Switched On

by John Elder Robison

  Strangely, I felt . . . free. The roar of the cooling fan was loud in the beginning, but after a moment, the sound faded into the background. The continuing snap of the machine told me something was happening, though I couldn’t feel it. In fact, I didn’t feel anything other than my facial twitching. My anxiety had melted away, but what replaced it ran much deeper. It was as if I’d stopped thinking, and time seemed to stand still. My head was in a neutral sort of state; I had no desire to do anything but gaze idly at the clock on the wall. I wasn’t even reflecting on my newfound tranquillity, even though it was a very unusual state of mind for me. As the clock’s second hand moved in time to the pulses in my head, my world got smaller and smaller.

  My ability to maintain a conscious stream of thought had slipped away, leaving me in a sort of mental standby.

  More than once, I tried to count the pulses, but I didn’t get far. One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . and that was it. I didn’t make a conscious decision to quit counting; the numbers just kind of ran down and stopped. My internal dialogue—the conversation that runs in our minds whenever we are awake—was somehow subdued.

  The minutes passed and then, with one last pop, it was done. Half an hour had elapsed. I’d never have known but for the clock on the wall.

  Looking around, I shook my head and slowly recovered my wits. Lindsay and Shirley were both watching me closely. A moment passed, and Shirley said, “Okay, let’s do those exercises again!”

  The list of objects wasn’t as long as it had been the first time, and naming them was a snap. A moment later I realized there might be more than one possible answer to the things they showed me. Was it a dog, an animal, or a German shepherd? Was there one correct answer or many? Still, try as I might, I couldn’t tell if I’d done better or worse than at the first session. As far as I could see, I was exactly the same as I’d been before, just a little bit stunned. What was I thinking? Had I really expected to sit down in that chair and stand up a different person?

  Gradually, however, I began to sense that something was different. It took a while for the insight to settle in, because I felt as though I were moving through a dense mental fog. My thoughts were clear, but I had to be very deliberate in forming them, and I had to be careful uttering words and phrases. Not that I stumbled—I don’t think I did—it was more that I felt I had to take more care, sort of like getting interviewed by the police when you’ve been drinking, or taking a mental walk barefoot over sharp gravel.

  The scientists perhaps sensed that something was amiss. “Are you feeling okay?” Shirley asked, startling me. She repeated what she’d said before—she expected the immediate effects of this stimulation to last about fifteen minutes, and she watched me closely during that time. For what, I wasn’t sure, because that time was lost to me. Gradually the mental fog faded away.

  At the half-hour mark I thought I was back to normal. That meant it was time for the neurologist and his exit exam. This was something they had to do after every session, to ensure I was fit to return to the outside world. What was the alternative if they decided I was not? I pictured a locked cage in the basement. Perhaps it was one of those answers best left unlearned.

  “What day is it?” he asked me, while watching discreetly for tics or twitches.

  “Monday,” I replied, with a touch of annoyance. Did they think I’d lost my mind?

  And therein lay the problem, for it was actually Tuesday evening, as the neurologist revealed to me a moment later. “Huunh,” I said in response. He looked at me, and I looked at him. I couldn’t generally read the messages in other people’s eyes back then, but I still watched for signs that he might be about to send me down to that basement ward for “observation.” Then the moment passed. He let it go and asked me the date.

  Son of a bitch, I thought. This guy has hard questions tonight. Venturing a guess, I said, “The eighth?” I’m naturally ignorant about these things, I thought. It’s not the TMS. And I vowed to memorize the day and date before our next encounter. I didn’t want to end up committed for observation over garden-variety ignorance.

  “Where are we?”

  “What county is this?”

  “What floor are we on?”

  “What season is it?”

  The neurologist’s questions seemed to fly past, and by the time we finished I was sure I’d been way more successful on his test than on the face recognition, calendar details notwithstanding. I wondered how the other patients had fared in comparison. Was I average, dumb, or exceptional? At least the neurologist had decided I was alert enough to be sent on my way. Once in my car I wove a path out of the hospital’s parking garage and accelerated onto the highway for the long ride home.

