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  Baron-Cohen describes autism as the "most severe of all childhood psychiatric conditions," one that affects between approximately four to fifteen children per 10,000 and "occurs in every country in which it has been looked for and across social classes."6 Although, as Gloria Origgi and Dan Sperber have pointed out, "mind-reading is not an all-or-none affair .. . [p]eople with autism lack [this] ability to a greater or lesser degree,"7 and although the condition may be somewhat alleviated if the child receives a range of "educational and therapeutic interventions," autism remains, at present, "a lifelong disorder."8 Autism is highly heritable,9 and its key symptoms, which manifest themselves in the first years of life, include the profound impairment of social and communicative development and the "lack of the usual flexibility, imagination, and pretence." It is also characterized—crucially for our presen

  by a lack of interest in fiction and storytelling (although one should keep in mind

  here, and I will address shortly, the important issue of degree to which people within the autistic range are indifferent to storytelling).

  One immediate, practical implication of the last two decades of research in ToM is that developmental psychologists are now able to diagnose autism much earlier (e.g., the standard age for diagnosis used to be three or four years, whereas now it is sometimes possible to diagnose a child at eighteen months11) and to design more aggressive therapeutic techniques for dealing with it. Moreover, cognitive anthropologists are increasingly aware that our ability to attribute states of mind to ourselves and other people is intensely context dependent. That is, it is supported not by one uniform cognitive adaptation but by a large cluster of specialized adaptations geared toward a variety of social contexts.12 Given this new emphasis on context-sensitive specialization and the fact that Theory of Mind appears to be our key cognitive endowment as a social species, it is difficult to imagine a field of study within the social sciences and the humanities that would not be affected by this research in the coming decades.

  What criteria do psychologists use to decide whether a given individual has an impaired Theory of Mind? In 1978, Daniel Dennett suggested that one effective way to test for the precense of normally developing ToM is to see whether a child can understand that someone else might hold a false belief, that is, a belief about the world that the chil

  The first false-belief test was designed in 1983 and has since been replicated many times by scientists around the world. In one of the more widespread versions of the test, children see that "Sally" puts a marble in one place and then exits the room. In her absence, "Anne" comes in, puts the marble in a different place, and leaves. Children are then asked, "Where will Sally look for her marble when she returns?" The vast majority of normal children (after the age of four13) pass the test, responding that Sally will look for the marble in the original place, thus showing their understanding that someone might hold a false belief. By contrast, only a

  8

  2: What Is Mind-Reading.?

  small minority of children with autism do so, indicating instead where the marble really is. According to Baron-Cohen, the results of the test support the notion that "in autism the mental state of belief is poorly under-stood."14

  But, apart from the carefully designed lab test, how do people with autism see the world around them? In his book An Anthropologist on Mars, Oliver Sacks describes one remarkable case of autism, remarkable because the afflicted woman, Temple Grandin, has been able to overcome her handicap to some degree. She has a doctorate in agricultural science, teaches at the University of Arizona, and can speak about her perceptions, thus giving us a unique insight into what it means to be unable to read other people's minds. Sacks reports Grandin's school experience: "Something was going on between the other kids, something swift, subtle, constantly changing—an exchange of meanings, a negotiation, a swiftness of understanding so remarkable that sometimes she wondered if they were all telepathic. She is now aware of the existence of those social signals. She can infer them, she says, but she herself cannot perceive them, cannot participate in this magical communication directly, or conceive of the many-leveled, kaleidoscopic states of mind behind it."15

  To compensate for her inability to interpret facial expressions, which at first left her a "target of tricks and exploitation," Grandin has built up over the years something resembling a "library of videotapes, which she could play in her mind and inspect at any time—'videos' of how people behaved in different circumstances. She would play these over and over again, and learn, by degrees, to correlate what she saw, so that she could then predict how people in similar circumstances might act."16 What the account of such a "library" suggests is that we do not just "learn" how to communicate with people and read their emotions (or how to read the minds of fictional characters based on their behavior)—Grandin, after all, has had as many opportunities to "learn" these things as you and I—but that we also have evolved cognitive architecture that makes this particular kind of learning possible, and if this architecture is damaged, as in the case of autism, a wealth of experience would never fully make up for the damage.

  Predictably, Grandin comments on having a difficult time understanding fictional narratives. She remembers being "bewildered by Rome, and Juliet: 'I never knew what they were up to.'"17 Fiction pressents a challenge to people with autism because in man

  kind of mind-reading, that is, the inference of the mental state from the behavior—that is a necessary in regular human communication.

