Harder Theory of Mind Test

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Interesting. Thanks for the explanation.

For some reason, this reminds a lot of when I took English composition classes (which was a long, long time ago). I used to struggle with trying to guess what the author was implying. I remember one English class in particular, the teacher would ask questions about the meaning of certain things. And, I remember thinking, "if the author really wanted us to infer this, he would have said so explicitly.

This all makes me wonder if Aspies also have trouble reading literature and making inferences from it. As it sounds like it involves similar thought processes.

I am in the UK. Birmingham is the second largest city of the UK, but is also one of the most landlocked. The Main Island of Britain is long and thin, and therefore you can only be around 70(?) miles from the cost, wherever you are. Birmingham sits fairly centrally, and so will be considered the dryer of the too.
Most Brits (at least traditionally), Go on holiday to the seaside (well it's never far away!) and at most sea-side resorts there will be a lifeboat centre/museum/giftshop etc. so the RNLI is very deeply imbedded in out 'national psyche'.

I've always done well in those courses because I figured out that one could write about damned near anything, provided one could find a way to stretch the details of the story to support one's thesis. The "meaning" the teachers ask for is basically whatever the reader projects onto the story, and so, despite the ease with which I could write those essays, I didn't really respect the process because the only true meaning of a story or novel is whatever the author was intending the reader to infer while writing it...which is probably often nothing.

I remember once reading Amy Tan's account of a college visit. Literature students came up to her and began talking about all of the things that her stories "meant." She was taken by surprise, hadn't intended any of those meanings in her writing, and, she wrote, hadn't been trying to convey any particular transcendent meaning at all. She'd just wanted to write good stories.

Literary analysis is kind of a load of b.s.



I think it would be in some sense easier than these ToM questions because there isn't as much figuring out others' motives involved; the themes of literature (coming-of-age, perseverance in the face of adversity, forbidden love, and losing innocence in exchange for knowledge) are not terribly personal. On the other hand, the themes are sort of in the more general social knowledge realm, and require something beyond concrete interpretation of the story.

I wanted to get A's in my high school english classes, so I became a master of spin.
I could spin anything in any story into supporting whatever I needed it to support.
I made up many bizarre ideas and made the literature including quotations support those ideas.
I don't even understand how I was so good at spin.
It must have been because I really wanted to get A's.
Then, I seemed to lose most of my spin ability in college.
But now, I seem to be gaining it back.

A possible reason for literature prefering dead authors. I recall a case, some 30 years ago, of an author doing very badly at an exam involving one of his stories because nobody involved realised that it was intended as parody.