My friends were all supportive of the idea. Dave said, “That sounds really cool. I’d love the chance to do something like that.” All that had me feeling pretty good, and I wrote on my blog about my decision to join a review board. The response from my readers was decidedly more mixed. “They just want to use you,” sceptics warned. “You’ll be their token autistic.” I could not decide if I should feel offended or sad. Some comments were downright angry. “Why would they pick you?” one writer ranted. “You’re a high school dropout with no qualifications to review autism science.” “He’s just jealous,” my friend Bob reassured me, but those critical reactions troubled me a lot.
Martha wasn’t so enthusiastic. She liked the idea of a trip to Washington, but she worried that my interest in autism science was taking me away from the livelihood that supported us. The science itself wasn’t of any interest to her, perhaps because it scared her. Looking back, I realize her concerns were real and valid, but at the time it drove one more wedge between us. Perhaps she just didn’t understand how important autism research had become to me, or how fast I was changing inside.
The review process itself was fascinating. Our group was to review about 155 proposals. I had been assigned 6 of them, but being inquisitive, I actually looked at all 155. We gathered together in a D.C. conference room, where we discussed and voted on the ideas.
Each of us had given scores to the proposals we were assigned, and those scores were tabulated so that the proposals under discussion were ranked from best to worst. We then discussed every proposal, and each of us had an opportunity to comment or question. I took full advantage of that, asking many questions and offering almost as many comments. By lunchtime I began feeling insecure, wondering if I was talking too much or in the wrong tone of voice.
TMS may well have sensitized me to that insecurity. In my earlier days of working in corporations, my commentary during meetings often got everyone upset, even when I was right. The way I saw it, I was just doing my job. Better to tell a roomful of engineers that their design was no good, and that they needed to redo it, than to have to explain it to the chairman of the board when a million flawed widgets were going up in smoke out in the field. My keen technical insight and direct communication style won me the opposite of fame and admiration in the corporate world, and most of the time I had no clue what went wrong. All I knew was that they didn’t want me around anymore. These science reviews were shaping up differently. There were a few proposals I was opposed to, and a number I didn’t support. But I didn’t call any of them drivel, and I gave everyone a chance to speak without calling them fools.
Scientists approached me during our breaks to talk and exchange pleasantries. They asked me questions, offered comments, and showed genuine interest in what I had to say. I wouldn’t credit TMS directly for making such dramatic changes in me, which in turn made those encounters successful. Rather, I believe it opened my eyes, and with my expanded vision and insight, my brain changed itself so that I fit better into that group.
The government moderator running the meeting affirmed that I was welcome there. “Those are good questions you’re asking. Keep it up.” Some of my words even sparked lengthy discussions.
After we were done the chairperson asked if I’d be willing to serve on other committees. “We could use more of your insights,” she told me. I was proud to have done a good job and honoured that she’d asked. As I pictured my staff putting water pumps on Land Rovers the next day, I thought of the phrase “cognitive dissonance,” and I wondered if I was facing a similar mental situation now, having to function effectively in two different worlds.
The early committee service led to other appointments and my increased involvement in autism science. My world was becoming so different, so fast. I was proud of my contribution, and of acceptance in a new world, but I was often terrified and also lonely. For the first time in quite a few years, Martha was not beside me in a new field of endeavour. Some people seemed to go it alone as a way of life, but I wasn’t one of them. For me, the changing world and the absence of someone to turn to was very frightening.
This science was fun while I was immersed in it, but when I got home and lay in bed at night and my mind started to wander, it got really scary. My friends thought my new life was cool and exciting. No one considered that the sense of stability I’d built so carefully over the years was now totally gone. Before I wrote a book and got into this TMS study, I just woke up in the morning and went to work, like millions of other people, doing the same things I’d done for years. But now those days were gone, and there was no telling what tomorrow would bring.
The researchers loved the uncertainty of what was unfolding. Lindsay said, “That’s the best part of my job! Every day is different, interesting, and exciting!” I smiled and agreed when I was in the lab with them, but when I returned home at night, I had to work hard to keep from feeling terrified.
My connection to Martha had changed in a fundamental way, as I found myself soaking up depressed feelings that had formerly rolled right off me. How was I to deal with that? She told me I had changed and things weren’t the same between us. She was scared, and so was I, because I believed she was right. I had changed.
After many years of accepting how she was, I found myself thinking I couldn’t handle her depression. She in turn interpreted my newfound vulnerability as a rejection of her, and that made me sad and confused.
For the first time, I was absorbing fear from people around me. The emotions swirling around my son and his upcoming trial were awful. That was a big and unwelcome change from my former Mr. Spock self. Looming over it all was the Flowers for Algernon fear—the possibility that I might experience other wonderful things, only to see them slip away to leave me more disabled than before, and now fully aware of what I lacked.
