"Theory of mind"

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What are we talking about when we say "theory of mind"?

"Theory of mind" is the ability of imagine the internal states/thoughts/emotions of another people and practically use it. Another way of dealing with another people is just learning the rules of social interactions and most typical reactions without understanding.

Theory of mind is like a little voice inside your head that tells you what others are thinking and feeling and what they want from you and it can also tell you how they will react to anything you do.

Of course there's no way your brain can really know what others are thinking so theory of mind is actually a delusion, what it does is assume that the other person is normal and guesstimate from that. Now what happens if the other person is not normal? They react in different ways to what your theory of mind had predicted and that confuses you and that's how you start thinking "this guy is weird". There are many non-normal people that can cause this shortcircuit of the theory of mind, not just aspies. Also aspies aren't the only types that lack theory of mind.

As far as i know you can't really connect with another person unless you are both normal and you theories of mind are operating correctly. Aspies have no idea what this level of connection feels like.

Theory of mind is the ability to understand other people's perspectives when their perspectives are different from yours (decent explanation here, if you don't object to Wikipedia). I don't think it's true that everyone on the spectrum lacks theory of mind. I can understand other people's perspectives. It's figuring out how to communicate with people that's the problem.

Wouldn't it be more correct to say that theory of mind is the ability to imagine what other "normal" people / "other people who are like yourself" think?

I have thought this over for a while because I don't think this highly celebrated theory of mind is very much used always by NTs. Often they will assume that you think exactly like they do, and they say that you should be able to guess what they mean... hmm...

Does this sound familiar?

PS. I don't mean to say that all NTs are quite the same, or to be angry at them - I just wonder a bit - do they really mean that by "theory of mind" and "empathy" that the official explanation says? Or do I misunderstand?

The classic test for theory of mind is the Smarties test. (Smarties are like M&Ms for those Americans who have not yet discovered them. In Canada they come in a box. In the UK I think they come in a tube.)

Take the Smarties out and eat or otherwise hide them. Fill the box/tube with pencils or something else that makes a good shaking noise when you shake the box. Find yourself a kid age 4-5 (the age that kids usually start to get this test). Ask the kid what's in the box. 99.9% of kids in Canada will say "Smarties!" The one kid I tried this on didn't know what they were because he wasn't allowed to eat candy. His mother was watching. I was so embarrassed I wanted to crawl under the table. Never mind.

Once you have established that you both know what is supposed to be in the box, open it and show the kid what is really in the box. Pencils. Then, ask the kid what person #3, who is not in the room and has not seen inside the box, will think is in the box. A child with theory of mind will say "Smarties" (snicker snicker snicker). A child who does not yet have theory of mind will say "pencils" (or whatever is actually in the box). Before you have theory of mind, you are unable to hold both the image of what is actually there and what looks like it ought to be there at the same time. With theory of mind you can do this. So a three-year-old will think: box->Smarties or box->pencils, but not both at the same time (they can't juggle all that at once yet). A five-year-old can picture both situations at the same time and so can get that he can think one thing and another person can think another thing about the same situation at the same time (he can picture both possibilities at once). Autobiographical memory (the situation or act of perceiving previous actions/situations) appears at the same age as theory of mind, and is probably a form of theory of mind.

Hope that helps rather than confuses.

That test actually is a false-belief test, not an overall theory-of-mind test.

(When I talk about "people" in this paragraph I actually mean mostly children.) A certain percentage of autistic people perform badly on the most common forms of it. Thing is, non-autistic people, with no particular social deficiencies, but with language deficits, also perform badly, just as badly as autistic people. So do deaf people.

However, if you give a language-free version of the test, suddenly autistic people and deaf people perform the same as non-autistic hearing people, or even slightly better than non-autistic hearing people.

So in autistic people that test doesn't test "theory of mind" as much as it tests the understanding of the most complex grammatical structures in the English language. (This is something I noticed myself before they proved it -- because when an autistic person passes the first version, they move on to versions that are more linguistically complex until the autistic person trips up, and then suddenly say that shows an autistic person has a theory-of-mind deficiency.)

When language is controlled for, autistic people and other people with language trouble overall do fine on the test.

So, the test doesn't actually show lack of theory of mind in autistic people, rather the opposite.

As far as I have been able to tell, theory of mind (as usually discussed) is not about the ability to understand what's going on from a truly very different perspective. Otherwise, non-autistic people wouldn't overall have so much trouble taking the perspectives of autistic people.