Blink_ The Power of Thinking Without Thinking - Malcolm Gladwell [85]
Klin had Peter put on a hat with a very simple, but powerful, eye-tracking device composed of two tiny cameras. One camera recorded the movement of Peter’s fovea — the centerpiece of his eye. The other camera recorded whatever it was Peter was looking at, and then the two images were superimposed. This meant that on every frame of the movie, Klin could draw a line showing where Peter was looking at that moment. He then had people without autism watch the movie as well, and he compared Peter’s eye movements with theirs. In one scene, for example, Nick (George Segal) is making polite conversation, and he points to the wall of host George’s (Richard Burton’s) study and asks, “Who did the painting?” The way you and I would look at that scene is straightforward: our eyes would follow in the direction that Nick is pointing, alight on the painting, swivel back to George’s eyes to get his response, and then return to Nick’s face, to see how he reacts to the answer. All of that takes place in a fraction of a second, and on Klin’s visual-scanning pictures, the line representing the gaze of the normal viewer forms a clean, straight-edged triangle from Nick to the painting to George and back again to Nick. Peter’s pattern, though, is a little different. He starts somewhere around Nick’s neck. But he doesn’t follow the direction of Nick’s arm, because interpreting a pointing gesture requires, if you think about it, that you instantaneously inhabit the mind of the person doing the pointing. You need to read the mind of the pointer, and, of course, people with autism can’t read minds. “Children respond to pointing gestures by the time they are twelve months old,” Klin said. “This is a man who is forty-two years old and very bright, and he’s not doing that. Those are the kinds of cues that children are learning naturally — and he just doesn’t pick up on them.”
So what does Peter do? He hears the words “painting” and “wall,” so he looks for paintings on the wall. But there are three in the general vicinity. Which one is it? Klin’s visual-scanning pictures show Peter’s gaze moving frantically from one picture to the other. Meanwhile, the conversation has already moved on. The only way Peter could have made sense of that scene is if Nick had been perfectly, verbally explicit — if he had said, “Who did that painting to the left of the man and the dog?” In anything less than a perfectly literal environment, the autistic person is lost.
There’s another critical lesson in that scene. The normal viewers looked at the eyes of George and Nick when they were talking, and they did that because when people talk, we listen to their words and watch their eyes in order to pick up on all those expressive nuances that Ekman has so carefully catalogued. But Peter didn’t look at anyone’s eyes in that scene. At another critical moment in the movie, when, in fact, George and Martha (Elizabeth Taylor) are locked in a passionate embrace, Peter looked not at the eyes of the kissing couple — which is what you or I would do — but at the light switch on the wall behind them. That’s not because Peter objects to people or finds the notion of intimacy repulsive. It’s because if you cannot mind-read — if you can’t put yourself in the mind of someone else — then there’s nothing special to be gained by looking at eyes and faces.
One of Klin’s colleagues at Yale, Robert T. Schultz, once did an experiment with what is called an FMRI (functional magnetic resonance imagery),