It requires that you hold two descriptions of the same scene in your
mind: there is the actual location of the marble (in B) and the location
of the marble as represented by puppet 1 (that's in A). These two
descriptions are incompatible. One of them is false and is the one that
will direct the puppet's behavior. Autistic children react like three-
year-olds. They expect puppet A to look for his marble in box B,
because that is where it actually is. They do not seem to grasp that the
marble in actuality could be in B and yet be represented by someone
as being in A. Ever since these experiments were conducted in the
1970s many other experiments have shown that the autistic syndrome
[104] occurs as the outcome of an intuitive psychology deficit. For instance,
normal five-year-olds, but not autistic children, assume that peering
into a box will give them more information about what is inside than
just touching its lid. Normal infants at the age of about ten months
start pointing declaratively—that is, just to attract other people's
attention to some object; they then check that people are indeed look-
ing at the object of interest. Infants who do not do that often turn out
a few years later to display the typical symptoms of autism.^6
Simon Baron-Cohen called autism a form of "mind-blindness,"
which is both felicitous—autistic people are indeed impervious to
something we think we "see," namely other people's mental states—
and perhaps misleading. As Baron-Cohen himself showed, our intu-
itive psychology is a bundle of different systems with different func-
tions and neural implementations. One of these examines what other
people's eyes look like and infers what they are looking at. Another
one distinguishes things that move in an animate fashion from inert
objects that move only when they are pushed or pulled. A third one
computes the extent to which other agents perceive what we perceive,
and in what way their perception is different. But autistic children
seem impaired in only one special subcapacity: the representation of
other people's representations. They are not blind to all mind-stuff
but only to a most crucial part of it.^7
Representations of other people's actions and mental states may be
even more complicated than this description suggests. For instance,
studies of neural activation in normal subjects have shown that when
we see someone making particular gestures, we generally imagine mak-
ing the same gestures ourselves. Again, this is something we are gener-
ally not aware of. Studies show that the brain areas that are activated
when we see people's gestures, overlap with those activated when we
actually act in a similar manner. In other words, there is some part of
RELIGION EXPLAINED