Speaker 1: Pushkin hay Slight changed listeners. It's Maya this summer. We're
Speaker 1: revisiting four of your all time favorite episodes. For our
Speaker 1: final episode in the series, we're hearing from John Elder Robison.
Speaker 1: This conversation changed my life. I developed a new perspective
Speaker 1: on how our mind's work, the emotions we feel, and
Speaker 1: all that comes along with that.
Speaker 2: I was never a socially skilled kid. I never knew
Speaker 2: what to say. Someone would come up to me, then
Speaker 2: they would say, look at my new doll and I
Speaker 2: would say, I like elephants, and they would just like,
Speaker 2: look at me. And I never understood what I did wrong.
Speaker 2: I was always saying and doing the wrong thing.
Speaker 1: That's John Elder Robison. He's always had a gift for
Speaker 1: understanding machines versus a sound engineer, then as a car mechanic,
Speaker 1: But the one thing he always felt was lacking was
Speaker 1: his ability to connect with people emotionally. He says he
Speaker 1: often felt depressed and anxious about his interactions, and over
Speaker 1: the years he'd done a number of things to try
Speaker 1: and foster a deeper connection with others. Then in two
Speaker 1: thousand and eight, John came across a unique opportunity he
Speaker 1: was given the chance to participate in an experimental brain
Speaker 1: study that he hoped would quote increase his emotional sensitivity.
Speaker 2: I so much wanted to do that, because when I
Speaker 2: had learned that there were these facial expressions, and there
Speaker 2: were these whole, like unspoken conversations that happened between so
Speaker 2: called normal people, and I couldn't get them. It was
Speaker 2: like there were two whole conversations going on, and I
Speaker 2: could only hear one of them. And I thought, if
Speaker 2: only I could hear the other one, only I could
Speaker 2: understand it, I would be happy. And that was this
Speaker 2: like fantasy I built up in my mind that if
Speaker 2: I could see these things in other people, my life
Speaker 2: would be beautiful.
Speaker 1: On today's episode, when you discover that the thing you
Speaker 1: most wanted to change about yourself didn't actually need changing.
Speaker 1: I'm maya Shunker and this is a slight change of plans,
Speaker 1: a show about who we are and who we become
Speaker 1: in the face of a big change. The core of
Speaker 1: John's story takes place in the nineteen eighties and nineties,
Speaker 1: when he was working as a car mechanic in Springfield, Massachusetts,
Speaker 1: but as you'll hear, John's had many careers over the years,
Speaker 1: and we started at our conversation by talking about his
Speaker 1: time in the music business. He is a rare ear
Speaker 1: for technical detail, and in the nineteen seventies he worked
Speaker 1: as a sound engineer for the likes of Kiss and
Speaker 1: Diana Ross.
Speaker 2: I think that people felt that I could see into
Speaker 2: the amplifiers, and I could see into the electronics systems,
Speaker 2: and I felt like I could see it. You know,
Speaker 2: I could stand out at the mixing desk at a concert,
Speaker 2: which was, you know, running my equipment, and you know,
Speaker 2: I could push It's like pushing the throttles on a
Speaker 2: powerful boat. You know, I could push it up, and
Speaker 2: I could feel that this is just how far you
Speaker 2: can push it before you blow it up. And I
Speaker 2: think that that was a gift that was relatively uncommon,
Speaker 2: and that was the thing I loved about it. I
Speaker 2: loved making the equipment sing for all those people.
Speaker 1: Oh, I love that. It's a very beautiful portrayal of
Speaker 1: what it means to work and sound. You ended up
Speaker 1: becoming interested in cars, right, which is what you do
Speaker 1: right now? Why is it that you decided to eventually
Speaker 1: leave your musical career behind.
Speaker 2: When it got to dealing with people because music was
Speaker 2: my first job. The musicians appreciated what I could create,
Speaker 2: but other people thought that I was strange or bizarre,
Speaker 2: or you know whatever. And I thought, well, what could
Speaker 2: I do? And I always had had this love of
Speaker 2: machinery and cars, and I thought, you know, I'm just
Speaker 2: gonna be a mechanic. And I turned out to have
Speaker 2: a gift for understand and automotive machines just the way
Speaker 2: I had understood musical machines and other kinds of electronics.