Every night, when the excitement of the day had faded, fear remained. All the bad emotions around me were scary. The possibility that my marriage was failing was horrible. The thought of my son in jail was terrifying. And the idea that I might have set all that in motion through a misguided sense of inferiority and a desire to make myself better was very unsettling. But the die had been cast the moment I’d walked into the TMS lab. As Dr. Hunter S. Thompson said, “Buy the ticket, take the ride.”
But Thompson shot himself in 2005, and Flowers for Algernon’s Charlie died in an institution. The excitement I’d felt with new TMS experiences was great, but I was now experiencing deeper low periods than I’d previously known in my life. I sure didn’t want to end up like those two, but I didn’t know how much power I had over my fate. The Thompson quote felt disturbingly apt—my emotions were taking me for a ride, and all I could do was see where it led.
* Flowers for Algernon was the basis for the Academy Award-winning 1968 movie Charly, starring Cliff Robertson.
The Zero-Sum Game
WE’VE ALL HEARD this myth: humans only use 10 percent of our brainpower. Usually, when people say that, they are suggesting that if we could learn to use the idle 90 percent we would become intellectual giants. Various supplements and therapies have been hawked over the years in pursuit of this lofty goal, but none of them has turned out to enrich minds, though I’m sure a few enriched their marketers.
The notion of wasted brainpower has been with us a long time. It seems to have started with a medical man and not a snake oil salesman, though one hundred years ago those two were sometimes one and the same. In “The Energies of Men,” published in 1907, psychologist William James wrote, “We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.” Unfortunately, Dr. James was wrong. We have no way of knowing exactly what he was thinking when he wrote those words, but everything we’ve learned in the hundred-some years since tells us there are no extra, unused pieces in the brain. We may not use all the parts of our brains in the most effective ways, but they are far from being idle.
We’ve known for a long time that any brain damage will cause some kind of functional co
nsequence. We may survive the injury, but we are changed. That alone should be enough to tell us that the brain doesn’t have any wasted space. Yet it is true that we don’t use the whole brain all the time. Still, we use more than many people imagine. You might think, for example, that we don’t use the part that moves our muscles as we sit in a chair and solve math problems. But Lindsay pointed out that wasn’t true. “You may think you’re sitting still,” she told me, “but your brain is sensing your position and sending thousands of signals to muscles in your body and your legs. They are constantly making tiny adjustments to keep you in balance. That’s why you’ll fall out of a chair if you pass out—because that stops.” During the course of a day every part of your brain will be called upon to do one thing or another. The parts that do particular tasks repeatedly get optimized for the jobs they do, which is how we become proficient. Some brains are optimized for cerebral things, like the study of history. Other brains guide their bodies to athletic excellence. Most brains—like most people—have a more generalist orientation.
A century ago, we didn’t understand what certain brain areas did—and we still don’t in some cases—so we assumed they did nothing. If a brain region didn’t twitch a limb or cause a yelp when electrified, early neurologists wrote the area off as unknown territory in the best of cases and empty space the rest of the time. It’s easier to say “It doesn’t do anything” than to admit the truth, which was that they had no idea how to figure out the inner complexities of the mind.
New brain imaging tools like functional MRI allow neurologists to see activity across the brain as we do tasks, and we see how the whole brain “lights up” even as we do the activities associated with ordinary living. We still may not know what certain areas deep inside our heads are doing when we solve a puzzle, but we at least know they are somehow part of the solution. That’s the first step to unravelling that mystery. We’ve also learned that the brain is constantly changing, refining its connections, and optimizing itself for the world around us. In fact, we recognize a “use it or lose it” mechanism at work during brain development. Our growing neurons form interconnections as we acquire skills, and those that don’t make useful connections die off and are absorbed by the body.
This pruning process is now seen as an essential part of human development. I pondered what it might mean for someone like me, as I was influenced by TMS. In particular, I wondered what happened in my mind when I developed new abilities after several stimulations. Did I truly get smarter, only to revert to my old self when the effect wore off, or did I temporarily trade sharpness in one area for brainpower somewhere else, recognizing what I’d gained without seeing what I’d lost? It’s sometimes hard to avoid a computer analogy when considering brain function, and I thought to myself, if my whole brain were already in use, it would be like a computer running at 100 percent load. You could add a new task, but the other programs would have to slow down to make room. If that were true, I must have lost something somewhere to experience greater insight into people.
Alvaro wasn’t so sure he agreed with my line of reasoning. “Remember that the brain is constantly rewiring itself—something computers cannot yet do. The number of brain cells may stay the same, but the connections between them change. That process of optimization happens with practice, and it’s how you get good at things. Learning to solve math problems faster doesn’t seem to come at a cost somewhere else. When you become a world-class violinist after thousands of hours of practice you don’t become clumsy or less functional in other areas.”
