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Center for Neurodiversity News

Different ≠ Disordered

John Elder Robison's first public appearance as visiting lecturer and advisor to the Center for Neurodiversity was on April 9, 2018. In the following video, Robison shares his vision for a neurodiverse society. 

Note: the following video contains language that may be unsuitable for some audiences. Viewer discretion is advised. Landmark College would like to thank Brattleboro Community Television for recording and production of this program.

 

Video Transcript

[DR. PETER EDEN, LANDMARK COLLEGE PRESIDENT]

Welcome, everyone! How are you? Wonderful, wonderful. So as Mark said, we have initiated a new Center for Neurodiversity. In many ways, the College has always been a Center for Neurodiversity.

We've changed a lot over the years. We were a small college, two-year college, serving students mainly with language-based LD, like dyslexia. We had changed over the years and started accepting students with ADHD. And I would imagine that from the beginning, we had smart, college-capable students with autism as well, even if the diagnostic label wasn't there.

This is a college which has tremendous heterogeneity--diversity in terms of the types of learning that happens. So we have developed a model which provides an opportunity for these students to excel and understand how to succeed and gain confidence.

Now of course, we are a college that has short-term programs, associate level programs, baccalaureate programs, we even have an online graduate level program. We've changed a lot. We've matured in many ways, but we’re only—only--focused on LD, neurodiversity, and we're so delighted to have John Elder Robison here tonight.

Let me read you a little bit about John: John Elder Robison is an author, a car enthusiast, and an associate for individuals on the autism spectrum. His busy career includes authoring four books including, Look Me In the Eye, which was the very first selection of Landmark College’s LD book club. John has served as an advisor to many organizations and was appointed in 2012 by the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services to the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee.

John Elder has also designed guitars for the rock band, Kiss, and toys for the Milton Bradley Company. He also founded JE Robison service in Springfield Mass., well-known for its restoration and customization work on models including Rolls-Royce, Bentley, and Mercedes.

We're so, so proud to have John serving as a visiting lecturer and advisor to our Center for Neurodiversity. His presentation tonight, “Different Does Not Equal Disordered: The Case for Embracing Neurodiversity is  the very first public event sponsored by our Center. As Mark mentioned, after the talk there'll be time for Q&A; and then John will be signing copies of his books just outside the auditorium.

It's my distinct pleasure to welcome John Elder Robison!

[Applause]

[JOHN ELDER ROBISON]

You know, I had a slide show to show you all tonight and it seems to be stuck. It's only showing one slide. Well, I'll have to just hope I can talk to you anyway.

So there I was, I was 14 years old, just about 30 miles south of here in Amherst Massachusetts. I was in the new Amherst Junior High School and I was failing every single one of my courses.

My parents were supposedly smart people. They’re both professors at the University of Massachusetts. Some people told me I was smart and some people told me I was stupid. They told me I was lazy and I was defiant. I didn't really know about all those things, but I knew that I always said and did the wrong thing.

I didn't have any friends. I looked at couples holding hands and stuff and walking between classes and talking to each other around the lockers and stuff and I so wished I could do those things, but somehow, as simple as they might seem, looking back, I couldn’t figure out how.

The one thing that kind of redeemed me was I had this interest in electronics. And I was so lucky because my parents were part of the university community here and my mother took me to the engineering building where one of her friend’s husbands was a professor, and her friend's husband didn't have too much use for me as an obnoxious teenager, but he handed me over to the grad students.

 [Audience chuckles]

Now, some of you may have had experience with grad students in your own lives. The grad students knew that I was smarter than any German Shepherd and I was not subject to university discipline. I couldn't be flunked and I couldn't be arrested, and so they had in me a perfect vehicle for all sorts of science experiments they had only dreamed of. [Audience laughter]

You might have wondered how the craters on the moon formed those spatter patterns. Well. I know! Because we went up to the roof of the grad research center that UMass was proud to say that was the tallest academic building in the United States at that time, and we tested the moon crater theory by rolling barrels of tar off and watching the patterns they made on the ground. [Audience laughter]

But it wasn't just stuff like that that the grad students taught me. The grad students answered all of my questions about electronics and music, and unwittingly as they may have been, the university engineering department provided me with a steady supply of test equipment and electronic devices. The test equipment, I used to make measurements. The other electronic devices, I sacrificed in pursuit of knowledge.

There was a time when it seemed that all I could do is industriously destroy things, but then I got to where I didn't just destroy things. I fixed things, and, of course, when I started to fix things even the teachers thought that I was potentially useful. And then there came a moment when not only could I fix things, but I started to have enough understanding of the electronic circuitry that I could create things of my own.

And I've always had this love of music and I turned to apply my knowledge of electronics to music. I turned to making an amplifier sound different, making guitars sound different, you know? Millions of people imagined themselves as the singer or the guitar player in a band. Well, I was never so bold as to think that for a kid with no friends, but I thought I could be the guy that fixes the amplifiers and builds them. And you know, that proved to be correct. All the millions of people that told me they were going to be the singers and they ended up working as waiters, and I never lacked for work making the amplifiers sing.