Speaker 2: I left, and I kind of never looked back.
Speaker 1: I'm wondering, John, can you bring me back to the
Speaker 1: day in your car shop when your client surprised you
Speaker 1: with a book.
Speaker 2: I had always been kind of a social failure, but
Speaker 2: at my car business I had to learn enough social skills.
Speaker 2: I guess that people would come back a second time.
Speaker 2: And I spent a fair amount of time talking to
Speaker 2: the customers that would sit in the waiting room and
Speaker 2: wait for their cars, and I got to know them.
Speaker 2: Some of them came in over a period of years.
Speaker 2: One fellow was a therapist and comes in one day
Speaker 2: and he says, you know, John, I've heard you tell
Speaker 2: me how alone you feel many times, and I've heard
Speaker 2: you tell me like you feel like you're standing in
Speaker 2: the rain outside looking in the windows at all the
Speaker 2: people standing by a fire, and you don't know how
Speaker 2: to get in and be with them. And he said,
Speaker 2: you know, there's a thing that we're talking about in
Speaker 2: the mental health community that kind of explains that. It's
Speaker 2: called Asperger syndrome. It's a kind of autism. And I
Speaker 2: just looked at him and I thought autism. Then he
Speaker 2: pulls out this book. It was called Asperger Syndrome. It
Speaker 2: was by a doctor Tony Atwood, and he says, look,
Speaker 2: he says, it's people like you and can't read facial expressions,
Speaker 2: can't tell when somebody's angry or somebody said, say inappropriate
Speaker 2: things and get people upset, to have difficulty looking other
Speaker 2: people in the eye, and other folks think that they're
Speaker 2: being tricky or evasive, and like everything he's saying to
Speaker 2: me is me. And I'm listening to that. And first
Speaker 2: I was like stunned at him telling me that I
Speaker 2: had this kind of autism. And then as he kept
Speaker 2: saying this is it, this and this and this and
Speaker 2: every one of those things with me, and it was
Speaker 2: just it was just shocking. It's just like totally came
Speaker 2: out of the blue. It's not like I was sitting
Speaker 2: in a therapist's office saying, doctor, tell me what's wrong
Speaker 2: with me. It's like I was sitting behind the desk
Speaker 2: at my car repair place and this is just thrust
Speaker 2: in front of me, and it was shocking.
Speaker 1: You're having this life changing moment, and I'm wondering, what
Speaker 1: did it feel like to have this kind of clarity
Speaker 1: for the first time.
Speaker 2: Well, my first thought was, Okay, if I have this
Speaker 2: Asperger thing, how do I get cured? And he said, well,
Speaker 2: it's not a disease. It's just how you are. People
Speaker 2: with autism that's how they are, and people with Aspergers
Speaker 2: that's how you are. He says, It's like being short
Speaker 2: or tall or you know whatever. It's just it's how
Speaker 2: you are. But then after it sinks in there's no cure. Well,
Speaker 2: now I know I have all this trouble and it's
Speaker 2: never going to end. And I was really sad, but
Speaker 2: I couldn't help reading the book he had left me.
Speaker 2: And at first I had thought, Wow, people told me
Speaker 2: I was mental and stupid and sociopathic and stuff. All
Speaker 2: my life I heard these kinds of things, and now
Speaker 2: here he is telling me, I'm not any of those things.
Speaker 2: I'm a person with this Asperger's and that explains why
Speaker 2: I've had all this trouble in my life. But gradually
Speaker 2: I realized I can take the knowledge from that book
Speaker 2: and I can teach myself to act differently. I can
Speaker 2: teach myself that even if it makes me uncomfortable to
Speaker 2: look in your eyes when you're talking to me, look
Speaker 2: at your cheeks, I can look at your mouth. And
Speaker 2: when I did that, it was kind of amazing, because
Speaker 2: people responded better to me, even though I couldn't tell
Speaker 2: about people's body language and expressions. After reading Atwood's book,
Speaker 2: I understood that I would get too close to people
Speaker 2: and I would make them feel threatened. So I could
Speaker 2: just make a rule. If I held my arm out
Speaker 2: in front of me, I could say, I won't get
Speaker 2: any closer to you than two arms lengths when we're
Speaker 2: talking in the waiting room. And I began to see
Speaker 2: that I could change how I behaved, and it really
Speaker 2: changed my life for the better. And that's when I
Speaker 2: started to go from feeling, oh boy, you know, I
Speaker 2: understand why I had all this trouble, but it's hopeless
Speaker 2: to thinking, you know, I can change my life completely
Speaker 2: with this knowledge. And that was a real, a really
Speaker 2: big deal for me.
