On a recent drive I was listening to an interview with John Elder Robinson, an Aspergers’ sufferer, who was discussing his new memoir, “Switched On.” As anyone who has met people on the Asperger’s’ spectrum knows, they can be disconcertingly deficient in interpersonal skills, unable to read other people or pick up social cues.
On the other hand, many also have unusual perceptual or neurological gifts, a heightened ability to concentrate, for instance. Robinson, for example, has an acute sensitivity to minute differences in sound and has devised several acoustic inventions.
“Switched On” describes his volunteering to take part in an experiment using TMS, transcranial magnetic stimulation. It provides a non-invasive way to stimulate minute areas of the cortex. Robinson was told his participation might help researchers better understand the mechanisms behind Asperger’s, and could possibly improve, temporarily, his ability to understand the emotions of others. He leapt at the chance.
In his first experience, there were a few sensory effects which sound a bit like those described by users of psychoactive drugs – heightened awareness of colors, textures, the world made more vivid. But in his next bout of TMS his wish came true. He achieved the ability for the first time in his life to look people in the eye and sense more clearly their feelings and moods. Things that had forever been hidden to him were revealed.
Be careful what you wish for. Robinson found the experience shattering in an unexpected way. In retrospect, he decided he had created a sort of fiction for himself to replace the information he was not receiving from others. In his mind, most people around him were kind, caring, benign. But being switched on transported him from a kind of heaven to the circles of hell. Suddenly, he realized he was surrounded by people who were afraid, anxious, sad, angry, ashamed, avaricious, envious and hostile.
Though the effects were transitory, the shock lingered on. It took him several years to come to terms with a world of roiling emotions that had been revealed to him by a technique out of science-fiction, tweaking his brain with magnetic rays. It sounds like Mesmer or Svengali at work, or Dr Henry Jekyll. This is obviously fascinating stuff, but I was immediately amused to realize that indeed fiction, which is often ahead of reality, had already described something like the phenomenon he had lived through.
L. Frank Baum, the author of the Oz books, also wrote a lesser known fiction called “The Master Key: An Electrical Fairy Tale.” The volume I read as a child had belonged to my uncle as a kid in the 1920s and I loved it when I was young too. It was published in 1901 when Edison and Tesla were demi-gods, revealing fresh electrical wonders daily.
Rob, our hero, is a boy who loves to tinker with electricity and inadvertently strikes the Master Key which summons forth the Demon of Electricity. Like the genie from the bottle he is required to present anyone who discovers the key with a series of gifts. The Demon is miffed. He was hoping for an Edison, he got a kid who did it by accident. But he is compelled to do his duty The gifts include a wrist watch which allows the wearer to nullify gravity and fly around the earth, a little tube that resembles a kazoo and works like a Taser to stun one’s enemies, and so on.
Robinson’s experience called to mind another of the Demon’s gifts, a set of spectacles that allowed the wearer to see blazoned on each person’s forehead a shorthand description of their character – kind, greedy, evil, untrustworthy. Just what Robinson had discovered when the veil of Asperger’s was lifted by magnetism. Rob is saved by the spectacles from a fellow he was about to trust who they identified as wicked, but he’s also smart enough to remove the specs before looking at his own family.
Robinson’s story also recalled the delightful winner of the Pulitzer for drama in 1945, “Harvey.” It concerns a harmless, bar fly, Elwood P. Dowd, who is perfectly amiable except for the fact that his best friend is an invisible six-foot, three-inch rabbit with whom he carries on animated conversations. This is socially awkward for his conventional sister with whom he lives.
She decides to have him treated with a miracle psycho-drug which will “normalize” him. After driving with him to a clinic, she waits with the cab driver who will drive them back home after Elwood gets the shot. The cabbie tells her he’s brought people out to the clinic for years. On the way there they’re relaxed and happy.
“They talk to me; sometimes we stop and watch the sunsets…We have a swell time. And I always get a big tip. But afterwards, oh oh.” His sister is suddenly worried. What does he mean, oh oh?
“They crab, crab, crab. They yell at me. Watch the lights. Watch the brakes, Watch the intersections. They scream at me to hurry….It’s no fun. And no tips… After this he’ll be a perfectly normal human being. And you know what stinkers they are!”
In an era of TMS and gene-splicing, dreams of creating human-machines and perfecting the flawed clay of actual men, perhaps we had better think long and hard. Not all defects are bad. And not all improvements are for the better. And the writers of silly fictions, perhaps themselves a little off-center, are often quicker to sound the alarm than sober scholars.