“What do you want?” I asked. Neat and trim, wearing dark sunglasses, she did not look very dangerous. Consequently, she merited a pleasant greeting, which I believed I had just delivered. I also thought she was kind of cute, but you don’t say things like that to strangers.
“I knew he was the owner,” she’d tell friends later. “No employee would have ever been that rude. He’d have been fired.”
Later on, when we had gotten to know each other, she revealed that she was somewhat taken aback when she met me. I asked what had been wrong with my introduction. I had, after all, greeted a thousand visitors before her in exactly the same way. Was there something better I could have said?
“Yes,” she told me. “What about ‘Hi, I’m John Robison. How can I help you?’”
Her suggestion left me momentarily speechless. Asking how I might be of help to her rather than demanding to know what she wanted had never occurred to me. What a great idea! I’ve tried to do it her way ever since, whenever strangers appear in the yard, with generally beneficial effect. I’ve now learned that good things can emerge from the most unprepossessing of motor vehicles, so I try to act accordingly.
After that first encounter, we ran into each other off and on through the years, more so after she bought a secondhand Audi from our company. I thought it was a rugged car but she came to see it differently—as constantly in need of service. Still, I always liked her and was happy to see her when she came around to get it repaired. We generally got along, but as she would tell me later, “You always acted kind of different.” Then I saw her by chance after the TMS experiments, and she remarked on the striking change.
I’d walked into my local Panera and was standing in line when I spied Maripat in a booth on the other side of the low wall. “Hi there,” I said, and then I noticed she was sitting with a group of people. I looked at them and said, “I’m John Robison, from Robison Service on Page Boulevard.” Each of the people introduced himself or herself to me, and I spoke to them for a moment before returning to my place in the line. The whole encounter had seemed perfectly natural and smooth-flowing to me, but in retrospect I realized how remarkable the exchange was. I’d never had the ability to engage strangers so easily before. I could always say hi and turn away, but actually shaking hands with strangers and engaging them in conversation was totally out of character for me, at least before TMS.
As Maripat told me later, “I thought to myself, What happened to John? That was a perfectly ordinary thing to say, but he’s never said ordinary things before.” I was a little embarrassed to hear that, but it was one more piece of confirmation that TMS was making me more successful at engaging strangers.
The only snag in the Panera experience was that when I returned to the line after greeting Maripat and her friends, a few patrons thought I had given up my place, and I had to set them straight. Luckily she didn’t see that part.
I got my sandwich and iced tea and retreated to a quiet corner table where I was out of sight and could eat and read in peace. The TMS sure had changed me, I thought, but now I didn’t know what to do next. Should I have asked if I could join them? Or should I have gotten my order to go and left? If I’d learned manners as a kid, I might have had some idea, and I wished I’d paid more attention to my grandmother. I read my Emily Post and tried to catch up.
The next time Michael Wilcox and I had lunch, I told him what had happened. “I haven’t seen any changes like that in myself,” he told me. But when I looked at him, his directness and connection to me was obviously better than it had been before TMS. When I pointed that out to him he said, “Yes, I do feel sharper. You’re right about that.”
Then he said, “You know, I never knew you felt so broken before we started this study. Maybe you went into it looking for a lot more than I did, and you found it. I just approached it as research without expecting anything to happen.”
I realized he was correct. “You were able to graduate from school and get a good job,” I told him. “I could never do that. No matter how successfully self-employed I was, I always felt inferior because I didn’t fit in with regular society.” Once again, I was struck by the difference between how I saw myself and how others saw me.
“That’s why you write about it,” he told me.
But it wasn’t just my emotional awareness that was transformed over the summer following the TMS study—my overall state of being improved markedly. I stopped getting anxious and worried about every little thing, as I had all my life. I could even let go of the depression I absorbed from Martha, once I was out of the house and in a different environment. Somehow, the TMS had broken my mind out of its tendency to get stuck in circles of negative thought. When something bad happened before TMS I would often perseverate on it and be upset and worried for days. Afterward, I still perseverated on bad news, but I generally broke out of it by the next day, and that was a big improvement for me.
The range of benefits I attributed to TMS seemed awfully broad, and I wondered if some of that was just wishful thinking. Alvaro wasn’t sure, but he did observe that getting happier sometimes seemed to change everything in a depressed patient’s life, and what I described was no greater an effect than what some of them reported.
The durability of the changes in my brain shows something else remarkable. It shows the power of the mind to seize on something good and reinforce it on its own. The TMS showed my mind a better way, and my mind built upon that with a process of rewiring that continues to this day.
* Name changed to protect his identity.
Nature’s Engineers
“SOMETIMES I THINK of autistic people like you as nature’s engineers,” Alvaro told me. “Thanks to the differences in your brain, you were able to observe things and teach yourself engineering skills without the benefit of a university. You’re able to look very deeply into machines and see points of strength and weakness. You don’t necessarily know what to do in social situations by instinct, but you can teach yourself by reasoning and practice and it’s worked. That’s obvious looking at your life. Whatever your social problems may be, that would have been a very powerful gift in a primitive society.”
