“Maybe not,” Alvaro agreed. “The new paths might have taken over by then. It might have been harder for those people to switch back to seeing.”
Several months earlier I had suggested to Alvaro that perhaps the area that recognizes emotions in people was recognizing traits of machinery for me. He had dismissed that notion at the time, but when I asked him again late that summer, he said, “Yes, you suggested that before and I find it very intriguing indeed.”
Our current understanding that every brain area is active seemed to support my hypothesis. If I lack a nonverbal conversation data stream because I’m autistic—or if my stream is very weak—the parts of the brain that should have analyzed that data are going to do something else with their computing power. Perhaps my brain chose to analyze machines. That might explain why I pick up on mechanical things others never see, and why I’m blind to the social signals that are obvious to most people. Following that line of thought, if TMS helps me develop an ability to read people, and that ability uses the part of my brain that was reading machines, I might well be trading one ability for another.
A new postdoc in Alvaro’s lab helped shed some light on whether that might actually be happening. Ilaria Minio-Paluello, an Italian neuroscientist, had recently joined Alvaro’s group. She too had an interest in autism, and she asked me to take part in some studies of her own. One of them proved particularly significant in light of the metamodal idea.
“Have you ever heard of prosopagnosia?” she asked me one day.
When I said no, she proceeded to explain that it was the medical term for face blindness—the inability to recognize faces and people. I’d certainly heard of that, but what did it have to do with me? As it happened, she had a test.
She sat me down in front of a computer and showed me one face after another. There were various exercises, which went something like this:
“Take a look at this face. Remember it.” I found myself looking at an ordinary-looking face with a neutral expression. Then the faces began changing. One after another, new faces began to appear, with varying expressions. “Now tell me when you see that first face again.”
I didn’t have a clue. It was very frustrating.
Other times, five faces appeared in a lineup. “Remember that first face I showed you?” she would say. “Which of these is the face you were asked to remember?” It didn’t seem to matter if the faces in the pictures had similar or different expressions—I still had no idea. After an hour of frustrating failure, I had a new diagnosis: prosopagnosia. How could I have gotten through fifty years of life and not known that I am face blind? I wondered.
“Many of the autistic people I study have face blindness,” she told me. “It’s one of those conditions that often go unrecognized, so we don’t know how common it is. We think it may affect one to two percent of the population as a whole, but in my lab work it’s way more common among people on the autism spectrum.”
After getting over the shock of her news, I considered what her words meant. I realized that I’d always had a hard time recognizing people. After talking with Ilaria, I figured out that I recognize people by context, which meant I was lost when I saw someone in a strange setting. As a joke, I suggested that she put my retired uncle Bob in a police uniform or behind a counter at Walmart and see if I knew who he was. But she took me seriously, and in fact when she rendered a photo of my son as a line drawing I could not pick him out of a lineup of similar faces.
Shocked as I was, Ilaria reassured me that I’d been adapting automatically all my life so that this particular disability had not held me back.
First I was sad, thinking this was yet another way I was less than other people. But after some thought I realized there was another side to it: I recognized cars and other mechanical things far more accurately than the average person. I often found myself saying, when a car drove into my yard, “That’s Bob Parker.” But I was recognizing the car—not the driver. If I saw Bob in a store, I’d have no idea who he was, which made for considerable embarrassment if he happened to recognize me and strike up a conversation.
I can’t begin to count the number of times that has happened. “Hi, John,” someone will say, and I turn and say hi in return. I’ve learned to be polite, even when I have no idea who’s talking to me. The person might go on for a minute or more, but at some point, he or she will say something like “You don’t recognize me, do you?” If I’m lucky, it will be said in amusement and not annoyance.
Experiences like those are embarrassing, but I never thought of them as illustrating a particular disability. I just thought of that inability to recognize people as one of my quirks. Now that it was officially pathologized I speculated about whether it might have a different meaning. Maybe that part of my brain was repurposed too.
Ilaria’s tests confirmed that my ability to recognize human faces was seriously impaired. But that “inability” was only one side of a more complex story. If Mr. Parker had arrived in a black Mercedes sedan and parked it among ten other Mercedes sedans in our lot, I would be able to pick out his car without fail when I was ready to work on it. To me, each car was an individual. To others, all cars look the same.
Was that more evidence of Alvaro’s metamodal brain in action? Was I using the face recognition area to identify specific machines, to my great benefit? For an automotive service manager, the ability to recognize particular cars, and parts of cars, conferred a great advantage. As a social human being I was disadvantaged by my weak ability to recognize people, but from my working technologist perspective the disability it produced was less than the benefit I got from machine recognition.
It would make sense that a human brain would be configured to recognize more than just people with great precision, I reasoned. Art experts learn to distinguish subtle differences in the works of the masters—things that are totally invisible to you or me.
