Review: Switched On by John Elder Robison

Back in April, I had the pleasure of attending an event where John Elder Robison was promoting this book, and I finally got around to reading it.

Robison is autistic. His first book, Look Me In The Eye, which I read and reviewed earlier, was a memoir about growing up un-diagnosed. Switched On, his latest, is about Robison's involvement in a research trial to try and stimulate emotional awareness in individuals with autism through a process called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS for short), and it's results.

The science behind TMS is hard to explain in a blog post. Parts of the book where it's described mention lasers,  magnets, neuroscience, and other things that went way over my head. The procedure itself involved about a dozen sessions of Robison having parts of his brain stimulated non-invasively. Before and after each session, he was required to do simple exercises where he would identify words, objects, and people's facial expressions to gage his emotional responses and understanding.

After one of the first sessions, Robison was driving home, listening to an old tape of music. He had heard these songs many times before. Robison writes that he could identify the basic emotion of the song (happy, sad, etc.), but he was always more in tune with the instruments and equipment than the lyrics and feeling of the music. But, on this one night, Robison says that the music "came alive."  The emotion of the music finally hit him. It was so powerful, he was brought to tears and had to pull over.

The book continues with Robison's new-found emotional awakening. For a while, he describes a heightened awareness like being able to "see inside people's souls." This would ware off, but his better understanding of people's emotions would remain.

Robison chronicles effects of the TMS sessions, both good and bad. On the upside, several Robison's friends and customers noticed an improvement in his social skills, and an increased attentiveness when listening to people. On the negative side, Robison writes about how his increased awareness of emotions opened his eyes to his then-wife's chronic depression and started to drag him down.

Switched On ends with a fairly lengthy, but thought-provoking discussion about some of the ethical concerns that could potentially come from procedures like TMS. Robison writes a lot about cures for autism and other disabilities and conditions and whether those afflictions should be cured, and brings up the idea of difference and uniqueness in people like himself, using his own proficiency with electronics as an example, and whether or not gaining social awareness but losing those unique qualities is a worthwhile trade-off.

Despite being way too technical and science-heavy in parts, Switched On was still a pretty good book to read and, like Look Me In The Eye, I would highly recommend it.

Cheers!