Imagine hearing the words of a song but not feeling the passion that lies within. Imagine living for years with someone in need and not being able to sense their sadness. Imagine your world turned upside down Like so many others, John Elder Robison was born with Asperger's. Over the years, he misread others' emotions or missed them altogether. Yet he'd also married, raised a son and become a successful businessman, designing sound systems for rock bands, creating robot games for Milton Bradley and building a car business. Then, at the age of fifty, he became a participant in a major study that would use an experimental brain therapy in an effort to understand and address the issues at the heart of autism. Initially, the results are startling. John's world is shaken by a previously unknown level of emotional awareness. But over the weeks that follow he struggles with the very real possibility that choosing to diminish his ';disability' might also mean sacrificing his unique gifts and maybe even some of his closest relationships.
"For the first time in my life, I learned what it was really like to truly "know” other people's feelings. At a stroke I went from oblivious to insightful, and my life was forever changed. It was as if I'd been experiencing the world in black and white all my life, and suddenly I could see everything - and particularly other people - in brilliant beautiful color.”
Six years ago, John Elder Robison published Look Me In the Eye, his memoir about growing up with Asperger's. Now he tells the remarkable story of how he met Dr Alvaro Pascual-Leone, a Harvard neuroscientist who proposed that John's emotional intelligence wasn't so much absent as it was dormant, and that by animating the appropriate neural pathways with powerful electromagnets he might be able to awaken this part of his brain. So began a five-and-a-half year journey in which John gave himself up as a guinea pig to some of the world's top brain researchers in an effort to understand and fix the deficits of emotional intelligence that lie at the heart of autism.
John experiences the benefits and pitfalls, the joy and melancholy, of being able to feel in response to things that happen to him and his loved ones. A real-life Flowers For Algernon with a happy ending, Switched On goes on the trail of the revolutionary science that has the potential to transform millions of emotionally circumscribed lives.