  The first call I made was to Dave, who’d been anxious to hear what had transpired. At that moment I didn’t have much to report, beyond the mechanics of the experience. I was pleased to have made it out in one piece, unsure of what had happened, but seemingly okay. But as our conversation progressed I was struck by the realization that I sounded different.

  Anyone who’s sucked helium out of a birthday party balloon knows what it’s like—there’s no mistaking it. You take the sound of your own voice for granted, until it comes out sounding like someone else. The change here wasn’t as drastic as helium breath, but it was noticeable, though I could not put my finger on exactly what was changed. I tried to unravel that mystery as I spoke, and gradually it hit me. Was it possible? My voice contained a tiny bit more emotional range, expressed as a rising or falling note to convey expression at the ends of sentences.

  That was it. I realized I was speaking with more of what speech therapists call prosody in my sentences. But almost as soon as it hit me, the idea seemed crazy. Could that be real? I asked myself. And what does it mean? Am I feeling more and expressing it in the same way or feeling the same and expressing it more? Or is it just my imagination . . . ? I was so confused that I had to hang up the phone and be alone with my thoughts.

  The scientists hadn’t remarked on any change in my voice, and I wondered if they had noticed. But I forgot all about prosody a moment later when I plugged in my iPod and turned on some old music. That’s when it hit me, like the onset of some hallucinogenic experience.

  The first revelation came as I played the old Tavares recording, a live show from twenty-some years ago. It was an old bootleg, made off the mixing console during a small performance. It may not have had the sound quality of a studio production but those old songs brought back memories for me.

  It’s funny . . . I became known in the music world for creating wild effects for high-powered rock and rollers like KISS, but I was never a fan of that kind of music. I remember sitting backstage one night long ago with Peter Frampton and his long time bass player, John Regan. Even though John had played with KISS’s Ace Frehley and other rockers, he shared my feelings about heavy metal. “I like music that’s more melodic,” he told me, “with more sophisticated arrangements.” I never forgot those words because I felt the same way.

  Back in the seventies, soul groups were the epitome of smooth and melodic, and their onstage choreography was beautiful to behold. Of all the shows I worked, those were the ones I loved best.

  I’d played the Tavares songs a thousand times before and heard nothing but an old bootleg tape. This time, everything was different. Every little nuance of the recording held meaning for me. My range of sonic comprehension had just widened a thousandfold. Whatever they did with that brain stimulator had unlocked something very powerful in the way I heard music.

  The previous day I’d have heard a slight hiss in the recording and thought nothing of it. Now I could recognize the faint sounds of Chubby’s microphone cable dragging as he walked across the stage. Each of the Tavares brothers sang in turn, and I smiled as I heard them sing together in beautiful counterpoint, always in perfect unison, even in the most complex harmonies. Thirty years ago—when listening was part of the job—I’d paid close attention to see if they were all on key an
d everyone sounded as they should. Nowadays I just enjoyed the songs and the memories they stirred. But I quickly realized something was profoundly different tonight. I was not just hearing more detail, I was feeling more too. All those years spent working in music, I had never felt I was sharing in the singer’s emotions. Now, thanks to TMS, I was. Did other non-autistic people experience music in this way? I cannot know, but for me it was an unforgettable experience.

  Perhaps this new way of hearing music meant even more to me because of my autism and my lifelong inability to feel what people say.

  The Tavares set finished, and my memory followed the next song as it began. Things I’d forgotten a lifetime ago played back as if I were watching a movie.

