Switched On

by John Elder Robison

  I’d also done this test before that day’s TMS session, with a very different result. Before TMS, I saw the pictures as just pictures, and I didn’t get any real feeling from the eyes. After the TMS, my reactions were strong and clear. When I looked at each pair of eyes I knew right away what they were saying. I can’t say how much better I scored, but it felt quite a lot easier.

  With the tests finished, Lindsay and Shirley started to talk. As our conversation unfolded I realized it was easier and more natural to look both of them in the eyes. The feeling that I was spying or intruding was gone, and both Shirley and Lindsay agreed that I gazed at them more directly. I had usually instinctively shied away from direct eye contact, and I didn’t anymore.

  That was a little surprising, because the original stimulation hadn’t hit me that way immediately. It had taken some time to build. “We’ll see how I’m feeling tomorrow,” I said to Lindsay on my way out. “Right now, I am not feeling like I am seeing deep inside, but that took twelve hours to develop last time.” I went down to the garage, got in my car, and headed for home.

  By the time I reached Worcester—the halfway point on my journey—I was starting to feel a little drunk. Just west of Sturbridge I found myself behind a state police car, and I dropped back, fearing I might get busted for driving while intoxicated. The internal dialogue that had quieted in the lab was working once again, as the little voices in my head asked, Are we weaving back and forth? Are we going the speed limit?

  Needless to say, I made it home. Even though the world was moving like a ship at sea, I retained my ability to navigate. And as strange as my head felt, my reflexes and coordination didn’t seem to be impaired. But I don’t really know if that’s true, because drunk drivers make the same claim, and they still crash. Later, when I told Lindsay about this feeling, she asked if I thought they should not let people drive home alone after TMS. I truly could not say whether my post-TMS driving ability was impaired or not. As she pointed out, the fact that I hadn’t taken any pills or drunk any liquor didn’t mean I wasn’t in an altered state of mind.

  There was no telling what would happen next, but the faux drunkenness I was feeling made me remember the hallucinations I’d had in April. Was something similar in store for me that night? It almost made me afraid to close my eyes. But bedtime was coming, and I’d have to do just that. When I did, the world started to spin the way it had before, but the hallucinations didn’t come. Instead, I lay in darkness with a feeling of motion, as if I were sleeping on a sailboat at sea, rocking and moving with the swell. I wasn’t getting seasick, but I wasn’t falling asleep either. After a few minutes, I got out of bed, went up to my study, and composed an email to the scientists while the thoughts were still percolating in my brain. I reported the dizziness and said, “It may be a while before I fall asleep, but at least I’m prepared.” I looked at my words later, and asked myself, Prepared for what?

  I wished I had someone to talk to. Martha was there in bed, but sound asleep. The TMS had driven a wedge between us, and she wasn’t eager to talk about what she called my “artificially induced feelings,” especially late at night. I wondered how long we could keep things together. The recognition that I was failing at marriage once again weighed on me like a rock in the pit of my stomach. I’m sure Martha shared my fears, but we were both afraid to talk about them and they just grew worse in silence.

  Returning to the bedroom, I decided to listen to some music through my headphones. When I did, I realized that the auditory clarity I’d experienced in April was back—but not the hallucinations—and with it, something new. The last time the music had come to life I had cried at the intensity of the emotions elicited by the words and melodies. The feelings that I’d experienced had been overwhelming. Now, that same thing was happening, but the music wasn’t making me cry. Tonight’s feelings were calmer, less dramatic, and they covered a wider range. There was joy and sadness in equal measure. And there was a new sense of connectedness. That made me wish I could reach out and speak to the musicians. I could not recall a single time earlier in my life when hearing the songs made me want to reach out and talk to the singers—even when they were right there beside me backstage.

  A few minutes before, I’d turned on the music to put myself to sleep. Love songs and gentle jazz typically had that effect on me, especially jazz from the fifties and sixties—Stan Getz, John Coltrane, or Miles Davis. Now I was wide awake, fascinated by what I was hearing and feeling. What would I have said to those musicians had time travel been possible? Back when I worked with performers, my comments were mostly limited to how we adjusted the equipment, how the system sounded, or which guitar we’d use on which songs next set. I never offered comments on the beauty of their playing or how it made me feel. Now I wanted to talk to someone about the message of the song, not how the amplifiers delivered it.

  I got back out of bed and trudged up to my study again, determined to capture a written record of my experiences of the evening. I brought my music with me, and as it played I looked at old photos that were stored on my computer. As familiar as they were, they also seemed changed. It took a moment to put my finger on the difference.

  When I wrote Alvaro to describe the experience, I said:

  You’re probably wondering what this feels like. . . . It’s as if the audio processor in my mind just got upgraded. I listen to old familiar music, and it’s similar, but richer. I notice things. At the beginning of a song, four bars in, the drummer misses a beat. Later on, I perk up my ears as I think, is that a xylophone playing back there? And indeed it is. Later on, I notice a little four-note riff on the bass. The individual components of the performance are somehow easier to pick out.

