Be Different: Adventures of a Free-Range Aspergian With Practical Advice for Aspergians, Misfits, Families & Teachers

by John Elder Robison

  Learning Calculus

  One of the first signs that electronics had taken over my life was the change in my room. Winnie the Pooh bedspreads and bright curtains were gone, replaced by test equipment, tools, and vacuum tubes. My bedroom had become a lab. Parental influence was nowhere to be seen.

  My grandparents had given me a huge Fender Showman guitar amplifier, which filled one corner of my room. Another corner had shelves of components. (They were very special shelves. I had made them myself in Mr. Jacque’s woodshop class.) On the other side of my room, I’d converted my dresser top to a workbench, though “converted” may be too strong a word. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say, I drilled holes and cut bits from the top of my dresser while using it as a workbench. My bed was next to that, but you couldn’t see it because it was hidden beneath a pile of filthy clothes, sheets, and blankets. The carpet underfoot was sharp with little snippets of wire and clipped lead wires from resistors and capacitors.

  I lurked in the midst of it all, staring into the round screen of my oscilloscope. I’d sit watching and listening for hours, absorbing music and unraveling how sound waves looked and how electrical signals worked.

  The whole process had started the year before, when I discovered the oscilloscope. In fact, a lot of people don’t even know what an oscilloscope is, so I’ll take a moment to tell you. The oscilloscope is a device that displays electrical signals as lines and shapes on a small screen. It allowed me to see the music I loved as patterns on the screen, patterns that I could unravel to gain a deeper understanding of how things worked. You may not believe that geeky piece of electronic test gear could be life-changing, but it sure was for me.

  I was drawn to those squiggly lines from the moment I saw them. Each signal had its own unique shape when viewed on the oscilloscope. The constant voltage from a battery made a flat line. It didn’t change over time. The signals on the phone line were a whole different story, though. They were alive and dynamic when seen on the scope. The dial tone appeared as a smooth wave pattern, while a honking busy signal made a more complex image. And a conversation was the most complex signal of all.

  There were oscilloscopes in the electronics classroom at the high school, but the best scopes were in the audiovisual repair department or in the engineering labs at the university, so that’s where I spent all my time in the beginning. Later, when I got a scope of my own, I became self-sufficient. I was able to look at patterns eight or ten hours a day, and that’s what I did, just about every day.

  Those green lines on the screen opened up a whole new world for me. The concept of seeing sound seemed magical, yet I understood what I was seeing—it all made sense. Watching sounds on that scope was even better than Lost in Space or any other TV show. I watched and listened and watched some more until my eyes and ears became interchangeable. By then, I could look at a pattern on the scope and know what it sounded like, and I could listen to a sound and know what it looked like.

  Music was the thing that gave meaning to all of this.

  I learned to adjust the scope to reveal its different parts. If I set the scope to sweep slowly, the rhythm of the music dominated the screen. Loud passages would appear as broad streaks, while quiet passages thinned down to a single tiny squiggle. A slightly higher sweep speed showed me the big, heavy, slow waves of the bass line and the kick drum as wide squiggles. Most of the energy was contained in those low notes. Up higher, with a faster scope setting, I found the vocals. At the top of it all lay the jagged fast waves from the cymbals.

  Every instrument had a distinct pattern, even when they were all playing the same melody. With practice, I learned how to distinguish a passage played on an organ from the same music played on a guitar. But I didn’t stop there. As I listened to the instruments, I realized that each one had its own voice. “You’re nuts,” my friends said, but I was right. The musicians all had their own ways of playing, but their instruments were unique, too. Actually, it was the musicians who taught me to tell them apart.

  “Just listen to that guy play,” they’d say. Often they’d be talking about the musician and his style, like Alvin Lee of Ten Years After or B. B. King playing the blues. But other times they talked about the sound, and they jumped on me fast if I failed to pick up the difference. “You’re not paying attention, man,” they would say. “Just listen to that guitar. Can’t you hear that hollow-body Gibson sound?” When I got it right, the older musicians praised me. “That kid is smarter than any houseplant,” they said, and I wriggled my ears in appreciation.

  With a lot of practice I got the ability to listen to a song and say, “He’s playing a Fender Precision bass” or “That keyboard player has a Hammond and a Korg.” Before you conclude that that ability is rare, let me put it in perspective. There were musicians who taught me who could go beyond simply identifying a Fender Precision bass. They could pick a particular Precision by its unique tone qualities, and they could tell one Precision from another when listening to a recording. “This is an old pre-CBS Fender,” I’d hear. “They always sound the best.” Sometimes they told me what kind of strings the instrument was strung with, and when I checked, they were always right.

  That same ability must have been latent in me, because the more deeply I immersed myself in music, the better I became, and soon I was just as confident of my musical insight as any professional musician. I wonder if anyone can do this but most people never know, or if this is a rare gift I have.

  People have asked me what the secret was to the way I could resolve such fine details in sound, but I don’t think there was one. It just took a good dose of concentration, some motivation, and a few thousand hours of looking and listening, and there I had it. I built my musical insight the way you’d build a stone wall … one note or one stone at a time, with a lot of dedication and persistence. My ability to focus surely helped, but most of my ability came about through countless hours of hard work. It feels strange to think of listening to music as practice or training, but that’s what it was for me. And I added an additional sensory input: I watched.

