but he has no intuition about things, so he needs me to define
the world for him.” Klin, who bears a striking resemblance to
the actor Martin Short, is half Israeli and half Brazilian, and he
speaks with an understandably peculiar accent. He has been
seeing Peter for years, and he speaks of his condition not with
condescension or detachment but matter-of factly, as if
describing a minor character tic. “I talk to him every week, and
the sense that I have in talking to him is that I could do
anything. I could pick my nose. I could take my pants down. I
could do some work here. Even though he is looking at me, I
don’t have the sense of being scrutinized or monitored. He
focuses very much on what I say. The words mean a great deal
to him. But he doesn’t focus at all on the way my words are
contextualized with facial expressions and nonverbal cues.
Everything that goes on inside the mind — that he cannot
observe directly — is a problem for him. Am I his therapist?
Not really. Normal therapy is based on people’s ability to have
insight into their own motivations. But with him, insight
wouldn’t take you very far. So it’s more like problem solving.”
One of the things that Klin wanted to discover, in talking to
Peter, was how someone with his condition makes sense of the
world, so he and his colleagues devised an ingenious