Another thing Cubby had inherited from me was impatience with the public school system. We’d all been frustrated by the way he struggled in school. Major challenges in reading and organization were dismissed by teachers, who called him lazy—the same thing they had said about me. The previous year, after concluding that Amherst Regional High School had nothing to teach him about advanced chemistry, Cubby had dropped out and continued studying on his own.
I’d been relieved when he immediately enrolled at nearby Holyoke Community College after studying hard to get his GED. “I can graduate faster that way,” he assured me. The speed with which he now learned math and physics was impressive. And he needed it to understand the graduate-level textbooks he was devouring. By his eighteenth birthday, the stuff he was reading was far beyond anything I had ever studied. That gave me hope that he’d found a path to a future career. I hoped he’d complete college and do better than I ever had.
Cubby didn’t have anyone to talk to about his high-level chemistry and physics questions, so he went online. He founded a discussion forum and soon had thousands of threads going on all sorts of topics. He also made some videos of his experiments and uploaded them to YouTube in the fall of 2007. That proved to be his undoing.
A few months later, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) went looking for him at Holyoke Community College. After a short discussion, Cubby led two federal agents and a state trooper to his lab, which by now was in the basement of his mother’s house.
The agents were soon joined by fifty of their friends and associates, and they spent the next few days removing the chemicals from my son’s lab. On the eve of their arrival, the ATF agent in charge said to me, “Mr. Robison, I want to assure you that the federal government has no criminal interest in your son. We just want to clean up anything dangerous. Somewhere in the United States, every year, we find a Boy Scout genius with a chemistry set, and this is your year.”*
Unfortunately, where the federal agents saw a bright kid with some dangerous chemicals, the local prosecutor saw a chance for fame and publicity—her own. She portrayed my son as a budding terrorist and herself as the community’s saviour. This was despite the fact that no one had complained about Cubby, he’d never been in trouble, and nothing was damaged by his actions.
Two months after the raid she charged him with three counts of malicious explosion—a felony that had formerly been reserved for mobsters who blow one another up with car bombs or criminals who throw grenades through windows when things turn ugly. My teenage son was facing sixty years in prison if convicted.
After the raid, Cubby and I realized that we both underestimated the response to his online activities. I’d known about the videos and had been a little bit concerned that viewers would misinterpret what he’d been doing, but even I failed to anticipate the venomous attack of the local prosecutor, who had never even spoken to my son before filing felony charges.
That showed me just how disconnected we both were from the rest of the world, and I realized that autism probably had a lot to do with that. Perhaps a more aware dad would have better understood the potential problems with Cubby’s online postings. I’d always been oblivious to much of what went on around me, which was explained when I got my own Asperger’s diagnosis. Now a psychologist had confirmed that Cubby was on the spectrum too.
Autism surely had a lot to do with Cubby’s current troubles, but I was adamant that he had really done nothing wrong. Stockpiling explosives for nefarious purposes is clearly illegal, but experimenting with household chemicals in your own backyard should not carry the threat of a prison sentence. Many of history’s greatest chemists had started out experimenting just like my son had. The prosecutor had twisted Cubby’s actions crazily out of proportion. Clearly one or the other of us was very out of touch with public mores. Only time—and a jury trial—would tell who it was.
Needless to say, the looming court date was a source of stress for all of us. The basement raid happened just as I was signing up for the TMS study, and the trial was not scheduled until the spring of 2009—over a year after the raid. I was not the only one who welcomed the distraction of the TMS study!
If brain stimulation had the potential to awaken things in me, and improve my life, perhaps it might do the same for Cubby. He was fascinated by my experience with music, and he began talking about his own senses. We listened to songs together and decided he might not be perceiving the same level of detail as I was—at least he wasn’t able to articulate it. But he was young, and he had never worked in music. Maybe he was hearing even more than I did and just didn’t know how to describe it. That’s always the problem when two individuals compare perceptions.
Cubby went through the same process of filling out consent forms and signing his life away as I had, and he got the same thorough evaluation. He spent considerable time comparing his brain MRI images to mine, as well as the results of another part of the admissions process—the IQ testing.
The institutional review board had told the science team that everyone they recruited had to have an IQ over 70. They set that threshold because they felt it was important for subjects to be able to describe their experiences, and they thought that was the minimum IQ for that ability to be assured. They gave each volunteer a long-form IQ test that took a psychologist all afternoon to administer. Each of us assembled puzzles, recognized words, and generally demonstrated our brainpower. We definitely got the hundred-dollar treatment there—no quickie Internet IQ testing for this programme! At the end Cubby insisted on knowing his score and mine, and ever since, he has proudly proclaimed himself “four points smarter than Dad.”