So I first joined a band when I was 16, because I was getting straight F’s in school, and as successful as I was learning about electronics at UMass, I was still a total failure at Amherst high school. In fact, they were so anxious to get rid of me that while I was still fifteen, one of the guidance people said to me, “you know state law doesn't allow you to drop out of school until you're 16, but if you take the GED and you get a 75 percent on that, we’ll let you out at fifteen. [Audience laughter]

And so, I went up there and I took the GED and I got a 90-some percent on it, and some smarmy son-of-a-bitch in the registration office told me that if I wanted my grade recorded I had to pay $20. You can imagine that that was a non-starter for me.

So even though I didn't pay the twenty bucks they reported the grade to Amherst High School and I was down the road. And I joined a local band, and that was the first time I actually came up here to colleges in southern Vermont and New Hampshire; came up here to play rock and roll at Keene State; used to play down in Brattleboro at a place that became the Mole’s Eye and now it's a restaurant; and actually I forget the other place that was in Vermont, in Brattleboro, that we played. We played at the ski areas, some of the motels and stuff because they hadn't built the really fancy ski areas back in the 70s, but played all over here.

And I got to work with bigger and bigger bands, and one day I got hired by these British fellows from a sound company called Britannia Row, and it turned out that they were the sound company that Pink Floyd had organized to put its sound equipment on the road when they were out on tour. Some of you probably look like you're old enough to remember Pink Floyd music, right? [Audience laughter]

So we put our sound equipment out with lots and lots of British bands that came to the United States: The Kinks and Roxy Music, Judas Priest, and all those guys sang through our stuff; and also a lot of soul bands, a lot of blues bands, arty people like Talking Heads and Blondie. And um, and I got to travel all over doing that.

And you know it was really such a thing because, as a kid who had no friends, I was always welcomed in the world of music. And of course that's because we musicians were all outlaws and misfits and freaks, and then I just fit right in. The thing is it didn't matter how you sound it or how you act or how you looked in music. If you could make beautiful music and you could make the show you were a welcome part of it.

So one day I was sent a monitor system in New York City in our studio and the guys from Kiss came in.  They wanted to put our monitor system out on their next tour and I was watching as their guitar player was digging this Les Paul with a chisel. Now the thing is, I didn't have any friends, and I had sacrificed electronic equipment in pursuit of knowledge, but I had not dug at fine guitars with a damn wood chisel. So even though I knew we were all freaks, this guy was more of a freak than me, and I went over to see what was matter with him.

So it turned out that was this fellow, Ace Frehley, Kiss’s guitar player, and he told me he's digging a hole in the thing because he wanted it to blow fire. And I looked at that and you know, I didn't know how to talk to humans, I had no confidence in my ability to do anything with other people, but I was absolutely confident about my engineering abilities; even though you know, I had never actually been to an hour of any real engineering class, but I was completely confident and I said, “well, I could do that professionally, you know.”

And he asked me how I would do it, and I had this flash of inspiration which I've had through the years, and it's saved my ass many times and I said, “well, you know we can hollow out the front where the pickup is, and we could put a box in back and we could insulate it with asbestos (because you could still use asbestos back then) so it wouldn't burn the guitar up, and we could put smoke bombs in there, put lights in there.” And he like listens for a little while, and he turns to his roadie and he says, “Tex, have Gibson send this guy a guitar right away.”

And so, with a little bit of further discussion I go home and we make a guitar. And I did, actually by that point, I did have a couple of friends. I had a girlfriend who I called a little bear. I called her that because she was short and fat and pugnacious and she was my best friend. And I had another friend, Jim Bouton who actually was from pretty close to here. Jim's parents taught theatre at Amherst College and in the summertime they ran the Weston Playhouse. Some of you have probably been up there, right?

And so I would go up with him in the in the summertime. And Bouton was a kind of a mad dog chemist in training. Now he's mad dog chemist for real working for army contractors, but back then he was just learning it. So he was inspired with the smoke bombs in the rocketry, and Little Bear was interested in building electronic things, and I designed the thing and we built it.

And you know it was really something the first time I saw that guitar play, because Ace brought it out on stage and he's playing it, and the audience didn't know that it was anything other than a regular Les Paul guitar. He turned the knob, and the pickup snapped open and the lights came on. The smoke poured out and it burned so hot that it burned the top three strings right off the guitar one after the other, and the audience just went wild. And I realized that they were applauding for this thing that I had created and I was so proud of myself I had never done anything like that before in my life.

And we actually went on, the three of us, to make every guitar that Kiss played the years they were big in the 70s and in the early 80s; that they put on stage that shot fire, shot lasers, shot rockets, or lit up, or blew up, and I would have never imagined to look back today that we were able to do that.

But I got scared, because after my success in music, I thought these guys are going to…they're going to think that I'm not a real engineer. I'm going to go out to work in New York, go work in LA, because people were talking about hiring me on the west coast, and they're going to realize that I’m this nothing high school dropout kid from Amherst, Massachusetts, and they're going to fire me and I'm going to be homeless 3,000 miles from home.

You might think, “what kind of crazy idea is that?”, but it's what I believed. So I quit music and I still wonder sometimes what would have happened if I had gone out there because this outfit that wanted to hire me, I didn't know they were back in the 70s, it was this outfit called LucasFilm, and who knows what I would have done if I had taken them up to become a director of engineering? What would I have done from there?  