As much as I wanted to believe Alvaro’s notion that we could tune our brains to make them more efficient, I could not help but think that whole swathes of my reasoning power were simply deployed to different purposes than they would be in a more ordinary sort of person. And as badly as I wanted to see into people again, I had to face the truth. Not being able to read people had made me sad, but it hadn’t made me a failure. The only consequence I could put my finger on was occasional embarrassment. If seeing into a machine was my offsetting gift—via brain repurposing—it had given me an extraordinary advantage in technical work. Recognizing people, in contrast, would only make me ordinary.
It was a real conundrum. I hated the idea of losing my special abilities, but I also felt alone so much of the time. And TMS had relieved that loneliness, at least temporarily. I had a return visit to the lab scheduled for more TMS in the not-too-distant future. But I was torn now that I’d come to believe that changing my brain might well be a zero-sum game.
When I went back to the TMS lab for the last round of stimulations in their initial study, I was ready for anything. In earlier sessions I’d seen my emotions amped up and my senses fine-tuned. What would come next? The answer, to my dismay, was . . . nothing. The first round of TMS study concluded quietly, without a bang.
As much as I’d hoped for further positive transformation, I realized that wasn’t going to happen every time. The researchers had told us that at the start. When I asked Lindsay what came next, she said, “We have to evaluate all these results and consider what to do now.” For her there was work. For me and the other volunteers, there was waiting, or a return to our pre-TMS lives.
Interestingly, the younger volunteers seemed to just move on after participating in the experiments. When I met a few of them after the study ended they acted as if TMS had been no big deal. It was the older participants—Michael, Kim, and I—who had experienced the most dramatic changes and wanted more. All of us were eager for the next phase, and we wondered why the younger participants didn’t share our excitement. I looked at my son and wondered the same thing.
As summer woun
d down we stayed in touch with the scientists, and with one another, as we waited to see what they’d come up with next. And we waited for an explanation of what we’d already experienced. “You’ll be the first to know when we’ve analyzed the results,” Lindsay had told us. Meanwhile the scientists answered our questions as best they could and we waited to see what would unfold.
* “The Metamodal Organization of the Brain,” Progress in Brain Research 134 (2001): 427–45.
The Shimmer of Music
NOW THAT THE STUDY had ended, Alvaro was free to discuss the areas they had targeted. Finally he could answer all my burning questions, one of which was “Did you try this on yourself?” To my surprise, Alvaro told me he had tried the stimulations from our study. “They had no effect on me,” he said, “but I’m not autistic. When we do the depression stimulation on people who are not depressed, it sometimes has the opposite effect. Instead of making them happier, it makes them more upset.”
That sounded strange, but Lindsay explained. “Think of your brain’s function as being on a bell curve,” she said. “The top of the curve is what we’d call the optimal area. That’s where excitability is kept in check and everything is balanced—not too much and not too little. If someone is disabled, and an area is not functioning optimally, TMS could push him or her to the top of the curve. But if we did the same TMS on someone whose function was already optimal, we’d push him or her off the balanced middle and into less functional territory.”
That was a good explanation, as far as it went. But what if a brain area had several different functions, each with its own bell curve? And what if some bell curves were optimal already but others were not? That’s when things get complicated.
In neuroscience, conventional wisdom used to say that each brain area performs a predefined function. But my own experiences, and the writings of Alvaro and other contemporary scientists, suggest that this viewpoint is evolving. Suppose that I had always used my “emotion recognizer” to see into machines rather than humans. If that was true then it’s no wonder that stimulating this area would affect me very differently than it would affect a person who uses that area in the more typical way. And as Alvaro had shown me, our understanding of what different brain areas do is still very incomplete.
As Alvaro’s metamodal theory suggested, even when we associate a given brain area with one task, researchers may discover it’s also a key to some totally different function. Computer scientists call that concept “distributed processing.” That’s what Alvaro believed was happening in our minds. If cognitive tasks are processed all over the brain—instead of in task-specific areas—the job of understanding and mapping function becomes exponentially more complex.
Being a writer, I had made notes the night that I “saw” music. On that night I had made a point of writing that the visions I saw were not actual memories of things I’d experienced in the past but rather constructs my mind had created around the music I was hearing at the moment. I was hearing music through the stereo and matching its tones to musical instruments and scenes that played in my head in time to the melody.
It happened so fast and so smoothly that I felt as if I were at a movie, or at an actual show. When I heard an organ, I thought, Hammond B3. As quickly as I thought that, I saw the B3—an instrument I’ve known half my life, even though I cannot play it—and I watched it play the melodies I was hearing. When I heard the singers’ voices, I saw them, their faces indistinct yet real-looking, as they stepped up to the mics to sing their parts. As the music changed, the movie in my head followed.
