I listened the other day to a fascinating Fresh Air interview with John Elder Robison, the author of Look Me In The Eye, a compelling 2008 memoir of his life with Asperger Syndrome. In that book, Robison talked about how so much of his life made sense after he received his Asperger diagnosis. (Asperger, if you don’t know, is an autism spectrum disorder.)

More recently, he underwent experimental treatment in which doctors used low-level doses of electricity to target minute sections of his brain. The treatment changed him, lifting a veil that his neurological condition had imposed on reality. In his new book Switched On, Robison talks about what it was like to suddenly be able to experience the world in a more neurotypical way, after forty years as an Aspie — in particular, being able to read other people’s emotions. From the interview:

I was always possessed of strong emotions, what I wasn’t possessed of was reaction to situations with other people, and indeed after another stimulation, when I could look in your eyes and feel like I was just reading your thoughts, which was really weird and powerful for me, because that had never ever happened in my life. …

Just looking at somebody and having her tell me about putting a water pump on her car, but I would look at her and I would see that she was worried and frightened and anxious and I thought, “Excuse me, I have to go outside and gather myself for a second,” because I was almost reduced to tears by an ordinary conversation of commerce and I think that looking back on that time I now see that having this unregulated ability to read emotion was actually, for me, perhaps more disabling than being oblivious to the emotion, because when I was oblivious I could just listen to her tell me about the water pump leak, and I didn’t even notice if she was scared or anxious.

And:

I can’t go to movies anymore. I can’t watch TV. Ten years ago I could’ve sat through the Texas Chainsaw Massacre eating popcorn and stuff and wouldn’t have cared. Now it’s really upsetting and really stressful to me just to watch the evening news. I can’t do it. …

But at the same time, I know that my ability to serve on these autism committees, I think that’s the greatest thing I’ve ever done in my life, and I’m really proud [that] I can do that, and I think this made it possible. So there’s pain that I felt from having these emotions come on, but I’m just so proud that I can do this thing that’s important to young people and other people with autism and differences. …

After all this seeing of emotion, though, one thing that I’ve come away with is the knowledge that I wanted all my life to be able to read these emotions, but of course reading emotions just makes me like everyone else. I think a debt that I could never repay Alvaro and those scientists is that they showed me that my geeky ability to see into machines and see into things, that’s my true gift in life too, that nobody else can do that.

Listen to the whole interview here. One thing that’s not clear for me from this interview is whether or not gaining the ability to read the emotions of others resulted in a corresponding lost of his “geeky ability to see into machines and see into things.” It doesn’t seem so, but it’s just not clear.

The unveiling of Robison’s mind came with significant costs, costs that he could not have anticipated ahead of time. In the past, he thought certain people he called his friends were laughing with him. In truth, they were laughing at him, and once he understood that, it broke his heart, but he ended the friendships. More seriously, it ended his marriage. His wife suffered from chronic depression, and once he was able to feel real empathy with her, he couldn’t bear her sadness. It overwhelmed him.

If you were in Robison’s shoes, would you have chosen this treatment? Let me put the question more pointedly: Knowing what Robison now knows about the treatment — that it could upend your life in unpredictable ways — would you still undergo it if it could life the autism veil?

I think that’s really an impossible question to answer from a neurotypical point of view, because we neurotypicals don’t know what the world is like seen through the autism veil. Think of it this way: if you were offered a treatment that would help you experience reality much more richly, and see things that you had not been able to see before, would you take it, knowing that you could never go back to seeing the world as you do today?

Thinking back to the LSD thread we recently had here, we discussed the beneficial experience that some people who try psychedelic drugs have of feeling at one with the universe. I heard privately from a couple of people, one of them a fairly well known writer, who said that their psychedelic experience unexpectedly brought them out of depression and opened the door for them to believe in God. They both said that they believe the drug gave them a temporary view into the world as it truly is — filled with the presence of God — and that shook them out of their misery.

Now, let me put this to you: if a doctor said to you that you could take a dose of laboratory-produced LSD, and would be monitored by physicians the whole time, to prevent you from doing anything stupid, would you do it? That is, if you could be reasonably sure that nothing bad would happen to you physically from this experience, but there was no predicting what kind of emotional and psychological experience you would have, and what its lingering effects (good or ill) might be … would you do it? Why or why not?

The question is not so much “would you do drugs?” as “would you open yourself to the experience that is like having a veil lifted, and giving you an encounter of reality that is substantially different from what you’ve known all your life?” Except in Robison’s case, it wasn’t just for 12 hours, or however long a psychedelic experience lasts. It was permanent.

Put that way, it’s pretty scary to consider, isn’t it? That your entire understanding of yourself and everyone and everything around you could change — and not necessarily for the better.

I think this is one reason why people resist true religion: they fear what the world will look like if they have an experience that convinces them that the religion is true. This was certainly the case with me as a young man. I wanted the comforts of religion, and I even wanted the mystical experience of religion, but I wanted to have them from the safety of a life that I controlled. But that’s not possible. It’s like wanting to experience the ocean in a backyard swimming pool. The ocean can only be the ocean if it can encompass you. The same is true with God.

I knew someone once who was so depressed and unhappy, but who refused to get help of any kind. She was afraid of what might happen if she changed. She preferred the misery she knew to the possibility of being healed and relieved of her pain, but at the cost of changing. This is how we all are at some level, is it not? But I digress…

UPDATE: Look, John Elder Robison responded in the comments:

Thanks for your thoughtful commentary on my Fresh Air interview, and my Switched On book.

You present my story and an example of why people resist trying mind-bending drugs, and why they might fear an insight that could come from religious experience.

Maybe that’s so. But remember, I had no expectation that such would happen to me. To the best of my knowledge, people who experience religious visions get them unexpectedly too. Taking psychedelic drugs is different – you go into that expecting a wild ride.

Did you know that I come from a long line of clergy? My dad was a preacher before becoming a philosophy professor. My 8th grandfather was the first rector at Bruton Parish in Williamsburg, VA nad he held the pulpit at Jamestown.

So maybe it’s all in my DNA . . .