Pushkin hay Slight changed listeners. It's Maya this summer. We're revisiting four of your all time favorite episodes. For our final episode in the series, we're hearing from John Elder Robison. This conversation changed my life. I developed a new perspective on how our mind's work, the emotions we feel, and all that comes along with that.
I was never a socially skilled kid. I never knew what to say. Someone would come up to me, then they would say, look at my new doll and I would say, I like elephants, and they would just like, look at me. And I never understood what I did wrong. I was always saying and doing the wrong thing.
That's John Elder Robison. He's always had a gift for understanding machines versus a sound engineer, then as a car mechanic, But the one thing he always felt was lacking was his ability to connect with people emotionally. He says he often felt depressed and anxious about his interactions, and over the years he'd done a number of things to try
and foster a deeper connection with others. Then in two thousand and eight, John came across a unique opportunity he was given the chance to participate in an experimental brain study that he hoped would quote increase his emotional sensitivity.
I so much wanted to do that, because when I had learned that there were these facial expressions, and there were these whole, like unspoken conversations that happened between so called normal people, and I couldn't get them. It was like there were two whole conversations going on, and I could only hear one of them. And I thought, if only I could hear the other one, only I could
understand it, I would be happy. And that was this like fantasy I built up in my mind that if I could see these things in other people, my life would be beautiful.
On today's episode, when you discover that the thing you most wanted to change about yourself didn't actually need changing. I'm maya Shunker and this is a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become
in the face of a big change. The core of John's story takes place in the nineteen eighties and nineties, when he was working as a car mechanic in Springfield, Massachusetts, but as you'll hear, John's had many careers over the years, and we started at our conversation by talking about his time in the music business. He is a rare ear for technical detail, and in the nineteen seventies he worked as a sound engineer for the likes of Kiss and Diana Ross.
I think that people felt that I could see into the amplifiers, and I could see into the electronics systems, and I felt like I could see it. You know, I could stand out at the mixing desk at a concert, which was, you know, running my equipment, and you know, I could push It's like pushing the throttles on a powerful boat. You know, I could push it up, and I could feel that this is just how far you can push it before you blow it up. And I think that that was a gift that was relatively uncommon,
and that was the thing I loved about it. I loved making the equipment sing for all those people.
Oh, I love that. It's a very beautiful portrayal of what it means to work and sound. You ended up becoming interested in cars, right, which is what you do right now? Why is it that you decided to eventually leave your musical career behind.
When it got to dealing with people because music was my first job. The musicians appreciated what I could create, but other people thought that I was strange or bizarre, or you know whatever. And I thought, well, what could I do? And I always had had this love of machinery and cars, and I thought, you know, I'm just gonna be a mechanic. And I turned out to have a gift for understand and automotive machines just the way I had understood musical machines and other kinds of electronics.
I left, and I kind of never looked back.
I'm wondering, John, can you bring me back to the day in your car shop when your client surprised you with a book.
I had always been kind of a social failure, but at my car business I had to learn enough social skills. I guess that people would come back a second time. And I spent a fair amount of time talking to the customers that would sit in the waiting room and wait for their cars, and I got to know them. Some of them came in over a period of years.
One fellow was a therapist and comes in one day and he says, you know, John, I've heard you tell me how alone you feel many times, and I've heard you tell me like you feel like you're standing in the rain outside looking in the windows at all the people standing by a fire, and you don't know how to get in and be with them. And he said, you know, there's a thing that we're talking about in the mental health community that kind of explains that. It's
called Asperger syndrome. It's a kind of autism. And I just looked at him and I thought autism. Then he
pulls out this book. It was called Asperger Syndrome. It was by a doctor Tony Atwood, and he says, look, he says, it's people like you and can't read facial expressions, can't tell when somebody's angry or somebody said, say inappropriate things and get people upset, to have difficulty looking other people in the eye, and other folks think that they're being tricky or evasive, and like everything he's saying to
me is me. And I'm listening to that. And first I was like stunned at him telling me that I had this kind of autism. And then as he kept saying this is it, this and this and this and every one of those things with me, and it was just it was just shocking. It's just like totally came out of the blue. It's not like I was sitting in a therapist's office saying, doctor, tell me what's wrong
with me. It's like I was sitting behind the desk at my car repair place and this is just thrust in front of me, and it was shocking.