But I quit touring with rock-and-roll bands and I took a job at a company called Milton Bradley, designing electronic games. You know at Milton Bradley, they were looking for engineers to design sound effects and electronic speech for what were then the first electronic toys with sound effects. And I thought, “well, I should be a perfect candidate for that because of my experience in music. I've done it for real.”

And they agreed with that. The only real issue with going to work there was they did expect their engineers to have college degrees, and it was necessary to sort of slightly mislead them in that respect. Luckily this was the 70s, not this decade when you could see if somebody's a Harvard graduate in ten minutes of online searching.

Back then, the way they checked your credentials was when a person--they called a personnel manager-- the personnel manager was typically a tougher older gentleman with a baseball bat behind his desk and he dealt with personnel problems in the factory and also budding engineers like me. And to determine if someone like me was fit to hire, he made it his business to know the engineering professors at all schools around him, so that he could ask questions. And when I got to my interview with him after passing the interviews with the engineering managers, he asked me did I know Professor Navon? And did I know Professor Warren? And did I know Professor Edwards?

And of course I answer all his questions and some of them I think might have been trick questions because I would say to him, “oh yes, I know him but he's not an electrical engineering professor, he's a mechanical engineering professor and this fellow here, he's another kind of professor.” And he nodded his head at all that. And of course I knew all the professors because I had rode the damn school bus with their children since 1965, you know? [Audience laughter]

So anyway, I passed his audition and they offered me the job. And ultimately, I quit that too because I felt like I wasn't a real engineer again. I was just a fraud and a fake, and it's such an irony because in those years, Simon and Microvision…Microvision was the very first changeable cartridge handheld video game sold in the world, and you think of all the hundreds of millions of handheld video games the kids have played between now and then and they are all built on the Microvision patents, and Simon was the first electronic push-button sequence game.

We partnered with Texas Instruments in speech synthesis and they brought out Speak & Spell, which was the biggest selling educational toy of all time; but despite all those successes I believed I was a fraud and a fake, and I thought I better get out while I'm still ahead. And I quit and ultimately I started a business fixing cars, because I thought nobody is going to bring the car in for service and ask where I went to school, or what my credentials were. Fixing cars and being a plumber have that in common, you know, if your toilets backed up you don't really interview your plumber for his academic credentials. You want the damn toilet to flush, and so it was with cars.

And the business was successful. It grew to the point where I sat in the office and I talked to customers, and the mechanics fixed cars out in the shop. And I got to know some of the customers, and one day this fellow who is a therapist—he’d been coming in for a few years and I'd gotten to know him--and he comes in and he says to me, “you know, I've been thinking a long time if I should tell you about this, because you're a successful guy. You got married, little bear and I got married had a kid--bear cub—and he said you own a business, own a house; you're more successful probably than most people now, but you've always said to me that you feel like you're alone and you feel like you're an outsider looking in the window at the rest of the world inside the warmth and the light, and you've told me how that hurts you.”

I kind of nod in my head wondering what was coming, and he says, “there's this thing they're talking about in the mental health world called Asperger's Syndrome. It's a kind of autism and you could be the poster boy for it.” And I just kind of looked at him. I didn't know what to say and he says, “I know,” he said. “It's hard to believe and it's a shock;” but he says, “I got this book,“ and he pulled out this book on Asperger's Syndrome and he said, “look at this look at these,” he'd marked out pages in the book and he said, “look at this, it's all you.”

And I opened up the book and it was like: People with Asperger's have difficulty looking other people in the eye;” “people with Asperger's don't understand personal space and we walk too close to people and make them feel menaced, or we turn away when they're talking to us, and we make them feel ignored,” and “people with Asperger's, we say inappropriate things,” or we give strange responses.

Everything I read was me, and I said, “well, how do I get cured?” And he said, “well, there isn't any cure. It's not a disease. You're not sick. You're just a person with this Asperger thing.”

And you know, it was a very mixed bag learning about that, because on the one hand I had an explanation that was not ugly and judgmental. I know that a number of you are autistic like me in the audience tonight. You've heard the same ugly shit as me. You've heard people say that we're retarded, we're stupid, we're lazy, we're disturbed, or disordered; all kinds of nasty stuff. So to hear, we’re just a person with autism or Asperger's, because Asperger's is a flavor of autism, it's a relief; but then you think about, at least I thought about, all the times things went wrong. What did I say to her? What did I do when I was talking to him? And how they thought I was a jerk, or I was obnoxious. I hurt their feelings, I made him mad. All the friendships I had lost and all the things that had gone wrong and I thought: There's no cure for this. It’s never going to end, and I'm going to have one failed relationship after another in my life, and that made me really sad.

But I took the book home and I studied it. And you know, I realized now that it's kind of a blessing that I didn't learn about autism and me until I was older, because when I learned about it, I had successes in my life. And when I was able to reflect on what autism had meant to me, I realized, yes, it had cost me many friendships, it had cost me jobs. I realized that it was this autism that made me blind to the messages from other people. I couldn't tell if anyone liked me when I was working in music. I couldn't tell that they thought that I was a successful engineer at Milton Bradley, or anywhere else I worked. And because I couldn't tell, and because I had been told what a second-class citizen I was all my childhood, I assumed that everything I did sucked and I better just quit.

