What happens when you have been seeing the world in black
and white, and all of a sudden someone turns on the color?
What happens when an autistic man, someone who has always
had great difficulty reading emotional cues, can suddenly see and feel it all
clearly?
John Elder Robison is autistic. He chose one day to
participate in a new study conducted by the Harvard Medical School. Allow him
to describe the treatment:
Then I
was offered a chance to participate in a study at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical
Center, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. Investigators at the Berenson-Allen Center there were
studying transcranial magnetic stimulation, or T.M.S., a noninvasive procedure
that applies magnetic pulses to stimulate the brain. It offers promise for many
brain disorders. Several T.M.S. devices have been approved by the Food and Drug
Administration for the treatment
of severe depression, and others are under study for different conditions.
(It’s still in the experimental phase for autism.) The doctors wondered if
changing activity in a particular part of the autistic brain could change the
way we sense emotions. That sounded exciting. I hoped it would help me read
people a little better.
It sounds like an interesting idea. The problem was: it
worked. In some ways it worked too well.
Suddenly, Robison found himself assaulted by raw,
unprocessed emotions. He did not know what to make of them and did not know
what to do with them. Also, he felt compelled to blurt out his own personal
feelings, feelings that he had not henceforth known he had.
It was almost as though he had become someone else. Friends
and family who had expected to be dealing with one person found themselves
facing someone else. Many of them did not very much like the new person they
were facing. Some, like his wife, could not deal with him at all any more. Enhanced
emotional sensitivity is not necessarily such a good thing, unless you know how to deal with it.
Robison described his experience:
They
say, be careful what you wish for. The intervention succeeded beyond my wildest
dreams — and it turned my life upside down. After one of my first T.M.S.
sessions, in 2008, I thought nothing had happened. But when I got home and
closed my eyes, I felt as if I were on a ship at sea. And there were dreams —
so real they felt like hallucinations. It sounds like a fairy tale, but the
next morning when I went to work, everything was different. Emotions came at me
from all directions, so fast that I didn’t have a moment to process them.
Before
the T.M.S., I had fantasized that the emotional cues I was missing in my autism
would bring me closer to people. The reality was very different. The signals I
now picked up about what my fellow humans were feeling overwhelmed me. They
seemed scared, alarmed, worried and even greedy. The beauty I envisioned was
nowhere to be found.
Seeing
emotion didn’t make my life happy. It scared me, as the fear I felt in others
took hold in me, too. As exciting as my new sensory ability was, it cost me
customers at work, when I felt them looking at me with contempt. It spoiled
friendships when I saw teasing in a different and nastier light. It even ruined
memories when I realized that people I remembered as funny were really making
fun of me.
In this initial stage, being emotionally sensitive did not
lead to happiness. It led to distress. Robison was crippled by the
sensations. He did not know how to process the emotions, to put them in place, to keep them at a distance, to think about them, to apply his rational faculties to them. Lacking those
abilities, he was overwhelmed. Apparently, human emotions do not exist in an
aesthetic vacuum. And yet, for the post-treatment Robison, they did.
Unfortunately, it cost him his marriage.
In his words:
When I
met my former wife (a decade before the T.M.S.), she was seriously depressed.
She’d accepted my autistic even keel, and I accepted her often quiet sadness. I
never really felt her depression, so we complemented each other. She could read
other people much better than I could, and I relied on her for that.
Then
came the T.M.S. With my newfound ability I imagined myself joyfully shedding a
cloak of disability. I thought she would be happy, but instead she said matter
of factly, “You won’t need me anymore.” My heart hurt, and I felt unspeakably
sad. Later, people at work told me they’d liked me better the way I was before.
I’d
lived with my wife’s chronic depression all those years because I did not share
it. After the T.M.S., I felt the full force of her sadness, and the weight of
it dragged me under. At the same time, I felt this push to use my new
superpower, to go out in the world and engage with other people, now that I
could read their emotions. When I think about the way my behavior must have
appeared to the strangers I encountered, I cringe.
Apparently, a man whose wife is chronically depressed does
best to be insensitive. As soon as he begins to tune in to his wife’s despair, he is overwhelmed. He is incapable of distancing himself from what
he is feeling.