You're having this life changing moment, and I'm wondering, what did it feel like to have this kind of clarity for the first time.
Well, my first thought was, Okay, if I have this Asperger thing, how do I get cured? And he said, well, it's not a disease. It's just how you are. People with autism that's how they are, and people with Aspergers that's how you are. He says, It's like being short or tall or you know whatever. It's just it's how you are. But then after it sinks in there's no cure. Well, now I know I have all this trouble and it's
never going to end. And I was really sad, but I couldn't help reading the book he had left me. And at first I had thought, Wow, people told me I was mental and stupid and sociopathic and stuff. All my life I heard these kinds of things, and now here he is telling me, I'm not any of those things. I'm a person with this Asperger's and that explains why I've had all this trouble in my life. But gradually I realized I can take the knowledge from that book
and I can teach myself to act differently. I can teach myself that even if it makes me uncomfortable to look in your eyes when you're talking to me, look at your cheeks, I can look at your mouth. And when I did that, it was kind of amazing, because people responded better to me, even though I couldn't tell about people's body language and expressions. After reading Atwood's book, I understood that I would get too close to people and I would make them feel threatened. So I could
just make a rule. If I held my arm out in front of me, I could say, I won't get any closer to you than two arms lengths when we're talking in the waiting room. And I began to see that I could change how I behaved, and it really changed my life for the better. And that's when I started to go from feeling, oh boy, you know, I understand why I had all this trouble, but it's hopeless to thinking, you know, I can change my life completely
with this knowledge. And that was a real, a really big deal for me.
Did it lead you to reinterpret your past you'd had experiences with depression? Did it help you understand aspects of that differently?
Now? The thing I had always wanted was to feel like I was a normal person. And so when I learned about autism, I had an explanation for why things had gone wrong with me and for why I was a second rate person. And I have to say that today we have this, you know, really different autism awareness, and to say that I was a second rate person, that's like a bad thing to say now, but you know,
that's how I felt. I felt like I was second right, and I wanted so much to be normal, and so I thought, you know, I should write my own story about growing up and learning about this Asperger autism thing. And that was what gave me the courage to write what became Look Me in the Eye. And the book
came out and all these people started reading it. And you know, one of the people who read it was this postdoctoral researcher at Harvard Medical School, and she showed up at a talk I was doing in a bookstore, and she said, we're doing a study that's aimed at possibly helping autistic people see emotional cues and read expressions in other people, and we're hoping that your talks are attracting autistic people in the audience, and maybe you could
hand out flyers for our study and you could attract some volunteers for us. And I was like, thinking, now I'll tell people, but I want to do it. I just I so much wanted to do that because when I had learned in that Atwood book that there were these facial expressions and there were these whole, like unspoken conversations that he described that happened between so called normal people, and I couldn't get them. It was like there were two whole conversations going on, and I could only hear
one of them. And I thought, if only I could hear the other one, only I could understand it. I thought, the reason I've always been anxious and depressed is because all I can ever understand is bad things. People don't like me, people think I'm whatever. They're going to fire me, they're going to throw me out. But maybe there's this whole other set of messages where people really love me and they like me and they want it. There's good messages.
Maybe all I can get are the bad ones. And if I could fix that and I would be happy. And that was this like fantasy I built up in my mind. And so when she came along and she said we're doing the study hoping to do that, I thought, well, maybe it would work, Maybe that would happen for me.
Yeah, you know you've written that autism gave you, quote a mixture of disabilities and gifts. Can you share more about this and how it affected your decision to enroll in this study.
