Martha and I went downstairs to an open-air Starbucks and sat outside sipping tea. I ate a cookie. My head was still roiling from my time in the lab, and I sat quietly, watching the activity around us. The scene seemed pretty normal at first. Then an ambulance pulled up alongside the kerb—maybe twenty feet away—and briefly turned on its siren. Barely a beat passed before I opened my mouth and howled right back at it, at full volume. Martha looked at me strangely, and I wondered why. At that moment, singing along with the ambulance seemed like a completely natural thing to do, and I gave a fine, melodic cry if I do say so myself. The others in the café didn’t seem to agree, but fortunately, no one called security. I had learned what I thought was a likely explanation for that a few weeks earlier, from Kathy Dyer, a speech pathology professor in the autism programme back at the Elms. We were talking about how my autistic eccentricity was perceived, first while I was a child and now as an adult.
“There’s this thing called the competence-deviance hypothesis,” she explained. “It says that the more competent an individual is in his field—the more respected he is in the community—the more his eccentric behaviour will be tolerated by others.
“But the opposite is true for young people, because they have not done anything to earn respect in a community. So when they do weird things they are treated like dangerous animals and hustled into cages. It seems unfair when older, respectable members of the community do stuff that’s even stranger and people just shake their heads and smile at their eccentricity.” I’d been aware of the need to appear responsible and respectable ever since my book came out, so I was wearing a nice button-down shirt and I was clean-shaven and showered to boot. The way I looked, I might have been a doctor or Harvard professor. If I’d been sporting a scruffy beard, a leather biker jacket, and a motorcycle chain around my neck, the patrons might have reacted a bit differently.
At least that’s how I explained what had happened to Alvaro and Shirley a couple of hours later when Martha told them the story. In the short time that had passed, the whole incident had faded from my memory, and I wouldn’t even have thought to mention it to the researchers if she had not brought it up. “You might not have made much of it, but I’m sure everyone else in Starbucks still remembers,” Martha assured me. “The whole place was looking at you—a great big guy with his head thrown back, howling along with the ambulance. You were like a wolf, singing for his pack.”
With a bit of trepidation I smiled at her description, but then I realized it wasn’t a compliment. I felt that cringe coming on—the one I get when I realize that I’ve really screwed up and it might be too late to do anything about it. Alvaro and Shirley didn’t say much in response. The strangest part was, the howl had meant no more to me than an automatic “excuse me” when making my way out of an elevator. That’s why I hadn’t remembered it. Who knows what I might have done had Martha not been there to look askance at me.
Was that an effect of the raising up Shirley had referred to, when she described the day’s two sessions? That sounded like an appealing explanation, because it meant that something in the TMS had caused the howl, and I wasn’t just crazy.
Shirley’s response was to do more TMS, in a nearby area. This time I had to clench my jaw to keep my teeth from clattering together, which was somewhat uncomfortable. The tests I did before and after the stimulations explored prosody—the way my voice may have changed in response to stimulation.
I repeated phrases like:
“Mike lives at thirty-four Alford Street, in a green house.”
“John works with roses, in the O’Connor greenhouse.”
Supposedly, the lilt in our voices helps tell listeners the difference between a home that’s painted green and a glass-sided structure filled with plants. Did I do better or worse on the tests? I couldn’t tell. As we drove home, Martha paid close attention to how I sounded. She thought my voice had a bit more tonal range, and I agreed. It wasn’t quite the same as last time, though. Before, I had sensed a lift in pitch at the end of my sentences. This time, it felt like the change in tone extended throughout the entire sentence. My son noticed it too. When we got home, he said, “Your whole voice goes higher pitched now and then drops back to normal.”
