Switched On: From Asperger's to Emotional Awakening

By: John Elder Robison

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Synopsis: "For the first time in my life, I learned what it was really like to truly "know" other people's feelings. At a stroke I went from oblivious to insightful, and my life was forever changed. It was as if I'd been experiencing the world in black and white all my life, and suddenly I could see everything - and particularly other people - in brilliant beautiful color."Six years ago, John Elder Robison published Look Me In the Eye, his memoir about growing up with Asperger's. Now he tells the remarkable story of how he met Dr Alvaro Pascual-Leone, a Harvard neuroscientist who proposed that John's emotional intelligence wasn't so much absent as it was dormant, and that by animating the appropriate neural pathways with powerful electromagnets he might be able to awaken this part of his brain. So began a five-and-a-half year journey in which John gave himself up as a guinea pig to some of the world's top brain researchers in an effort to understand and fix the deficits of emotional intelligence that lie at the heart of autism.John experiences the benefits and pitfalls, the joy and melancholy, of being able to feel in response to things that happen to him and his loved ones. A real-life Flowers For Algernon with a happy ending, Switched On goes on the trail of the revolutionary science that has the potential to transform millions of emotionally circumscribed lives.