Speaker 1: Did it lead you to reinterpret your past you'd had
Speaker 1: experiences with depression? Did it help you understand aspects of
Speaker 1: that differently?
Speaker 2: Now? The thing I had always wanted was to feel
Speaker 2: like I was a normal person. And so when I
Speaker 2: learned about autism, I had an explanation for why things
Speaker 2: had gone wrong with me and for why I was
Speaker 2: a second rate person. And I have to say that
Speaker 2: today we have this, you know, really different autism awareness,
Speaker 2: and to say that I was a second rate person,
Speaker 2: that's like a bad thing to say now, but you know,
Speaker 2: that's how I felt. I felt like I was second right,
Speaker 2: and I wanted so much to be normal, and so
Speaker 2: I thought, you know, I should write my own story
Speaker 2: about growing up and learning about this Asperger autism thing.
Speaker 2: And that was what gave me the courage to write
Speaker 2: what became Look Me in the Eye. And the book
Speaker 2: came out and all these people started reading it. And
Speaker 2: you know, one of the people who read it was
Speaker 2: this postdoctoral researcher at Harvard Medical School, and she showed
Speaker 2: up at a talk I was doing in a bookstore,
Speaker 2: and she said, we're doing a study that's aimed at
Speaker 2: possibly helping autistic people see emotional cues and read expressions
Speaker 2: in other people, and we're hoping that your talks are
Speaker 2: attracting autistic people in the audience, and maybe you could
Speaker 2: hand out flyers for our study and you could attract
Speaker 2: some volunteers for us. And I was like, thinking, now
Speaker 2: I'll tell people, but I want to do it. I
Speaker 2: just I so much wanted to do that because when
Speaker 2: I had learned in that Atwood book that there were
Speaker 2: these facial expressions and there were these whole, like unspoken
Speaker 2: conversations that he described that happened between so called normal people,
Speaker 2: and I couldn't get them. It was like there were
Speaker 2: two whole conversations going on, and I could only hear
Speaker 2: one of them. And I thought, if only I could
Speaker 2: hear the other one, only I could understand it. I thought,
Speaker 2: the reason I've always been anxious and depressed is because
Speaker 2: all I can ever understand is bad things. People don't
Speaker 2: like me, people think I'm whatever. They're going to fire me,
Speaker 2: they're going to throw me out. But maybe there's this
Speaker 2: whole other set of messages where people really love me
Speaker 2: and they like me and they want it. There's good messages.
Speaker 2: Maybe all I can get are the bad ones. And
Speaker 2: if I could fix that and I would be happy.
Speaker 2: And that was this like fantasy I built up in
Speaker 2: my mind. And so when she came along and she
Speaker 2: said we're doing the study hoping to do that, I thought, well,
Speaker 2: maybe it would work, Maybe that would happen for me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know you've written that autism gave you, quote
Speaker 1: a mixture of disabilities and gifts. Can you share more
Speaker 1: about this and how it affected your decision to enroll
Speaker 1: in this study.
Speaker 2: So the way the way autism had kind of played
Speaker 2: out for me by that time in my life. The
Speaker 2: average person couldn't see into machinery the way I could,
Speaker 2: and the average person couldn't they couldn't focus on details
Speaker 2: of things the way I could. I still, even without
Speaker 2: understanding that I had gifts, I thought that my gifts
Speaker 2: were in the category of something in a freak show.
Speaker 2: You know, Sure they were gifts, but they weren't gifts
Speaker 2: that most people cared about, and the things most people
Speaker 2: do care about I couldn't do. So I I felt
Speaker 2: that the more I could understand emotional cues, the more
Speaker 2: I might be able to be like other people. And
Speaker 2: I wanted to be able to do that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, it reveals so much to me about
Speaker 1: where you were at psychologically with respect your self image
Speaker 1: and self perception, that you would want to jump at
Speaker 1: this opportunity, right, And you know, just to let listeners
Speaker 1: in on the specifics of this study that you were
Speaker 1: signing up for. It was not without risk, right. It
Speaker 1: used TMS transcranial magnetic stimulation to activate specific areas of
Speaker 1: your brain using high power magnetic fields. I mean it's
Speaker 1: hard to imagine not having a little bit of trepidation, right,
Speaker 1: some fear associated with getting enrolled in this kind of study,
Speaker 1: is that, right?