So the way the way autism had kind of played out for me by that time in my life. The average person couldn't see into machinery the way I could, and the average person couldn't they couldn't focus on details of things the way I could. I still, even without understanding that I had gifts, I thought that my gifts were in the category of something in a freak show. You know, Sure they were gifts, but they weren't gifts that most people cared about, and the things most people
do care about I couldn't do. So I I felt that the more I could understand emotional cues, the more I might be able to be like other people. And I wanted to be able to do that.
Yeah, you know, it reveals so much to me about where you were at psychologically with respect your self image and self perception, that you would want to jump at this opportunity, right, And you know, just to let listeners in on the specifics of this study that you were signing up for. It was not without risk, right. It used TMS transcranial magnetic stimulation to activate specific areas of
your brain using high power magnetic fields. I mean it's hard to imagine not having a little bit of trepidation, right, some fear associated with getting enrolled in this kind of study, is that, right?
You know you might have thought of it that way as a person who was educated in neuroscience. I didn't see it that way. The idea of TMS was, or is that they take a coil of wire, which is the basis for an electromagnet, and they fire a bunch of electricity into it and it induces a powerful magnetic field in that wire. They would put that on your head, and so they would fire a pulse of magnetic energy
into your head when they put electricity into the wire. Well, I had worked with really really powerful coils of wire and magnets in making sound systems. And it's funny because so many people in retrospect they said, weren't you scared of that? And no, because of my background and making high power electronic systems, I was scared at all. I thought, bring it on.
Wow, that's so interesting. I want to push you a little more here though, right, because it's one thing to be building electronic equipment, it's another thing to have specific parts of your brain activated by technology.
I just I really thought there was I thought there was just like so much more that I was missing, and if I could possibly see it, it would be it would be huge revelation for me. It would be such a huge positive thing.
Was your family as enthusiastic about this as you were?
Oh? My family wanted enthusiastic at all. And my wife, she said, you know, when it comes to getting involved in experiments to change myself, she said, you're good just the way you are. Why do you want to change yourself? And I said, I want to feel like other people. I want to have people want to be my friend and stuff and she said, people do want to be your friend, people like you you have friends, And I said, well, I just feel like there's something more, you know, So.
You decide to enroll in the TMS studies, and I'm wondering if you can set the scene for me, you know, to do the study.
They said to me, well, we're going to stimulate these different areas of your brain, and the way we're going to tell if anything happens is we're going to show you on a computer monitor, people making faces, people doing things, and we're going to ask is it ellis is it anxious? Is it eager? You know, they'll have these different emotions and you'll push buttons for what you're seeing. And they said,
we don't care if you don't get it right. Then we're going to do this stimulation on you and we're going to put you right back in front of the machine, will show you another set of faces, and we'll see if your responses are more or less accurate or the same. That's how we'll tell. So they put the images in front of me before the stimulation, and I didn't I didn't have a single idea what I was seeing. So then they sit me down and they start firing these pulses.
It's one pulse a second, and the thing goes click, click, click, and every time it would fire, it would make a pop, and I would feel this like twitch on the top of my scalp, which they told me was the energy from the magnetic field triggering muscles in my scalp. And so I was sitting there and all of a sudden, she lifts the thing off away from my head and she said, come on quick, we got to test you. And I realized half an hour had passed. Wow, And
so I go over. You know, it's just like ten feet and I move across the room and I sit down and the faces fly in front of me, and I push the buttons and I still don't have any idea, And I thought, well, kind of fool was I? You know, I imagined that I'm going to look at those faces again and I'm going to know every single one of them. Well I didn't. I didn't know anything. So she says, okay, that's good, And I said, well, how did I do?
And she says, well, I don't know how you did, but even if I did, I couldn't tell you because it's a study. So that I go out down the garage and I get in my car, so I'm like two hours from home. And so when I drive out, I always would play old music, and I had a lot of concerts or bootleg recordings I could listen to. And I put on recording this show of a band called Tavares, And so I put on this show and I start playing, and it was like I stepped into
a musical hallucination. It's like I was back there at the show and I could I could like almost smell it, and I could feel it, and it was it was just an overpowering thing listening to it, and it drove along and it was it was so overwhelming that it made me cry. I had pulled over and I was just crying. And all the years I had worked in music, I didn't feel the emotion of the music. I felt. Was it technically correct, but I didn't feel was it happy?
