Mind-blindness

Mind-blindness is a cognitive disorder where an individual is unable to attribute mental states to others. As a result of this kind of social and empathetic cognitive deficit, the individual is incapable in putting himself "into someone else's shoes" and cannot conceptualize, understand or predict knowledge, thoughts and beliefs, emotions, feelings and desires, behaviour, actions and intentions of another person. Such an ability to develop a mental awareness of what is in the other minds is known as the Theory of Mind (ToM), and the "Mind-blindness" Theory asserts that children who delay in this development often are or will be autistic and Asperger's syndrome (AS) patients. In addition to autism and AS, ToM and mind-blindness research has recently been extended to other disorders such as schizophrenia, dementia, bipolar disorders, antisocial personality disorders as well as normal aging.

Mind-blindness is a state where the ToM has not been developed or lost in an individual. The ToM is implicit in neurotypical individuals. This enables one to make automatic interpretations of events taking into consideration the mental states of people, their desires and beliefs. Simon Baron-Cohen described an individual lacking a ToM would perceive the world in a confusing and frightening manner; leading to a withdrawal from society.

An alternative approach to the social impairment observed in mind-blindness focuses on emotion of subjects. Based on empirical evidence, Uta Frith concluded that the processing of complex cognitive emotions is impaired compared to simpler emotions. In addition, attachment does not seem to fail in the early childhood of autistics. This suggests that emotion is a component of social cognition that is separable from mentalizing.

Lombardo and Cohen updated the theory and pinpointed some additional factors that play an important part in ToM of autistic patients. They highlighted that the middle cingulated cortex which is outside the traditional mentalizing region was underactive in autistic patients, while the rest of ToM activation was normal. This region was important in deciding how much to invest in a person and hence required mentalization.

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