{"id":1762,"date":"2010-10-14T18:30:03","date_gmt":"2010-10-14T22:30:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/?p=1762"},"modified":"2010-10-14T18:30:03","modified_gmt":"2010-10-14T22:30:03","slug":"theory-of-mine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/2010\/10\/theory-of-mine\/","title":{"rendered":"Theory of Mine"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was flipping through this book on dog behavior, Inside of a Dog<\/em>,<\/a> 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.\u00a0 Dr. Horowitz had such a lovely, deft way of describing the minute details of what her dog Pump does to learn and communicate.<\/p>\n

I found myself feeling envious of dogs, for the level of affection, tolerance, and understanding so many of us give them.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

I am thinking in particular about how we judge Theory of Mind in autistics.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The theory of Theory of Mind is that with autism you only know yourself and you’re not aware of others.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Most of the time, the difficult issues that crop up with autism, are about communication and frustration.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Someone who doesn’t know would think, “Jeez, that guy cannot swim.”\u00a0 But he can.\u00a0 He just hasn’t learned how to overcome his impaired legs.<\/p>\n

How do we know that people on the Spectrum have little or no Theory of Mind?\u00a0 Maybe they do, but they don’t know how<\/em> to show it, or they don’t know to<\/em> show it.\u00a0 Nat knows how to smile, but he doesn’t do it sometimes when he “should.”\u00a0 Is it that he doesn’t feel <\/em>warm towards others?\u00a0 Or is it that he doesn’t know that this is the way to show<\/em> how warm he is feeling towards you?\u00a0 What may look here like semantics, is actually a lightyear of a distinction.<\/p>\n

Even if we ask some with Asperger’s who can describe their own experiences, is that going to explain Nat’s?\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It means that she now understands the more universal way of expressing that.\u00a0 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?\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Another example of this would be the way I see blue compared to the way you see blue.\u00a0 We can all agree (colorblindness notwithstanding) on what is blue, but none of us know what blue actually looks like to another person.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 I defy anyone to prove to me that people with autism have no Theory of Mind.\u00a0 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?\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 We don’t want to be guilty of what I am now calling “neurism,” bias towards neurotypical responses.\u00a0 If we don’t consider autism from fresh perspectives, we will continue to be dogged by the problems of stereotyping and ignorance, and hopelessness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pSTth-sq","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1762"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1762\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1763,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1762\/revisions\/1763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}