only because you grasped some aspects of what was going on in these
different people's minds. This was made possible by specialized mech-
anisms that constantly produce representations of what is going on
inside people's heads, in terms of perceptions, intentions, beliefs, etc.
That this requires subtle and specialized machinery is made obvi-
ous, indeed spectacularly so, by the fact that a part of this machinery is
impaired in some people. They can compute the trajectories of solid
objects and their causal connections, predict where things will fall,
identify different persons, etc., but the simplest psychological
processes escape them. Indeed, the story of the thief and the police
officer is largely inspired by similar anecdotes used by neuropsycholo- [103]
gist Chris Frith and his colleagues to test autistic patients. Children
and adults with this condition have great difficulty making sense of
such anecdotes. Why the man would give the police officer the jewels
and why she would be surprised are events that they register but can-
not easily explain. Also, Frith showed that a specific pattern of brain
activation occurs when normal subjects listen to such a story. This
activation is typical of what happens when they have to represent how
other people represented a certain scene. But the autistic have a rather
different pattern of activation, which would indicate that their "theory
of mind" mechanism is either not functioning or functioning in a very
different way.^5
This interpretation of autism as a failure to represent other people's
representations was originally proposed by three developmental psy-
chologists, Alan Leslie, Uta Frith and Simon Baron-Cohen. Autistic
children do not seem to engage in social interaction that is typical in
normal children of their age. They develop strange, repetitive behav-
iors, can become obsessed with details of particular objects and
develop strange skills. Some of their development can be otherwise
normal, as some have high IQs and many can talk. Yet they do not
understand other people and often treat them like inert physical
objects. Their special impairment is made obvious in simple tasks such
as the "false-belief test" about puppets on a stage. Puppet 1 puts a
marble in box A, then goes offstage. Puppet 2 arrives on the scene,
finds the marble in box A, puts it in box B and goes offstage. Now
puppet 1 comes back. The question is: Where will he look if he wants
his marble? Children older than four years (and even Down's syn-
drome children of a comparable mental age) generally answer "in box
A" and sometimes comment "in box A, because that where he thinksit
is." Note that this apparently simple task is in fact quite complicated.
THEKIND OF MINDITTAKES