lack the ability to interpret the mental states of others, and consequently cannot assign mental causes to the actions of others. He explains this in terms of autictics lacking certain postulated mental structures involved in what he calls "mind reading"; for instance, most autistic children do not seem to be able to follow the gaze of another person, a skill that Baron-Cohen believes is central to understanding another's intentions.

While I find his arguments well supported by the data, I do have some differences with him as to the primacy of causation in his model. I would suggest that the reason the analytic mechanisms are absent is that the underlying mental state are absent. For instance, in the writings of one noted high-funtioning autistic, Temple Grandin, she notes that certain mental states having to do with interpersonal relationships are simply unknown to her; she cannot really understand deep friendships and love. To me this suggests not merely the absence of an an analytic and conceptual mechanism, but also the absence of certain physiological correlates that underly the emotions that are a large componant of social attachements.

Regardless, "Mindblindness" is an excellent addition to the theoretical literature of autism and serves as a superb summary of much of the experimental data as well.

This book takes recent cognitive research findings and aligns it with the problems that autistics and other people with non-verbal learning disabilities have in correctly interpreting and responding to social situations. It was a fast read for me and very helpful in assisting me to understand that there is a physical cause for inability to respond appropriately to social situations by learning disabled people. The book actually gave me the intellectual key to forming an appropriate emotional response to LD individuals and in assisting them in learning how to respond appropriately to social situations.

Excellent discussion on eye contact and interpreting actions. Author also provides some interesting observations on intra species communication and how it relates to the evolution of human response in social situations.

Well worth the read if you work with people who have non-verbal learning disabilities or have a child with learning disabilities that encompass the spectrum of autistic disorders. Good tie in to language disabilities and discussion of temporal and frontal region of the brain.

Aimed at both professionals and the lay person, the author has managed to do a good job of straddling both worlds.

Recommended for those people who have managed to finally catch their breath and are over grieving from discovering the consequences of living with an LD individual, and who have managed to proceed to formulating a program of education, personal and familial response to non-verbal disabilities.

While the author made good points about eye contact and subsequent social knowledge, he did fail to discuss those social situations where eye contact would be considered to be aggressive rather than a bonding or friendly situation. Nor was there adequate discussion of social groups where the types of eye contact he discusses works opposite the general norm in the United States (ie: Native American Tribal culture).

Good material that serves as a starting point in putting together an education program for those individuals who haven't been able to absorb all those unwritten social rules which can make any learning disabled person an outcast.

I am a diagnosed aspie, and read this while in my last year of high school. Writing this a few years into college, I will say that before I would read this book again, I would need:

1) An additional semester of psych 101 to understand many of the points that will be made.
2) A tall glass of my favorite alcohol: (something I couldn't have had back the first time around >_<)

This is a very, very, very deep and informative guide that will tell you everything you need to know about the facet of autism known as mind blindness. It will always have a safe niche in the bookshelves of psychology libraries, and the footnotes of academic theses.

However, I do not recommend this book to the newly diagnosed, or concerned parents who wish to become more educated about their child's gifts/mental hardware/curse/... or wherever you are in your general coping and understanding process. There are much more light, and easily read, anecdotal books out there to assuage your fears and tell you everything's going to be just a-okay (if they weren't, there wouldn't be so many of us functional enough to write books about the experience).

But back to the positive recommendation: this book is short, well written, straight to the point, and backed by enough walls of studies and citations to make you believe in what you're writing, and your study readers will be reading.

Easily worth your hard earned study grant dollars. Go at it, you brave, brave, psychology enthusiasts: you make all of our lives better, even if it's sometimes incidentally.

Classic work on Theory of Mind and its importance in understanding autism, Asperger Syndrome and High-Functioning Autism. Understandable and readable. Good diagrams and models.

This book is based on past research, as it should be. The ideas in it, however, seem formulated for the topic. The arguments for and against the author's theory are both convincing, but arguments in favor of the author's theory read like there is a slight bias behind them.

All in all, though, this book is excellent because the author does an excellent job of explaining a topic that has little or no definition.

I rely on customer reviews when deciding on a book. Apparently the three reviews I read that appeared to be helpful turned out to be a disappointment. This book is obviously written for someone with a very extensive vocabulary. It is filled with $10.00 words and ideas that are really hard to decipher. I was under the impression, via the other 3 reviews, that this book would provide an explanation of "mindblindness" in terms the average layman could understand. After reading the first two chapters, I had to go back and read them again and again. I suggest you try to find this one at the public library before you decide to permenantly add it to you own personal collection. Save your money and the shipping charges.

This is an excellent and fascinating description of the way the mind/brain works. I could not put it down!

If you are one who is interested in theories instead of applied research/information, this book is for you. Baron-Cohen is 'way out there' with this theory using a psychological approach.