Not only was I worried about the cost of possible lost brain functionality, I also worried that the time I was expending studying the brain—as fascinating as it was—was coming at too steep a price. I found myself neglecting my work and other responsibilities. Reading articles about the brain didn’t get the bills paid, and it didn’t keep our customers happy at work. Learning about neuroscience wasn’t making me dumber about cars, but it was distracting me from my job, and I could already see how success in one arena might lead to failure in another.
“But that’s not getting dumber in the old area. That’s changing your priorities,” Alvaro told me. My friends agreed that those two things were unrelated and that choosing between them was a simple act of willpower. Unfortunately, it wasn’t for me. The TMS effects were far too powerful to ignore. They filled my head with new thoughts and turned my mind in new directions. That’s how I felt; I wasn’t getting dumber, but I was surely becoming different.
At fifty years of age, I stood atop a pyramid of my collective life experience. A large part of its foundation was the car company I had built. Could I remain in place, and maybe climb a little higher, or was I going to leap sideways into space, fall to the bottom, and be forced to start the climb anew or, worse, build a new pyramid? “These new feelings are a big deal for you, but they don’t take away any of your former abilities. Not wanting to do something is different from not being able to do it,” Alvaro told me, and I realized it was true. So far, the TMS had been a big distraction, but I could not think of anything good it had taken away. And as soon as I had that thought, I felt guilty, as I remembered my unravelling marriage and how I now lived my life on the run from depression. One reason I was spending so much time in Boston with the scientists was that I couldn’t bear to be at home with my newly heightened awareness of what I now saw as my wife’s eternal sadness.
I was beginning to realize that my marriage was not as solid as I’d imagined it to be. Maybe all marriages are like that, I told myself, but I knew there was a fundamental problem. Is TMS opening my eyes to a weakness that was always there? Martha sure didn’t think so—she thought the TMS was the problem, and she was scared, angry, and unsure where to turn. I was embarrassed to discuss my marital problems with the scientists, and it never occurred to me that a marriage counsellor might be able to help. Instead I ran from our problems and wrapped myself in a cloak of hope that my newfound emotional intelligence would save everything. Ironically, it was turning out to have the opposite effect.
Without any idea of the disastrous effects TMS was having on my marriage, Alvaro remained ever the optimist. He believed the brain naturally rewired itself for better performance, and he thought it did that every time we got really good at any new task. That mental tune-up was part of what researchers call brain plasticity. “So did TMS just dramatically speed up the process of improving performance?” I asked.
“Not exactly,” he answered. “TMS probably didn’t build new pathways. Pathways are physical things, like roots beneath a tree, and growing them takes time. That’s days or weeks—more than overnight. It’s more likely that the TMS energy opened up paths that were already there. Whatever TMS turned on in you must have been there all along for it to come to life as it did.”
Alvaro then described for me what he called his theory of “metamodal” organization of the brain,* which argues that brain regions should be defined by what they do and not by what they act upon. The visual cortex has traditionally been called by that name because it processes image data in people who see. If that’s all it was, he argued, it should be dormant in a person who is blind. But it’s not. Instead, a blind person’s visual cortex processes information from the ears, and it extracts data from that sound that gives some blind people an ability to almost see in the dark. It can also adapt to process touch signals from the hands, allowing some blind people to read braille as fast I can read printed words.
When the brain’s so-called visual processing centre is fed sound instead of image data, it processes the sound stream just as sighted people analyze visual images. We use our eyes to decide which objects are in front and which are in back. In a blind person, that same brain area may tell that person where things are by their sound, or even by the way they reflect sounds—like the echolocation ability of a bat.
In a later conversation, Michael Wilcox shared the experience of a friend who’d experienced that very thing. He told me about his buddy Mark, who was blind, tho
ugh not from birth, and who went through training to learn how to use echolocation. His guide took away his cane and taught him to walk down the street without bumping into lampposts. He learned to do that by listening extremely intently and paying close attention to where every little sound came from. That allowed him to make a sound-based picture of the world around him, just as the rest of us do with visual signals. He said it took an extraordinary amount of effort, but it also made him realize the possibilities. Mark still uses a cane, but he also has an amazing map of the world in his head, and if he’s been someplace he can find his way back there. “I was once giving him a ride and my GPS shut itself off for some reason. ‘Don’t worry!’ he said. ‘Just take the next exit and then go left at the stop sign.’ He guided me to our destination more efficiently than my GPS ever could have.”
Alvaro had established something similar in a study that was published a few years before the TMS autism work. He’d set up an experiment in which he blinded people for a week with bandages and watched the activity in their visual cortexes. As expected, those areas became inactive, but they reawakened within a few days as the former visual processor of the brain began evaluating sound data instead. He believed that showed preexisting alternate paths coming into use and then being quickly optimized to process a different kind of data.
What might have happened if he had carried the experiment on for a year instead of a week? Maybe what neurologists called the visual cortex would have become the auditory cortex in those people, and it might process touch for others. If they’d worn the blindfolds for a year, would their visual processing have come right back when they removed them, as it did after a week?
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