It felt a little strange listening to their comments, as if I were a rat in a cage and they were observing my changes as the scientists experimented upon me. It was also interesting that I could comment on my seemingly increased tonal range, yet I wasn’t being overwhelmed by emotion anymore. What would Cubby have said had he been there for the ambulance howl? Luckily, I never spontaneously howled again, or if I did, no one else was there to point it out. That night I lay in bed pondering the day’s events—particularly singing along with the ambulance. Why did I do that, and what might it mean? I felt like a kid again, searching for a way to explain my outlandish behaviour to the adults around me.
Your sense of inhibition must have been suppressed. That’s what the voice in my head told me, and it may have been right. I wondered if my singing out was an example of the mirroring I’d been learning about. Resolving to look into that the next morning, I drifted off to sleep.
The next day, some additional reading about mirroring and mirror neurons made clear how far off base my ideas had been, at least with respect to published science. Mirroring in human beings begins when an infant looks at Mom’s face, reads the signals, and smiles back, learning to feel Mom’s happiness. Normal humans do not mirror machines—ambulances or otherwise. You’re not normal, the voice in my mind reminded me. I wondered if that voice was right. Maybe mirroring was different in me, because I’m autistic. I sing for ambulances.
As nutty as it sounded, I thought there might be something to it. After it was first observed in monkeys, mirroring was then found in a bunch of other animals and, of course, in humans. Neuroscientists have identified the particular brain cells that do this job, and there is a lot of debate over the way they may be implicated in autism. Some researchers think mirror neurons are missing in autistic people, while others suggest they are broken. And then there is a third contingent of scientists who think the whole mirroring theory is wrong and that autistic social blindness has some other root cause.
It’s a frustrating thing to try to understand, because the experts have such disparate and mutually exclusive views. There are a few scientists who assume autistic people lack empathy and emotion completely. That sure doesn’t describe me! When I think back to how lonely I felt as a boy, it’s hard to believe that any person could feel more sad or more alone. I’m not sure the researchers who hold this belief really know what they’re talking about or know autistic people. I have a hard time believing that I am the exception to the rule and that other autistic people are emotionless automatons.
Then there are the scientists—and this seems to be the majority—who feel that autistic people have the same emotions as everyone else but we don’t have the expected empathy reactions to things that happen around us. That’s true in my own life, and I’ve seen it in others’ too.
When I get upset, I’m sure my distress is as intense as yours or anyone else’s. Now imagine that you and I are crossing the street, and you trip and scrape your knee. A non-autistic person might “feel” your pain, even though nothing has hurt her. Even though I don’t always share your pain, I’m fully aware that you fell, and I’m ready to respond. A typical person might offer a sympathetic kind of sound, while I’m more likely to offer a truly practical response, like “Get up!” That may sound cold and uncaring, but it’s not. The best anyone could do is to get you out of the street before a car runs you over.
So I might not have the expected response when you trip and fall, but you could call me on the phone and tell me about some bad medical test results, and I might get more emotional than anyone else you know. When that happens, anyone can see that the ability to have the feelings is there inside me, it’s just that my reactions are not triggered in the same ways. And from what I can see, lots of other autistic peo
ple are the same. The question is why it happens.
When I asked Lindsay, she said, “That was the subject of my master’s thesis. We studied the nervous system reaction by measuring how much kids sweated when they saw someone else get hurt. That’s one measure of empathy. When we compared autistic and typically developing children, they had equal physiological responses—all the kids sweated the same amount in response to stress—but their visible behavioural responses were strikingly different.
“So their nervous systems reacted the same way, but you couldn’t tell by watching them. There was no visible sign that the autistic kids felt anything at all, even though their clammy skin said they did.
“I proposed that the connection between the visual and emotional centres was intact, but that there was some breakdown between the emotional centres and frontal regions of the brain that help produce a behavioural response to what you see. So the autistic kids felt the same things but didn’t show it. That was how I came upon mirror neurons and hypothesized that they may be the key to this breakdown in empathy.
“And by the way,” she added, “no one was really hurt in the study. We showed the kids video clips of actors pretending to poke themselves with needles, and they responded just like it was real.”
