Autism and Mind-blindness: He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore. The silent conversation-a passing grin, a sudden look of recognition, a lurking question about anthers motivation-comes so naturally to us that most of the time were not even aware that we are locked into such a complex exchange. the internal duet comes naturally because it relies on parts of the brain that specializes in precisely this kind of social interaction. Neorscientists refer to this phenomenon as mindreading-not in the ESP sense, but rather in the more prosaic, but no less impressive, sense of building an educated guess about what someone else is thinking. Mind reading is literally part of our nature. This selective pressure is most likely the strongest determinate factor for our highly acute consciousness. We are some of the most social species on the planet, thus, we had to develop increased specialization moduals for detecting cheaters from genuine share providers. there will always be cheaters in society who live off others by ways of deceit and defrauding. It makes for an easy living , compared with having to pull youre work load to contribute to the community. Also mindreading was important in relationships to assure you were caring for youre child and not someone elses. This would require valuable expenditure of resources for our ancestors. However, midreading is not taught, most of the processes involved are located in the unconscious. You have to be able to pick up cues of facial muscle movements extremely fast, which our conscious part is too slow in doing. Most people can usually determine a fake smile from a genuine smile, without ever having been taught this ability, it is an instinct. In fact the next time a beaming waiter truly wants you to have a nice day, check out the outer edges of his eyebrows, if they dont dip slightly when he smiles, hes faking it. This ability also is the key ingredient into social exchanges, anticipating what they other is thinking and thus acting upon that. but people differ in degree levels of mindreading. some people are deft mindreaders, picking up subtle intonational shifts and adjusting their response with imperceptible ease. Others are always second guessing themselves or interrogating their conversational partners. Some are simply mindblind, shut off entirely from other peoples internal monologues. I have always had an interest in autism and their unique abilities in photographic memory and astonishing mathematical abilities and their ease with mechanical systems, including computers can be extraordinary. I had always believed that if we have a certain skill that we excel in there is a cost of expense in lacking ability with another skill. This is a natural trade off. Youre brain has many different processes all competing for executive control of decision making and only one winner can come out. While autistic people can usually learn and communicate using language, there is something missing in their exchanges with other people. they seem emotionally remote, disconnected. Autistic s are mindreading impaired, which those of us who perform this ability everyday without notice, they have to go to school and learn to read facial expressions by memory. Learning to intuit another persons mood is at least as challenging for them as learning to read is for the rest of us. Most experts and physicians consider autism a disorder, while I have always disagreed. Darwins own “pangenesis” model provided a mechanism for generating ample variability on which selection could act. It involved, however, the inheritance of characters acquired during an organisms life, which Darwin himself knew could not explain some evolutionary situations. Simon Baron-Cohen believes that the symptoms of autism exist on a continuum: while some people clearly suffer from extreme cases, millions suffer only from minor cases of mindblindness.Basically this is not a disorder at all ( Because autism is ten times more likely to develop in boys than girls, Baron-Cohen has argued that the disorder should be considered simply an extreme version of the male brains tendencies. rather than a disconnected aberration.) The reason for this is most likely due to the corpus calosum which is the only communication structure between the right and left side of the brain. Females corpus colosum is twice as large than males. Here is where my point lies, we all know people who are bright and intellectual, but socially inept. Physicists, mathematicians, and scientists are mostly populated with borderline autistics.Even if youre a particularly astute mindreader, you probably have youre own autistic moments in passing, when youre conducting a conversation on autopilot , lost in youre own internal monologue. ( I have this problem badly at times, some people take it for rudeness, but it is beyond my control. There is no malice or intent behind it.) Furthermore, if you spend enough time reading literature , you cant help dividing up your friends and colleagues into talented mindreaders and the minddyslexics. you start evaluating your own prowess as you engage with other people. Mindreading becomes part of your vocabulary for evaluating yourself and others. If autism exists on a continuum, then it is possible to locate yourself on that continuum. You can take a simple test online called the Autism Spectrum Quotient that Baron-Cohen had created-you answer fifty questions about yourself, and a simple program spits out a number between 1 and 32, the higher the number the, the closer you are to autism. ( The medium result is 16.4.) In conclusion, this medium score informs us that we all are on the autism spectrum, thus, autism is an adaptation, which I believe is related to technology and epigenetics. I also think we will start seeing more variability in population sectrum scores. But to talk about it as a disease is absurd. Read my book reaction on the book Thinking in pictures by Temple Grandin, in collaboration with Oliver Sacks. She is an architect, psychiatrist, and speaker. She taught herself by many years of memory practice to able to speak with providing the most valuable mechanism for communication, body language-which is a form of mind reading in reverse. I will continue this essay with the topic in mirror neurons, related to mindreading. Now I going to take the test and see where it lie, although my score may be skewed since I have knowledge about autism and their qualities and attributes.
Posted on: Thu, 30 Jan 2014 03:55:55 +0000
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