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If it is strong enough to affect the human physiology then it can be detected regardless how short lived it is. If your neighbor honks the car 3 times at 3 in the morning you will still hear it even though it is only for a few seconds. If you are watching a real-time football match on LTE and drives through a tunnel with no signal, there will still be a interruption even if the tunnel is very short.

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What if it's focused/targeted at a specific window? Would a detector on the roof detect it?

Depends on how tight the beam is and how high gain on the receiving antenna. For a point of reference: radio transmitter => light source, focused beam => light focused with a lens, antenna gain => strength of lens. If you have any questions, just visualize the system (or draw it out) as a series of light sources and light sensors. RF and light are both radiation and follow the Maxwell equations. (Optics are sometimes considered to have additional properties mostly due to limitations in our current understanding of certain RF spectrums, see terahertz bandgap but by and large they follow the same rules).

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