  Whereas the correlation between the impaired ToM and the lack of interest in fiction and storytelling is highly suggestive, the jury is still out on the exact nature of the connection between the two. It could be argued, for example, that the congnitive mechanisms that evolved to process information about thoughts and feelings of huma

  feeling ticular, is implicated with our mind-reading ability to such a degree that I do not think myself in danger of overstating anything when I say that in its currently familiar shape it exists because we are creatures with ToM.23 As a sustained representation of numerous interacting minds, the novel feeds the powerful, representation-hungry comple

  3

  THEORY OF MIND, AUTISM, AND FICTION: THREE CAVEATS

  In theorizing the relationship between our evolved cognitive capacity for mind-reading and our interest in fictional narratives, one has to be

  3: Theory of Mind, Autism, and Fiction

  careful in spelling out the extent to which one builds on what is currently known about autism. Three issues are at stake here. First, though the studies of autism were crucial for initially alerting cognitive scientists to the possibility that we have an evolved cognitive adaptation for mind-reading, those studies do not define or delimit the rapidly expanding field of ToM research. For example, later in this section I discuss the work of cognitive evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, who deals with autism only tangentially and who grounds his study of cognitive regularities underlying our mind-reading processes in a different kind of compelling empirical evidence. Similarly, Alan Palmer's recent groundbreaking study of cognitive construction of fictional consciousness, Fictional Minds, mentions autism only briefly. I use research on autism merely to provide a vivid example of what it means not to be able to attribute minds (just as in Part III use research on schizophrenia to show what it means not to be able to keep track of the sources of one's representations); the bulk of my argument does not rely on it.

  Which brings me to the closely related second point. Increasingly probing and sophisticated as research on autism is becoming, it still is— and will remain for the foreseen future—a research-in-progress. Given the broad range of autistic cases—indeed it is often said that no two autistic individuals are alike—it seems that the more cognitive scientists learn about the condition, the more complex it appears. Again, the complexity of the issues involved should be a warning to cultural critics casually pronouncing some texts, individuals, or groups somehow deficient in their mind-reading ability—an increasingly
popular practice, as autism becomes what one researcher has called a "fashionable"1 cognitive impairment. I remember giving a talk once on ToM and fiction, after which one of my listeners suggested that adolescents today must all be "slightly autistic" because they are not interested in reading books anymore and want to watch television instead; as if—to point out just one of many problems with this suggestion—making sense of an episode of Friends or Saved by the Bell somehow did not require the full exercise of the viewer's Theory of Mind. Consequently, my present inquiry into Woolf's, Richardson's, James's, and Nabokov's experimentation with our mind-reading capacity should not be taken as a speculation about what so-called normal versus so-called borderline autistic readers can or cannot do.

  My final point sounds a similar note of caution about applying our still-limited knowledge of autism to the literary-critical analysis of reading and writing practices. Although I used the now-iconic story of Temple Grandin to illustrate the challenge faced by autistic individuals in understanding fictional narratives, we have to remember that this challenge varies across the wide spectrum of autism cases. For example, if we include within that spectrum people with Asperger syndrome2—which is sometimes classified as high-functioning autism and sometimes viewed as a separate condition (i.e., a nonverbal learning disability3)—we can say that a "dash of autism"4 does not necessarily preclude people from enjoying fictional narratives.

  Consider Christopher, a bright teenager with Asperger syndrome from Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a novel drawing on Haddon's previous work with autistic individuals. Although Christopher "mostly [reads] books about math and science" and is not interested in what he calls "proper novels" (4), he does like murder mysteries, appreciating, in particular, their puzzlelike structure. Following the advice of his teacher (a figure based, perhaps, on Had don), Christopher decides to write his own mystery murder narrative. Christopher's novel will tell the true story of his quest to find the person who killed the neighbor's dog because, as he puts it, "it happened to me and I find it hard to imagine things which did not happen to me" (5).

  In describing the story that Christopher wants to write, Haddon attempts to capture the boy's peculiar mind-reading profile. For example, Christopher can figure out, at least partially, some states of mind behind some behavior. Thus he guesses that, when an elderly lady tells him that she has a grandson his age, she is "doing what is called chatting, where people say things to each other which aren't questions and answers and aren't connected" (40). Similarly, Christopher knows that "people do a lot of talking without using any words." As his teacher tells him, "[I]f you raise one eyebrow it can mean lots of different things. It can mean 'I want to do sex with you' and it can also mean 'I think that what you just said was very stupid'" (14-15). This nonverbal communication—which requires reconstructing (and, inevitably, often misconstructing) a mental state behind an ambiguous gesture—is one reason that Christopher finds people "confusing."5 Consequently, his murder mystery novel is mostly lacking in attribution of thoughts, feelings, and attitudes to its protagonists (we, the readers, supply those missing mental states, thus making sense of the story). Still, as a novel authored by a child with a compromised Theory of Mind (even if this child is himself a fictional character), The Curious Incident is a much-needed reminder about the complexity of the issues involved in the relationship between autism and storytelling.''