Speaker 2: You know you might have thought of it that way
Speaker 2: as a person who was educated in neuroscience. I didn't
Speaker 2: see it that way. The idea of TMS was, or
Speaker 2: is that they take a coil of wire, which is
Speaker 2: the basis for an electromagnet, and they fire a bunch
Speaker 2: of electricity into it and it induces a powerful magnetic
Speaker 2: field in that wire. They would put that on your head,
Speaker 2: and so they would fire a pulse of magnetic energy
Speaker 2: into your head when they put electricity into the wire. Well,
Speaker 2: I had worked with really really powerful coils of wire
Speaker 2: and magnets in making sound systems. And it's funny because
Speaker 2: so many people in retrospect they said, weren't you scared
Speaker 2: of that? And no, because of my background and making
Speaker 2: high power electronic systems, I was scared at all. I thought,
Speaker 2: bring it on.
Speaker 1: Wow, that's so interesting. I want to push you a
Speaker 1: little more here though, right, because it's one thing to
Speaker 1: be building electronic equipment, it's another thing to have specific
Speaker 1: parts of your brain activated by technology.
Speaker 2: I just I really thought there was I thought there
Speaker 2: was just like so much more that I was missing,
Speaker 2: and if I could possibly see it, it would be
Speaker 2: it would be huge revelation for me. It would be
Speaker 2: such a huge positive thing.
Speaker 1: Was your family as enthusiastic about this as you were?
Speaker 2: Oh? My family wanted enthusiastic at all. And my wife,
Speaker 2: she said, you know, when it comes to getting involved
Speaker 2: in experiments to change myself, she said, you're good just
Speaker 2: the way you are. Why do you want to change yourself?
Speaker 2: And I said, I want to feel like other people.
Speaker 2: I want to have people want to be my friend
Speaker 2: and stuff and she said, people do want to be
Speaker 2: your friend, people like you you have friends, And I said, well,
Speaker 2: I just feel like there's something more, you know, So.
Speaker 1: You decide to enroll in the TMS studies, and I'm
Speaker 1: wondering if you can set the scene for me, you know,
Speaker 1: to do the study.
Speaker 2: They said to me, well, we're going to stimulate these
Speaker 2: different areas of your brain, and the way we're going
Speaker 2: to tell if anything happens is we're going to show
Speaker 2: you on a computer monitor, people making faces, people doing things,
Speaker 2: and we're going to ask is it ellis is it anxious?
Speaker 2: Is it eager? You know, they'll have these different emotions
Speaker 2: and you'll push buttons for what you're seeing. And they said,
Speaker 2: we don't care if you don't get it right. Then
Speaker 2: we're going to do this stimulation on you and we're
Speaker 2: going to put you right back in front of the machine,
Speaker 2: will show you another set of faces, and we'll see
Speaker 2: if your responses are more or less accurate or the same.
Speaker 2: That's how we'll tell. So they put the images in
Speaker 2: front of me before the stimulation, and I didn't I
Speaker 2: didn't have a single idea what I was seeing. So
Speaker 2: then they sit me down and they start firing these pulses.
Speaker 2: It's one pulse a second, and the thing goes click, click, click,
Speaker 2: and every time it would fire, it would make a pop,
Speaker 2: and I would feel this like twitch on the top
Speaker 2: of my scalp, which they told me was the energy
Speaker 2: from the magnetic field triggering muscles in my scalp. And
Speaker 2: so I was sitting there and all of a sudden,
Speaker 2: she lifts the thing off away from my head and
Speaker 2: she said, come on quick, we got to test you.
Speaker 2: And I realized half an hour had passed. Wow, And
Speaker 2: so I go over. You know, it's just like ten
Speaker 2: feet and I move across the room and I sit
Speaker 2: down and the faces fly in front of me, and
Speaker 2: I push the buttons and I still don't have any idea,
Speaker 2: And I thought, well, kind of fool was I? You know,
Speaker 2: I imagined that I'm going to look at those faces again
Speaker 2: and I'm going to know every single one of them.