  When I speak, it sounds as if I’m listening through a sound system where the upper midrange bands on the equalizer have been turned up. My voice is crisper and better defined to me. To others, as best I can tell, I sound the same as always. Sight and sound is just, well, richer.

  I went on to describe how colour had become richer for me too.

  It’s everywhere I look. Every colour I see is now multi-hued and textured. Even the basic blue background on this computer monitor is different. The shading in the corners of the screen is obvious tonight, yet I never noticed it before. I can walk back to my bedroom, and in the gentle night light I see a hundred shades of colour on the peach walls. I’m sure those subtle shadings were there all along, but I never saw them till now.

  One can argue that I could have seen any of these things if they were pointed out. That’s not true. Look at the change in how I hear my own voice. It’s not just a matter of paying attention. I’m hearing more definition. It’s as if everything is sharper and crisper. You have to actually hear such a thing to truly understand it. As an analogy, it’s a bit like wearing earplugs for quite a while and then taking them out. That is what I’m experiencing now, but in a more subtle way.

  The sense of wonder at my musical insight kept me awake for many more hours. Dawn was breaking when I finally fell asleep, and I was late getting to work the next day. When I arrived, there was no eureka moment as I looked in someone’s eyes, but I felt different just the same.

  I didn’t feel like I was looking into the souls of others, as I had back in April. I just had a greater sense of comfort and feeling of connectedness, especially when customers started to describe problems with their cars. That morning I found myself sympathizing with our clients and asking how they felt—with no prompting. The feeling this time, five months later, was more settled and less dramatic than it had been in April. The emotional insight this stimulation had built up was more like an old friend than a stunning new revelation. I’d told the scientists that this result was more subtle, but I gradually came to see that “more subtle” might be the key to what lasts in life.

  I thought of Carly Simon’s song “The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of” and wondered if TMS was revealing the world I’d always dreamed of, right before my eyes. Then I felt sad, because her song was about
the realization that the dreary partner beside her was really the special one she’d been waiting for, and of course the opposite was happening to me with the state of my marriage.

  With no better answer, I put that sad thought aside and listened to the old music with ears that felt renewed despite the ravages of middle-aged deafness. A part of me felt twenty-one again, and that made me smile.

  Different Kinds of Success

  I MONITORED MY behaviour closely in the days and weeks after the August session. And I had a lot of help—my family, my friends, and the scientists in the lab were all watching me and offering opinions. The thing is . . . I’d gotten what I’d long dreamed of. For a brief moment, I’d felt sure I was seeing into the souls of other people, and the different way they responded to me bore that out.

  What I never for a moment considered is that I might be devastated by what I would find. My childhood had been pretty rough, with a violent, abusive dad and a mentally ill mom. There were a lot of hard parts, but I’ve always believed many of them slipped by me unnoticed. More than one psychologist has suggested that autism shielded me from the worst of my upbringing by making me oblivious to what was happening around me. With greater emotional insight, I lost that protective shield, and at moments it was devastating. I had created a fantasy that seeing into people would be sweetness and love. Maybe there was some of that, but there was a lot more fear, and jealousy, and anger, and every bad thing I could imagine. Sure, there were some good emotions, but they were very much in the minority.

  Before TMS enlightened me, I thought the reason I often felt somewhat down was that I could not receive positive emotions from other people. Now I knew the truth: most of the emotions floating around in space are not positive. When you look into a crowd with real emotional insight you’ll see lust, greed, rage, anxiety, and what for lack of a better word I call “tension”—with only the occasional flash of love or happiness.

  It’s funny how that worked out. Before doing TMS, I was often anxious, and I reasoned that it was because my autism made it hard for me to unravel another person’s feelings or intent. But now that I could read others more clearly, my plight was not necessarily improved, because one of the strongest emotions I sensed in others was their own anxiety.

  I had recently started to notice what I called a “weird vibe” when I was around some people. First it was a sense I got from a few friends, like Richard, but then I realized I was getting the feeling from some customers too. Sometimes it began with a seemingly innocuous encounter. There is one that sticks in my mind even now.

  “Would you like a ride to work, and we’ll bring the car back when it’s done?” I was asking a local doctor if he wanted his Mercedes sent back to the hospital where he practised when his repairs were done. Most times people appreciated pickup or delivery of their cars, or a ride back to work, but this time I got turned down.

  “No, my assistant is coming. I’m sure your time is much too valuable for that.” A few months ago that comment would have gone unnoticed. It was not overtly nasty or critical. But with my new awareness I recognized it for what it was—a subtle dig at our company or me. I felt sudden deep sadness, as if the fellow had just announced he didn’t much like me. The feeling was the same one I’d gotten as a kid, when no one wanted me on his team.

  With a start, I realized that I had just experienced the adult version of rejection on the playground. I wasn’t sure why it had happened or what to do. Why would he leave the car here for service if he didn’t like us? The answer remained a mystery, so I did nothing. The man went to work, and we did the service that was requested. And all day long I reflected on those few words of rejection. It wasn’t just the words—it was the way he’d said them, his attitude . . . a bunch of signals I never would have noticed before but couldn’t forget now. How I wished he had never come in! It took all my self-control to keep quiet and not tell our service manager to call him and say we could not service his car and we’d leave it in his spot at the hospital.

