left rear window of the car and fires a single shot, and it hits
Russ in the hand and chest. The cop says that he said, ‘Show me
your hands, show me your hands,’ and he’s claiming now that
Russ was trying to grab his gun. I don’t know if that was the
case. I have to accept the cop’s claim. But it’s beside the point.
It’s still an unjustified shooting because he shouldn’t have been
anywhere near the car, and he shouldn’t have broken the
window.”
Was this officer mind-reading? Not at all. Mind-reading
allows us to adjust and update our perceptions of the intentions
of others. In the scene in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolff where
Martha is flirting with Nick while George lurks jealously in the
background, our eyes bounce from Martha’s eyes to George’s to
Nick’s and around and around again because we don’t know
what George is going to do. We keep gathering information on
him because we want to find out. But Ami Klin’s autistic patient
looked at Nick’s mouth and then at his drink and then at
Martha’s brooch. In his mind he processed human beings and
objects in the same way. He didn’t see individuals, with their
own emotions and thoughts. He saw a collection of inanimate
objects in the room and constructed a system to explain them —
a system that he interpreted with such rigid and impoverished