However, individuals with autism lack this repertoire of social skills.47 They are effectively ‘mindblind’.48 Alison Gopnik captured this notion of mindblindness in her terrifying vision of what it must be like to be at a dinner party if you have autism:
Around me bags of skin are draped over chairs, and stuffed into pieces of cloth, they shift and protrude in unexpected ways . . . Two dark spots near the top of them swivel restlessly back and forth. A hole beneath the spots fills with food and from it comes a stream of noises. Imagine that the noisy skin-bags suddenly moved towards you, and their noises grew loud, and you had no idea why, no way of explaining them or predicting what they would do next.49
No wonder individuals with autism find direct social interaction frightening. If you can’t figure out other people, social encounters must be intensely baffling. They cannot easily infer what others are thinking and generally withdraw into activities that do not involve people. Maybe this is why many individuals with autism often do not like direct eye contact, do not copy, do not mimic, do not yawn, retch, laugh or join in with the rich tapestry of social signals we share as a species.50
Temple Grandin provides remarkable insight into what it’s like to suffer with autism.51 She has a PhD and is one of the world’s authorities on animal husbandry, but she is also a highly intelligent or ‘high-functioning’ individual with autism, able to provide a window into what it is like to be mindblind. Temple was diagnosed with autism from early childhood. She went to progressive schools and eventually college, but always had difficulty interacting with other people. She could not understand or predict their behaviours and so turned her attention towards animals, which seemed less complex. She could get inside the minds of animals better than she could humans, and eventually went on to study animal welfare and developed techniques to soothe and calm cattle before slaughter. Humans, on the other hand, were unpredictable. Temple taught herself to study people – to pay close attention to their routines and behaviours. In this way she was able to predict what they would do in familiar situations so that she could behave appropriately. She described her experience of predicting other people’s behaviours to Oliver Sacks, as being like ‘an anthropologist on Mars’, a phrase which would go on to become the title of one of Sacks’ bestsellers.52
Although there is no definitive neurological test for Temple’s condition, autism must be some form of brain disorder. The incidence of autism is higher in identical compared to non-identical twins, which suggests that there is a genetic component to the disorder.53 Autism is also on average four times more likely in boys compared to girls, which again, strongly implicates a biological basis. To date there is tantalizing evidence based on brain-imaging studies that regions in the front part of the brain – most notably the fronto-insular- (FIC) and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) that are activated by social interaction in normal individuals – operate differently in individuals with autistic spectrum disorder.54 The ACC is like an ‘alarm centre’ that monitors goals and conflicts, including social interactions. If these interactions do not go according to plan, if people start to get the wrong idea out us, we get anxious. These regions are part of the mirror neuron system that activate when we imitate others either voluntarily or have our experiences hijacked by watching others.
So far, the brain-imaging studies of the mirror system in individuals with autism are inconclusive and, according to Christian Keysers, indicate that the system is not broken but may be very delayed in development because such individuals are not attending to the relevant information during normal social encounters.55
Others have targeted specific types of neurons. Neuroscientist John Allman at the California Institute of Technology has proposed that the social deficit in autism may be a lack of a special class of spindle neurons, called Von Economo neurons (VENs), after their discoverer who located them in 1925.56 VENs are cortical neurons with highly connective fibres that are thought to branch out to different brain regions that are activated by social learning. This may explain why VENs have only been found in species that are particularly social, including all the great apes, elephants, whales and dolphins.
Humans have the largest population of VENs found only in the FI and ACC areas – the same regions that may be disrupted in autism. VENs are thought to work by keeping track of social experiences – a strategy that would facilitate a rapid appreciation of similar social situations in the future. They form the neural networks that provide the basis of intuitive social learning when we watch and copy others. VENs may help to create and sculpt the self from copying and reading others.
One intriguing discovery is that the density of VENs in these social regions increases from infancy to reach adult levels somewhere around the fourth birthday in typical children – a time when most child development experts agree that there is noticeable change in social interaction skills and an emerging sense of identity. This may also explain why autistic individuals, who have disrupted VEN regions, have difficulty working out what the rest of us simply know without having to think very much. I recently discussed this with a good friend who is the mother of a high-functioning daughter with autism. Her daughter compensated for her condition by asking those around her to write down a description of who they were and their life stories as a way of understanding them. This was because she was unable spontaneously to integrate information and backgrounds to generate narratives to describe others. Without this capacity to read others and integrate socially, someone with severe autism is going to have a very different sense of self that does not include those around them. I can only speculate as I do not have autism, but I would imagine that individuals with severe autism inhabit a solitary world, very much in isolation from others.
The Agony of Adolescence
Perhaps you remember a party you went to when you were fifteen, and everyone stopped talking and stared at you when you walked into the room. Or maybe there was a time when the teacher made you stand up in class and everyone was looking at you. Do you remember feeling your face flush bright red and your palms sweating? It was so embarrassing. You felt so self-conscious.
Most of us have had some embarrassing event in our lives that at the time was the worst possible thing we could imagine. We felt we could have died and wished the ground would open up and swallow us. Being embarrassed and becoming self-conscious are key components of the looking glass self. If we did not care about what others think, then we would not be embarrassed. Initially young children are so egocentric and the apple of their parents’ eye. It is not clear that others would ever be of concern to them. However, with a developing sense of self, the child increasingly starts to care about what others think, aided by their emerging theory of mind, where they are able take another person’s perspective. This self-conscious awareness can provide the basis for a moral compass. Even our own reflection can make us acutely aware that we are potentially the focus of other people’s attention. For example, in one classic Canadian study of social transgression,57 children on Halloween night were secretly observed after being told to take only one piece of candy from a bowl while the owner went into another room. If there was a mirror placed so that it reflected a child as they approached the bowl, the children became self-conscious and did as they were told. However, in households where there was no mirror, children took more than one candy. There was no mirror to remind them that they could be seen.