And so I realized this autism cost me one job after another, and it cost me more friendships than I could account; but I thought, does it have to be that way? I looked at what that book said about not understanding body language, not understanding what to say, and I thought I can teach myself what to say. I can make rules. I can teach myself that when I'm talking to somebody, I'll imagine my arm held out like this. I won't get any closer than two arm lengths to somebody. I'll make a rule that when I'm talking to someone, I won't turn around and walk away for more than say a second, and I'll keep looking back. When somebody is talking to me, even though it's uncomfortable for me to look people in the eye, I'll teach myself to look at that person when they're talking to me, and I don't have to stare in their eyes, but just if I teach myself to look up at them, maybe that'll be enough. And you know? It was enough.

Sometimes, I talk to people who are not autistic and they think, what simple childish shit. Anyone knows that. Well no, we don't know that. We autistic people do not know. You may think it is simple childish shit, but for people like me to learn that, it is life-changing.

At age 40, people begin inviting me to dinner and inviting me to lunch and wanting me to go out and do things with them. It was magical the way my life changed and it was all from just learning simple rules.

You know, people said to me that I was direct all my life. Well let's be frank, people said I was an asshole all my life. And why did they do that? I finally learned the answer. I learned that you can always look at the girl in the cafeteria and you can say you look really pretty with that red shirt, but you cannot say you look like a circus animal with that yellow striped shirt, you should go home and change it. Even though you really like her, and you believe that you are giving her constructive advice, you can't say that. [Audience laughter]

Now, a person who was not autistic would just be a lying snake, and he would look at her and he would say, “oh dear, you look lovely in your yellow shirt,” and he would wrinkle his nose when he turned around. I would not do that, but I learned I didn't have to pretend. I didn't have to be something I wasn't. All I had to do was keep in mind that if you think her shirt is pretty you can say so, and if you think her shirt is bizarre you just keep your mouth shut.

And it is just unbelievable what a difference that made in my life, and it ultimately sent me on a path of wanting to share that that insight with other young people, because I realized that the world must be full of young people just like me who are growing up told how crummy we are. And of course, when I was 12-, 13-, 14-years old, I didn't know any different. I believed what they said. I believed that I was less than everyone else.

So ultimately, I started trying to find autistic people to talk to, and I couldn't. This was almost 20 years ago and there was nowhere I could find that there were autistic people to talk to. So eventually, I decided that I would write a book. And my brother had already written a story about our childhood. My brother actually started by writing a sort of an idiotic comedy about the perversions of the Home Shopping Network, and I sold that book at the front counter in our automobile business. People would come in and they would see the book on the counter. Of course, they didn't know who this Augusten Burroughs was, and they would say, “how come you got this guy's book for sale?” And the receptionist would say, “oh, that's the owner’s brother.” And people would buy it.

So then my brother comes out with the next book. It's about us. It's called Running with Scissors, and you open that book up and like the first scene in the book is this 35-year old guy having sex with my 13-year old brother. And the stories in that book, it's kind of a horrific thing, some people thought it was funny. Well, I didn’t think it was funny at all because that's the other side of my growing up besides this autism thing. You know, most of the major figures in my childhood, my brothers too, would end their days at state prison, if that happened today and not 40 years ago, and 40 years ago people thought that kind of stuff didn't happen in educated families like mine, but it does.

So we put that book out on the counter, and I thought people are going to read this and they're going to be so disgusted by us they're never going to come back, but that is not what happened. People read that book and they came back in tears telling me that they couldn't believe what we had gone through and that the same thing had happened to them and that they were raped in college or they were put in a foster home when they were 12-years old, and these were respectable men and women who would have never in a million years have thought would have identified with that story, but it was actually that that gave me the courage to write my own story. And, I did.

When Look Me in the Eye came out, many people read it and they began inviting me to speak at schools, at universities, they also asked me if I would take part in advising scientists on autism research they wanted to do. And this one group of scientists at Harvard Medical School asked if I would be interested in taking part in a study that was aimed at changing our brains so that we could see emotional cues in other people, and I thought that is the thing that I could never do all my life, and where do I sign up for that?

And that story is kind of a talk in itself, but you know, I went into their lab and they fired pulses of electromagnetic energy into my head, at one pulse per second for 30 minutes. Before they had fired this energy into my head, they had had me do these tests where I looked at figures on a computer screen. They were laughing and smiling and stuff, and I had to push buttons for what the expressions were, and I had absolutely no idea what I was seeing. And I thought I'm going to flunk this test before it even starts. And the doctor said, “No, no, don't worry because we're going to test you before and then we're going to test you after a stimulation, and we're going to see if your responses change.” And I wasn't very hopeful. I didn't have a clue what they were showing me in those faces.

