Now im pleased to introduce john and doctor pascual is the professor of neurology and associate dean for clinical and Translational Research at Harvard Medical School who served as the chief of the division of cognitive neurology and the Barrington Allen center for noninvasive brain stimulation act the medical center. John robison is a world recognized authority and the best times author of raising cubby. Hes from the college of william and mary. Ththe members of the number of e details his experience of the study led using the magnetic stimulation, the new experimental brain therapy. The hope of the doctors and scientists must understand and then address some of the issues at the heart. The Washington Post praises he takes readers for a ride through the science and leaves us wanting more. Hes explaining physical concepts and doesnt shy away from asking hard questions. This is a truly unusual memoir both poignant and scientifically important. Please join me in welcoming john robison and l. Virus. [applause] thank you all for joining us tonight. Id like to point out looking at us here you cant tell who is the privacy professor and the inmate and in fact that was in part one of the changes from this expansion of emotional sensitivity and range that ive experienced through this. This book of mine. One thing its not is a story of curing autism. Thats what this is about and its not. What this is about is a therapy that in my opinion is one of the most powerful tools available to no scientist today but no one knows about and the reason that no one knows about it is because it draws electricity from the ball and sends it to the brain you can make changes. But the effects of these experience experiments were life changing and i think that although im autistic and i talk about why. Tuesday emotion for folks like you is a magical thing. It was magical and wonderful but at the same time as devastating an overwhelming. It was a metaphor for what we can do elsewhere because it isnt just an autism therapy. Its something looking at epilepsy and if it can stop seizures it is going to save peoples lives. Now it is being used to treat depression and anxiety over the country. All over the country. They are looking at it powerfully remediate symptoms of intellectual disability, and isnt that kind of amazing . Thats one of those things that was never touchable by psychiatry. And you might wonder how i got involved in this. And its kind of funny, you know, i was starting to speak in public after the publication of look me in the eye. And i was at a college in western massachusetts and what looked like a graduate student approached me and asked me if she could hand out flyers for a study she was doing. There she is. Stand up so they can see you. You ought to be able to do this. There she is. She got it all going. [applause] so she announced that she was a post doc at this medical center, and i didnt even know who that was and by the time she had told me about this, i was convinced not only i wanted to hand out flyers but i wanted to try this myself. I had so many questions and she suggested i could beat her boss meet her boss. I went home and looked him up and i found he is a professor knows hes the dean and scientist and head the center of the beth israel hospital, and she is at the hospital at harvard. And i thought shit, i hope it is chased them away with my weakness. They were the only autistic people that were prepared for that. So i guess what i will do as i will have the fellow who thought this whole thing up to you how he described t it to me when we met. They made the connection and a in a stud the study to the cos to understand the goal of the study. It involves talking with the subjects and explaining to them what youre doing and he said he wants to talk more so we thought that is part of what we are supposed to do. They are using medicine to do anything other than the discovery to the medical technology. It was very, very brief. And thats rapidly changing currentcurrent in the field is perpendicular to the field that is very strong but very brief. Potentially it is using electricity to modify and work ultimately through the electoral to become. [inaudible] if we know how much electricity and others will use this approach for therapy but even before that we can use it to understand how the brain activity relates to the given behavior. That is the type of study that we are interested in that lindsey was spearheading that they had to do fundamental in the question in the mechanisms of learning and elasticity and autism disorders are a normal and abnormathe normaland abnorme abnormal are they the result are too strong. Its the ability to relate the learning to speak and finding the right words. What we try to do is modify activity for a little bit of time, a few minutes. It is a destruction and we know that is the case. We told him what it will look like and if yo it would come ino the lab. We have researche the research t those different areas. We make sure that by the time its done the effect is gone and follow enough. We had the description of what was going to happen and the thinking was that they would have me look at the figure figud the spaces and different patterns. Before the stimulation i would see these patches to make a pasg have to push a button if it was sad and angry, whatever. I looked at those things and i have absolutely no idea what i was seeing. I have no idea what im seeing and they tried to reassure me saying there are no right or wrong answers and i thought thats crazy of course, there is nobody that can test without right answers and in a sense it made me feel good and to see that. What does it feel like getting zapped, they have a quail that is the size of the little smaller and they hold up to your head and they have cameras that are looking at me after they shot a bunch of images of my brain so they had a really precise map of where my brain was relative to the features of my face and they could locate exactly where they wanted us to stimulate. They turned on and it started firing energy one pulls a second. Every time there was one i would feel a little tap on the top of my head and it wasnt painful, it wasnt pleasurable but what it did is they put my mind in mutual. They assured me i wouldnt feel anything in my head from this but it wasnt so. What happened