I understood Lindsay’s explanation, but the more I read about what she had called internal wiring differences in folks with autism, the less I liked what I saw. Most descriptions seemed devoid of hope for change, and it was hard for me to accept that there was nothing to be done. But my best course of action was to think positively. What if my mirroring system wasn’t hopelessly broken? Alvaro had suggested that, and Lindsay was optimistic that TMS could help change my wiring. Perhaps my mirror system worked but mirrored something besides faces. Who’s to say that the only kind of mirroring is between two humans? With my close connection to electronics and machines, wouldn’t it make sense that I might watch a machine or device and imitate it in my mind? People always said I had extraordinary insight into machines. Maybe I was using brain areas that most folks use to understand Mom to understand a Jaguar V12 or Fender Twin guitar amplifier.
When I worked in music, I always felt as if I sensed the emotions of the equipment while everyone else felt the emotions of the songs. It’s strange to ascribe feelings to pieces of electronic machinery, but that’s the only way I can describe the way they called out to me. For example, our sound system had one hundred–plus speakers, divided into groups for different parts of the sound. The biggest speakers carried the heavy bass notes, while the little compression drivers and horns delivered the highest highs—the brush of the cymbals, the snap of a snare drum, and the brilliant edge of the other instruments. Bass drivers tend to be big, slow, and forgiving. Horns are not. The sound of a horn’s compression driver changes dramatically when the amplifier behind it overloads and goes into clipping. With one hundred speakers in the system, it’s hard to recognize each one separately and pick out those cries, but I taught myself to do it.
What I’d hear was the horn squealing in pain. Ignore it, and the horn’s diaphragm would shatter. The grunts of a straining bass speaker are a bit more subtle, but the consequence of ignoring them is just as destructive. Cones rip, and amplifiers blow up. So my job was to get the best sound and clearest volume without any destruction. The audience never noticed, because I felt that pain the moment anything bad occurred, and I backed down the crossovers and turned up the limiters to protect them.
Sometimes people on the crew would remark on my ability to do that—“It’s like a part of you crawls right into the wires, like an alien in a movie”—and they’d suggest that I was part machine too. At the time, I knew nothing of autism and I assumed any sound guy could concentrate the same way. Now I know most can’t, and I see how my ability was both a gift and a difference that set me apart from everyone else.
Could another autistic person be just as likely to deploy that mirroring system to see into the hearts and minds of animals and, in doing so, become an extraordinary animalist? If such a thing were possible, that would truly be a situation where one man’s disability was another’s great gift. I liked that idea a lot. It made me think of my friend Temple Grandin, an autistic woman ten years my senior who has written very successful books about her experiences and who often describes seeing the world the way cows and other animals see it.
Unfortunately, Alvaro didn’t agree with my theory. “I don’t think that’s correct,” he said when I presented him with that notion a few days later. But there was a hint of doubt in his voice. The question had gotten him thinking.
Meanwhile, there didn’t seem to be any new long-lasting effects from this most recent round of TMS. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, but nothing happened. That made me curious to know whether the effect of the last stimulation was too subtle to be seen or if it would show itself later. “Some of the areas may have no effect,” Shirley had told me before we began. With the passage of time, my emotional fragility was lessening, but I still felt all sorts of new emotions from things I read and heard.
Cubby and Martha thought my voice had returned to normal, though I hoped they were wrong. The problem with watching for subtle differences of the sort I was experiencing is that we become accustomed to a new normal very quickly, and that blinds us to little alterations.
Both of them had been quick to say, “You sound different,” but determining when and if my voice returned to normal was quite a bit harder. Interestingly, I wasn’t reading body language or expressions any better—at least not that I could tell. Maybe that meant the scientists had missed the mark with me, but I kept my mouth shut because the other changes I was seeing were nothing short of remarkable. Even in my self-centred and oblivious state, I knew better than to insult them. They had done these experiments to see if I would change, and I had. The only question was where it would lead.