  I remembered my grandfather’s words: Sometimes it’s better to be dumb. Then I had a thought: I’m the owner here. We have a thousand customers, and most of them are great. But a few are pretty nasty. They come in here bad tempered and complaining about everything we do. For all I know, they spend their whole lives bitching and being miserable. I can’t control how they feel or what they do elsewhere, but I don’t have to let them be miserable in my shop.

  In a spiral of negative feeling I let my mind wander to other unhappy customers and the things they had said. I suspected some of them were just unhappy people, no matter what we did for them. For some people, everything was too expensive, took too long, or there was something else broken.

  For a moment I asked myself if they were right. We certainly took too long on some jobs, and try as we might, we inevitably made errors. All of us had a role in creating customer dissatisfaction at times. But most of our clients were happy with our work. Our surveys said the vast majority of jobs were done correctly, with a good level of quality. Sure, in the past I’d known that some people were never happy, but it didn’t mean anything to me. They were never my favourite people, but I tolerated them just as I tolerated most everyone else.

  Standing up to bullies was a good strategy when I was a kid, and I resolved to stand up for myself now. Things played out very differently the next time that doctor showed up expecting service. I listened to his requests, which were followed by a comment about making sure to “watch my technicians” that I found particularly offensive. We had never, as far as I knew, made any errors in servicing his vehicle, but he complained and warned me every time.

  “You’re a smart guy,” he said with a smarmy smile. “But you’re not the one fixing my car.” This was followed by a five-minute rant about the shortcomings of my technicians and how they didn’t quite know how to diagnose a car like his.

  I didn’t get upset. I just answered him calmly. “You are never happy with what we do. There’s a Mercedes dealer in Hartford. It’s less than an hour from here. Why don’t you go down there and see if they can’t meet your needs better? I’m not going to do any more work on this car.”

  Whatever outcome the doctor was expecting, that wasn’t it. He back-pedalled quickly; now it seemed we were not all that bad. But my position didn’t change. “We have a limited amount of time here, and I want to spend it working for people who appreciate what we do. If you’re not happy with us—and that’s obvious to me—go somewhere else.”

  Over the next six months I sent quite a few miserable people down the road in that fashion. “Why did you throw him out?” the guys in the shop would ask me. “His money was as good as anyone’s.” It wasn’t about money for me. It was about how they made me feel. “We’re not here to let customers treat us like doormats,” I said.

  Car repair is complicated, though many motorists assume it’s simple. Things aren’t always easy, and they don’t always go as planned. Jobs cost more than people hope. Some customers don’t want to believe what the carmaker or I say about maintenance. I point to a page in the owner’s manual and say, “That’s the oil rating your car needs,” and they say, “That’s not really true.” I ask why they doubt the carmaker’s specifications, and they get huffy and say, “Don’t you understand that the customer is always right?”

  That was a dangerous question for a customer to ask me, because it spoke to the heart of who I was. There was plenty I could not do, but I was absolutely confident of my gift for reading machines. Someone who came in asking me to fix his car clearly did not share that gift. If he did, he wouldn’t need me to tell him what was wrong! If the customer was always right there would be no need for professional diagnostics or a car repair shop in the first place.

  Liberace used to say he played classical music “with the boring parts left out.” We’ve sort of done the same, but with cars. We now focus on difficult diagnostic work no one else can do and restoration that is as much automotive art as mechanics. As I watched this process u
nfold I thought back to my vision at the company’s founding. I’d said we would work on cars people care about, and we do. But though it might sound funny, in all my past encounters, I had considered the needs of the cars first. Now, though some customers annoyed me, I was connecting better with most of them and striking a chord I had never before hit. Instead of being 100 percent logical when a client would come in with a problem, I began speculating aloud about how that person might have been feeling in her moment of vehicular crisis. “That must have been scary,” I would say, and like as not, I’d get a response explaining exactly how scary it was when the car quit running in the left lane on the interstate in the midst of rush hour traffic.

  “I’m glad I found you guys,” a client would tell me, even before we had fixed his problem. I heard praise like that more and more, and the only explanation I could come up with was that my behaviour was making people feel more comfortable. Nothing else had changed at work. The staff and the shop were exactly the same. That was a remarkable realization—the thought that TMS had opened my eyes to outside emotions and that awareness was translated almost immediately into success at work. I slowly learned that I couldn’t simply pick a brand—like Land Rover—and assume that all Land Rover drivers cared about their cars. They don’t. It takes an ability to connect with the drivers, because one guy can be proudly passionate about his rusty Subaru while another driver can be essentially indifferent to a new Ferrari.

  As my ability to connect with people improved I came to see that many of our angry and dissatisfied former customers had not been car enthusiasts at all. They were just people who wanted transportation to work, and it happened to be a Benz or BMW that did the job. I’d been trying to share an excitement and interest that they simply didn’t feel. Now that I can read our clients better I am far more successful at building relationships with the real enthusiasts who are the heart of our customer base, and that connection has made life better for all of us.