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