Describing the experience of having 'mind-blindness'

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Can you describe what it's like to be mind-blind? To be able to look at someones face forcefully yet not be able to decipher the expressions? I'm asking because I obviously have these issues but I want to see how other "sufferers" describe their experience with this condition. Being afflicted myself kind of means I'm unable to know any better, right? I suppose this topic is open to NTs as well. Would just like to get a discussion going on this topic that I don't think gets talked about enough.

I just don't react to the expressions of people sometimes. Maybe I'll have anxiety or some worry related feelings, but it never adjusts accordingly. I've learned to keep calm and try to understand what other people are thinking by verbally communicating with them. Ask them what their thoughts are, rather than guess what they are trying to say.

My first impressions of people are usually wrong.

Look out your window. See some animals — birds, cats, whatever. Look at what they're doing and try and figure out what's going through their heads and what they will do next. Test your predictions by observing what they actually do next and seeing how well that matches up to what you thought they would do next.

That failure to accurately predict their actions (and note that I'm confidently assuming you will fail): that's mind-blindness.

I used to do this a lot as a kid and along the way discovered two things: (i) How animals think is different to the way people think; and (ii) Most people automatically anthropomorphise, ask themselves "what would I do in those circumstances" and make predictions on that basis; the fact that they are dealing with a non-human creature who thinks differently just doesn't seem to register.

Mind blindness is encountering creatures or people who do not think the way you do, so asking yourself "what would I do in those circumstances" or "why would I react that way" doesn't help — whether the difference is due to neurology or just culture. You have to actually think about it and model how they think.

Last edited by Amaltheia on 18 Nov 2016, 8:32 am, edited 1 time in total.

So I guess one way to test someones theory of mind is by testing how well they can predict the behavior/actions of other people.

I often find that behavior often leads to people being judgmental because they often think they would do this or that and end up judging the other person for not doing it. It's very easy to say what you would do in a situation you have no been in. Easier said than done. But I have seen autistic people do the same too.

The picture sequence game tests this. This supposedly tests the person's TOM and autistic children are supposedly bad at this game according to Simon Baron Cohan and I read it's a test doctor gives to kids while testing them to rule out autism when they do tests to see what their abilities are and what their weaknesses are. This is a game that is also made for little kids mostly around 5 years old you can find in stores. It's even on my son's kindergarten brain quest cards.

Yes. That matches my experience.

Ages ago, years before I was diagnosed, a friend recommend a book, I and Thou by Martin Buber, translated from the German Ich und Du. It's a book of existential philosophy, which suggests people have two ways of relating:
I-It, in which people recognize a self, "I", and treat everything else as an object, an "It", to be used or experienced;
I-Thou, in which people recognize that there are other people with their own drives and desires, a "Thou", who the self can have relationships with.

The interesting thing is that my friend misremembered, and told me that Buber had proposed three types:
I-It, as above;
I-I, in which people realize that other people are like themselves, with feelings and desires;
I-Thou, in which people realize the feelings and desires of other people are not exactly like their own and to have a relationship with them you need to understand how they feel and what they want.

I automatically understood what he meant and it wasn't until I actually read Buber's book (in translation) that I realized that he had interpolated an entire middle section. The thing was, that middle section, the I-I relationship, fit my observations of the world and without it Buber's theory seemed incomplete. It also seemed to be a logical course of development: babies start treating the world as I-It, develop I-I as part of socialization, and only move to I-Thou when they develop a special bond with someone, a best friend or they fall in love.

The thing is, as far as I can tell, most people don't move beyond I-I. This works because most people live in homogeneous groups and assuming everyone has the same feelings, desires, and thinks in the same way generally works. It's close enough. Most people think they have empathy and theory-of-mind when all they actually have is projection.

This leads them to assume that if someone's feelings, desires, or way of thinking aren't like theirs, then there must be something wrong with the that person, not with their mental modeling. Obviously, this applies to autistics, but it also works against homosexuals, foreigners, ethnic minorities, even the opposite sex. Basically, anyone I-I doesn't work with is "the other" and is regarded as, in some way, defective.

So, mind-blindness is the state you're in when I-I fails, and you have not yet managed to develop an I-Thou understanding of someone.

Ok, my five cents worth on autism and mind blindness. For nts, the feedback loop between eye and behaviour is faster than the 500 ms plus it takes us to get eye detection into thought space, come up with an interpretation and decide what to do about it.
Thus, our responses in real time person to person interaction are missing or delayed, we detect that, too late, and our stress levels rise. We can do well at watching on screen and commenting on the meta communication but not so well in the real time stuff which is all many nts pay attention to