Was it sad? Was it longing? Was it wistful? I didn't feel those things, And of course that's what made me a good engineer. But now I was feeling the emotion of it, and it was just overwhelming. And I thought to myself, this must be what all those people in the audience were feeling when they listened to those shows.
I thought back at all those concerts I had been at, and people were crying and they were singing, and they were smiling, and I would see like tears, you know, from people, and I'd just be I'd just be standing there looking out, thinking, it's working. The system, it's doing what we wanted it to do. The musicians are up there playing and our sound equipment is working. But I
never felt the feelings of the audience. And I went home and it was really late by then, and I sent an email to the doctor and I said, this is like some really powerful stuff. This has happened. And I sat awake all night and I just listened to old music, just sitting listening to it, and it was like dawn, and it finally the brilliance kind of faded away, and I went to sleep and it was just it was just an amazing night.
We'll be back in a moment. With a slight change of plans. So John Elder Robison volunteered to participate in a pioneering study run by a teaching hospital out of Harvard Medical School. The study used transcranial magnetic stimulation or TMS, which uses electromagnetic pul to stimulate nerve cells. The impact of TMS on things like migrains, obsessive compulsive disorder, and major depressive disorder are relatively well understood, but less so the impact of TMS on people on the autism spectrum.
And the two thousand and eight study that John participated in was entirely exploratory. It was a research study that recruited those with Asperger's, a diagnostic category still used at that time, and it's worth noting that among the participants in the study, John's response was singular and highly unusual in its expression, and it had a complex impact on
John's life. It changed his understanding of himself in a profound way and affected the relationships in his life, including with his wife and the folks in the car shop.
I went to work and one of the guys was in the hall and I looked at him and I thought, he has most beautiful brown eyes. And then it like hit me. I thought, what's going on with me? I had never ever in my life had a thought he has beautiful brown eyes. But of course I had heard that people had said, oh, old blue eyes, and such pretty blue eyes. And pretty. You know, i'd heard it,
but I had never ever had that thought. And then I went into the waiting room and there were people out there, and I looked at people and I thought, she's really anxious, really scared. And I never had a feeling like that before. I mean, I would go in the waiting room and my logical brain would tell me they're waiting to know what's wrong with their car, But never ever did I look at someone and think she's
really scared. And I actually I said to the person in the waiting room, I said, don't worry, it'll be okay. She kind of smiled at me. Wow, And I thought, this is like magic. This has never happened to me. And lest you think that my life was all like beauty and sweetness and light from that moment on, it
wasn't that way. Because I went out and I went you know, I was a big shopping center where I live, and I'm walking through the mall and I'm just like looking around at the people, and it was not beauty and sweetness and light. It was like fear and anxiety and worry and jealousy and all these things that they're all coming at me from a million different directions. It's just like this wave of emotion and I thought, holy shit,
I thought, what kind of fool was I now? And you know, as I went through life, that faded away.
Luckily, sorry that meaning.
My ability to see those emotions in people dissipated over the next few weeks. But while it lasted, it was overwhelming. It was like devastating to me.
I mean, I so appreciate the complexity you describe, and from what I understand, while the very acute results of the TMS have dissipated over time, there is this element of you can't unsee what you've seen, right, and you are you are altered permanently from this experience in terms of your perspective of the world.