I had always told him he was smarter than a houseplant, and that was finally proven true. It turned out that everyone who volunteered for the study was well above the threshold. With a study population mostly drawn from the Harvard and MIT communities, our group’s average IQ was 122. Alvaro and I talked about that and what it might mean for the research. He hoped our pool of bright subjects would be able to articulate what we felt and that the analogy of using zippier computers to get the job done faster would prove apt.
Like me, Cubby was eager to start the actual TMS. He received his stimulations in random order—like everyone in the study—which means his first stimulation wasn’t necessarily the same as mine. His first couple of sessions didn’t seem to have much effect. We talked, and I watched him closely, but nothing seemed to be different. Then came the third session. After that one, we walked down to the Starbucks, the same one where I’d howled at the ambulance.
As we sat there, something about Cubby seemed different. He was watching things much more intently. After a moment he said so himself. “That’s weird! I can see all kinds of detail out there,” he announced. When I looked where he was pointing, all I saw was a street full of cars. It didn’t look like anything special to me. “Well, it does to me,” he insisted. “It’s like someone turned up the screen resolution in my eyes. I just went from low-def to HD.” After a pause, he said, “I hear more too. I can pick out each of the cars as it drives past.”
Some of the car sounds stood out for me too, but I certainly couldn’t differentiate all of them. When I said that to my son, he was quick to assure me, “I can.” Then he reminded me of those four IQ points.
That sensitivity stayed with him for a while. “There’s more colour,” he said a few days later, and he saw new and interesting patterns everywhere we went. He picked out licence plate numbers on passing cars and shapes in brickwork mortar. When I played him some old live recordings he could now tell me how many singers were in the background chorus, and he’d pick up the transitions onstage. I’d never observed that sort of sensitivity in him before.
Both of us found it very interesting that TMS expanded our range of senses, but differently. I got a better sense of hearing, and he got sharper vision. “But not sharper like getting new glasses,” he assured me. “Sharper like seeing more things.”
Yet he didn’t
describe any of the more dramatic emotions I had experienced. I wondered if he might have been feeling them but just wasn’t saying anything. “I feel a little sharper,” he said, and that was pretty much it. When I was young, there had been times when I’d done that, because I couldn’t fully articulate what I was feeling. I wondered if Cubby, at eighteen, felt the same.
* The full story was told in my 2012 memoir, Raising Cubby.
Seeing into People
THE NIGHT THAT the music came alive for me was a transcendent experience. Even though the energy in my head had dissipated by morning, I remained powerfully affected long after. If I had any doubt about the power of TMS, that one night put it to rest.
The TMS had brought back an ability I thought I’d lost forever—seeing deeply into music—and added a layer of emotional understanding that I’d never known before. The combination left me a nervous wreck—crying at ordinary news stories—but it had also showed me a beauty in art and sound that I’d never known before. The researchers all agreed that my basic ability to “see” music had been inside me all along—I’d used it years before and described it in my writing—and somehow the TMS had set it free. But they didn’t know how that had happened or what might come next as a result. It might even have surprised them more than it surprised me.
Alvaro agreed that the music experience was wonderful, but he said it could just as easily have been awful. He had cautioned me about that in the beginning. He’d been very careful to develop his theories about where to aim the TMS for an intended effect, but there was no way to anticipate what direction my thoughts would go in when the energy arrived.
I asked him what he meant by “awful.” Would I see monsters and demons? Would I want to hurl myself off the side of a cliff? “I don’t think anything that dramatic would have happened,” he reassured me. “You felt elation and wonder. But what if you’d felt worry, fear, and anxiety instead?”
The idea that TMS after-effects might be the stuff of nightmares was very disturbing. His suggestion that any unexpected outcome was just as likely to be bad as good was particularly worrisome because his reasoning made sense to me. The emotions I tended to feel most strongly in life were the bad ones, the things that brought me down. I had often wondered if that could be an evolutionary trait. Failing to sense a good thing might keep us from a momentary joy, but failing to sense a bad thing could get us killed.
Could there be a mechanism in my brain that tilted the odds in my favour? That had occurred to me earlier, in the context of my career. Why had I been successful while other autistics who tested better than I did struggled to find jobs?
To my amazement, Alvaro did not dismiss that as a crazy notion. His answer surprised me.
“You’ve done a lot of things in your life. Most of the time, you educated yourself and made your own way. And you succeeded. Most of us are happy to succeed at one thing. But you succeeded in music, in electronic games, in car mechanics, in photography, and now in book writing. If you were just relying on luck, half or even all those things would be failures. You thought you failed at everything at the time, but you hadn’t. You didn’t succeed randomly. You succeeded because the engineering, the technology, the writing were . . . correct. You did it right, without any formal training. Why did things work out for you so many times? Who knows? Maybe there is something in your mind that guides you to choices that will work. We just don’t know.”