By this time, there were several different TMS studies going on in Alvaro’s lab, with teenage and adult volunteers. But when I asked the researchers about them, all I got was that enigmatic smile. “We can’t tell you about the others,” Shirley would say in her French accent.
A Family Affair
MY FAMILY’S REACTIONS to the way I was changing ran the gamut. Martha was worried. Little Bear remained sceptical. My mother was fascinated. And Cubby’s response morphed from indifference into curiosity. Now he wanted to get involved and decided to join the programme as a research subject.
Their differing reactions reflected the personalities of the members of our little family. Martha was depressed, so she tended to focus on the potential pitfalls in any situation. Despite that, she’d always trusted me to forge ahead. But that didn’t seem to apply to the present situation. TMS seemed to make her nervous no matter what I said. “You hope it turns out great,” she told me, “but you really don’t know.”
Like many ex-spouses, Little Bear and I had a somewhat combative relationship. We’d shared many interests when we were younger, and we still had a lot in common. It hadn’t seemed that way when we first got divorced, but I’d come to see it with the passage of time. Our greatest interest of all was our son, Cubby. Yet our once-intertwined lives had become quite divergent, and the degree to which we’d grown apart was at the root of our divorce. Both of us had escaped violent, crazy parents—and we’d seen the inability of psychiatry to fix our childhood families. That made us both dubious of any possibility of changing the brain. She had watched the failure of psychiatry with my parents, and she had shared my terror when they were each institutionalized during junior high school. Rightly or wrongly, she saw TMS as “psychiatry on steroids.”
But I was on the inside, and the changes I felt seemed more real than any I’d known before. I told that to my ex-wife, but she was not ready to accept it. Try as we might, neither of us fully understood where the other was at, and she greeted any news of mental experimentation with great scepticism.
My son wasn’t scared or sceptical. He was just in his own world, one wh
ere chemistry and physics were front and centre. I’d tell him what was happening in the brain lab, and he’d respond with his latest discoveries in science. With their collective absence of enthusiasm I realized I was on my own with this TMS business. I’d done other things alone—like genealogy research—and they had worked out. I trusted myself to stay the course. Just four months had passed since that night Lindsay approached me at Elms College. It felt like much longer, so much had changed. My family didn’t really share my feeling of incipient transformation, but they did see that something was happening.
That was what ultimately drew my son into the study, and I was really happy to have him join me. We had always known Cubby was a lot like me, and that was confirmed in a sort of elemental way when he was officially diagnosed with Asperger’s that spring. With his new diagnosis, Cubby qualified to join the study, and he did so at the end of April. He’d gotten into some trouble two months before, and the TMS study seemed like a good way for him to learn about himself while providing a distraction from his current lot in life. It turned out that my son had felt the same sense of social isolation that I had known, even though he was far more successful socially. I hadn’t really grasped that until we spoke with the psychologist together at the time of his diagnosis. Like me, he was willing to try anything that might help him connect a bit better, even though his main focus remained his science experiments.
Cubby’s fascination with chemistry started out with model rocketry, which led to making rocket engines, which led to the pure chemistry of energetic materials—explosives. He would mix up experimental compounds and set them off in the woods behind the house or in the empty space of the old landfill in town. It seemed harmless enough to me. When I was an engineer for KISS in my early twenties, we’d fired off enough pyrotechnics for a medium-sized city’s July 4 celebration at every show. That always seemed like good fun, and good showmanship. No one got hurt and the crowds loved the spectacle, and most of us were never arrested—at least not on explosives charges! All that happened long before Cubby was born, but it was inevitable that he’d hear about his dad’s colourful past. And of course I wasn’t the only one in the family with a pyrotechnic background. I may have designed the rocket guitars for KISS, but it was Cubby’s mom—Little Bear—who assembled them with me. So he inherited that interest from both sides of the family.
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