  In 1978, the Canadian songwriter Dan Hill had a number-one hit with “Sometimes When We Touch,” and he used our sound equipment when he toured North America with Phoebe Snow. She was an even bigger star, launched on the success of her hit “Poetry Man.” Now I found myself back on their stage, at the old Orpheum Theatre in Boston. Standing in the curtain folds, hidden on stage left, I watched Dan Hill out there alone, silhouetted by the spotlights. The melodies he played were crystal clear, and I remembered every detail of our setup that night. The Orpheum, Capitol Theatre, Vassar College . . . I’d carried their gear all over the Northeast, filled with pride that my amplifiers were delivering their music to the crowds.

  As the next song played, the musicians and the venue changed and I heard Diana Ross hit a triangle. As it rang out I saw her in my mind, standing at the front of a different stage, holding the chime up to the microphone. The metal rang with a beautiful purity, and I felt the joy and energy in her voice. She wore the most dazzling sequin dresses at those shows.

  My mind wandered to other times, when Diana was dating Gene Simmons, the bass player for KISS. She would stand silently beside me backstage as we watched him play from the shelter of the speaker cabinets. As we stood there I would see the waves of music, as if there were an oscilloscope inside my head. The songs themselves had become tangible things. I could reach into them and hold the individual bits and pieces—melody, rhythm, instrumentals, vocals—in the hands of my imagination.

  All that came back to me now. It was like a replay of some of the most pivotal moments of my young adulthood, with a brand-new layer of emotion laid on top.

  I heard Eddie Holman announce his song “Hey There Lonely Girl,” and I could see him up onstage in some long-lost arena. At the end, I felt his joy when he shouted, “Thank you, Lord!”

  As the guys in the band talked between songs, I thought of my friends—Bobby Hartsfield and Seabreeze, the brother of blues musician Taj Mahal—standing outside my shop with their Harley-Davidson motorcycles. As I listened to the recording of the musicians, my old friends, I could see their individual expressions and understand what they were feeling. Their voices had a beautiful richness and warmth. I had always heard it but now I could feel it too.

  The filter of autistic disability—if that is what hid the emotion from me before—seemed to have vanished. I heard a smile in one voice, as I saw it on my friend’s face, and I felt its truth inside of me. All the while, the sweet music kept on playing. If only this could last forever, I thought. Then I remembered the fifteen minutes Shirley said the TMS effects would last. We were way beyond that now. What was going on? Was this the real goal of their research or some bizarre side effect? Or worse, was it my overactive imagination? Either way, my insight into what I heard felt incredibly real.

  When I listened to McFadden & Whitehead sing a song they wrote for Marvin Gaye, I focused my mind into the performance and listened to the instruments one by one, as I’d done so long ago when I was a music engineer. What had been a background melody resolved itself into notes from a keyboard. As I concentrated, I realized I was hearing several keyboards, each with its own distinct sound. The more I focused, the more clearly I recognized the individual instruments and their arrangement on the stage. There were three stacked keyboards with a fourth—a piano—to the side. Their sounds were so clear; I felt I could touch them. Just then the keyboard player was walking one hand along the Korg synthesizer while his other hand played the Hammond organ. The melody and counterpoint made me smile as I admired the masterful way he played the difficult passage.

  Was I remembering shows long past, or was I hearing and recognizing the individual instruments in a new way and then building the images in my mind? I don’t know. But I trust my ability to recognize different instruments when I hear them, and the subtle sonic cues were enough to tell me where each performer stood up there on the stage. Back in my twenties, I could not only tell a Gibson bass from a Fender bass, I could tell one Fender from another, and even what kind of strings they had. I couldn’t experience the emotions in the music, but I could hear all the parts and understand how the music was made.

  Many symphony musicians say they can do the same thing. Most people don’t hear with that level of detail, but it was that precision that had taken me to the top of the music-engineering world. As that thought entered my mind, I realized that the abilities I’d left behind had all come back to me, with added emotion.

  In Look Me in the Eye I’d written dispassionately of losing that gift, telling readers it was a good trade-off and part of growing up. And as I lost the ability to see deeply into music, I moved away from that scene. In exchange I believed that I’d developed an ability to relate to people, have conversations, and make friends, and I’d largely forgotten what that sense had been like. Now that it was back, I was overcome with emotion. After all those years I suddenly—and profoundly—valued what I had lost, and I treasured its return.

