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Take a look at the illustration. According to a philosopher critic of the imprinted brain theory, in seeing something like this, “we do not first observe the contractions of the facial muscles and subsequently develop the prediction, derived from a ToM [theory of mind], what the invisible ‘mind states’ of the boy and the chimpanzee are.”
Nevertheless, a lot of autistic people would do exactly this: and thanks to their mentalistic difficulties with interpreting facial expression and linking it to a mental state they could easily see the chimp as threatening and the boy as frightened. Indeed, even normal people can make disastrous mistakes in such situations. In the case of the ex-owner of a pet chimpanzee reported by Jeremy Taylor who lost his testicles, one foot, all his fingers, an eye, and parts of his nose, cheek, lips, and buttocks in a ferocious attack the animal launched on him when he made eye-contact with it on bringing it a birthday cake, the misreading of the chimp’s state of mind was pretty catastrophic!
Later this critic repeats the point when he claims that “When someone is crying or laughing we do not first observe mechanical movements and, after we have learnt to use a ToM, make predictions about an unobservable inner life.” But this is exactly how autistics are taught mentalistic skills: look at the expression, compare it to the models you have been taught, predict the mental state indicated.
Furthermore, there is a wealth of evidence that the two steps in the process—observing faces and predicting mental states—are distinct. A comparison of children diagnosed with Williams syndrome (WS) with those diagnosed with autism found that the WS children spent 58% of the time when viewing a person's face looking at the eyes by comparison with autistic children, who only spent 17% of the time monitoring the eyes. Gaze-monitoring is critical in social interaction, and WS children have been described as “hyper-social” and over-gifted with "cocktail party skills" by contrast to autistic ones, who have symptomatic social deficits.
Indeed, the fact that WS is a syndrome caused by a specific genetic deficit implies that observing faces is not only distinct, but under the control of one or a small number of genes (some of which are known to be imprinted or subject to copy number variations in ways which fit the predictions of the imprinted brain theory). However, as I point out in my book, paranoid schizophrenics are not only abnormally sensitive to direction of gaze, but given to over-interpretation of it in delusions of being watched or spied on—in other words, not only making delusional "predictions about unobservable inner life" but pathologically predicting observers of their outer life who simply don't exist!
Admittedly, "theory of mind"—which is what this critic is taking issue with—is not a theory in a consciously thought-about sense for most people, and this is one major reason why I prefer to call it mentalism, as I also explain at length in my book. The fact that we interpret mental states automatically, unthinkingly, and implicitly comes to the same thing though: mentalism is our innate, evolved ability to interpret other people’s expressions and behavior in mental terms. To this extent, it’s just like speaking a language: you can attend classes to learn one, but you can also learn implicitly and without thinking about it—and all of us do where our mother tongue is concerned. Nevertheless, this author comes to the astonishing conclusion that “the idea that autism is caused by a disturbed development of ToM is mistaken.”
But you simply cannot dismiss the mountain of experimental evidence for the reality of theory of mind/mentalism with philosophical assertions. Albinism revealed the secret of color throughout nature simply because albinos have no coloration, and as we have just seen, another deficit syndrome—Williams—highlights the role that genes play in components of mentalism like gaze-monitoring. Indeed, you could say that autism has revealed the secrets of the mind as a whole simply because autistics lack such aspects of mentalism and as a result have exposed the critical factors just as albinism did in the case of color.
Furthermore, these factors can be studied quantitatively and objectively in laboratory experiments, and even directly observed in brain scanners. And although this critic dismisses the imprinted brain theory as “conceptually incoherent crypto-Cartesian dualism,” the fact remains that only this theory can explain why the medial pre-frontal cortex (which is known to be active in mentalizing) is hyper-active in schizophrenics performing theory of mind tasks. Indeed, this is probably why frontal lobotomy/leucotomy worked (and won a Nobel prize for its inventor): it simply disconnected the over-active prefrontal cortex with a resulting reduction in hyper-mentalizing, which according to the imprinted brain theory, is the fundamental factor in psychosis.
Unfortunately though, a tendency to hyper-mentalize is also intrinsic to philosophy (for example in taking conceptual coherence to extremes reminiscent of paranoia, as in Marxism or Thomism: both all-inclusive systems which claimed complete and irrefutable truth and in the former case at least, numbered its victims in tens of millions). Perhaps this explains this critic’s inability to accept that theory of mind/mentalism is a reality widely replicated by many different scientific investigations and—thanks to autism—a fundamental insight into the mind which is set to transform not just psychiatry, psychotherapy, and cognitive neuroscience, but philosophy too. Indeed, I've already made a start with the free-will/determinism issue, as readers of my earlier post will have seen.