And I also felt like my dream was kind of shattered, this idea that if I could see these things in other people, my life would be beautiful. And so now we are thirteen years since that TMS experience, and I guess, I guess I never imagined that just a brief experience
like that could change your life forever. The way I guess I could explain it, and maybe it's an explanation, is if you're a color blind person and you grow up and you imagine people are talking about the beautiful blue sky, pretty red shirt, nice green grass, and of course to you, it's all shades of gray, and you start thinking it's just bullshit, and it just makes you angry. This blue, yellow, green talk. It's all the same. You
know it. You know the evidence of your eyes. And you go into some doctor's office and they do something to you, and you walk out and you see color and you realize, holy shit, these people were telling the truth. It's really what it is. And then the ability fades away. Well, even if you go back to see in a black and white world, you are never going to forget that all those other people are seeing yellows and blues and greens, and you're going to try your hardest to discern what
shade of gray is yellow and what's green? And can I determine green by context? You know that's a lawn, so that must be green. And you're going to always be changed. I don't know what to say except that I'm I'm changed all these years later. Yeah, and the insight I think has been empowering. But it was a really, really rough rive. Yeah, so it was a very mixed bag. It was a very mixed thing.
That leads me to another question I have for you, John, which is, you know, you talk about this experience in the mall where you're inundated with emotion, and what you're realizing is your experience being on the autism spectrum wasn't shielding you all the good parts.
It was shielding me from those bad parts.
It was shielding you from bad parts too.
Yes, being autistic definitely shielded me from that. It made me different, but it didn't make me worse. Because those people who have to live with that, you know, being a logical person, they can't be logical people because there's so much emotion around them. I don't have that around me, So I am logical, and you know, logic works in a lot of life. You ought to be a programmer, boy, there's nothing better than logic.
Yeah. I'm wondering what impact the TMS had on your relationship with your wife.
Well, ultimately, my wife was living with significant depression, and because I was largely blind to the emotional cues from others, her included, she was just what she was, you know, and she could say like, I can't get out of bed today, I'm too depressed. And I would say, Okay, I'm going to work and I'm just going to and that worked, you know, worked for us. But when I saw those feelings after the TMS, I saw her sadness and misery, and I thought, I must have done this
to her. We're married. I must be the cause of her misery. That's just just horrible, and it really shattered my marriage. I thought, you know, I'm like killing her and her depression is killing me, and we're horrible for each other. And I got to leave, and you know, and I guess I'm very sad for that.
Yeah, I mean, it's a poignant illustration of the complexities that come along with picking up on human emotions. Knowing what you know. Now, if you could go back in time, would you still go through with the TMS experiments, if you.
Put me in the shoes of the post TMS John Robison, where I had experienced what it would be like to see and feel emotion, and I saw and felt what it's like to read emotions. And yes, that's a powerful thing, and yes that could help me engage with people who don't know me. But it devastated my logical brain. In it upended the world as I had known it. I am not a broken version of some someone else's normal. I am my normal. Autistic people maybe different from non
autistic people, but we are not broken. And that's what's been brought home to me. I think through this TMS and now that I know that, do I need to learn it again? No, that's a lifelong lesson, and that's a gift the TMS gave me that I truly understand that as an autistic person, I am my normal, and I'm a good normal, as much a complete, correct person as anyone else.
Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed my conversation with John Elder Robison, I recommend you check out another episode that features rock climber Tommy Caldwell. A near death experience unlocked a completely new state of mind for Tommy and propelled him to become the greatest big wall climber in the world. A Slight Change of Plans is created,
written and executive produced by me Maya Schunker. The Slight Changed family includes Tyler Green our senior producer, Jen Guerra our senior editor, Then Tolliday our sound engineer, Emily Rosstek our associate producer, and Neil Lavelle, our executive producer, Louis Scara wrote our theme song and Ginger Smith helped arrange
the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is the production of Pushkin Industries, so big thanks to everyone there, including Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg, Lee tal Mallatt and Heather Fame and of course a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow A Slight Change of Plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Schunker see you next week.
And then the neurologist comes in to see me and he says, he says, what day is it? And what's your name? And who's the president? He asked me some questions I don't know the answer to. He says something like, well, who's our senator? I don't know who our senator.
I didn't know before you. Yeah, I would totally a bid you John.
And he says, Okay, I get it. You haven't forgotten it. You never knew it.