Dear Prof. Hood, Great idea. Sometimes consolidating the illusion helps people cope and feel better, but the next stage might be as you discuss. Sandor Grau's Ambivalence Based Psychotherapy follows/enhances a similar path as you recount [as presented in "A Practioner's Guide to What Works in Modern Psychotherapy].

Incredible

How is the "square" he shows an illusion? Objects like squares don't exist "out there in ther reality" independent of human mind anyway. Mind just attaches in a particular pattern into the unorganized "reality" and that attachment is an object. The patterns of attachment are instrumental to our biological goals (from evolution) or whatever you happen to believe in. The square "illusion" is no more or less real than the proper square.

that sally-anne test video at 37:00 and following reveals something utterly different to what it is said to reveal - a complex understanding and determination for justice, not a lack of theory of mind. the child *ACTS*... knowing sally will not know where the marble is, she steps in as problem-solver and presents it to sally "there you go, sally!" this is *NOT* evidence of a lack of theory of mind at all (other videos on this topic sometimes do show - possibly - lack of ToM but this one diesn't) but actually appears to show not just an awareness of sally's thinking (cognitive empathy) - my marble is in the basket - but an understanding that the experience of being deceived, feeling loss, is unpleasant, i.e. emotional empathy. she is also aware of her agency, her ability to remedy this, prevent the distress sally will face, and prevent it before it happens. this is a pretty extraordinary complexity of awareness and reasoning. what is missing from this clip is the following section where an older child is put through this process, as a demonstration of the development of ToM... but actually (and you can see this by searching online for the full video) the older child enters into a sort of contract, a mutual agreement, with the experimenter. there is a complicity, an awareness not of what sally is thinking at all, but of what the social relationship is between the child himself and the experimenter. this is the development of an awareness of social hierarchy, and of the acceptability of deception endorsed by the authority figure. at one point there is an exchange of glances, that serves to confirm the complicity and the *permission* handed to the child to part-take in the deception - the ethics are shaped by this permission. as such this video is a fabulous insight into human psychology and its early development... not in terms of development of ToM, but in the early development of emotional empathy, and how social structure quickly undermines that by providing permission to subvert ethics. I would suggest that this is in a way an elaboration of the very mimicing/mirroring technique discueed earlier by Bruce. each time I've highlighted this over the last 5 or so years the common response is efforts to strenuously deny my read, but nobody can show in the video where or why I'm incorrect in this read. I've been quite aggressively attacked at times for this, even. the response is as fascinating as the video itself, as my read tends to get understood as saying that the power hierarchy that is the basis of our society is learned around 4 years of age, and that it suppresses the impulse to cooperation, implying that our societies are manipulative, unethical to the core, and that those ethics can be and are cast aside when the self-interest advantage of mirroring is on offer... I will co-operate with your request to deceive because this will generate a stronger sense I am part of your in-group and thus linked to the authority you represent. partly, I think that is actually true, but what of the younger child shown here? there's a rule-breaking in play in her case also. she failes to follow instruction, and steps in to help sally. there was no permission from an authority figure to do so, and that exchange of glances seen with the older child doesn't occur either... but there's a way to read her actions as equally in self-interest, but in different ways. why does this girl change the situation and prevent sally's distress? nobody asks this. all that gets seen is failure to show ToM... because we keep being told that's what the video shows. in a way we are doing what the boy in the later part of the video does - aligning with a point of view regardless of the evidence in front of us. so what's the girl doing? I would suggest she is acting in self-interest by seeing herself in an in-group relationship with sally. but sally is just a toy. how can that work? well, perhaps because she knows this scenario, of being deceived and the hurt that follows. or perhaps because some people mature their emotional development faster than others, while others develop that social awareness faster. perhaps. it is significant, though that Bruce goes on to cite this ToM nonsense (it is nonsense) as absent in autistics who 'never develop this sense'... except they do. the whole ToM argument regarding autistics was always problematic, has many times shown to be total nonsense based on clearly definable biases, and with the excpetion of a few determined supporters, has been pretty much left by the wayside as any sort of valid picture of the autistic mind. It is interesting to note that this notion had been elaborated and promoted by a Cambridge scholar, and is here repeated decades later - and decades after it was shown to be nonsense - also in Cambridge. There's some exceptional insights into early childhood on offer in this short video (both the excerpt used here and the fuller version) and it is something of a tragedy that this has remained largely invisible to researchers. the sally anne test has great potential, not for identifying the presence of basic ToM but of other aspects of the self, as shown in this case.