Susan Senator

I was flipping through this book on dog behavior, Inside of a Dog, which is about dogs’ thoughts, reasoning abilities — it caught my eye as a good thing to get for Max’s animal-crazy girlfriend Hannah — and right away I was struck by the admiring tone of the author, Alexandra Horowitz, who is a cognitive psychologist.  Dr. Horowitz had such a lovely, deft way of describing the minute details of what her dog Pump does to learn and communicate.

I found myself feeling envious of dogs, for the level of affection, tolerance, and understanding so many of us give them.  I was thinking that we can be especially generous with our assessments of dogs’ intelligence, because we allow from the start that they are different from us.  We know that dogs are not humans, but that there are so many traits that they share with us, including the ability to learn, reason, and predict.  We automatically cut them slack for their inabilities, because our perspective is that we take them for who they are. I wish that our magnanimity extended as such to humans.

I am thinking in particular about how we judge Theory of Mind in autistics.  Dr. Horowitz makes the typical claim that many people with autism have difficulty with or even lack Theory of Mind, which is the ability to understand that there are minds, perceptions, and mental existences apart from your own.  The theory of Theory of Mind is that with autism you only know yourself and you’re not aware of others.

It is time that we, as representatives of enlightened humanity, move past this archaic notion of autism. Those of us who live with, work with, and or love a person on the Spectrum know that there are many ways to skin a dog, er, cat.  Most of the time, the difficult issues that crop up with autism, are about communication and frustration.  It follows that if you are a person that has overstimulated neural connections, underutilized neural connections, and other complex difficulty with language and interaction, you will have difficulty showing others what you do know.  If Michael Phelps, a swimmer capable of breaking Olympic records, has his legs frozen, immobilized, and you throw him in a pool, he will flip and flop and sink.  Someone who doesn’t know would think, “Jeez, that guy cannot swim.”  But he can.  He just hasn’t learned how to overcome his impaired legs.

How do we know that people on the Spectrum have little or no Theory of Mind?  Maybe they do, but they don’t know how to show it, or they don’t know to show it.  Nat knows how to smile, but he doesn’t do it sometimes when he “should.”  Is it that he doesn’t feel warm towards others?  Or is it that he doesn’t know that this is the way to show how warm he is feeling towards you?  What may look here like semantics, is actually a lightyear of a distinction.

Even if we ask some with Asperger’s who can describe their own experiences, is that going to explain Nat’s?  If Temple Grandin says that she learned about human interaction by observing social cues and teaching herself, “That facial position means you are happy,” for example, that doesn’t mean she does not feel the happiness.  It means that she now understands the more universal way of expressing that.  Dr. Grandin may even go as far as saying that she does not feel what the rest of the neurotypicals feel in terms of love, but how does she know that?  Maybe the emotion that feels like love to her is actually more intense than the way I feel love, but we have no way of comparing.  Another example of this would be the way I see blue compared to the way you see blue.  We can all agree (colorblindness notwithstanding) on what is blue, but none of us know what blue actually looks like to another person.

It stands to reason that Nat does wonder about other minds but does not show it, or does not know what to do with that input.  I defy anyone to prove to me that people with autism have no Theory of Mind.  Even or especially with the non-verbal, so-called Low Functioning (that’s another term we have to reconsider) isn’t the burden on us to try to plumb what he does know, rather than to assume what he does not?  There is some disconnect within Nat’s processing, but I would never go as far as saying that he does not have awareness of others’ different perspectives, of others’ minds.

The responsibility rests with us, the neurotypicals who are in the majority in this society and who make the rules and draw up the I.Q. tests and create the hypotheses, to be ever more accurate, to move our own language forward so that it matches potential reality.  We don’t want to be guilty of what I am now calling “neurism,” bias towards neurotypical responses.  If we don’t consider autism from fresh perspectives, we will continue to be dogged by the problems of stereotyping and ignorance, and hopelessness.