Dr. Nancy Minshew said something similar when I spoke to her some months later at an autism science conference. “Some people just make the right choice consistently. It’s not luck, and no one knows how to define it. We should study the brains of successful autistics to see if we can find the answer.” The notion that I was successful was flattering, though I didn’t see myself consciously following any kind of invisible optimal path. All I did was complete the work at hand as best I could. Was there something to be learned from that?
Many people do the same thing, but what Alvaro took notice of was that I had done that successfully in multiple areas of endeavour—something I had not really considered before. I wondered what the common thread was that allowed me to succeed. Maybe I should have become obsessed with mastering professional blackjack and poker when I was younger. I guessed that so-called success trait was what Nancy wanted to find.
A few people have suggested that maybe I was just drawn to what I was good at, the areas where I’d have the best chances of success, but I don’t see it that way. How could I have anticipated creating those KISS guitars the first time I picked up a transistor and gazed at it in wonder? Alvaro was right—the odds against my sequential successes being simple good luck were very long.
Even with those encouraging thoughts, the notion that TMS might cause me to spin off in a negative direction had me worried. I’d already drawn a mental analogy between my musical hallucinations and a drug experience. I well remembered the stories of musician friends who took psychedelics and ended up on bad trips—nights of horror that left some of them scarred for years. But I didn’t say anything, because I was ashamed and embarrassed by those thoughts. I had to wear a brave face for the researchers, and that’s what I did when I arrived at the lab for our next stimulation. And I’d nearly forgotten that a TV crew would be there, to film some of the day’s session.
Several weeks earlier, a television producer had contacted me on behalf of Dr. Norman Doidge, whose book I’d read before first meeting Lindsay. Doidge is a Canadian psychiatrist who studies the powers of the mind, with particular interest in neuroplasticity, and he was filming a TV series to complement his book. He wanted Alvaro and me to be part of it—to go on camera and talk about brain stimulation. Medical research is usually conducted in private, but my situation was already unconventional—I had met Lindsay in a public venue, and I was already speaking out online about my interest in her research. I had chosen to give up some of my own privacy, in the hope that others might see the promise of what I believed could be a life-changing therapy.
That was why I’d said yes when the film crew had reached out to me. My friend Michael Wilcox had also agreed to be involved, and the crew planned to shoot footage of both of us receiving TMS that day. Having the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) television crew in the lab in the midst of our experiments complicated things, but I really enjoyed meeting and talking to Dr. Doidge. I’d found his writing fascinating and inspiring, and we spoke at some length about his ideas throughout the day. He described techniques for changing our brains, and people who had done so in amazing ways. The CBC crew filmed both Michael and me as we underwent our stimulation sessions, and shooting didn’t finish till after seven P.M. Martha and Cubby were with me, and by the time we were done, they were hungry. And of course I’m always hungry. Lindsay, Shirley, and Erica from the lab decided to join us for pizza down the street.
Alvaro went home, and Dr. Doidge and the film crew had other plans. That was just as well, given the strangeness that was about to unfold.
The six of us who remained began talking once we were seated at the restaurant. I’m generally a pretty circumspect person, but I’m no saint. During my rock and roll days I experimented with drugs and drinking, like most everyone else in that universe. However, I’d gotten all that out of my system decades ago. Today, conversation with me rarely gets edgier than car engines and off-roading. I’ve always been insecure about how others see me, so I’m generally cautious about what I say. For some reason, everything was different that night. Whatever inhibition I normally have was gone, and I began recalling hallucinogenic experiences from the seventies, things I hadn’t thought of in years. As everyone else munched their pizza in astonishment, I regaled the group with a story about eating a handful of mushrooms during a James Montgomery Blues Band show at the Shaboo Inn in Willimantic, Connecticut, and then feeling an overpowering urge to drive my friend’s car to Canada because I needed desperately to pee on Canadian soil. I couldn’t pee till I got to Canada, no exceptions. We were facing a genuine crisis. Several
friends—also high on mushrooms—had driven north with me, and they must have shared my delusion, because we crossed the border at Rock Island, Quebec, drove a mile into the country, and got out and peed in a line by the roadside.
A story about eating psychedelic mushrooms and then driving 275 miles to take a piss is one that any sensible adult would be embarrassed to relate, especially in front of a group of esteemed scientists and an impressionable eighteen-year-old son. I’d never said a peep about it before that night; in fact, the incident had faded in my mind like an old tie-dyed T-shirt. But somehow it popped into my head again and I couldn’t seem to stop myself from telling them the tale in all its glory in that pizza parlour.
That wasn’t even the end of the story. Once we were done peeing, we’d picked up some rocks as souvenirs of Canada and, mission accomplished, gotten back into our VW Squareback, turned around, and started for home. We crossed the border, and it was smooth sailing for about five minutes. Then four Border Patrol cars roared out of the dark, pulled us over, and the lawmen arrested us for driving back through the border at four in the morning without checking in. We had been so sure that the border station was closed!
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