I ought to have known better than to have lunch with a psychologist.
“Take you, for example,” he said. “You are definitely autistic.”
“What!?”
“I rest my case,” he shot back. “Q.E.D.”
His ironic point seemed to be that if I didn’t instantly grasp his point — which clearly I didn’t — then, at some level, I was exhibiting autistic tendencies.
Simon Baron-Cohen, for example, in his book “Mindblindness,” argues that the whole raison d’être of consciousness is to be able to read other people’s minds; autism, in this context, can be defined as an inability to “get” other people, hence “mindblind.”