Speaker 2: Well I didn't. I didn't know anything. So she says, okay,
Speaker 2: that's good, And I said, well, how did I do?
Speaker 2: And she says, well, I don't know how you did,
Speaker 2: but even if I did, I couldn't tell you because
Speaker 2: it's a study. So that I go out down the
Speaker 2: garage and I get in my car, so I'm like
Speaker 2: two hours from home. And so when I drive out,
Speaker 2: I always would play old music, and I had a
Speaker 2: lot of concerts or bootleg recordings I could listen to.
Speaker 2: And I put on recording this show of a band
Speaker 2: called Tavares, And so I put on this show and
Speaker 2: I start playing, and it was like I stepped into
Speaker 2: a musical hallucination. It's like I was back there at
Speaker 2: the show and I could I could like almost smell it,
Speaker 2: and I could feel it, and it was it was
Speaker 2: just an overpowering thing listening to it, and it drove
Speaker 2: along and it was it was so overwhelming that it
Speaker 2: made me cry. I had pulled over and I was
Speaker 2: just crying. And all the years I had worked in music,
Speaker 2: I didn't feel the emotion of the music. I felt.
Speaker 2: Was it technically correct, but I didn't feel was it happy?
Speaker 2: Was it sad? Was it longing? Was it wistful? I
Speaker 2: didn't feel those things, And of course that's what made
Speaker 2: me a good engineer. But now I was feeling the
Speaker 2: emotion of it, and it was just overwhelming. And I
Speaker 2: thought to myself, this must be what all those people
Speaker 2: in the audience were feeling when they listened to those shows.
Speaker 2: I thought back at all those concerts I had been at,
Speaker 2: and people were crying and they were singing, and they
Speaker 2: were smiling, and I would see like tears, you know,
Speaker 2: from people, and I'd just be I'd just be standing
Speaker 2: there looking out, thinking, it's working. The system, it's doing
Speaker 2: what we wanted it to do. The musicians are up
Speaker 2: there playing and our sound equipment is working. But I
Speaker 2: never felt the feelings of the audience. And I went
Speaker 2: home and it was really late by then, and I
Speaker 2: sent an email to the doctor and I said, this
Speaker 2: is like some really powerful stuff. This has happened. And
Speaker 2: I sat awake all night and I just listened to
Speaker 2: old music, just sitting listening to it, and it was
Speaker 2: like dawn, and it finally the brilliance kind of faded away,
Speaker 2: and I went to sleep and it was just it
Speaker 2: was just an amazing night.
Speaker 1: We'll be back in a moment. With a slight change
Speaker 1: of plans. So John Elder Robison volunteered to participate in
Speaker 1: a pioneering study run by a teaching hospital out of
Speaker 1: Harvard Medical School. The study used transcranial magnetic stimulation or TMS,
Speaker 1: which uses electromagnetic pul to stimulate nerve cells. The impact
Speaker 1: of TMS on things like migrains, obsessive compulsive disorder, and
Speaker 1: major depressive disorder are relatively well understood, but less so
Speaker 1: the impact of TMS on people on the autism spectrum.
Speaker 1: And the two thousand and eight study that John participated
Speaker 1: in was entirely exploratory. It was a research study that
Speaker 1: recruited those with Asperger's, a diagnostic category still used at
Speaker 1: that time, and it's worth noting that among the participants
Speaker 1: in the study, John's response was singular and highly unusual
Speaker 1: in its expression, and it had a complex impact on
Speaker 1: John's life. It changed his understanding of himself in a
Speaker 1: profound way and affected the relationships in his life, including
Speaker 1: with his wife and the folks in the car shop.