I liked those words: “powerful gift.” The notion that autistic people ruled the world in ancient times was appealing, though of course I had no evidence that it was true.
Whenever I was in Boston, I stopped by the lab, and if Alvaro was in we’d sit and talk. One topic that we seemed to return to was whether autism was an evolutionary adaptation or something gone wrong, and Alvaro’s opinion on the matter took me by surprise: he told me he wasn’t sure. Some of us seem to have unique gifts mixed in with our disabilities, but many of us seem mostly disabled by autism.
I was beginning to see the same thing in my travels. People like me seem disabled because we often can’t do schoolwork in the structured manner that today’s institutions require. But had I been born in an earlier time, with less regimentation in my schooling and more focus on hands-on learning, I might well have been an academic star instead of a dropout.
I realize that may not be true for everyone on the autism spectrum. My gifts are mostly of a technical nature, but there are others with autism who think they have no special gifts at all and believe that their autism is purely crippling. I don’t mean to paint an unrealistically positive picture of what is to most people a disability, but at the same time I’m reminded of how little people thought of my prospects as a teenager and of how marginal my son seemed to the psychologists who tested him at age six. In addition there’s the fact that my writing, storytelling, and disability advocacy only emerged in my sixth decade of life!
When I think of that, I realize we cannot know the future, or the potential, of anyone. Maybe I am intellectually gifted, and some people surely are intellectually challenged. There should be a place for all of us in this world, but modern society makes it pretty hard for those of us who are different, no matter how smart the tests say we are.
No one had ever called me a natural e
ngineer before, but it was true. Details in machinery and electronics that were invisible to the average person were obvious to me.
“Look at your understanding of math,” Alvaro said. “As you’ve told me, you can’t do anything but basic mathematics with a pencil and paper. Yet you could see musical waveforms in your head, combine them, and correctly imagine the result. You might not have been able to write that as an equation, but you could solve the problem to a close approximation.”
Alvaro’s words sent me back to the years when I worked as a signal processing engineer. I’d felt such a sense of wonder the first time I saw a sophisticated tool—an FFT spectrum analyzer—a machine that could do analysis like I did in my head and show it on an oscilloscope screen. The computer showed so much more than I could see through imagination alone. And it had great precision. You could put the tool’s cursor over a point and read it out to six decimal places. But the one thing it could not do was show me the actual design solutions I wanted. It just showed data and couldn’t tell me what to do, so in a problem-solving sense, it was useless.
My own vision wasn’t like that. A typical electrical engineer who designs things using formulae from a text would follow a path set out in the book. He’d choose a standard design, calculate the necessary component values, and come up with exact, repeatable numbers for his circuit. I didn’t design things that way. Instead, I was more likely to imagine a new circuit topology and then guess at the initial component values. I never saw great numerical precision; rather, I saw approximate values I could fine-tune for the exact result. My process seems more random, but if the goal was originality—like it often is in music—my creative approach gave me a decided advantage. That was the way I’d seen equations in school, where it wasn’t so useful. My teachers criticized me for not doing the work in the accepted way, but out in the real world results were what mattered. For me, adjusting a circuit was like tuning a guitar—I could feel when I had it right. Musicians value that ability, and I can still remember how it was first revealed to me.
It was at the Blue Wall at the University of Massachusetts—a place where all the local bands performed and some got their start. The drinking age was twenty-one, and I was fifteen, but the guys at the door were college students and they let me by when I said, “I’m with the band.” Some musicians I knew were getting ready to play and I had drifted backstage to watch what they did up close. One of them was tuning guitars as I watched. He plugged the instruments one by one into a tuner, which was a device with a spinning disc that seemed to stand still when you played just the right note. I watched him tune two guitars, plucking the high E string and turning the tuning peg.
“You always tune upward,” the musician told me, “by tightening the string.” As I watched, he twisted the peg and suddenly the spinning disc stood still. How it happened is a mystery, but that frequency imprinted itself in my mind. I picked up the next guitar myself and tuned it right to the spot by ear alone. Then I tuned the other strings to that one. Correctly.
“That’s really cool,” he said. “You must have perfect pitch.” Then he stepped out onstage and ripped into an Edgar Winter song. As the notes poured from his guitar I marvelled at the relationship between them, how they sounded right when they were in tune and subtly wrong when they were off. From that night on, I could tune guitars.
Michael Wilcox told me he experienced something very similar. He used to develop mathematical formulae for financial analysis. His ability to do that was exceptional enough that he had a group of mathematicians working for him on Wall Street back in the 1990s. “Sometimes they would get stuck on a problem,” he told me, “and I would just see the answer. Go try this, I’d say, and they’d look at me like I was nuts because it just came out of my head, but most of the time it was right.” Michael never worked the answers out on paper; he just saw the paths to solution. Guided by his insights he solved complex problems in financial analysis without ever knowing how he did it. “I used to assume everyone was that way,” he told me. Both of us agreed that this gift was instrumental to our success.