So, in 30 minutes they fire these pulses into my head and they say, okay, it's done, and we got to test you quickly because the effect is going to wear off in 15 minutes. And I thought, well what good is that going to do? A therapy that lasts 15 minutes? And the doctor said, “well it's cumulative, see? And that's how we…that's how it's safe; because if we stimulate you now and it only lasts 15 minutes, it just goes away and if this worked, we would do it over and over again. That would be something that would last.  And I look at the faces again and I still didn't have any clue. And I thought what kind of a crazy fool was Ito think that I was going to sit in the chair and something like that so elemental in me would change?

And they kept me there for a couple more hours to make sure nothing was the matter with me, and let me go. And so I get in my car to go home. I live two hours west of Harvard, and I pulled out onto the highway, and I always would play old music when I was working in rock and roll, and I put on this this concert by a band called Tavares, a soul band from out in eastern Massachusetts. Some of you probably remember the movie Saturday Night Fever, right? So people associate that movie with the Bee Gees because they sold millions of records as a result of that, but actually Tavares sang several the tracks on the on the film, and they, you know they were a band we’d done sound with in clubs in Boston.

So I put on that that set and it was like I stepped into a hallucination. You know the music was so alive and so real, and I started to cry because it was just overwhelming. It was like I was back there in the 70s and I was part of it. I could see it and I could hear it. It's like you could smell the smoke, cigarette smoke in the bar, in the car. It's just so real, and I listened to music all night. And finally. it's near dawn, and the glitter of it kind of faded away, and I fell asleep. And I wrote the neurologist, I said, “that’s some powerful mojo you've got in that thing.”

I talked to my friend, David, later. He’s a radiologist, and he pointed out that they had said to me that the effects wore off in 15 minutes, and for me those effects didn't even start until hours later and nobody knew how that would work at the time.

And so we continued on with this journey of trying different stimulations. And I talked at considerable length with the scientists there, and they were the first people to help me understand that I had abilities that were extraordinary.

I had all my life known about the stuff I couldn't do. I knew all the courses I failed in school. I knew all the things I couldn't do. I knew I couldn't talk to people and I knew I didn't recognize expressions. I knew all that shit. I had plenty wrong with me and people had been telling me that all my life.

But it was Alvaro…Alvaro Pascual-Leone, who is Dean of Neuroscience at Harvard, who told me about the things I could do that were exceptional, and I realized that it was true. As he said to me, a person who’s not like me can’t teach himself engineering in the basement of a lab. A person can’t normally learn about analog engineering and decide to be a digital engineer and then study it for a couple of weeks and then be one.

And I had always thought to myself that what people said to me was true. People said, “well you aren't a digital engineer, you just bullshitted your way into the job,” but as Alvaro said, if I bullshitted my way into the job I would have failed. And I didn't fail. We made things that were successful on a grand scale, and people still buy them today; and I was successful in envisioning these things in rock and roll, and millions of people listen to and watch my creations in music; and then I was successful in expressing my ideas in books. And as he said, “if you want to be a normal person, a normal person can't do those things. He might do one of those things but they wouldn't do all of those things, and they certainly wouldn't do those things without any kind of structure and education.

And I realized, listening to him, that after I learned about autism the thing I wanted most in my life was to be this thing I imagined as normal, and there really isn't such a thing, and I am never going to be it. And even if I took part in these neuroscience experiments that changed my ability to see emotion for a time and it expanded my understanding…people have expanded their understandings in other ways, with psychedelic drugs and other things over the years.

I always wanted to be normal because I thought I was less than normal. And it was those scientists out at Harvard that showed me that yes, there are ways that I am less than normal, but there are other ways than I am far beyond it. And it is the autism that has caused so much suffering in my life, but it is autism that made me a star in music. It’s autism that made me a successful engineer of the dawn of video games and electronic games. It’s autism that gave me the creative vision to do my photography -- which I wish you could have seen but, son of a bitch didn't work -- and it's autism that gave me the gift of written communication; just think of that, you know? As an autistic person, I could never say or do the right thing, but I can write the right thing in words, and millions of people read those words. I'm not disabled writing even if I'm disabled talking to people.

And now I realized that that's…that's what we are. We autistic people, all of you, you're just like me. You have grown up being told that you're second-class, and we are not second class. I am here to tell you that we autistic people and those of us with ADHD and dyslexia, and OCD, and all the other neurological differences that touch me and my family, and all of you at this university, we are not broken versions of some asshole’s version of normal. We are complete, correct humans that stand proud in our own right.

And that's the thing that we really have to seize upon. That's the idea of neurodiversity and it's why e have a neurodiversity institute starting at this school; because teaching people with autism and ADHD and such is like disability accommodation. Well, disability accommodation is great. People deserve therapy that helps us speak. People in wheelchairs deserve ramps so they can get into buildings. I am absolutely all for disability accommodations, but neurodiversity goes way beyond that.

