experience difficulties with spoken language — which involves the 

 muscles associated with the voice of course — might also find it hard 

 to execute flowing movements with other muscles. It was thus an 

 exciting scientific development when Philip Teitelbaum and his col- 

 leagues (1998) found that autistic children display precisely such 

 difficulties. 



Not all autistic children have diminished intelligence, admittedly, 

 though the great majority of them do have lower-than-normal IQs 

 (Frith, 1989). The infirmity cannot be diagnosed reliably until the 

 end of the second year, because the pediatrician would like to check 

 whether there are difficulties with language. But studies of videos 

 taken of children at the age of three months, well before they were 

 diagnosed with autism, have revealed that there are indeed early 

 signs of difficulties with the linking together of elementary move- 

 ments. If a normal child is lying on its back, and wants to roll over 

 onto its stomach, it soon learns that a twist of the head, followed 

 by a twist of the shoulders, and then by a twist of the hips, leads 

 to a rolling motion requiring a minimum of effort. But yet-to-be- 

 diagnosed autistic infants experience great difficulty in performing 

 such sequences, just as they will later encounter trouble in joining 

 words together to make sentences. 



Another consequence of these ideas is that it makes sense to talk 

 of intelligence only in the conscious animal. An animal not pos- 

 sessing consciousness may be capable of impressively intricate pat- 

 terns of movement, but these are executed automatically, and the 

 repertoire is never expanded during an individual's lifetime. Let us 

 briefly return to honeybees, and note that despite their abilities to 

 gauge direction and distance they are not able to additionally signal 

 flower type to their hive-mates. Given sufficient time, however, bees 

 with that ability might evolve. But their thus-augmented signalling 

 capacity would not indicate acquisition of consciousness; they 

 would still be functioning as unthinking automatons. Martin Ham- 

 mer's (1997) circuit diagram of the honeybee's nervous system 

 shows why this is the case. There are in fact internal feedback loops, 

 which mediate associative reward learning, but there is nothing that 

 even remotely resembles the attention mechanism shown for the 

 mammal in figure 2. 



24 