Speaker 2: I went to work and one of the guys was
Speaker 2: in the hall and I looked at him and I thought,
Speaker 2: he has most beautiful brown eyes. And then it like
Speaker 2: hit me. I thought, what's going on with me? I
Speaker 2: had never ever in my life had a thought he
Speaker 2: has beautiful brown eyes. But of course I had heard
Speaker 2: that people had said, oh, old blue eyes, and such
Speaker 2: pretty blue eyes. And pretty. You know, i'd heard it,
Speaker 2: but I had never ever had that thought. And then
Speaker 2: I went into the waiting room and there were people
Speaker 2: out there, and I looked at people and I thought,
Speaker 2: she's really anxious, really scared. And I never had a
Speaker 2: feeling like that before. I mean, I would go in
Speaker 2: the waiting room and my logical brain would tell me
Speaker 2: they're waiting to know what's wrong with their car, But
Speaker 2: never ever did I look at someone and think she's
Speaker 2: really scared. And I actually I said to the person
Speaker 2: in the waiting room, I said, don't worry, it'll be okay.
Speaker 2: She kind of smiled at me. Wow, And I thought,
Speaker 2: this is like magic. This has never happened to me.
Speaker 2: And lest you think that my life was all like
Speaker 2: beauty and sweetness and light from that moment on, it
Speaker 2: wasn't that way. Because I went out and I went
Speaker 2: you know, I was a big shopping center where I live,
Speaker 2: and I'm walking through the mall and I'm just like
Speaker 2: looking around at the people, and it was not beauty
Speaker 2: and sweetness and light. It was like fear and anxiety
Speaker 2: and worry and jealousy and all these things that they're
Speaker 2: all coming at me from a million different directions. It's
Speaker 2: just like this wave of emotion and I thought, holy shit,
Speaker 2: I thought, what kind of fool was I now? And
Speaker 2: you know, as I went through life, that faded away.
Speaker 1: Luckily, sorry that meaning.
Speaker 2: My ability to see those emotions in people dissipated over
Speaker 2: the next few weeks. But while it lasted, it was overwhelming.
Speaker 2: It was like devastating to me.
Speaker 1: I mean, I so appreciate the complexity you describe, and
Speaker 1: from what I understand, while the very acute results of
Speaker 1: the TMS have dissipated over time, there is this element
Speaker 1: of you can't unsee what you've seen, right, and you
Speaker 1: are you are altered permanently from this experience in terms
Speaker 1: of your perspective of the world.
Speaker 2: And I also felt like my dream was kind of shattered,
Speaker 2: this idea that if I could see these things in
Speaker 2: other people, my life would be beautiful. And so now
Speaker 2: we are thirteen years since that TMS experience, and I guess,
Speaker 2: I guess I never imagined that just a brief experience
Speaker 2: like that could change your life forever. The way I
Speaker 2: guess I could explain it, and maybe it's an explanation,
Speaker 2: is if you're a color blind person and you grow
Speaker 2: up and you imagine people are talking about the beautiful
Speaker 2: blue sky, pretty red shirt, nice green grass, and of
Speaker 2: course to you, it's all shades of gray, and you
Speaker 2: start thinking it's just bullshit, and it just makes you angry.
Speaker 2: This blue, yellow, green talk. It's all the same. You
Speaker 2: know it. You know the evidence of your eyes. And
Speaker 2: you go into some doctor's office and they do something
Speaker 2: to you, and you walk out and you see color
Speaker 2: and you realize, holy shit, these people were telling the truth.
Speaker 2: It's really what it is. And then the ability fades away. Well,
Speaker 2: even if you go back to see in a black
Speaker 2: and white world, you are never going to forget that
Speaker 2: all those other people are seeing yellows and blues and greens,
Speaker 2: and you're going to try your hardest to discern what
Speaker 2: shade of gray is yellow and what's green? And can
Speaker 2: I determine green by context? You know that's a lawn,
Speaker 2: so that must be green. And you're going to always
Speaker 2: be changed. I don't know what to say except that
Speaker 2: I'm I'm changed all these years later. Yeah, and the
Speaker 2: insight I think has been empowering. But it was a really,
Speaker 2: really rough rive. Yeah, so it was a very mixed bag.
Speaker 2: It was a very mixed thing.
Speaker 1: That leads me to another question I have for you, John,
Speaker 1: which is, you know, you talk about this experience in
Speaker 1: the mall where you're inundated with emotion, and what you're
Speaker 1: realizing is your experience being on the autism spectrum wasn't
Speaker 1: shielding you all the good parts.
Speaker 2: It was shielding me from those bad parts.
Speaker 1: It was shielding you from bad parts too.