  4: "Effortless"Mind-Reading

  "EFFORTLESS" MIND-READING

  As we discuss mind-reading as an evolved cognitive capacity enabling

  both our interaction with each other and our ability to make sense of fiction, we have to be aware of the definitional differences between the terminology used by cognitive scientists and that used by literary critics. Cognitive psychologists and philosophers of mind investigating our Theory of Mind ask such questions as, What is the evolutionary history of this adaptation, that is, in response to what environmental challenges did it evolve? At what age and in what forms does it begin to manifest itself? What are its neurological foundations? They focus on the ways "in which mind-reading [plays] an essential part in successful communication."1 When cognitive scientists turn to literary (or, as in the case below, cinematic) examples to illustrate our ability for investing fictional characters with a mind of their own and reading that mind, they stress the "effortlessness" with which we do so. As Daniel Dennett observes, "[W]atching a film with a highly original and unstereotyped plot, we see the hero smile at the villain and we all swiftly and effortlessly arrive at the same complex theoretical diagnosis: Aha!' we conclude (but perhaps not consciously), 'He wants her to think he doesn't know she intends to defraud her brother!'"2

  Readers outside the cognitive-science community may find this emphasis on "effortlessness" and "success" unhelpful. Literary critics, in particular, know that the process of attributing thoughts, beliefs, and desires to other people may lead to misiyiterpreting those thoughts, beliefs, and desires. Thus they would rightly resist any notion that we could effortlessly—that is, correctly and unambiguously, nearly telepathically— figure out what the person whose behavior we are trying to explain is thinking. It is important to underscore here that cognitive scientists and lay readers (here, including literary critics) bring very different frames of reference to measuring the relative "success" of mind-reading. For the lay reader, the example of a glaring failure in mind-reading and communication might be a person's interpreting her friend's tears of joy as tears of grief and reacting accordingly. For a cognitive psychologist, a glaring failure in mind-reading would be a person's not even knowing that the water coursing down her friend's face is supposed to be somehow indicative of his feelings at that moment.3 If you find the latter possibility absurd, recall that this is how (many) people with autism experience the world, perhaps because of neurological deficits that prevent their cognitive architecture from narrowing the range of interpretive possibilities and restricting them, in this particular case, to the domain of emotions.

  Consequently, one of the crucial insights offered by cognitive psychologists is that by thus parsing the world and narrowing the scope of relevant interpretations of a given phenomenon, our cognitive adaptations enable us to contemplate an infinitely rich array of interpretations within that scope. As Nancy Easterlin puts it, "[W]ithout the inborn tendency to organize information in specific ways, we would not be able to experience choice in our responses."4 "Constraints," N. Katherine Hayles observes in a different context, "operate constructively by restricting the sphere of possibilities."5 In other words, our Theory of Mind allows us to connect Peter Walsh's trembling to his emotional state (in the absence of any additional information that could account for his body language in a different way), thus usefully constraining our interpretive domain and enabling us to start considering endlessly nuanced choices within that domain. The context of the episode would then constrain our interpretation even further; we could decide, for instance, that it is unlikely that Peter is trembling because of a barely concealed hatred and begin to explore the complicated gamut of his bittersweet feelings. Any additional information that we would bring to bear upon our reading of the passage—biographical, sociohistorical, literary-historical—would alert us to new shades in its meaning and could, in principle, lead us to some startling conjectures about Walsh's state of mind. Note, too, that the description of Walsh's "trembling" may connect to something in my personal experience that will induce me to give significantly more weight to one detail of the text and ignore others, which means that you and I may wind up with wildly different readings of Peter's and Clarissa's emotions "at eleven o'clock on the morning of the day she [is] giving a party."6 None of this can happen, however, before we have first eliminated a whole range of other explanations, such as explanations evoking various physical forces (for instance, a disease) acting upon the body, and have focused instead solely on the mind of the protagonist.

  This elimination of irrelevant interpretations can happen so fast
as to be practically imperceptible. Consider an example from Stanley Fish's essay, "How to Recognize a Poem." To demonstrate that our mental operations are "limited by institutions in which we are already embedded," Fish reports the following classroom experiment:

  4: "Effortless"Mind-Reading

  While I was in the course of vigorously making a point, one of my students, William Newlin by name, was just as vigorously waving his hand. When I asked the other members of the class what it was that [he] was doing, they all answered that he was seeking permission to speak. I then asked them how they knew that. The immediate reply was that it was obvious; what else could he be thought of doing? The meaning of his gesture, in other words, was right there on its surface, available for reading by anyone who had the eyes to see. That meaning, however, would not have been available to someone without any knowledge of what was involved in being a student. Such a person might have thought that Mr. Newlin was pointing to the fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling, or calling our attention to some object that was about to fall ("the sky is falling," "the sky is falling"). And if the someone in question were a child of elementary or middle-school age, Mr. Newlin might well have been seen as seeking permission not to speak but to go to the bathroom, an interpretation or reading that would never have occurred to a student at Johns Hopkins or any other institution of "higher learning."7