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By Root 583 0

a highly sophisticated brain scanner that shows where the blood is flowing in the brain at any given time — and hence, which part of the brain is in use. Schultz put people in the FMRI machine and had them perform a very simple task in which they were given either pairs of faces or pairs of objects (such as chairs or hammers) and they had to press a button indicating whether the pairs were the same or different. Normal people, when they were looking at the faces, used a part of their brain called the fusiform gyrus, which is an incredibly sophisticated piece of brain software that allows us to distinguish among the literally thousands of faces that we know. (Picture in your mind the face of Marilyn Monroe. Ready? You just used your fusiform gyrus.) When the normal participants looked at the chair, however, they used a completely different and less powerful part of the brain — the inferior temporal gyrus — which is normally reserved for objects. (The difference in the sophistication of those two regions explains why you can recognize Sally from the eighth grade forty years later but have trouble picking out your bag on the airport luggage carousel.) When Schultz repeated the experiment with autistic people, however, he found that they used their object-recognition area for both the chairs and the faces. In other words, on the most basic neurological level, for someone with autism, a face is just another object. Here is one of the earliest descriptions of an autistic patient in the medical literature: “He never looked up at people’s faces. When he had any dealings with persons at all, he treated them, or rather parts of them, as if they were objects. He would use a hand to lead him. He would, in playing, butt his head against his mother as at other times he did against a pillow. He allowed his boarding mother’s hand to dress him, paying not the slightest attention to her.”

So, when Peter looked at the scene of Martha and George kissing, their two faces did not automatically command his attention. What he saw were three objects — a man, a woman, and a light switch. And what did he prefer? As it happens, the light switch. “I know for [Peter] that light switches have been important in his life,” says Klin. “He sees a light switch, and he gravitates toward it. It’s like if you were a Matisse connoisseur, and you look at a lot of pictures, and then you’d go, ahh, there is the Matisse. So he goes, there is the light switch. He’s seeking meaning, organization. He doesn’t like confusion. All of us gravitate toward things that mean something to us, and for most of us, that’s people. But if people don’t anchor meaning for you, then you seek something that does.”

Perhaps the most poignant scene Klin studied comes at a point in the movie when Martha is sitting next to Nick, flirting outrageously, even putting a hand on his thigh. In the background, his back slightly turned to them, lurks an increasingly angry and jealous George. As the scene unfolds, the normal viewer’s eyes move in an almost perfect triangle from Martha’s eyes to Nick’s eyes to George’s eyes and then back to Martha’s, monitoring the emotional states of all three as the temperature in the room rises. But Peter? He starts at Nick’s mouth, and then his eyes drop to the drink in Nick’s hand, and then his gaze wanders to a brooch on Martha’s sweater. He never looks at George at all, so the entire emotional meaning of the scene is lost on him.

“There’s a scene where George is about to lose his temper,” says Warren Jones, who worked with Klin on the experiment. “He goes to the closet and pulls a gun down from the shelf, and points it directly at Martha and pulls the trigger. And when he does, an umbrella pops out the front of the barrel. But we have no idea until it comes out that it’s a ruse — so there is this genuine moment of fear. And one of the most telltale things is that the classic autistic individual will laugh out loud and find it to be this moment of real physical comedy. They’ve missed the emotional basis for the act. They read only the superficial aspect that