Speaker 2: Yes, being autistic definitely shielded me from that. It made
Speaker 2: me different, but it didn't make me worse. Because those
Speaker 2: people who have to live with that, you know, being
Speaker 2: a logical person, they can't be logical people because there's
Speaker 2: so much emotion around them. I don't have that around me,
Speaker 2: So I am logical, and you know, logic works in
Speaker 2: a lot of life. You ought to be a programmer, boy,
Speaker 2: there's nothing better than logic.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I'm wondering what impact the TMS had on your
Speaker 1: relationship with your wife.
Speaker 2: Well, ultimately, my wife was living with significant depression, and
Speaker 2: because I was largely blind to the emotional cues from others,
Speaker 2: her included, she was just what she was, you know,
Speaker 2: and she could say like, I can't get out of
Speaker 2: bed today, I'm too depressed. And I would say, Okay,
Speaker 2: I'm going to work and I'm just going to and
Speaker 2: that worked, you know, worked for us. But when I
Speaker 2: saw those feelings after the TMS, I saw her sadness
Speaker 2: and misery, and I thought, I must have done this
Speaker 2: to her. We're married. I must be the cause of
Speaker 2: her misery. That's just just horrible, and it really shattered
Speaker 2: my marriage. I thought, you know, I'm like killing her
Speaker 2: and her depression is killing me, and we're horrible for
Speaker 2: each other. And I got to leave, and you know,
Speaker 2: and I guess I'm very sad for that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, it's a poignant illustration of the complexities
Speaker 1: that come along with picking up on human emotions. Knowing
Speaker 1: what you know. Now, if you could go back in time,
Speaker 1: would you still go through with the TMS experiments, if you.
Speaker 2: Put me in the shoes of the post TMS John Robison,
Speaker 2: where I had experienced what it would be like to
Speaker 2: see and feel emotion, and I saw and felt what
Speaker 2: it's like to read emotions. And yes, that's a powerful thing,
Speaker 2: and yes that could help me engage with people who
Speaker 2: don't know me. But it devastated my logical brain. In
Speaker 2: it upended the world as I had known it. I
Speaker 2: am not a broken version of some someone else's normal.
Speaker 2: I am my normal. Autistic people maybe different from non
Speaker 2: autistic people, but we are not broken. And that's what's
Speaker 2: been brought home to me. I think through this TMS
Speaker 2: and now that I know that, do I need to
Speaker 2: learn it again? No, that's a lifelong lesson, and that's
Speaker 2: a gift the TMS gave me that I truly understand
Speaker 2: that as an autistic person, I am my normal, and
Speaker 2: I'm a good normal, as much a complete, correct person
Speaker 2: as anyone else.
Speaker 1: Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed my
Speaker 1: conversation with John Elder Robison, I recommend you check out
Speaker 1: another episode that features rock climber Tommy Caldwell. A near
Speaker 1: death experience unlocked a completely new state of mind for
Speaker 1: Tommy and propelled him to become the greatest big wall
Speaker 1: climber in the world. A Slight Change of Plans is created,
Speaker 1: written and executive produced by me Maya Schunker. The Slight
Speaker 1: Changed family includes Tyler Green our senior producer, Jen Guerra
Speaker 1: our senior editor, Then Tolliday our sound engineer, Emily Rosstek
Speaker 1: our associate producer, and Neil Lavelle, our executive producer, Louis
Speaker 1: Scara wrote our theme song and Ginger Smith helped arrange
Speaker 1: the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is the production
Speaker 1: of Pushkin Industries, so big thanks to everyone there, including
Speaker 1: Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg, Lee tal Mallatt and Heather Fame
Speaker 1: and of course a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee.
Speaker 1: You can follow A Slight Change of Plans on Instagram
Speaker 1: at doctor Maya Schunker see you next week.
Speaker 2: And then the neurologist comes in to see me and
Speaker 2: he says, he says, what day is it? And what's
Speaker 2: your name? And who's the president? He asked me some
Speaker 2: questions I don't know the answer to. He says something like, well,
Speaker 2: who's our senator? I don't know who our senator.
Speaker 1: I didn't know before you. Yeah, I would totally a
Speaker 1: bid you John.
Speaker 2: And he says, Okay, I get it. You haven't forgotten it.
Speaker 2: You never knew it.