Neurodiversity is not just recognizing stuff that we can't do and asking how society is going to accommodate us. Neurodiversity is recognizing that we are a necessary part of the human species. Think about what I did as a kid; I taught myself engineering without the benefit of a school, and you imagine what did humans do for thousands and thousands of years before schools existed? Who could you turn to to figure out how to make a bridge? Some freak like me, and some of you, because there were no schools. [Audience applauds]

And you know what? We built schools to teach the masses, and when we built schools to teach the masses, we made ourselves irrelevant. I did a talk at a big university and I talked about the calculus and how I envisioned the waveforms of musical instruments in my head, and I imagined how circuitry I designed would change the waves and what they would sound like. And then, when I built the circuits, the circuits sounded like I imagined. And sometimes, my employers had to hire mathematicians if they wanted to describe how my circuits work, but I said that I myself did understand how they worked. I didn't need to use calculus, and a pen and paper or a calculator. I could manipulate the waves in my head and I could get the answers.

And this math professor, he said to me, “well, I don't know what you call that but it's not knowing math. You've said that you don't know any math beyond multiplication and division. I can't imagine how you could say you know math.”

And you know, in one of those other flashes of inspiration, like I had those years before with Ace Frehley, I said, “you know, people today they say that Newton gave us the calculus, and more recently psychiatrists look at Newton and they look at everything that's written about him, and they say Newton was almost certainly an autistic person based on how he behaved. Now maybe Newton didn't give us the calculus. Maybe Newton was the 18th century version of me. Maybe Newton saw ripples on ponds and movements in the air and Newton imagined waveforms for that; and I saw musical instrument waves in my head and I saw the waves from that. And maybe what I did with my waves, is I gave the world sound effects. Maybe what Newton gave the world is a system of writing that down so that other people could understand it. Maybe what Newton did is not invent the calculus, maybe the calculus lives in us and Newton invented a way to write it down to share it with people like you.”

Well needless to say, he was not very appreciative of my suggestion, but I stand by what I said. I believe that it's very likely true; that the calculus is within us, and there's more than calculus in us. There's so many things that we autistic people can do that other people can’t do, and it's high time that somebody started to recognize the exceptionality in autistic people and my hope is that you students at this school are going to lead the charge to do that.

You know when I was growing up there were some parents who said, “yeah, we're going send our kid to Catholic University; we're going to send our kid to Hebrew University, because we believe in that. That's a big thing in our family.” And when those people grow up saying they went to Holy Cross or whatever, it's a big deal to them, too, and they send their kids there.

You know what I want to see? I want to see a world where students—you--graduate from this place and you go out in the world, and you do stuff like me, and you get successful, and you get yourself a girlfriend or boyfriend, and you get married and have a kid; and when your kid gets bigger, kid’s gonna be autistic or ADHD or dyslexic or any other kind of freak like us, and when that kid goes to school, you're gonna say, “Hey, that Landmark place is the place for neurodivergent people. It is our Catholic school. It is our Hebrew University. It's our people's home.”

And you know, I believe that we have a chance to establish this school as the leading institution of neurodiversity in America. There are other schools who've spent hundreds of years establishing themselves as centers of academic excellence. We had a couple of universities in America that established themselves teaching black people before the era of civil rights, and think how proud those schools stand today. Well, we have the opportunity to be that school for neurodiversity, to stand proud and say we are teaching that. We are teaching those values because it's so much more than disability accommodation. It's civil rights and it’s culture.

We got to go home and we got to wake up all the parents. you know? People have to recognize that this autism thing. the apple does not fall far from the tree. And for all of you that have these traits, they’re most likely in your parents, too. And I know how many of you have heard from your parents, “oh, I don't know where that autism thing came from,” but you know sometimes I hear that and I look at the parents, they're like autistic as hell and it's obvious to me. [Audience laughs] And it's because of shame nobody wants to admit it. We got to turn that around. We gotta make it a mark of pride and this school can do it.

And that really is my message to you, and that's what the idea of a neurodiversity center is about. As I said to some of the students at dinner, it is now time to go out and kick ass and take names. This isn’t disability accommodation, this is seizing our civil rights and our birthright and I hope you'll join me.

So with that, I guess it's time to ask for questions. It’s 8 o’clock, we have time for questions, right?

[Audience applauds]

We have a fellow here with a microphone, and he is going to pick questioners. So yes, first is right there.

[AUDIENCE MEMBER] What’s your favorite rock band?

[JOHN ELDER ROBISON] Well you know, Tavares will always kind of have a place in my heart because I played Tavares on the night that I had that magical experience. And you know, what's funny is um… listening to the songs…I had been a successful engineer in music because I could listen to the music and I could make sure every last detail was right. It was all balanced. The vocals were at the right level. It wasn't distorted. It was smooth. Everything worked right, but I never understood the music. I never really cared what people were playing, but listening to that band in the car, suddenly I realized this is a love song for a real person.

And when I set down the story, it took me eight years to write the story of what happened to me then, and that became my book Switched On, which they have out there; and Focus Films is trying to develop as a movie now. So I used some of the lines from the song. And by the time I wrote Switched On, I'd written three other books and I was a reasonably well-known writer, and so I thought well, I should call the composer of the song and ask if it was okay to use that in that context. Copyright law would allow me to use a small snippet, but I thought that was the polite thing to do.