was i was thinking about what i was going to do next when i left and the fox wouldnt stay in my mind. Ive tried to count the pulses and i would count one, two, three, four so then i kept sitting there and all of a sudden it went off and stopped in half an hour had passed and they rushed me over and had me do the looking at the faces and stuff again and i didnt think i did any better and then its time to hand me over to ask questions to see if im ready to go home. He looks at me and says its thursday and i said while im selfemployewell i amselfemploy good attention that i can see if i screwed this up i could be heading to a locked cage in the basement. I answered the questions good enough and he let me go. I started out driving home and i had been at the hospital and nothing had happened and i thought what kind of a crazy fool was i to think that they were going to zap me like that. It was going to advance science and i really believe Nothing Happened and i turned on my ipod and i was playing music because back in the 70s i was a sound engineer and used to play all the clubs up and down for how to record and they were known for singing part of the side track on saturday night fever and i listen to them sing and it was like i heard when i was 18yearsold. I could listen to each individual instrument and each individual singer and i havent had that ability but thats what made me a star in producing music back then. I asked him why he thought that happened and nobody knew. We did one of the experiments and couldnt change me at all as i could see a. Some of them made me happy and cheerful or anxious. He said when good things happen to you we have to be thankful because you could just as easily have a bad thing happened to you. I said in my going to be seeing the boxster is and he said i dont think that will happen but you could be anxious or unsettled. Some of the simulations truly turned my life upside down over a period for years when we did this they were simulations where i saw into people just like seeing into their soul into those experiences were temporary but they changed me forever. And you know something people find hard to believe, they think how can a momentary experience change you forever let me give you an example that you are somebody that is colorblind. In all of your life you get to o the night chant here about the beautiful sky and the pretty graphs and you dont see it, you see shades of gray and after a while you get the behaviors and start to think its making me mad. I dont want the evidence of my eyes and they go on and switch the color on and all of a sudden you realize its real and you walk out of the lab and a few days later the color fades away. You are going to conduct the rest of your life with the full knowledge of what it was a. Youre not going to be mad anymore because you will know that the thing they were talking about it youre going to be different forever. So how could see emotions change me in the same way . Ive wrestled for years the answer my question i asked myselmyself have i fantasized al this and do i imagine that i saw a motion, no, the changes in my life were too obvious and too striking for it to be by imagination and other people of course have had the same effect now. The two keep listening why interrupt. [inaudible] we put a lot of time and a lot of care and effort about what account for what affects. You walk out of there and feel great. If you are leveraging anything you can bring to the table from biology to medicines and find the medicine and you get a better. It changed me and was changed me is the tapping sensation. The way they ask the questions is interesting but thats not what im after what we were after his are there mechanisms that are normal or different. We didnt know where we were stimulating or predicting. So reading the story gives you a different perspective from somebody who is a participant and is telling you things you would never think of even asking. I had to ask the questions, not the answers. I know what i want to find at a given time in the lab but for the most part, we forget that moment in time it may have effects that we can capture but that will change you and have an impact on who you are in a lasting way to. You make somebody able to realize a under certain circumstances i can forget the meaning of intentions and just go by the outcome and if you were trying to tell me that you didnt thats okay with me. What are thfor the insight on te that have it but realized the we need to ask those questions and we dont ask how it may change somebody in this life because frankly, we dont hear them. We explore the individuals and its all about the person. In the experiment we often times try to identify what is common among the participants and blur the differences. What this book is its an enormous call to action. The. What we would expect the. Of difficult subjects and mechanisms that last a certain time and may last longer. With that they cannot acquire knowledge or skills that are. But the first thing you learn interferes in the next thing and the next one and the next one, so depending on the study of the Life Experience it can become an enormously disruptive way of the brain functioning. It might change forever. Hispanic its okay if we are. We want things to impact our brain does not change us forev forever. We didnt expect to have that degree of effect but the question is the mechanisms are better than normal in some people. So i could change more than anyone ever anticipated and that actually makes me think of something that i really great debt and that is when we first met, he had read my book with me in the eye and he told me he was drawn to talking with me in part because of my description of how i became a digital engineer designing sound effects that Milton Bradley. Ive been in engineer working for the pink floyd sound company into the touring band was all analog circuitry and the world was in that time growing digital and everything was microprocessorbased. I didnt view the Older Technology of the 50s and 60s and that is what we used on the stage and amplifiers that i had a chance to get a job. The only thing was they wanted a microprocessor familiar engineer digital designer to design digital sound effects. It maybe was the arrogance of the youth from me to be a digital designer so i went to the