  The scope patterns helped me learn what set the instruments apart. The secret was all in the harmonics, the components sound waves are built from. I was able to see them on the scope, but it took all those hours to unravel the way visual patterns related to the design subtleties of musical instruments and circuits.

  My ability to recognize the voices of the individual instruments took me much deeper into the music. If I listened to a song and recognized a Rickenbacker bass, I could see it in my mind, just as I could see every other instrument being played. It was almost like being there. The music came steadily more alive as my insight deepened.

  The most complex patterns emerged when different instruments played together. At first, they were hard to unravel with my ears and virtually impossible to sort out with my eyes. But I persisted. At times, the screen could just dissolve into a blur of light, until I taught myself how to adjust the scope to emphasize different components of the sound. With practice, I was beginning to decode the secrets of music, and with it, waveform mathematics.

  I didn’t even see it as math. I saw the whole thing as a great mental puzzle—adding the waves from different instruments in my head, and figuring out what the result would look like. The biggest challenge was learning how the different shapes I saw in my mind actually sounded. With practice, I became pretty good at it, and my imagination began matching reality. As my knowledge expanded, I began asking bigger questions. How do electronic circuits alter sounds? I know what an echo sounds like, but what does it look like? How are special effects created?

  I started building simple circuits and looking at how they altered the wave patterns. For example, I learned how a fuzz box made the honking guitar sound on the Beatles’ “Revolution.” I learned about the effect they call flanging on songs like Orleans’s “Love Takes Time.” Once I saw them and heard them, I understood their workings. I always asked myself, What’s next? I built new circuits, and predi
cted how my changes would look and sound. I was thrilled when I was right and puzzled when I wasn’t.

  Those circuits were hard to figure out at first. I’ll bet I spent two hundred hours wrestling with my first audio amplifier. There were days when I almost cried with frustration, and my wall had dents where I punched it in anger as I struggled to make things work. But I got faster as I got more experience. Soon my designs began working, right off the drawing board.

  I wish there were a secret to share for my eventual success, but there isn’t. I just solved one puzzle after another. Some took me forward in huge steps, while other discoveries showed me the error of a previous “breakthrough.” If there is a secret to that at all, it’s probably that I was too pigheaded and stubborn to quit.

  I never had a shortage of ideas, and within a few years I developed a solid enough foundation of knowledge to think of something new and turn the concept to reality fairly successfully.

  By then, I had gone from unraveling other people’s devices to inventing my own. That was what took me to the top in music. Rock-and-roll musicians always wanted something unique. Companies popped up every day, selling little special-effects boxes that changed the sound of an instrument. There were phasers, doublers, wah-wah, distortion, echo, and reverb. The list was endless. I began building my own devices, but instead of putting them in boxes, I built them right into the instruments. I also built effects that became part of the main sound system. It was a wonderful, creative time for me. I had truly found the first of my Aspergian gifts.

  I’d imagine a wave from a musical instrument, feed it into a circuit in my mind, and look and listen to the result. If I liked what I heard, I built the circuit and fine-tuned it. If it didn’t work, I thought of something else that did. When my own thoughts weren’t enough, I turned to books with titles like Active Filter Design and Signal Processing Electronics. That’s where I sometimes ran into trouble.

  The books were filled with formulas, which I did not understand. I looked at the symbols and equations on the pages and got nothing. But I looked at the schematic drawings—the circuit layouts—and things began to make sense. I’d stare at a circuit and imagine a simple wave. I’d put the wave into the circuit and imagine the result. I’d read the descriptions and compare those to the patterns in my mind.

  Looking back at that time, I now see what was happening.

  I didn’t relate to math symbols, but I had taught myself to “read” a circuit diagram the way most mathematicians solve equations. Electronic components had taken the place of mathematical symbols for me. I couldn’t make any sense of an integral signal and some formula in a calculus book. But I knew exactly what happened when I connected resistors, capacitors, and amplifiers to integrate a signal in real life. The thing was, the calculus concept of integration was a meaningless abstract. Reality for me was the way I added harmonics to a simple wave to turn it from a curve to a sawtooth shape. And I knew how that changed the sound, making it smooth and fat.

  Ultimately, sound was what mattered. The equations on the page were just dry representations of the sounds I created by applying my vision and imagination. The sound was what was real. That’s the same thing other inventors have realized since the beginning of time.

  A math professor called me out on that one day. He said, “How can you say you understand calculus concepts if you can’t even pass algebra?” Years ago, I was demeaned by comments like that, but today I understand the answer.

  Modern math teachers say Isaac Newton invented calculus in the seventeenth century. The implication of that statement is that advanced math did not exist before that day. That’s not true. Math is merely a set of tools to represent complex things that have always happened in the real world. If you can see into the patterns of nature, like the movements of the planets or the interplay of musical notes to make a melody … you are seeing the foundation that modern representational math was built upon. That’s a fairly uncommon ability that I now know to be a gift of my Asperger’s.

