Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind (Paperback)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Wow! in this lucid, compelling book Simon Baron-Cohen guides us deep into the realm of the mind....This fascinating book captures the excitment of an emerging field, and advances that field."
—Henry M. Wellman, University of Michigan

Product Description

foreword by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby

"Wow! in this lucid, compelling book Simon Baron-Cohen guides us deep into the realm of the mind....This fascinating book captures the excitment of an emerging field, and advances that field." -- Henry M. Wellman, University of Michigan

In Mindblindness, Simon Baron-Cohen presents a model of the evolution and development of "mindreading." He argues that we mindread all the time, effortlessly, automatically, and mostly unconsciously. It is the natural way in which we interpret, predict, and participate in social behavior and communication. We ascribe mental states to people: states such as thoughts, desires, knowledge, and intentions.

Building on many years of research, Baron-Cohen concludes that children with autism, suffer from "mindblindness" as a result of a selective impairment in mindreading. For these children, the world is essentially devoid of mental things.

Baron-Cohen develops a theory that draws on data from comparative psychology, from developmental, and from neuropsychology. He argues that specific neurocognitive mechanisms have evolved that allow us to mindread, to make sense of actions, to interpret gazes as meaningful, and to decode "the language of the eyes."

A Bradford Book. Learning, Development, and Conceptual Change series

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 197 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press; New edition edition (February 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 026252225X
• ISBN-13: 978-0262522250
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #117,381 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

113 of 117 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book goes to the core of the problem behind autism., September 29, 1998

By	Hubert Cross ([e-mail]) (U.S.A.) - See all my reviews

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."

31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Provides understanding of non-verbal/social LDs., May 20, 1999

By A Customer

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.

34 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A good argument for a model of autism, April 26, 2000

By	Michael J Edelman (Huntington Woods, MI USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.