University Research center and looked at books on design and study them for a couple of weeks and i went down there to Milton Bradley and for them i was a digital designer and they hired me and all my life i sort couldve lived with the feeling i just bullshit my way through the job and quick Milton Bradley because i thought i was a fraud. Actually it was this fellow he here. If it isnt the story of being fraud. That is the kind of thing you sometimes see in the descriptions of behaviors that you learn to the skill in two weeks and he sai said maybe you didnt know as much as some other person but youd knew enough to do the job. If it was just luck and bullshit you would have failed but instead you made yourself an analog engineer and been a digital engineer after a couple of weeks and made yourself other things and that was first of all the first time in my life i ever really have somebody recognize that it was a gift and not just a cheap trick to get a job. What a remarkable gift to some of us autistic people have and he said to me a little later we have no way of knowing how many people are offered ability like that for all we know theyre in the fields in india and china and we may never find out. And this is the most remarkable story. If you were told about the studies i took part in and read this book of mine you would never know they were the same. The only points of comparison are that both articles describe things like looking at faces and stick figures and awe. But beyond that, the experiences are totally different and i think that wha thats what he ao is when they set up an experiment in medical research, it is a very tightly designed thing and sometimes there are effects that are almost magical. What happened with me was the success beyond the wildest dreams of any therapist but the thing is he wasnt an autism therapist or my doctor treating me. He was a fellow engaged in research that i believe can and the effect on me with a stunning side effect that none of us expected and i think the lesson to take away from that is that sometimes scientists may structure studies at the outcome of the study that really meaningful and may be something that is totally out of the bounds of what they expected. Its the human experimentation and acted. Its an opportunity to give us insight. I think that is absolutely the case. Hispanic you couldnt have known the question. You had no idea what would happen to me like that. There is another aspect at least a couple of other aspects, one is the responsibility that comes with the potential consequences that we may not anticipate that are important to be aware of and that often gets passed and there are things we just dont know or make sure the person understands what that really means and thats important in your book. Its important to realize and there is another important takehome lesson for us for seeing the colors and the notion that there is a reality of moments when you become aware of something and people have seen the experiences like that by chance and experiments and in the one case it at a moment of insight led to function in a different way that was more adaptive in a way that it wouldnt have been able to do. And that is interesting. Is it the experiment that did it or would you get an opportunity without which may be wouldnt have happened so in that sense it did do it in a different way than we often think of the effect. Its a curious thing that ive often wondered why am i the one that was so affected by this compared to other people in the study and of course i think that im the only one who went into the study that was one kind of engineer and then another kind of an engineer and a banana automobile restorer and book writer and photographer indicted on all these Different Things successfully and as he said to me, i wouldnt be likely to have been successful in all those things if i just bullshit my way through so somehow i have this gift of acquiring the skills and it appears that is related so maybe im more changeable than others. Its found to be abnormally good for the individuals disorder unto others that have high iqs so why is it that you are able to then extract that momen momef experience and change th changey that you live in that impact and another participant that has been in the moments of insight and thanks to you, weve heard them but the effect was much less transformative. I think its a waste of illustrated the therapeutics or they couple the simulation with the appropriate behavior and the appropriate intervention and maybe by chance that what happened in your case. You were able to come up with putting yourself in situations that let you to these emotions and to tell stories and get the close reactions and that behavioral intervention into is benefitinhisbenefiting from thef insight. But we speculated about as maybe some of the young people in our study that ar were on the autism spectrum or werent very social might have been stimulated in the same way as me and they might have had stimulations that switched on their ability to see emotion in people coming too. But they went home and read books and give video game videod on the internet and by monday it wore off and they went to school and it was as if nothing had happened and i am completely the opposite. I am the most inquisitive subject they ever have. So im like completely the opposite. What i did receive was expert advice and thought from the most knowledgeable people in the subject at the time. Its a mess i used to turn myself into a digital engineer 20 years before and its a really good question because you know there was a time that i had performance reviews and companies and people told me you are not a team player you cant work in a group. Alternately i quit working in grid environments and electronics because i couldnt handle the social situations that i go into the lab with these folks and they do experiments with me and a year later my social skills are such that im invited by the director of the National Institutes of health to get more involved in the service in six years later, i served on the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee where he produced a pla we prodr autism in the u. S. Government. The government bureaucracy of 30 some people how can i make that transformation for being so socially inept to being a key play