Joe

by Michael Blastland

  We often ran into blackspots of household congestion like this, too often for them to be the result of momentary indecision. It was something he’d do frequently and so, in a spirit of mischievous curiosity, I’d walk right up to him, the two of us standing two inches apart for half a minute while Joe loitered, waiting listlessly for whatever might happen next, mooching, his body a swaying curve of boredom, tummy like a spinnaker, biting on a thumbnail.

  Sometimes he seizes the moment for one of his sudden, enveloping bear hugs, and the cheese sandwich has to take its chances somewhere in the middle. I suppose my movement towards him had appeared random and might take me anywhere, might stop at any moment, as in some cases it had to, and so for him to move aside would be a little like trying to avoid snowflakes in a blizzard. I must assume that in his eyes I was just such a swirling snowflake. In order to understand that he was in my path, he would have had to guess where it led and deduced that we were about to collide. To do that he would have needed to make assumptions about my intentions, but as far as he was concerned I had no more intention than the weather.

  Which brings out the contrast with the rest of us. For we are so habitually inclined to attribute intention, and act accordingly – not least because it helps anticipate other people’s movements – that we often talk of the weather as if it actually knows what it wants: ‘The sun is trying to poke through the clouds.’ A figure of speech, of course, but an indicative one. The sun isn’t ‘trying’ to do anything, we just find it convenient to talk about it that way.

  Indeed, child psychologists report that we are over eager to attribute mental states. If you show a normal young child two shapes moving about on a computer screen which behave like independent, agitated snowflakes, the children don’t like it. Random, independent movement when there seems to be the potential for a relationship disappoints them. If one shape appears to be following the same path as the other, however, the children are happier, and interpret what they see in terms of human motivation: ‘Look, it’s chasing!’ They seem to think it’s to be expected when even inanimate objects appear to be influenced by each other and thus to express an intention towards one another. This is a powerful, instinctive mode of thought, and yet so familiar to us that we perhaps underestimate the achievement.

  ‘The ability to do psychology,’ writes Nicholas Humphrey, ‘however much it may nowadays be an ability possessed by every ordinary man and woman, is by no means an ordinary ability. Let no one pretend that natural psychology or psychology under any other title is anything but an extraordinarily difficult thing to do … it represents the most peculiar and sophisticated development in the evolution of the human mind.’

  Simon Baron-Cohen spends several pages of his book Mindblindness simply describing everyday examples of natural psychology, to try to wake us up to its ubiquity. It’s a hard thought experiment, he says, to imagine life without it: ‘When someone points out all this mind-reading to you,’ he writes, ‘it hits you with some force. Recall the apocryphal man who was shocked to discover he had been speaking in prose all his life. We mind-read all the time, effortlessly, automatically, and mostly unconsciously. That is, we are not even aware we are doing it – until we stop to examine the words and concepts that we are using.’

  It is such a habitual, casual habit of mind that we are sublimely unaware of the complexity of what we attempt every day. Seeing me make a sandwich, you might easily assume that I felt hungry, simple as that. Except that beneath this simplicity is a skill humans possess to a unique degree, and upon which depend many sophisticated social arrangements, much of the love, understanding, cooperation (and competition) which make civilisation possible.

  Daniel Dennett offers a familiar case: ‘Every time we venture out on the highway, for example, we stake our lives on the reliability of our general expectations about the perceptual beliefs, normal desires and decision proclivities of other motorists …’

  When I was a young journalist on a local daily paper, an untidy, haunted-looking man came into the office and I took the call from a grateful receptionist to come through and see him.

  ‘I’ve got a story that’ll blow the lid off local politics,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, yes?’ I said, as he drew on a cigarette. ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘I hope you can handle something this big …’

  ‘We’ll try.’

  ‘OK … Social services are trying to kill me …’

  The police kept picking him up, he said, and telling him he was paranoid. ‘You’d be paranoid if someone was trying to kill you,’ he added with disconcerting logic.

  The murderous methods of social services staff were cruel and devious, he went on. Through hypnosis, they were tempting him to drive into the oncoming traffic on the other side of the road.