I thought back to when I was engineering the systems that delivered that music and how I saw the music then. Back in those days, what I loved most was designing and building the pieces of gear that made a show possible. I felt great joy seeing them work. It didn’t matter what kind of song rang from my speakers; my happiness came from delivering the show successfully. The audience might have been there to have fun, get high, or get laid, but I was there to work. For me, live music was a serious business. Instead of feeling emotion when I heard a song during a show, I felt the subtle signals of my equipment in a way the audience never recognized. If one of my speakers began breaking into distortion, I felt it like fingernails on a chalkboard, but I never had a hint that anyone in the audience had a clue. Like children, my amplifiers made me proud when they did their jobs well, and I cringed when they failed. I actually hurt when they broke down.
In those days, my mind was like an oscilloscope screen, one that flashed beautiful smooth waves when everything was right and hard angular patterns whenever the sound system overloaded or went into clipping distortion. It took thousands of hours to do it, but I taught my brain to match patterns of waves with layers of sound, so I could see as well as hear the structure of the songs. That visual component helped me to envision and then create the sound effects people would love. With practice, I learned to visualize the waveform as a musical instrument that played in my head. Then I imagined how a circuit I was conceiving might change it. I’d mentally pass the wave through the circuit and predict what the result would look and sound like. When I had a circuit pattern that felt good, I’d build it in real life and then test it. Sometimes I would be wrong about what it would do, but the more I did it, the more often I was right, and it was satisfying to know I could successfully imagine how electronic circuits could bend and shape complex waves of music to make new and better sounds.
At the time, I thought that was just being an audio engineer, but now I know most engineers don’t come up with designs in that manner, because their brains don’t work that way. For most people, there is no path in the brain that connects circuit diagrams seen in a drawing to sound effects as they are heard. A typical person can imagine and sketch out a circuit, but doing so won’t cause him to hear its sound in his head.
Yet that’s what happened to me. Neuroscientists call that ability synaesthesia, and they say it may be a result of brain areas being cross-connected. However it works, it seems that my math, sound, and visual processors may be a little more interconnected than the average person’s. Some synaesthetes can taste sound or see numbers as particular colours or shapes. Daniel Tammet, another autistic adult, wrote a book called Born on a Blue Day about his ability to see numbers and words as shapes and colours. Neuroscientists believe that as many as 4 percent of humans may have this ability. But I was the only one in this particular study—as far as we knew.
It has always bothered me that many people, doctors included, tend to view anything that deviates from the typical as being abnormal or broken. The common medical perception of synaesthesia illustrates this perfectly. Doctors don’t generally say, “This is an incredible gift; how can we give it to other people?” Instead, they say, “What went wrong in this poor fellow’s head, and how can we fix him?” It made me sad sometimes to realize that the things that made me special were—to many observers—just broken circuits. The TMS was beginning to open my mind to lots of ideas, one being a deeper appreciation of how my brain is wired and what that could mean.
The initial TMS study had ended that first summer, but already the researchers were planning more studies, building on what this one had shown them. “It would be great if you participated in those too,” Lindsay told me. Although I had given a lot of thought to the possible trade-offs that might come with TMS, after much debate, I decided there was only one answer. Shamans and scientists both choose a life dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge, and so would I. And the path I chose in this case would lead, I hoped, to deeper self-knowledge, and maybe even a glimpse of the unknown territory inside myself. I resolved to stay with the experiments as long as the studies lasted. Interestingly, when I talked to them later that summer, I realized that Michael, Kim, and my son had all come to the same decision. Each of us felt ourselves affected by TMS, and we wanted to stay the course to see where the scientists could take us.
When I thought of my synaesthesia in light of the TMS study, I wondered whether the TMS mig
ht have energized connections all over my brain—not just under the coil—and if some of those connections had in turn stimulated the process of synaesthesia. Alvaro had almost suggested as much when he told me that TMS wasn’t making new pathways, that “it turns on what’s already there.” And he’d told me that one neuron could have connections to a thousand others, so it was easy to imagine everything connected to everything else, at some level. If I have more or different paths than the average person, it would be no surprise that I’d have broader and stranger experiences in response to TMS.
Most people don’t have so many cross-connections in their brains, so they don’t see images when they hear a song, as I do. It’s even impossible to know if the estimated 4 percent of the population thought to be touched by synaesthesia is accurate; the actual number could be much higher because some synaesthetes view their way of being as natural, and they’d have no reason to report themselves to a psychiatrist. “There might be a thousand people with minds like yours, working on farms in India, and we’ll never know,” Alvaro told me. Maybe everyone has a touch of it, and it’s only the heavily cross-connected who are truly uncommon.
When I mentioned that conversation to Lindsay, she told me her former professor felt the same way. “Rama would say that’s why we call cheese sharp, or a colour loud.”
Think about how people describe music. It’s brilliant, shimmering, and dark as the night. It’s light as a feather. The more artistic the person, the more her adjectives are those of sight, touch, or smell. I used to think that was just speech, but now I’m not so sure. When I turn on the stereo and close my eyes as the singers sing, I do see the shimmer. As the music plays, the melody transports me into a world of other senses. Can I possibly be the only one affected this way? Maybe it’s a question we are just too polite to ask. Perhaps all of us see music, and it’s just a matter of degree.
Switched On Page 19