[Heartlogic-dev] an autistic person's review of the book Mindblindness

[Joshua N Pritikin]

Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind, Baron-Cohen 1997

September 29, 1998
Reviewer: Hubert Cross (address@hidden) from U.S.A.

There are many books about autism and Asperger's syndrome, but they are
all superficial.  This is the only one that goes to the source of the
problem itself: The brain at the hardware level. 

What our consciousness 'sees' is not reality itself, but the output of
battalions of highly specialized neurone co-processors that interpret
reality in a distorted way engineered by Natural Selection to maximize
our chances of surviving and reproducing. 

We are blind to the existence of these unconscious perception
mechanisms, and we confuse their perception of reality with reality
itself.  This is the reason why autism has been a mystery for so long,
because it is not possible to understand autism without even knowing
that these perception instincts exist. 

Everything about this book is superlative.  Autism is *very* *difficult*
to understand even for us autistics, let alone Neurologically Typicals. 
This guy has the ability to explain autism with concepts that make
things rather easy to visualize.  Concepts so befitting that leave me
wondering how he manages to invent them. 

Let me give one example: As a kid, I didn't see people like objects, but
I didn't quite see them as people either.  They were there, but they
were not very important.  That is as far as I can go explaining how it
was for me.  The only thing I can add is that I am not giving you
anything more than a faint idea of how it really was. 

What does Simon Baron-Cohen do? He introduces the concept of "skinbags."
Bags of skin that move and talk like people but that are not quite
people. 

"Skinbags" is precisely what people were for me.  They moved and talked,
but they had no feelings.  It was not that I believed that they had no
feelings; it was that it never crossed my mind to consider the
possibility. 

The book makes you realize right from the start that nothing really
exists as we imagine it.  Not even color exists.  Color is only an
invention of Natural Selection...  "that allows us to identify and
interact with objects and the world far more richly that we otherwise
could." Bats could very well use colors to "see" ultrasound reflections
the same way we use colors to "see" electromagnetic waves. 

The warmth of a smile and the anger of a stare do not exist either.  You
feel them only because your unconscious perception mechanisms interpret
a smile as "warm" and a stare as "angry" and feed the appropriate
feelings into your consciousness. 

It must be really wonderful to be able to look at a girl and *feel* the
warmth of her smile.  When I look at a girl smiling I feel nothing.  No
warmth, no nothing.  Those perception mechanisms are burned out in us
autistics, or for some reason they do not reach our consciousness, maybe
because of a faulty wire someplace. 

I read almost every book there was in the Library system, and I began to
really understand autism *only* after I read "Mindblindness."

(copied from amazon.com)

-- 
A new cognitive theory of emotion, http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/aleader