So I called the songwriter Kenny Nolan and I asked him, and he says no, he'd rather I didn't. Well first I emailed him, and he says no, I'd rather you not use my lyrics in that way. And I thought that's nuts. Why would he not want me to do that?  And I called him up and I said, “why would you not want me to use your lyrics like that? About, you know, a love song to somebody?” And he said, “well, because it's not really that way in songwriting.” He said, “I'm a songwriter, and I felt like I had a rhyme in my head, and I had a formula and of what I needed to make it work.” And he said, “I put that together and I can't remember the person I wrote the song for at that time.” But he said “it’s not just me,” he said, “when that song is sung. It's the singer up there thinking of his girlfriend at home, and it's the backup singers thinking of their husbands and wives and boyfriends and girlfriends, and it's all…it's the bass player, the guitar player…all the different musicians all thinking about the different people in their lives.” And he said, “what you’re hearing is the interpretations of 20 or 30 people, and then it's colored by somebody like you, with the sound system and all.”

And I had never really thought of that before because when I write a book it just goes straight from me to you. So if you ask what means most to me? It might be that, but if you ask what kind of music that I like? I traveled a little bit with Peter Frampton and I liked his music probably more than that of Kiss because it was more melodic. Kiss certainly was very high-energy rock and roll and I perk my ears up any time I hear it now. And I like blues and soul. I liked a lot of different music, you know, I just I liked a lot of different kinds. So I guess I really I loved it all.

[AUDIENCE MEMBER] Mine’s Rage Against the Machine

[JOHN ELDER ROBISON] Woof! Cool.

[AUDIENCE MEMBER] What got you specifically into sound engineering?

[JOHN ELDER ROBISON] Well I got into electronics because I actually got given an electronics kit for my 13th birthday and then I started taking apart radios and tinkering with radios. And from radios at age 13, at that time in junior high they were encouraging all of us to take music class and play a musical instrument, and so I had the music kind of thrust upon me, and I had the radios and stuff and I thought, “I won't play the instrument, I'll make electronic instruments.” And that's what led me down that road.

But then, there's no question that the musicians welcomed me all my life and that's really been a cool thing. She's got a question here.

[AUDIENCE MEMBER] So you had talked about how you had ended up getting through, and how you turned to music as a way to through, and you wrote books, but how did you deal? I can only imagine that you must been dealing with so much stuff psychologically before you'd even found out about your thing and dealing with all that isolation.

[JOHN ELDER ROBISON] Well, you asked how I dealt with things in life? I mean it was my life. It was all I knew. I think that sometimes, if you're talking about my brother's story as related in Running with Scissors about sex abuse and child abuse and stuff, I think that if you grow up in that kind of environment it's what you know. It's not a matter of how do you survive it, you don't know anything else. And you might think, “well you know, I'm not going to let people come have sex with my kid when he's, you know, five years old, but it kind of doesn’t change the reality of whatever you do yourself.

I…I don't…I don't know what to say except…except that. It's all I knew. In Look Me in the Eye, there's a chapter in that book, it's a chapter about nightmares and when I learned to defend myself. You know I wrote that part of the book in one night and I never looked back at it. And so the only thing I really have ever written about what I did, it's probably that, and you can see that in my story. And you know otherwise, I have written about how to make it in life and that's what all my stories are about.

[AUDIENCE MEMBER] Hi John, we've kind of come to know the national symbol for Autism Speaks is a puzzle piece, and I wondered how you feel about that as a symbol and how you interpret the puzzle piece?

[JOHN ELDER ROBISON] I don't really interpret the puzzle piece, but Autism Speaks has never been autistic people speaking. Autism Speaks has never given voice to actual autistic people. Autism Speaks has been the voice of parents of autistic children, and more specifically Autism Speaks has for the most part been the voice of parents who wanted to fix what they believed were broken children.

I've told you very clearly that I do not believe any of you are broke. You may all feel that you are disabled. I feel that I am disabled, but I also feel that you and me are all gifted, and that's very different than just thinking that we are broken, screwed-up kids that our parents want to fix.

Now, I will say that many of the parents who were part of Autism Speaks at the outset have said to me in recent years that people like me, autistic adults like me, have shown them what their children can be and that their early dreams of cure they see were misguided. But the fact is that was still destructive to a generation of autistic people, and it is very important to keep in mind that Autism Speaks has always been a parent's organization.

And there's absolutely a place for a parent's organization. Every High School in the country has a PTA, and that's where the parents have their say; and it has a student assembly, and that is where the students have their say; and every one of you has gone through a high school, and you know that you and your parents have very divergent interests when you were 14, 15, 16 years old. To suggest otherwise is simply foolish.

So for parents in Autism Speaks to say we can speak for our children better than anyone, I don't deny that you know your child better than I know your child, but if you are not an autistic person it's not clear to me how you can say that you know life with autism better than me. And I am not ever trying to force my ideas on you or anyone else, but certainly if you have an autistic child and you want role models for your autistic child to look to when he's growing up, you need autistic people to stand up for that. And that's not what they have been, unfortunately.

But having said all that, I am friends with a lot of people at Autism Speaks and they are good people and they are committed to helping autistic people. They are parents and, and I just I think it's…it's…it's not…it's not what it was represented to be, but what it is, is a thing that's valuable, too. And I guess I would just…I would put it in that perspective; just because a parent isn't autistic doesn't mean they can't have empathy for us and want with all their heart to help us, and I absolutely believe they care. And I think they're welcome to join in that mission. It's just not the way people thought it was. That's all.

