on the subject of theory of mind

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everyone has problems understanding / believing things they have not experienced themselves. This is not an Asperger thing. We get blamed for it, but NTs don't do it any better - they just have better odds. When they guess, they are more likely to be correct.

Just an observation.

At the moment I disagree - I disagree that they have better odds. I think they are just more willing to "go with the flow" and assume they are right. They are just as likely as us to be right, but we second guess ourselves more often so it becomes more obvious that we might be wrong, because our doubt shows. Often when an NT is wrong, nobody really cares or notices anyway, in everyday social interaction at least.

NTs are more likely to guess, not more likely to be correct. That's my feeling on the topic currently.

I'm not sure if you disagree or if I was confusing. I meant that if they assume a read on another person based on what they would experience in that person's situation, they are more likely to be correct than we would be, because they are more likely to be similar to the person. If confronted with someone unlike them, I believe them not to be especially accurate. Basically I think people have no way of estimating what others experience except by comparing their own experience.

A good point though that your post made me think of: NTs make social mistakes also (and bad reads on other people), but they change course to the correct response very quickly, and keep up with what is expected of them next. It is like someone driving a car off road and they hit a very bumpy spot, they have excellent control of the car, so they stay on the path. we would be in the car as it veered off road and flipped over a few times, then have to get out, dust off, assess injuries, change a tire ...

I've noticed that NTs also lack TOM because they can't always put themselves in other peoples shoes when they have never been there. Plus they expect people to handle things the same way they did. They also think they are right. But yet these are characteristics you find in AS. Makes me think this is more of a human thing.

That's a really good point katzefrau. NTs probably would be more likely to make the right assumption, being more likely to be similar to the person they are trying to interpret.

This is correct. Moreover, NTs don't really seem at all concerned with whether or not their assumption is accurate or if it's totally out there. And they have no qualms propagating their assumption as if it's fact. And if they're proven wrong, they don't seem to learn much, oftentimes conveniently forgetting their assumptions or adamantly defending them.

While they have a better chance of being correct as they understand how others of their ilk think, it's still strange to me how they seem oblivious or indifferent to their own misunderstandings when they're wrong. I can't imagine going through life like that.

This is all making my head absolutely boggle!

...I must be lacking ToM !

If NTs were really good with ToM there wouldn't be so much cheating in the world and nobody would need a paternity test. Also, there had to be significantly less frustration in the sense of "nobody understands me". Or look at politics, that whole business is about lying and cheating.

I think that ToM is not really useful to determine if someone has AS AS. Joint attention or the lack thereof would be a better criterion.

I've often felt a double standard throughout my life, and this is a good example of one.

Yes, NTs also lack ToM when the mind to be theorized is verry merry berry different from theirs. I think that NT and autistic adults lack ToM or have sucky ToM when it comes to interpreting each other's thinkings and actings across the ToM divide. I think that many autistic children lack ToM in general when it comes to interpreting anyone's thinkings and actings, or at least I did when I was a kid.

Also, I am purrrty sure that I lack empathy for many NT-specific social things that I can't even put into words, but they lack empathy for many of my feelings too, like needing to maintain eberrything in the same place in my room.

How are you all at reading the non-verbal? There is usually verbal communication, but are you good at reading the intentions behind what the the non- verbal conveys? Such as, facial gestures, hand gestures, tone of voice and, eye expressions.

This is what "Theory of Mind" is about. Of course everyone non autistic has more or less better success with this to varying degrees.

Well, I guess language (verbal or otherwise) is how one would acquire ToM, so a child would lack ToM if they couldn't understand language at all for any reason at all.

I think you would have to have both severe/profound retardation and severe autism to not acquire some semblance of ToM.

Precisely. The difference between a brain and a mind is mainly culture, mainly language.

A human is born with a brain, but a human is not born with a mind. And a human will never develop a mind on its own, the way other anatomical and physiological parts develop/mature naturally. The human brain is capable of becoming a mind, it is born with the necessary hardware, but it requires social/cultural inputs to become a mind. Left totally to its own biological devices, and nothing else, a human brain will never become a mind. I mean, if you were to take a baby at birth and immediately place it some isolated area with no human contact, and nourish it, but never speak to it or interact with it in any way, that human could live a long life and never develop a mind. A mind is the product of experience as well as a product of biology. It needs certain experiences to happen, or else it is just a brain.

So: brain is a product of biology. A mind is product of biology and culture. I don't think there could be a mind without culture or language.

This model was originally proposed by Vygotsky, the idea that "grammatical speech and human culture scaffold the brain's biological capacities to create a mind that is something different again."

There have been cases of feral and children raised by wolves, who never learned to speak, and therefore never developed minds.

As one researcher who studied a child raised in the wild put it:

Now that is a no brainer


I posted this in *Your ASD moments* archive: http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp4951510.html#4951510

This is also a spectrum and some cannot read any body language period. I miss the nuances. Sure it's naive. It could even fall under an introvert umbrella as I'm INTJ. But I get the sense that it runs deeper than that.

Actually, there's been several instances of deaf kids coming together, almost always at the school for the deaf, and developing their own sign language, or at least influencing the sign language around them, creating little dialects everywhere. They've been exposed to non-verbal language, obviously, but not verbal language.

I would imagine it would be very difficult to have a human who hasn't been exposed to non-verbal language. Even non-human animals have that! Considering that, how would you insulate a baby completely and totally from non-verbal language and have it live? I think it's impossible, unless you physically nourish the baby while wearing a mask or something.



But even you realized that the girl was flirting with you eventually, correct? I mean, several years too late, but still. You developed a ToM eventually.

I think that's what happens with most people. By the time they reach adulthood, they have some amount of ToM, even if it's nowhere near the average, NT amount of ToM.

(ETA response to Mdyar)

NTs are no mind-guessers either. ToM is about assuming the average assumption, not about mind-guessing.

As long as you automatically assume the standard assumption, you're fine. Whether you're right or wrong is a lot less important - if you're wrong when applying conventional, standardized wisdom, then for everybody, including the other person, it's the other person who's responsible for misleading you.