Sarah-Jayne Blakemore on The Mind and The Brain

Tell me about Autism: Explaining the Enigma by Uta Frith. 

It’s about autism, which most people have heard of now, but which wasn’t so well known in 1989 when the book was published. Prior to Frith’s work autism was really considered a sort of emotional disorder: a lot of people used to think it was caused by parents not being warm enough (for which, by the way there is absolutely no evidence). But nothing is purely environmental, and nothing is purely genetic – most things are a result of an interaction between the two, and it looks like this is the case for autism. One aspect of the book which revolutionised the way we think about this condition was Frith’s cognitive theories of autism. She was one of the first scientists to propose that autism is characterised by neurocognitive impairments: that is, an impairment in a circuit in the brain which allows us to perform some cognitive process. 

Does she give case studies?

She does give vivid case studies, and she also describes experiments as if you’re actually in the room doing them. I read the book as a teenager and it was one of the inspirations for me to become a cognitive neuroscientist. Uta writes brilliantly about these scientific findings in a way that is easy to understand, even with no expertise in the subject, and she makes quite complicated concepts very comprehensible and fascinating to read about. 

One of the things that inspired me about this book was that it illustrated that you could actually do experiments which look at these aspects of psychology that seem so abstract and unreachable: like our ability to understand other people’s minds. You can actually parse that down to its very basic components, and you can experiment to see whether children with different conditions have problems with different aspects of some high-level cognitive capacity like ‘Theory of Mind’, which she concentrates on. ‘Theory of Mind’ is our ability to attribute mental states like intentions and beliefs and desires to other people. We do it all the time: we constantly read other people’s behaviours and actions in terms of their underlying mental states and emotions. For example, if I grasp a glass of water you don’t have to ask me why; you automatically infer things, like my intention, which is to drink water from the glass, or my belief that there’s drinkable water in the glass. Frith’s idea was that perhaps this cognitive process of theory of mind is impaired in autism, and she published the first paper showing this in 1985. What comes across in the book is her absolute fascination for autism, and the different ways of investigating its causes. Even though the term ‘autism’ was only coined in the mid-1940s, she’s really interested in historical descriptions of children who seem to have had autism, like the 19th-century foundling Kaspar Hauser. One whole chapter in this book is about the lessons from history that can teach us about autism.

Tell me about your next book.

It’s by Chris Frith, Uta Frith’s husband, and it’s about consciousness, and how we are conscious, and how our brains enable us to be conscious, and to have awareness of the world around us. The point he makes is that, in fact, our conscious perception of the world is very different from what the world is actually like. Some parts of the brain process everything in our environment, but we’re not conscious of that; if we were, we would be completely overloaded with information. His main thesis in this book is that our brain creates an impression of a coherent world that makes sense, that we’re in control of. There are some nice examples from neuroscience showing that. For example, the studies by Libet from the 1980s in which he measured electrical waves in the brain to show that it produces something called a ‘readiness potential’ – about half a second before you make a movement, the brain starts preparing the movement. But what’s really interesting is that if you get people to estimate when they had the intention to move, that intention occurs many hundreds of milliseconds after the readiness potential. In other words, what seems to happen – and this has been replicated by many different experiments – is that your brain starts to produce electrical signals which prepare the movement before you feel you have the conscious intention to move. That’s just a very nice example of how our brain is constantly making us do things, but our conscious experience is actually constructed afterwards. The idea is that our brains are just reacting to changes in the environment, and this feeling of free will is completely illusionary. That’s the most extreme argument, but the evidence from neuroscience suggests that that could be the case. Other examples in the book are things like visual illusions, which are all based on the same principle – even if you know it’s an illusion, you still perceive the illusion; your brain is constructing a story. Another example is whenever you move your eyes around, you have what’s called saccadic suppression – a ‘saccade’ is an eye movement. We know that the eye is effectively blind during the movement, but we don’t experience that blindness, because our brain fills in the gaps. 

It makes something like a google cache of the scene in front of us and then draws on it?

That’s quite a nice idea because there is a cache, based on previous experience, which the brain uses to predict what should be there. So the point is that we don’t just react to the world, our brains predict it way ahead of time. The other point about Chris’s idea is, if our construction of the world – our consciousness – goes wrong, then he argues that it can lead to delusions and hallucinations.