Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

Good Ideas 331knowledge, put themselves in the newcomer's shoes, and say, "Smarties."Three-year-olds have more trouble keeping their knowledge out of thepicture; they insist that the newcomer will expect to find pencils in thecandy box. But it's unlikely that they lack the very idea of other minds;when the wrong answer is made less alluring or the children are inducedto think a bit harder, they attribute false beliefs to others, too. Theresults come out the same in every country in which children have beentested.Thinking of other minds comes so naturally that it almost seems likepart and parcel of intelligence itself. Can we even imagine what it wouldbe like not to think of other people as having minds? The psychologistAlison Gopnik imagines it would be like this:At the top of my field of vision is a blurry edge of nose, in front are wavinghands . . . Around me bags of skin are draped over chairs, and stuffedinto pieces of cloth; they shift and protrude in unexpected ways. . . . Twodark spots near the top of them swivel restlessly back and forth. A holebeneath the spots fills with food and from it comes a stream of noises.. . . The noisy skin-bags suddenly [move] toward you, and their noises[grow] loud, and you [have] no idea why. . . .Baron-Cohen, Alan Leslie, and Uta Frith have proposed that there reallyare people who think like this. They are the people we call autistic.Autism affects about one in a thousand children. They are said to"draw into a shell and live within themselves." When taken into a room,they disregard people and go for the objects. When someone offers ahand, they play with it like a mechanical toy. Cuddly dolls and stuffedanimals hold little interest. They pay little attention to their parents anddon't respond when called. In public, they touch, smell, and walk overpeople as if they were furniture. They don't play with other children. Butthe intellectual and perceptual abilities of some autistic children are legendary(especially after Dustin Hoffman's performance in Rain Man).Some of them learn multiplication tables, put together jigsaw puzzles(even upside down), disassemble and reassemble appliances, read distantlicense plates, or instantly calculate the day of the week on whichany given date in the past or future falls.Like many psychology undergraduates, I learned about autism from afamous Scientific American reprint, "Joey: A Mechanical Boy," by the psychoanalystBruno Bettelheim. Bettelheim explained that Joey's autismwas caused by emotionally distant parents ("icebox mother" became the