  We’ve developed the written mathematics to describe the movement of the sun and stars only in the last few hundred years, but the Mayans and Egyptians somehow figured out many of those same things a thousand or more years ago. You can find examples of inventors and engineers with instinctive insights into complex problems throughout history. Perhaps they were Aspergians, too.

  My ability to twist and shape waves in my mind may not be as precise as a mathematician with a computer, but for my purposes, that didn’t matter. My imagination was close enough to reality that I could hit my target by thinking of a circuit, building it, and refining it through a bit of experimentation. There are lots of people out there who know calculus. The number of people who grasp its principles intuitively and use them to invent things is a lot smaller. I didn’t know that then, but there was never any reason for me to feel inferior to other engineers, despite what people said.

  By arranging different components in my mind I could make a saxophone solo sound like the instrument took wing and flew. I could put some bottom under the organ, so the bass notes sounded like distant rolling thunder. I’d make the drums snap in that unique way that got the audience clapping along with the band. I heard those things first in my head. Then I made them real when I built my designs.

  If you asked a mathematician what I did, he’d describe extremely complex calculus functions that transformed one wave pattern into another. He’d write symbols and equations that only a math professor would understand. Looking at them on a paper, they wouldn’t mean a thing to me. They’d be just as flat and lifeless as the sheet they were written on. I could never make any sense of them.

  To me, the waves were like living things. They went into imaginary circuit components in my mind, and they emerged transformed. I could bend and shape them, and view them from any angle. My resistors, capacitors, and other imaginary parts took the place of math symbols in my head. The shapes they made became sounds in my imagination. That’s why I never learned traditional math. I left it behind with my mathematical vision. And it worked.

  When I think of earlier inventors, I realize that many of them must have had a similar intuitive understanding of higher mathematics. I now know that it’s possible to add waves in your head, even if you can’t write the formulas to do it on paper.

  I’m with the Band

  Lots of young people go to Hollywood, but very few become stars. Of all the high school bands, how many reach national prominence? With those odds, why would a logical guy like me ever choose a career in music, and how could someone as socially disabled as I am possibly succeed?

  The obvious answer is that I created some things the world had never seen before. With their fire, light, and action, my special-effects guitars made the musical instrument a centerpiece of the rock-and-roll show, and set the stage for countless effects that followed, in movies, on MTV, and in today’s music videos. The equipment I built for Pink Floyd’s sound company delivered powerful music to countless people at concerts all over North America, and that paved the way for the sophisticated digital concert sound systems in use today.

  Stated that way, my accomplishments sound awfully grand. In reality, what I did was quite a bit simpler, and more attainable. If I had to describe my abilities I’d say I was first a circuit designer, a person who invented an electronic circuit to solve a particular problem. It just so happens that my particular skill was really evident because I used it to create things the whole world could see or hear. Other designers might well have been more talented than I was, but the area where they worked was obscure. For example, another engineer I know invented a brilliant method of regulating the throttle in a car, but no one outside the car industry ever noticed his creative genius. That’s still true today, even though millions of cars now drive around on his inventions. You might say electronic design was my “core skill,” and that skill was certainly facilitated in a big way by my Aspergian brain differences.

  The second “success skill” is that I was a loner
when it came to creating my designs, but I was a team player when it came to building them. For example, I envisioned the light guitar that Ace Frehley made famous, but my abilities stopped at thinking up the concept and designing the circuits. I turned to Jim Boughton to engineer and make the structure of the thing, and my girlfriend Little Bear for all the actual electronic assembly. When the “light guitar” part was done, I took my creation to Long Island luthier Steve Carr, who worked the frets and action to make a guitar you could actually play, and play well. I could never have made that instrument without those people. The same was true for most of my other creations—I relied on others to help carry my ideas to completion.

  So was I just a cog in the machine? Surely, I was more than that. First, I had the vision followed by the drive to make things happen. Millions of people see an unmet need and say, “Someone should invent an xyz.…” I am someone who’s said that, and then actually followed through, many times in my life. I don’t know what you call that trait, but it’s not genius. Maybe it’s imagination plus determination, or stubbornness, or something else. Whatever you call it, I know that many people today could go much further if they just took the next step, when they had an idea, instead of letting it die as idle conversation.

  Then there’s teamwork. We live in a complex world, one where it’s nearly impossible for any one person to “do it all,” no matter how smart he or she may be. When it came time for me to build the devices I’d imagined, I knew I could not do it alone. That capacity—the ability to know what you don’t know, and know what you need—is vital to success. I assembled a little team and served as its leader of sorts.

  Finally, there’s self-confidence, and that’s a funny thing. Most people think self-confidence relates to other people, and I have no confidence when it comes to intimate matters with others. When I was twenty-one, if you had pointed to a pretty girl and said, “Go say hi to MaryAnne; she thinks you’re sweet,” I would have been far too shy to budge. But if you had said, “Can you design a guitar that would project a laser show back over the audience?” I would have said, “Sure, why not?” And I would have started thinking, and spouting ideas, and in minutes I’d have been far down the road to a laser guitar light show.