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

332 J HOW THE MIND WORKSfavored term) and early, rigid toilet training. He wrote, "It is unlikely thatJoey's calamity could befall a child in any time and culture but our own."According to Bettelheim, postwar parents had such an easy time providingtheir children with creature comforts that they took no pleasure in it,and the children did not develop a feeling of worth from having theirbasic needs satisfied. Bettelheim claimed to have cured Joey, at first byletting him use a wastebasket instead of the toilet. (He allowed that thetherapy "entailed some hardship for his counselors.")Today we know that autism occurs in every country and social class,lasts a lifetime (though sometimes with improvement), and cannot beblamed on mothers. It almost certainly has neurological and geneticcauses, though they have not been pinpointed. Baron-Cohen, Frith, andLeslie suggest that autistic children are mind-blind: their module forattributing minds to others is damaged. Autistic children almost neverpretend, can't explain the difference between an apple and a memory ofan apple, don't distinguish between someone's looking into a box andsomeone's touching it, know where a cartoon face is looking but do notguess that it wants what it is looking at, and fail the Smarties (falsebelief)task. Remarkably, they pass a test that is logically the same as thefalse-belief task but not about minds. The experimenter lifts RubberDucky out of the bathtub and puts it on the bed, takes a Polaroid snapshot,and then puts it back in the bathtub. Normal three-year-oldsbelieve that the photo will somehow show the duck in the tub. Autisticchildren know it does not.Mind-blindness is not caused by real blindness, nor by mental retardationsuch as Down's syndrome. It is a vivid reminder that the contentsof the world are not just there for the knowing but have to be graspedwith suitable mental machinery. In a sense, autistic children are right:the universe is nothing but matter in motion. My "normal" mental equipmentleaves me chronically dumbfounded at the fact that a microdot anda spoonful of semen can bring about a site of thinking and feeling andthat a blood clot or a metal slug can end it. It gives me the delusion thatLondon and chairs and vegetables are on the inventory of the world'sobjects. Even the objects themselves are a kind of delusion. BuckminsterFuller once wrote: "Everything you've learned ... as 'obvious' becomesless and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example,there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of asolid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. Thereare no straight lines."