  And it was totally unexpected.

  The moment I got off the highway I called Bob and Celeste. I was so overcome by the power of the music and how it came back to me that I wanted to tell them all about it. “You have to meet me,” I said urgently. We agreed to rendezvous at a restaurant in Amherst, where I tried to explain the experience, but I could not stop crying as I struggled to put it into words.

  Once I got home I played more of my old recordings long into the night. Paul Stanley roared the introduction to “Shout It Out Loud” for KISS, and Melissa Manchester sang “Just Too Many People” at a long-ago concert by Cape Cod Bay. I continued to smile through my tears as the emotions of the songs washed over me like a warm summer rain. But as the night wore on, the magical edge started to fade. The researchers had told me that the TMS effects would only be temporary, but I so wished for this wonderful power to last forever. By five A.M., the brilliance was gone, and I fell asleep.

  My family slept through the whole thing. When I woke up the next day, my hearing seemed to have returned to normal. The crystal clarity of heightened perception I’d had the previous night was gone. Sound was no longer a portal into the hidden workings of everything around me, as it had been for those few hours the day before. The extra range I’d sensed in my own conversational voice seemed to have slipped away too. Yet I remained incredibly moved by the experience. My “normal” wasn’t quite the same as it had been two days earlier. I felt a mixture of sadness and wonder at the way it had all unfolded.

  Lindsay, Alvaro, and Shirley didn’t say much in response to my email describing what had happened. All Alvaro wrote back was “Very interesting. And unexpected.” When I asked for more, Alvaro said they didn’t have any idea why the TMS would have awakened the musical vision. It hadn’t been part of their plan.

  I began to suspect that they did not know how these experiments stimulating the mind would play out long-term either. Before we began I’d imagined that they had done what they were going to do to me many times before, so I was testing a familiar thing in a new context. Now I was discovering that wasn’t the case. If what they said was correct, the result I experienced was not only unexpected but a mystery.

  The next day I called Dave and filled him in too. After listening to my story, he again offered up his physician’s perspective. “They had an idea, a t
reatment plan, and a test to see if their idea panned out. You did that, and all this stuff you just told me about came later. So the real experience for you was from the side effects. You don’t even know if their treatment did what they hoped, because no one told you what they intended. They couldn’t have expected what happened later, because if they had, they would have kept you at the hospital to measure it. They sent you home with no idea what would happen later.” I realized he was right, and the idea left me more than a little unsettled. “I think it’s kind of neat,” he told me.

  Before we hung up, I assured him that I was still developing amazing superpowers, and even then I could practically visualize the numbers on his credit card. And that was with one session! By the third session, I would surely be able to clean out his bank account, just by thinking about it. He expressed his doubt and I said, “You just wait and see.”

  Later that day I was certain that all the effects had dissipated, and I felt a bit sad. But over the weeks that followed I came to realize that my initial judgement was premature. When I listen to music now, it does not have the mind-blowing richness of what I heard that night after TMS. But it still feels fuller and more detailed than it had seemed in years. Little details like the brush of a cymbal would have escaped my notice before TMS. Now they stand out clearly. Did TMS make me notice what was already there, or did it help me see what I’d been blind to for many years? I don’t know, but whichever it is, it’s wonderful.

  And a remnant of the emotional change seemed to linger too, making my listening deeper and richer, more full of feelings. Not only do I recognize a wider range of musical sound, I also associate what I hear with a broad range of feeling. Some of that is still with me today. The best way I can describe it is with an analogy.

  Imagine that all your life you have seen the world in black and white. Meanwhile, everyone around you describes the beauty and richness of colour. After a while, their talk of colour frustrates you. Which do you believe? Their words or the evidence before your eyes?