  Trite though it is to say that only someone suicidal or not in their right mind would deliberately steer a car into oncoming traffic, it could not be said to my informant. When we drive, we assume most people in the other lane are not paranoid schizophrenic, or hypnotised, and we drive in the confidence that they are highly unlikely to veer into our path. We assume this, if we give it much thought, because we think they think as we do, and that driving on the wrong side of the road would be a foolish thing to do if you wanted to stay alive. This is a statement of the blindingly obvious, but only, I submit, because we’ve grown blasé about the psychological presumption on which it rests. At traffic lights, junctions, roundabouts, we assume other drivers will abide by the rules because we have a collective self-interest in doing so. It only seems at all remarkable when we become aware that those with mind-blindness would not be able to make such straightforward calculations. And then the very fact that it is obvious for the rest of us to be able to presume to know what others are thinking becomes amazing.

  An odd consequence of Joe’s inability to see that my mind has contents, contents which are limited in scope, emotionally constrained, driven by my own purposes, is that I can’t say to him ‘I don’t know.’ To know and not to know are states of mind. If, as he assumes, I have no mind, he can’t understand that there may be constraints on what’s in it. If he asks for something, he seems to assume I will be able to deliver it. If he wants Mummy to arrive, now, he looks to me as if I can conjure her appearance round the corner there and then. If he wants to go swimming with her tomorrow, he expects me to tell him that he may.

  ‘Peep, en ets (sleep, then swimming).’

  ‘I don’t know, Joe.’

  ‘Peep, ets.’

  ‘I don’t know, Joe, you’ll have to ask Mummy.’

  ‘Ets. Ets. Ets, Dee, ets!’ Until I phone up to find out.

  Now and then I’ll endeavour to resign myself to the notion that I am more machine-like to Joe than human, though it’s an uncomfortable truth. When he wants something from me, I must suppose that I am nature’s universal vending machine, the great button to all desire, which if pressed frequently enough will provide. He credits me with omniscience and omnipotence, which is flattering, but somewhat demanding. Lacking, to his mind, any mind of my own, I guess that I function as an automatic portal to the world with no gatekeeper, no consciousness in operation, a machine with no ghost imagined or needed.

  Recent research suggests that the rest of us second guess other people’s thoughts by watching what they do, subconsciously imagining ourselves performing the same task, and then noting how we feel. Narender Ramani and colleagues at Oxford University found that when we watch other people’s actions the motor system of our brain lights up in a kind of mental dry run, allowing us to share the physical sense of what they’re going through (and hence what they might feel about it) without actually going through it ourselves. These are areas of the brain found to be abnormal in people with autism. Other research has also suggested the existence of so-called mirror cells that replicate a sense in our own minds of what we observe in others.

  If it’s true that those with mind-blindness like Joe would not be able to imagine the commonsense v
alues and motivations of the drivers of other cars, or predict their actions by performing a mental dry run of their own, why don’t they assume that all driver behaviour will be random, a snowstorm of vehicles; why don’t they expect a sudden swerve from the far lane into their own at any time? As we blunder down the M4, why isn’t Joe in a state of terror at the slabs of HGV hurtling in the opposite direction? The answer is probably that he doesn’t expect disaster because so far it has never happened. His judgement is based not on human understanding but on past performance or, in other words, a sense of ritual or routine. Cars do what cars do, though not for any particular reason. This is the critical point: cars are only their reputation, without present purpose: no one is late, no one has relatives to visit, jobs to go to, places to see; rather, they hurtle around as large lumps of red, blue and white, just as such lumps have always hurtled around in Joe’s experience. Yes they have people in them, he knows that much, but the people, being machine-like too, follow the rules of all similar machines. Joe never expected a car to hit him – until one did – and he had no idea that being hit by one would hurt – until it did – and now he is afraid of them. As the advertisements for investments are required to say, past performance is no guide to the future. Any student of human affairs knows as much. Joe still seems to expect otherwise.

