From an early age, it was clear that John Elder Robison had been wired with extra fibers for appreciating music. He could easily hear the difference between one kind of Fender bass and another. He could recognize which of 100 speakers in a sound system was groaning in distress. He could take any musical gizmo and, as Nigel Tufnel might say, make it go to 11. (His talent for creating fire-breathing guitars earned him a gig with Kiss as a young man.)
But until eight years ago, Mr. Robison, who wrote the 2007 memoir “Look Me in the Eye,” a touchstone in the literature of Asperger’s syndrome, had never experienced the most obvious aspect of music that neurotypical people do: its simple emotional power.
That all changed, Mr. Robison explains in “Switched On: A Memoir of Brain Change and Emotional Awakening,” when he participated in a pioneering Asperger’s study at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston in 2008. Using transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, doctors hoped to activate neurological pathways in his brain that would deepen his emotional intelligence.
Driving home after his first session, Mr. Robison cranked up a song he’d heard countless times before. Before he knew it, tears were streaming down his face.
“Switched On” is an eye-opening book with a radical message, but because Mr. Robison is who he is (logical, direct), he addresses even the most provocative questions unprovocatively. The transformations he undergoes throughout the book are astonishing — as foreign and overwhelming as if he woke up one morning with the visual range of a bee or the auditory prowess of a bat.
Most of the effects fade over time, as the doctors had warned Mr. Robison they would. (The doctors, truth be told, had zero expectation of any lasting effects.) But to this day, Mr. Robison moves more comfortably among strangers. He relates better to the customers at his car repair shop.
He has even learned to look people in the eye.
A “Flowers for Algernon” story, right? With an improved ending?
Yes. And no. This latest memoir by Mr. Robison — he’s also written “Raising Cubby” and “Be Different” — is far more bittersweet and existentially challenging than that.
As nonverbal cues became increasingly legible to him, Mr. Robison also realizes that a longtime friend has been subtly mocking him for years. Mr. Robison’s marriage to his second wife, who suffers from debilitating depression, starts to decay. “When Martha had her down days, I was no longer able to jump out of bed and go to work,” he writes. “As soon as I got up I’d feel panic over her sadness.”
Most profoundly, he discovers that neurotypical humans are not, as a rule, happy.
“I had created a fantasy that seeing into people would be sweetness and love,” he writes. “Now I knew the truth: most of the emotions floating around in space are not positive. When you look into a crowd with real emotional insight you’ll see lust, greed, rage, anxiety, and what for a lack of a better word I call ‘tension’ — with only the occasional flash of love or happiness.”
Arthur Schopenhauer couldn’t have said it much better himself.
“Switched On” is subversive in more ways than one. In this age of heightened sensitivity to neurodiversity, one of the most uncomfortable notions you can raise about Asperger’s is that it can cruelly obscure the most basic elements of personality. The very idea is offensive and wounding to many people, because it frames a difference as a deficit; to wistfully suggest that a person with Asperger’s might be someone else without Asperger’s is to denature them completely, to wish their core identities into oblivion.
“Asperger’s is not a disease,” Mr. Robison wrote in “Look Me in the Eye.” “It’s a way of being. There is no cure, nor is there a need for one.”
In “Switched On,” Mr. Robison, 58, retains his Asperger’s pride. Part of him even fears he’ll lose his special gifts, on the (beguiling, I thought) theory that “perhaps the area that recognizes emotions in people was recognizing traits of machinery for me.”
But he is also torn. He did not come of age when “neurodiversity” was part of our vocabulary of difference. He did not come of age when “Asperger’s” was part of our vocabulary at all. He received his autism diagnosis at 40, and he has many memories of being bullied, losing jobs and mishandling social situations because of his inability to read others. His family is also a frightful caldron of mental illness, which further colored his self-image until he received his diagnosis. (For further details, see “Running With Scissors,” written by his brother, Augusten Burroughs.)
Mr. Robison still believes autism is not a disease. “But I also believed in being the best I could be,” he writes, “particularly by addressing the social blindness that had caused me the most pain throughout my life.”
But if the effects of Asperger’s can be mitigated, what consequences will that have? And what does it mean for the future of the neurodiversity movement?
It’s an extremely delicate question. TMS is still not an federally approved therapy for autism. Mr. Robison is cautious to note that he responded more powerfully to it than the other participants in his research group, and that the young adults were the least responsive. (He seems especially wary of using it on young people, wishing to see their minds flower into whatever they are meant to be.) He frets, too, that its ephemeral effects may strike some people as “a cruel joke.”
Mr. Robison has led such an unusual and varied life — from fixing guitars to working on games for Milton Bradley to writing books to running a car repair shop — that his brain may have been an optimal one for rewiring.
And he is still a man with Asperger’s.
While reading, you start to realize, a bit queasily, how shrewd it was for the team at Beth Israel to seek out Mr. Robison for its study — as soon as Mr. Robison began blogging about it, the researchers’ office was inundated with calls from prospective volunteers. The book can read like a love letter to his doctors at times, if not outright advocacy for their research.
Mr. Robison’s experience may be sui generis. Or it may augur something much larger. With any luck, therapies in the future will allow people like Mr. Robison to both preserve their strengths and make the world an easier place for them to negotiate. “Different, not less,” as the autism activist Temple Grandin likes to say — but with better amps to improve the sound.
Switched On
A Memoir of Brain Change and Emotional Awakening
By John Elder Robison
296 pages. Spiegel & Grau. $28.
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