Wired for Change

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 yet 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, if 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 and 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 has 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 electronic 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 I loved making the equipment thing for all those people. Oh, I love that. It's a very beautiful portrayal of what it means to work in 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 understanding 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 guessed 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 him. 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 is

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 At 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, and 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 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 Asberger 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 Asperger's 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 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've 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, I can 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 really, 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 rate and 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, Oh, 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, if 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, and there's good messages. Maybe all I can get of 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 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're 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 and 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. 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 jealous, 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 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, 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 pushed 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 I go out down to 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 an old concerts, old bootleg recordings I could listen to, and I put on recording and this um, this show of a band called a Tavaris, 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 Yeah, it was so overwhelming that it made me cry. I 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. Ought back and 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 I went to sleep and it was was just an amazing night. Will be back in a moment with a

slight change of plans. So John Elder Robeson 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 pulses to stimulate nerve cells.

The impact of TMS on things like migraines, 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 it was in the hall and looked at him and I thought, he has the most beautiful brown eyes. And then it'd 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 all old blue eyes, and you're such pretty blue eyes and pretty, you know. I 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, 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 and I went, you know, as 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, and 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, but that meaning my ability to see those emotions and 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're 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 first 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. It's 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, 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 sea 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 which 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 changed all these years later. Yeah, and the insight I think has been empowering. But it was a really really rough ride. Yea. So it was a very mixed bag. It was. 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. 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, and a lot of 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 and she could say like I I can't get out of bed today, I'm too depressed, and I would say, Okay, I'm going to work, and I was just 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 depressionis killing me, and we're horrible for each other. And I got to leave, and you know, and I guess

I'm 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 and it upended the world as I had known it. I am not a broken version of some someone else as normal. I am my normal. Autistic people may be 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. Join me next week when I talk with psychologist Angela Duckworth about the science of grit and how natural talent inability will only take you so far. I really don't know anybody who has become world class of economics or at being a political leader, or anything else.

You know, a classroom teacher, a nurse like without years and years of effort. A Slight Change of Plans is created written an executive produce by Nie Maya Shunker. The Slight Change Family includes Tyler Greene, our senior producer, Jen Guera, our senior editor, Ben Taliday, our sound engineer, Emily Rostek our associate producer, and Neil Lavelle, our executive producer. Louise Scara wrote our theme song and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plants the production of

Pushkin Industries so big. Thanks to everyone there. Including Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg, Lee Tall Mulat 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 Shunker 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 too. He says something like, well, who's our senator? S I don't know who our senator? I didn't know it before either. Yeah, I would totally avid you John. And he says, Okay, I get it. You haven't forgotten it. You never knew it.