Blink

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