to their words and watch their eyes in order to pick up on all
those expressive nuances that Ekman has so carefully
catalogued. But Peter didn’t look at anyone’s eyes in that scene.
At another critical moment in the movie, when, in fact, George
and Martha (Elizabeth Taylor) are locked in a passionate
embrace, Peter looked not at the eyes of the kissing couple —
which is what you or I would do — but at the light switch on
the wall behind them. That’s not because Peter objects to
people or finds the notion of intimacy repulsive. It’s because if
you cannot mind-read — if you can’t put yourself in the mind of
someone else — then there’s nothing special to be gained by
looking at eyes and faces.
One of Klin’s colleagues at Yale, Robert T. Schultz, once did
an experiment with what is called an FMRI (functional magnetic
resonance imagery), a highly sophisticated brain scanner that
shows where the blood is flowing in the brain at any given time
— and hence, which part of the brain is in use. Schultz put
people in the FMRI machine and had them perform a very
simple task in which they were given either pairs of faces or
pairs of objects (such as chairs or hammers) and they had to
press a button indicating whether the pairs were the same or
different. Normal people, when they were looking at the faces,