  Thus we find ourselves with an ingrained tool of perception – mind-reading – apparently at odds with the philosophical orthodoxy of Wittgenstein and the materialists, but with remarkable explanatory power. Joe, more respectful of that orthodoxy, less inclined to the perceptual fallacies, is in a state of perpetual bewilderment.

  Our mind-reading faculty helps make the world a little less unpredictable, and also helps us learn at prodigious speed – about others as we learn about ourselves and about their views and attitudes to the world around us, views about what’s dangerous being but one example. I’ll mention just one more. It occurred when Joe, aged three or four, was seated on a tiny chair at a tiny table while a psychologist perched on an equally small chair opposite. Slowly, deliberately, the psychologist produced a clear plastic cylindrical tub with a lid in which there were three holes: round, square and triangular. Parents everywhere will know them. He removed the lid (a mistake), emptied halfa-dozen shaped wooden blocks onto the table and replaced the lid. Next, the obvious test: taking one of the shapes between finger and thumb with the deliberation of a magician, fingers splayed, a dainty touch and a raised eyebrow, he showed us clearly how to push it neatly through the appropriate hole. It clattered into the tub. Presto, he smiled, and pushed the remaining shapes towards Joe.

  Joe pulled the whole tub closer, slipped off the lid, which he tossed onto the floor, and began plopping shapes straight in. Less stage-craft, admittedly, and, oh, all right, less precision too, but my, what efficiency!

  Only, no, sorry, the psychologist was not testing for that.

  ‘Joe! Joe!’ he interrupted through the plonking of blocks. ‘Let me show you again.’

  Something in the rules of the test forbade spoken instruction. Joe had to watch, learn and repeat. He watched as the man poured out the pieces, which Joe liked, watched as the man demonstrated his magic again, and then repeated exactly what he’d done the first time, flipping off the lid and chucking in the first of the shapes.

  ‘No, Joe,’ said the man, taking away the toy.

  Joe, however, didn’t care for ‘no’. He thought ‘yes’, the pouring out bit was most interesting and he wanted it again. He thought it quite insistently, in fact, and I have to say I agreed, though not perhaps with quite Joe’s vehemence, as the two of them became locked in a tussle for control of the tub. I smiled inwardly (memo to myself: conquer this impulse to sly amusement at those caught in Joe’s turbulence), impressed by Joe’s directness: stuff the prissy malarky with the holes, let’s do the noisy, jumbly bit. Joe, meanwhile, was being failed.

  His difficulty with the task makes sense to me with hindsight as a partial expression of mind-blindness. He might have been capable of understanding that certain shapes could be passed though certain corresponding holes, I can’t recall, but I suspect he hadn’t understood that this was what was wanted of him and so did something else, whatever else took his fancy in fact. In order to complete a task, we must have some sense of what the task is and we define that, often as not, by what we think the maker had in mind. How often when we confront a game or puzzle do we say: ‘So, what are you supposed to do?’ What did the designer of this thing intend to be the object of the game? To Joe, other people’s prior intentions are out of bounds.

  The bitter implication for Joe of these stories seems to be this: that he is alone in a sense none of us can quite comprehend. Unable to reach out with empathy to others and unable to understand the degrees to which we can and cannot reach him, he lives by trying to impose a grossly imperfect regularity on life, by insisting on routine and familiarity, and by raging with frustration – or subsiding in bafflement – at the mystery of those failed expectations.

  The word autism derives from the Greek autos, or self. Uta Frith tells us in her now standard account of autism, Explaining the Enigma, that the term was first used in psychiatry by Eugen Bleuler at the turn of the nineteenth century in a study of schizophrenia. He described, she says, ‘a narrowing of relationships to people and to the outside world, a narrowing so extreme that it seemed to exclude everything except the person’s own self.’ There is another phrase, ‘autistic aloneness’, coined by Leo Kanner, who in 1943 published the first account of autism and described the isolation caused by these fierce limits on social capability. That the rest of us are not so alone is perhaps because we are able to believe we can touch the minds of others, share thoughts and emotions, recognise fellow travellers. When we do feel most alone, it is often because we feel most misunderstood, when it is as if there is no correspondence, no echo. In trying to imagine what it is to be mind-blind, to be unable to form a view about the mental state of others, I feel a rush of claustrophobia, a solitariness that fills me with dread.

