It is a good term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind My wife and daughter are on the spectrum and it h

It is a good term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind My wife and daughter are on the spectrum and it has been an interesting (and often difficult) experience to spend a lot of time around people whose intuitive theory of mind isn't as strong as a typical person's. It made me realize how much we take for granted the dedicated brain regions we have for social cognition. For most of us, it's completely effortless to know "Oh, I told her ___ so she'll want ___." We do that processing as automatically as we recognize faces or climb stairs with a cup of coffee in our hands. But for people on the spectrum, it's like the wetware is reduced, like having bad balance or no sense of direction. They can do the same task deliberately by focusing all of their attention on it, using the general-purpose calculator part of their brain to do a job most of us rely on dedicated hardware for. Doing that takes a lot out of them. Imagine if every conversation felt like a calculus test. When they don't do that, it manifests itself in all sorts of behaviorally strange ways. There's the classic stuff like unusual affect and eye contact. But the one I notice a lot now that I'm attuned to it is pronouns. They will often use a pronoun to refer to a noun they've never introduced, because they are already thinking of that noun and didn't notice that they never mentioned it explicitly. Brains are weird.