Understanding Autism

What, ultimately, makes autistic people different? How do they experience the world? Twenty years ago no one had much of a clue. But a burgeoning body of research now suggests that the core of all autism is a syndrome known as mindblindness. For most of us, mind reading comes as naturally as walking or chewing. We readily deduce what other people know and what they don't, and we understand implicitly that thoughts and feelings are revealed in gestures, facial expressions and tone of voice. An autistic person may sense none of this. In one of the first studies to highlight this issue, researchers quizzed children about a scenario in which a girl named Sally places a marble in a covered basket and leaves the room. While Sally is out, her friend Anne moves the marble from the basket into a nearby covered box. When asked where Sally would later look for her marble, even retarded children knew she would expect to find it where she'd left it. By contrast, most autistic children thought she would look in the box. They couldn't see the world through Sally's eyes.

Autistic people can master Sally-Anne scenarios with practice, but subtler mind-reading tasks still stump them. They fail tests of "second-order belief attribution." (If Sally watches John get a miscue about an object's location, where will she expect him to look for it?) And even the most brilliant Asperger sufferers are easily flummoxed by facial expressions. In one recent study, Cambridge University psycholo-gist Simon Baron-Cohen asked three of them--a physicist, a computer scientist and a mathematician--to match pictures of people's eyes to words like "grateful" or "preoccupied." They were lost. The clear implication is that our brains are wired for certain kinds of social awareness--and that this circuitry can fail even as the rest of the organ thrives.

It's not hard to see how mindblindness would derail a person's social development. If you can't perceive mental states, you can't show empathy, practice deceit or distinguish a joke from a threat--let alone make friends. Sharing becomes pointless when you can't see its effects on people, and conversation loses much of its meaning because you miss the unspoken intentions that hold it together.

Ten-year-old Jace Covert of Sagaponack, N.Y., is always falling into that trap. When an adult friend buys him a cookie, saying it "has your name all over it," he replies earnestly that he can't see it there. Jace is not autistic in the way that Russell Rollens is. Jace spent several years in a mainstream private school and kept up with the curriculum. But his social ineptitude made him a magnet for ridicule. Lacking the tools to deflect it, he resorted to hitting, and the school eased him out. Jace is now thriving in public school with the help of a social-skills program, but his prospects are hard to gauge. "Will my son ever know what it feels like to fall in love?" his mother asks. "What kind of work will be available to him? Those are the questions I ask myself."

Romance is predictably difficult for autistic people, but many do brilliantly in certain lines of work. Only rarely does an autistic savant come along who can memorize a phone book in 10 minutes or measure the exact height of a building by glancing at it. But one autistic person in 10 shows exceptional skill in areas such as art, music, calculation or memory. And because they share a cognitive style known as "weak central coherence," they consistently excel on certain mental tasks. Whereas most of us use context and categories to sort our perceptions, people with autism tend to view the world as an array of discrete particulars. "My concept of ships is linked to every specific one I've ever known," says Temple Grandin, the autistic author and livestock scientist. "There is a Queen Mary and a Titanic, but there is no generic 'ship'."

Sometimes that's just as well. As the British psychologists Uta Frith and Francesca Happe have shown recently, autistic people's blindness to contextual cues helps them resist optical illusions. People with autism also have a strong advantage on "embedded figures" tests, which involve finding a simple shape hidden in a complex design (graphic). And they're masters at telling similar objects apart. With prolonged exposure, anyone starts noticing the uniqueness of things that look identical at a glance; that's why experienced bird watchers are so good at spotting different subspecies of warblers. People with autism don't experience this effect. Where others see forests, they see trees from the start.