Moreover, after he was no longer emotionally disabled, his
wife believed that they were no longer soul mates, and that he would no longer
need her. Since she had apparently defined herself as his
eyes and ears in the world of human emotion, his new ability made her feel superfluous.
As it happened, emotional insight created as many problems
as it solved:
I
learned the hard way that emotional insight allowed me to see some things, but
another person’s true intent and commitment remained inscrutable.
And also:
After
some initial tumult, the changes in me proved transformational at work. My
ability to engage casual friends and strangers was enhanced. But with family
and close friends, the results were more mixed. I found myself unsettled by
absorbing the emotions of people I was close to, something that had never
happened before. Strong emotional reactions welled up in me, and I showed
feelings I had never expressed.
But then, the intensity faded. I am not clear about whether
this happened because Robison was learning how to process the emotions or
whether the treatment was wearing off—assuming that the change it produced in
the brain could wear off.
At the least, the TMS treatment does not seem to cause
Robison to revert to his earlier state and it certainly did not cause him to
regress.
Either way, the story does have a happy ending:
I’m
married again, to someone who’s emotionally insightful. To my amazement, she
became best friends with my first wife, and helped me reconnect with my son.
She started a tradition of family dinners and gatherings, and brought new
warmth into my life. Even more, she helped me become part of a web of emotional
connectedness I’d never known before, and surely could not have known
pre-T.M.S.
That
really shines through in my relationship with my son. We had grown apart before
the T.M.S. through a combination of his teenage rebellion and our mutual
inability to read each other’s feelings. (My son is on the autism spectrum,
too.) We joined the T.M.S. study together, and it became a powerful shared
experience. Even as the T.M.S. effects pushed my ex-wife and me apart, they
drew my son and me together. The T.M.S. also helped me understand my mother, in
the last years of her life.
I’ve
made new friends, and built a stronger business. And there’s something else:
I’ve learned that the grass is not always greener when it comes to emotional
vision. For much of my life, I’d imagined I was handicapped by emotional
blindness. When that changed, seeing into other people was overwhelming.
Becoming “typical” proved to be the thing that was truly crippling for me. Now
I realize that my differences make me who I am — success and failure alike. I’d
call that hard-won wisdom.
Considering that this is a new study, it is best not to jump
to conclusions. But certainly, it is well worth our attention.
[Further information about the Robison book in this review by Jennifer Senior.]
[Further information about the Robison book in this review by Jennifer Senior.]
5 comments:
Holy cow. Like having the blind see.
That is pretty amazing. However, I have heard about success with the long term effects of "properly administered" electro shock therapy to "stabilize" people. Where I live this is still being practiced, and I do live in North America. Also the problem with having an amplified ability to feel is that you realize how much individuals are in pain. It can be overwhelming to say the least.
I read that article too. My son is low-functioning autistic, and while he expresses his emotions in a very rudimentary form, I think this kind of treatment would be absolutely disastrous for him. While he needs much in the way of assistance in his basic life skills, I can't see how anything more would help him.
And without sounding flip, I think our population could actually use a dose of insensitivity. Otherwise we stand on the cusp of electing a dangerous bitch who thinks that we have to empathize with our enemies, and a House minority leader (and, sadly, former speaker) who had the vapors when Benjamin Netanyahu addressed that body. "Feelings" is costing our economy and our national security big time.
It sounds like science fiction.
Its perhaps almost like becoming a child in the sense of experiencing things for the first time, before you have time to build up filters and defenses to slow things down.
I've heard people who use certain drugs are also overwhelmed by their experiences, and it might be similar to "altered states" where what is normally unconscious is suddenly experienced.
Perhaps if this treatment is not just science fiction, it must have wider utility than just for autistic people.
Perhaps it could be used in small doses to remind many of us of what we've pushed outside our awareness because it was once too painful.
But it clearly should be used with caution, since it may be hard to undo, as this case shows.
Ares Olympus said...
It sounds like science fiction.
***
It used to be science fiction: Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes; movie version "Charly"
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