Switched On Quotes

“But were we so different, my pug and I?”
― John Elder Robison, Switched On: A Memoir of Brain Change and Emotional Awakening

“The concept of “brain plasticity” refers to the ongoing capacity of the brain and the nervous system to change itself. Everything that we do, think, feel, and experience changes our brain. A stroke or a traumatic brain injury can affect brain plasticity, and plasticity may also be associated with such developmental disorders as autism. Increased brain plasticity may also potentially endow a person with unanticipated new abilities, as John appears to have experienced in this book. TMS, or transcranial magnetic stimulation, the intervention that John undergoes, provides a unique opportunity for us to learn about the mechanisms of plasticity, and to identify alterations in the brain’s networks that may be responsible for a patient’s problematic symptoms, and also for recovery.”
― John Elder Robison, Switched On: A Memoir of Brain Change and Emotional Awakening

“One of the hardest things about my emotional awakening was the way it reshaped so many of my memories. It may sound crazy, but all too often, it turned formerly good memories bad. And there’s no balance. There’s not a single bad memory that’s now turned to good. (Page 211, the first paragraph of the “Rewriting History” chapter)”
― John Elder Robison, Switched On: A Memoir of Brain Change and Emotional Awakening

“When characters got up and moved on their own I found it so unnerving that I would stop writing for days. Glue eventually held them down.”
― John Elder Robison, Switched On: A Memoir of Brain Change and Emotional Awakening

“I had created a fantasy that seeing into people would be sweetness and love. Maybe there was some of that, but there was a lot more fear, and jealousy, and anger, and every bad thing I could imagine.”
― John Elder Robison, Switched On: A Memoir of Brain Change and Emotional Awakening

“Loss of language, as I experienced it, was immediately replaced by the expansion of something that was always there—a holistic understanding of the natural world through sight, smell, and sound. That background is there for all of us, but it’s usually overpowered by the words flowing through the thing we call consciousness. Some might say the state I was in was akin to one of meditative bliss. I felt one with the world around me, freed from the strictures of logic and spoken language. Yet meditative bliss is a state that’s pursued and attained voluntarily. Loss of language is no one’s goal.”
― John Elder Robison, Switched On: A Memoir of Brain Change and Emotional Awakening

“With no more than a slight pop, language was gone. The vanishing was so complete, I didn’t even know what I’d lost because the entire concept of words and the ability to string thoughts together simply disappeared. One moment there was a dialogue playing in my head, a little voice saying, I wonder what’s going to happen when they do this. The next moment, the voice was gone. All that remained was feeling. The comfort of the chair, and a sense of familiarity with the people beside me. I was incapable of a realization like “I can’t talk!” since it consists of words. Without words I had ceased to be a creature of coherent logical thought. Instead, I lived in the moment with sound, sight, smell, and feeling.”
― John Elder Robison, Switched On: A Memoir of Brain Change and Emotional Awakening

“A burst of high-frequency TMS pulses applied over Broca’s area on the left side would shut down the ability to speak, Shirley told me. This wasn’t what they were doing in the autism study—what they proposed was a much subtler tweaking. But I was intrigued by her comment and didn’t let it go. “Did you actually try it yourself?” I asked her. It turned out that she had—in fact, quite a few of the researchers, as part of their training to work in the lab, had experienced the speech-suppression TMS. They offered to show me what it felt like.”
― John Elder Robison, Switched On: A Memoir of Brain Change and Emotional Awakening

“It has always bothered me that many people, doctors included, tend to view anything that deviates from the typical as being abnormal or broken.”
― John Elder Robison, Switched On: A Memoir of Brain Change and Emotional Awakening

“The world is full of friendly people with no technical skills.”
― John Elder Robison, Switched On: A Memoir of Brain Change and Emotional Awakening

“His words made me wonder what else might be prewired in my brain. Did we have multiple personalities all wired up and ready to use, just as “emotional vision” was always latent in my mind, waiting for activation?”
― John Elder Robison, Switched On: A Memoir of Brain Change and Emotional Awakening

“There’s this thing called the competence-deviance hypothesis,” she explained. “It says that the more competent an individual is in his field—the more respected he is in the community—the more his eccentric behavior will be tolerated by others. “But the opposite is true for young people, because they have not done anything to earn respect in a community. So when they do weird things they are treated like dangerous animals and hustled into cages. It seems unfair when older, respectable members of the community do stuff that’s even stranger and people just shake their heads and smile at their eccentricity.” I”
― John Elder Robison, Switched On: A Memoir of Brain Change and Emotional Awakening

“Law-abiding citizens and people with good political connections stand their ground.”
― John Elder Robison, Switched On: A Memoir of Brain Change and Emotional Awakening

“Being lonely as a kid might well have been necessary for me,” I told audiences in my talks. “If I’d had the friends I dreamt of, I’d never have spent the time to become the machine aficionado I am today. Now that I’m grown I can put that in perspective. The world is full of friendly people with no technical skills. The few of us who see into machines like others see into humans are singularly uncommon, and we’re valued for that. If we use a technology like TMS to help a lonely teen today, will we be taking that exceptional ability away from him tomorrow? Should we trade friends in seventh grade for designing a working spaceship at age twenty-five?”
― John Elder Robison, Switched On: A Memoir of Brain Change and Emotional Awakening

“Kids who love organic chemistry invariably explore one of two things—drugs or explosives. Cubby chose explosives.”
― John Elder Robison, Switched On: A Memoir of Brain Change and Emotional Awakening

“It was that time of the night when most of the drunks were already home in bed. The crickets were done chirping, and the birds weren’t ready to herald sunrise.”
― John Elder Robison, Switched On: A Memoir of Brain Change and Emotional Awakening