Unlike me, Michael had actually gone to college and studied math, but he still solved equations in his own way. And like me, he never realized that was unusual until much later in life. No one knows how many people have abilities like ours. Perfect pitch is fairly common among musicians. Clearly some mathematicians and engineers have the gift of just seeing answers. Researchers are beginning to think that perfect pitch is more common among autistic people, just as autism is more common among musicians than in the general population. And seeing answers to equations is more common too, as evidenced by the many autistic people with unusual math skills.
Neuroscientists can’t explain why this is. It may be that we solve problems that interest us by deploying brainpower that typical people use for other things. With a billion neurons per cubic inch, a fist-sized chunk of brain has far more latent computing power than any device ever built by man. Maybe we’ve just got the gift of harnessing it in a particular way.
“Do you think my ability to visualize musical waves is like the calendar-calculating ability some other autistic people have?” I asked Alvaro.
“I don’t know,” he answered. “We don’t know how that works either, so it’s impossible to tell if they are the same or related.”
Consider Isaac Newton, widely acclaimed as the inventor of calculus. Several recent articles suggest that he was autistic, as they point to signs of autism in accounts of his behaviour. We can’t ever know that for sure, but I had a flash of insight into how he perhaps “invented” calculus. Maybe he saw waves in his head, like I do. But he lived in a time when there were no oscilloscopes or electronic aids to visualization. Perhaps he devised the representational system we call calculus as a way of demonstrating what he visualized instinctively to other people, who otherwise would have no idea what he was talking about.
When I suggested that to Alvaro he thought for a moment and said, “Maybe so.”
After our conversation I went back and reread the articles about Newton and autism. In one article Simon Baron-Cohen, an autism researcher at Cambridge University, described Newton’s behaviour in a set of paragraphs that could have been just as easily describing me, except I didn’t have a nervous breakdown at fifty. Dr. Baron-Cohen seemed to think Newton was on the spectrum, and after reading his account, I was inclined to agree.
Then I thought about my own history—diagnosed at age forty with a son just recently diagnosed, but who all his life felt different, like me. My father had died a few years earlier, but my stepmother and I both felt sure he’d had traits of autism too. Looking at the rest of my family tree, I realized that the eccentricity displayed by many of my cousins and ancestors points to a thread of autism. And those nonspeaking cousins I grew up with were not “idiots,” as my grandfather had dismissed them. They were almost certainly autistic people with more severe impairments than mine. Today we know that autism is considerably more common among engineers, scientists, and musicians. It’s also common among lawyers and clergymen, which my family tree has in abundance. The more I researched my history, the more I saw that my own family’s thread of neurodiversity might reach all the way back to Newton’s era, and maybe even farther. Some of my ancestors were truly exceptional people, but other relatives—even cousins I grew up with—were disabled enough that they spent their lives in parents’ basements or attics.
Scientists now believe autistic people have too many connections inside their heads, and that may well be disabling. But it may also be one way some of us are gifted in seeing and creating patterns. Non-autistic brains undergo a kind of pruning process in the first decade of life, where excess connections and unused neurons get removed in what neuroscientists think is a process of optimization. That does not seem to happen in the same way, or to the same degree, with autistic brains.
There are researchers who suggest that these extra connections make us sensitive to sensory overload and others who believe they lead to c
onfusion when brain signals get lost on the multiple pathways. Then there are the autistic people who have extraordinary calculating or other abilities, and they sometimes ask if that may be associated with those so-called excess connections. “Nature’s stingy,” they say. If you believe autism evolved in us for a purpose, the connections may be there for a reason. At this point, no one knows.
Thirty years earlier my autistic disabilities had prevented me from succeeding in school. And because I’d never graduated from high school, I was not considered qualified for the conventional scientific work I might otherwise be suited for. But I was technically qualified, and I found a home in theatre and professional audio. Three hundred years ago a person with my ability to see into machines would have been at an advantage, pure and simple.
I’d been thinking a lot lately about that in relation to the thread of autism that runs in my family. My father seemed less disabled by his differences than I was, but perhaps his differences were just hidden because he grew up before autism awareness, and he became a college professor, a profession in which eccentricity went unremarked. My son grew up in a more diversity-aware world, and he might be more visibly autistic than I am.
When I asked Alvaro if he thought I would have been considered disabled or gifted if I had lived in Newton’s day, he smiled. “You probably would have been both, just as you are today. Your social problems would have existed then as now, but your ability to teach yourself might have been an even greater gift in a time where there were no modern teaching tools.” Lindsay had gotten her PhD in psychology, and she agreed—my own autism was likely a double-edged sword, now or in an earlier day. Hearing these words, I wondered if the three generations of us were perhaps the same, and those of us who were born earlier simply fit better into a less restrictive world.