  When I was a small child I indulged a fear – or was it a dream? – that everyone else was a robot and only I alive. As in The Truman Show, the Hollywood film of a character whose whole life – adopted as he is by a TV mogul – takes place in a purposefully constructed film set of utopian suburbia, they say (dystopian we think), for the benefit of a prime-time audience, the point of my imagined uniqueness was to see how a creature, strange and miraculous as I, lived and behaved, and so hidden cameras that I could never detect spied on my every movement.

  Excepting the titanic vanity of my fantasy, is this Joe’s world too? Is he, in his own mind, the point of it all, with all his internal reflections, thoughts, motives just about all the thoughts and reflections there are? If so, though he would never stop to reflect on that fact, he would be the only boy in the world. And the rest of us? The rest of us … just are. Relatively empty of emotional content, we move, we function, we cause him difficulty, force him to do strange things, facilitate his desires, or not, come and go and make strange noises.

  I have to acknowledge that, agonise as I do whether or not Joe has very much capacity for empathy, many people who know him are firmly convinced that he has, and that I am too doubting. His mother says she can give dozens of examples, but perhaps none better than when, after Joe had been a long time under general anaesthetic with the doctors struggling to bring him round, they asked her into the recovery room and she whispered into his ear: ‘Joe, it’s Mummy.’ He opened his eyes and stretched out his arms for her to hug him. She doesn’t believe that she is a machine to him, excepting those occasions when there’s a whiff of video and obsession outweighs empathy.

  It was once believed that all children, not just those with autism, lacked the ability to ‘de-centre,’ as it is known among educationalists, to picture the world from some point of view different from their own. Children as old as six or seven were thought to be so egocentric that they couldn’t imagine what objects looked like fro
m another angle. Jean Piaget, whose powerful influence cemented this view, showed children a model of a range of three mountains of different colours, one with snow on top, one with a house and one with a red cross. A doll was then placed at some position away from the child and the child was asked to select the doll’s view from a range of pictures. Children find this task hard even up to the age of eight or nine. Piaget concluded that they were incapable of imagining the world from another perspective. But he was mistaken, his test was flawed.

  More recent tests by other researchers have presented children with a model of two walls intersecting like a cross. The children are asked where they should hide within the model in order that someone else in another position – a playmate who is trying to find them, say – won’t be able to see them. They are able to work out perfectly easily which areas of the model the playmate has sight of from any given position, and in which areas they can safely hide. It is impossible to reconcile this experiment with the notion that children are incapable of imagining what others see.

  In fact, according to the developmental psychologist Margaret Donaldson, children may fail the Piaget tests not because they lack the ability to de-centre but because they do it too readily. Here’s an example from her beautifully argued essay, Children’s Minds:

  Take two sticks of equal length and show the children that, when lined up, the sticks correspond at each end … Piaget then showed that if you say ‘watch this’ and push the top stick slightly to the right, then ask children about the length of the sticks, they will suggest that the one just moved is now longer.

  Piaget’s conclusion was that children fail to appreciate that an object – the stick – will conserve its length and other properties through time because they are incapable of reasoning from a de-centred perspective. In fact, as Donaldson goes on to argue, it is far more likely that they are watching what the adult does – pushing one stick to one side – and assuming that the question is related to the adult’s actions. ‘Ah, she moved that one, now she’s asking me about the same one, she must intend the question to relate to the change she’s just made.’ In other words, the children are placing greater emphasis on what they take to be adult intentions than on the words of the question; they are attempting to de-centre, to mind-read. It is Piaget who failed to de-centre because he didn’t imagine what children would make of his question. According to Donaldson, Piaget was the victim of his own precise but unnatural logic. Our more unschooled instinct to mind-read, to de-centre, to mentalise, call it what you will, is the tool of choice when it comes to understanding others.