On that topic, are you still interested in writing to Morton Ann #Gernsbacher about the topic of popularized #mindblindness theory delaying diagnosis by convincing people they couldn't possibly be autistic? I actually wrote a draft email some time back, but I didn't get a response to my DM asking about appropriate email accounts to use, etc.
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Items tagged with: mindblindness
The sick thing is that according to Steve #Silberman in #NeuroTribes, even though #RainMan was a serious distortion of the reality of autism, the prior public understanding of autism had been so grotesquely warped that #RainMan was actually a huge step forward from that. Similarly, I'm sure #TempleGrandin's book "Thinking in Pictures" was also a huge step forward — but because I think more in words than in pictures, that book was one of two major obstacles that delayed my self-diagnosis by decades. (The other was the #mindblindness theory.) I'm told that she has now released a new edition of the book, in which she classifies autistics into three types, only one of which thinks in pictures.
Yes. And until I read this blog post, and one or two others like it, I thought he just needed to be reasoned with. Despite having originated the #mindblindness nonsense, he has at least now spoken out against some of the cruder forms of it. But after reading these blog posts, it appears we're dealing with someone who will just say whatever serves his purposes at the moment, without regard to truth or consistency. And if so, THAT calls for a different approach. He needs to be exposed and discredited.
@hosford42 Fascinating! I'm now wondering how many of us there are, with similar stories. I'm thinking the two of us should jointly contact Morton Ann #Gernsbacher. She's written eloquently about the harm #mindblindness theory can cause, but IIRC she focuses entirely on its contribution to bigotry against autistics, and overlooks its contribution to missed diagnoses — which IMO may involve even greater harm to us. She might want to include this aspect of the problem in her future research. She's a professor and the head of a research group.
@punishmenthurts @emily_rugburn @Uair This is part of what I mean by saying that the #mindblindness / "theory of mind deficit" idea almost has it backwards. While #allistics do have a theory of mind, they typically let it atrophy from neglect, habitually using the automatic, intuitive mechanisms built into their #EnvironmentalYoke instead of doing any explicit theorizing. That approach may be great if all you're interested in is jockeying for position in a social hierarchy. It's not so great if you'd like to understand what kind of world your actions are building.
An observation about "theory of mind deficits" in #autism: what's missing in our relationship to other minds is not a THEORY. It's a set of "click, whirr" automatic shortcut mechanisms for dealing with the social world that neurotypicals use INSTEAD OF the explicit, conscious reasoning that reliance on an actual theory would entail. It's what I've termed the #EnvironmentalYoke. It's what advertising and propaganda exploit, in ways that influence expert Robert #Cialdini has built a career exposing. It's likely a large part of the reason why we're less susceptible to advertising than neurotypicals are.
It would be closer to the truth to say that NEUROTYPICALS lack a theory of mind. They actually do have one, but they mostly don't need to use it; their instinctive reactions, driven by their environmental yoke, mostly render actual theorizing unnecessary. It is WE who must reason explicitly about other minds if we are to understand them at all.
The pernicious and misleading "theory of mind deficit" / #mindblindness terminology is frequently misunderstood by the public to mean that #autistics cannot even understand the CONCEPT of other minds. From that misunderstanding, it's only a short step to regarding autistics as subhuman. The #mindblindness theory is thus a major contributor to bigotry against autistics, as Morton Ann #Gernsbacher has so eloquently pointed out.
I also have personal experience with another problem that #mindblindness theory can cause. I suspected that I might be autistic "or something like that" for DECADES before I finally reached the conclusion that I was, in late 2024. A major reason why it took so long: I, too, misunderstood #mindblindness theory to mean that autistics literally couldn't understand the concept of other minds; I knew that wasn't true of me; I accepted the #mindblindness theory as the best explanation of autism that psychological science could currently offer; and I concluded that I couldn't be autistic!
It's time to bury the "theory of mind deficit" / #mindblindness idea with a stake through its heart. We should avoid using this terminology except to criticize it — and demand that psychology professionals do the same. They can and should find more accurate terminology to express their findings about our neurodivergent relationship with other minds.
As a health professional (inpatient pharmacist), I'm on Medscape's mailing list. I'm seeing a recent Medscape Psychiatry article link collection entitled "Autism: The Facts — Experts Dispute Report". My reaction is similar to yours: they're jumping WAY too fast past the problem of identifying what autism IS, to identifying alleged causes of a phenomenon they've barely begun to characterize.
And that's not even the worst of it. They confidently pontificate on diagnosis of the phenomenon they still can't characterize. The titles of two of the linked articles:
"Diagnosing autism, ADHD in 15 minutes" [with an AI!]
"Autism surge: where a broadened diagnosis went astray"
I've characterized #mindblindness theory as the phlogiston of autism research, and equating autism with "thinking in pictures" as overly narrow. But at least these approaches do have the merit of being theories of what autism is and how it works. They attempt to go beyond a mere syndrome — a collection of empirically correlated but otherwise unlinked "symptoms" — to a causal picture of a few basic mechanistic differences in mental processing, from which everything else flows. And they try to get the basic psychology and neurology straight BEFORE jumping off to clinical diagnosis or genetic analysis. The theory of #monotropism (of which my own theory of #kaleidotropy is just a variant or refinement) is similarly structured, but IMO is far superior to #mindblindness or "thinking in pictures" in its fit with the lived experience of autism. This is what we need more of.