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Peter’s movie-watching experiment is a perfect example of what happens when mind reading fails. Peter is a highly intelligent man. He has graduate degrees from a prestigious university. His IQ is well above normal, and Klin speaks of him with genuine respect. But because he lacks one very basic ability — the ability to mind-read — he can be presented with that scene in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and come to a conclusion that is socially completely and catastrophically wrong. Peter, understandably, makes this kind of mistake often: he has a condition that makes him permanently mind-blind. But I can’t help but wonder if, under certain circumstances, the rest of us could momentarily think like Peter as well. What if it were possible for autism — for mind-blindness — to be a temporary condition instead of a chronic one? Could that explain why sometimes otherwise normal people come to conclusions that are completely and catastrophically wrong?

5. Arguing with a Dog

In the movies and in detective shows on television, people fire guns all the time. They shoot and shoot and run after people, and sometimes they kill them, and when they do, they stand over the body and smoke a cigarette and then go and have a beer with their partner. To hear Hollywood tell it, shooting a gun is a fairly common and straightforward act. The truth is, though, that it isn’t. Most police officers — well over 90 percent — go their whole career without ever firing at anyone, and those who do describe the experience as so unimaginably stressful that it seems reasonable to ask if firing a gun could be the kind of experience that could cause temporary autism.

Here, for example, are excerpts of interviews that the University of Missouri criminologist David Klinger did with police officers for his fascinating book Into the Kill Zone. The first is with an officer who fired on a man who was threatening to kill his partner, Dan:

He looked up, saw me, and said, “Oh, shit.” Not like “Oh, shit, I’m scared.” But like “Oh, shit, now here’s somebody else I gotta kill” — real aggressive and mean. Instead of continuing to push the gun at Dan’s head, he started to try to bring it around on me. This all happened real fast — in milliseconds — and at the same time, I was bringing my gun up. Dan was still fighting with him, and the only thought that came through my mind was “Oh, dear God, don’t let me hit Dan.” I fired five rounds. My vision changed as soon as I started to shoot. It went from seeing the whole picture to just the suspect’s head. Everything else just disappeared. I didn’t see Dan anymore, didn’t see anything else. All I could see was the suspect’s head.

I saw four of my five rounds hit. The first one hit him on his left eyebrow. It opened up a hole and the guy’s head snapped back and he said, “Ooh,” like, “Ooh, you got me.” He still continued to turn the gun toward me, and I fired my second round. I saw a red dot right below the base of his left eye, and his head kind of turned sideways. I fired another round. It hit on the outside of his left eye, and his eye exploded, just ruptured and came out. My fourth round hit just in front of his left ear. The third round had moved his head even further sideways to me, and when the fourth round hit, I saw a red dot open on the side of his head, then close up. I didn’t see where my last round went. Then I heard the guy fall backwards and hit the ground.

Here’s another:

When he started toward us, it was almost like it was in slow motion and everything went into a tight focus…. When he made his move, my whole body just tensed up. I don’t remember having any feeling from my chest down. Everything was focused forward to watch and react to my target. Talk about an adrenaline rush! Everything tightened up, and all my senses were directed forward at the man running at us with a gun. My vision was focused on his torso and the gun. I couldn’t tell you what his left hand was doing. I have