Years ago Simon Baron-Cohen wrote a book called Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind.  He could not have imagined that Disney movies might be harnessed to teach autistic children about mental processes in their own minds and in the minds of others.  Wallace Stevens told us that symbolic worlds help us visualize the real, and now it seems that they also provide a portal into minds.

Be sure to watch the video that accompanies the article–it makes the term moving pictures come alive.

When Owen was 3, his comprehension of spoken words collapsed. That’s clear from every test. But now it seems that as he watched each Disney movie again and again, he was collecting and logging sounds and rhythms, multitrack. Speech, of course, has its own subtle musicality; most of us, focusing on the words and their meanings, don’t hear it. But that’s all he heard for years, words as intonation and cadence, their meanings inscrutable. It was like someone memorizing an Akira Kurosawa movie without knowing Japanese. Then it seems he was slowly learning Japanese — or, rather, spoken English — by using the exaggerated facial expressions of the animated characters, the situations they were in, the way they interacted to help define all those mysterious sounds. That’s what we start to assume; after all, that’s the way babies learn to speak. But this is slightly different because of the way he committed these vast swaths of source material, dozens of Disney movies, to memory. These are stored sounds wecan now help him contextualize, with jumping, twirling, sweating, joyous expression, as we just managed with “The Jungle Book.”

But what draws kids like Owen to these movies is something even more elemental. Walt Disney told his early animators that the characters and the scenes should be so vivid and clear that they could be understood with the sound turned off. Inadvertently, this creates a dream portal for those who struggle with auditory processing, especially, in recent decades, when the films can be rewound and replayed many times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/magazine/reaching-my-autistic-son-through-disney.html?ref=magazine

I want to change the title of the NYT article to: “Reaching My Son through Disney”

And the book, Life, Animated, comes out in April.  Creating the semblance of life from celluloid–animating–was always the goal of Disney films, and that theme emerged self-reflexively in Pinocchio.  And now we can discover how film, and art in general, can animate us.  What is fascinating to me is that the parents used the mechanisms of autism to have Owen learn about how the mind works in ways that his own mind could not.