So yes, here, this yellow-shirted fellow.

[AUDIENCE MEMBER] Hi, I was wondering…with people who have learning disabilities of any kind--it could be learning disability with autism or ADHD or anything like that--from your life experience, how did you, how do you…how do you learn…how do you learn skills to over…not over…not conquer but to to cope…coping strategies to do the best you can despite having a challenge with a disability or whatever it is?

[JOHN ELDER ROBISON] Well, one thing that I think is worth considering, and it's something that a neurodiversity institute at Landmark can probably study in years to come, is the sort of existential question, why are we here? All of you who've been diagnosed with OCD or ADHD, dyslexia, autism, you all know what you can't do, and you’ve all been told that the thing that you're diagnosed with is a genetic thing. Odds are you inherited it or somehow appeared in your genes, and it's a combination of the genes and the environment, but it's something that's been around a long time. You can read books and you can read articles talking about how people had the thing that you have thousands of years ago. So, if the trait has been part of the human genome forever, what's the purpose of it?  

And I think that in the case, let's say of autism, I talk to you about how I taught myself engineering without…well, I did it in the basement of an engineering school, but without classes any of that, not any structure…and I learned to be able to do that.

If we look at ADHD there are many, many examples of extremely successful people who operate businesses where they have to jump from a hundred things during the course of the day and people ADHD really do well with that.

There are other differences where people do really well at engaging animals and doing other things, and I think that the innate strengths of the various things we now call learning disabilities, the innate strengths that cause those things to persist in our genome are not widely recognized, but I believe they exist.

One reason they're not widely recognized, is that today's society maybe renders them seemingly irrelevant. Like now, if you're a calendar calculator, if you can tell when the day comes before or after the solstice to plant the crops where you live, who could do that? An autistic person could do that. The world is full of autistic people who can tell you when it's been 365 days and who can look at the sky and tell you when the planting time is. That's something that we can do, but you know now it's nothing but a parlor trick, because we have calendars and computers that tell us.

It's like that with calculus. If you can manipulate waves in your head like I could do, that was a really, really powerful skill to have 500 years ago. Today, we have computers that can manipulate waves better than me. But you know what? Better only goes so far, because better--a computer can manipulate the waves better than me-- but a computer can't have the idea, and that's the thing that I did first. Those sound effects and those visual effects we created, I've no doubt a computer-aided design system could do them better than me, but someone had to think of up in the beginning, and that is an example of what we people who are different can do.

So I hope that you, in your time here, you can put some really serious thought into what's the evolutionary purpose of the things we now call disabilities, such that they persist in the genome? Because it's there, and if you know what it is, then you got to ask yourself, and the generations that follow you, how could you take the knowledge of what my greatest gift is, because of the kind of person I am? And how can I translate that maybe into what I want to do for work in my life? And then you have a really powerful thing.

Yes, he has a question, too.

[AUDIENCE MEMBER] You said you didn't like find out until like much later in your life that you have like Asperger syndrome, do you think if you had like, known earlier, when you were younger, it would have changed anything? And also do you think it's better for people to know earlier?

[JOHN ELDER ROBISON] Well, I think that if I had known earlier it would have spared me, perhaps, some of the pain of being told I was less than other people. It's quite possible that if there was Special Ed. in high school when I was in high school, I would have graduated. It's possible if Landmark existed when I thought about…was of college age…I could have gone to a school like this and graduated. I think that that's probably reasonably likely.

But you know, if I had done all that, would my life have been better? I don't know. You know, people think that I did a lot of cool stuff with my life now, but I didn't do it because I thought it would be cool. I didn't join a band because I thought it would be really neat, I joined a band because I had no credentials to get a legitimate job. So joining a band was like running off to the circus, you know in a storybook. [Audience Laughs] And a lifetime of doing that stuff has turned out okay for me, and I don't know that I would have been better off. I think that had I not experienced the crummy parts of life, I would not be so motivated to speak out so strongly on behalf of young folks like you now, and perhaps that's the greatest thing for me.

She's got one there.

[AUDIENCE MEMBER] So you said that at one point that like, having your autism and having your LD was like. something that was really great in your life. So do you think that having autism or having and LD has more positives than negatives, like it's like a superpower? Sometimes, I think that my ADHD is kind of a superpower for me so yeah, I'm saying is there more positives than negatives?

[JOHN ELDER ROBISON] I think that it's very much a mix of disability and exceptionality. I think that my differences allow me to do things that regular people cannot do. I now realize there's no doubt about that. But you know, I lived for 40 some years of my life thinking that everything I did was just a lucky break, because I experimented and a real engineer or real whatever could do it all better than me. So all that time I never thought anything I did had any value. And now I realize that people couldn't do what I did all those years.

So in that sense it's a superpower, but it's a superpower that comes at a very high cost. I got divorced twice. I had a lot of sadness in my life. I threw away what were otherwise promising careers, and so there's been a very high cost to my being different. And so yes, it's a super-power and also kind of like a super-sucky in other ways. [Audience laughs]

And that's just really what it comes down to, for every good thing there's something that's not good, and the more powerfully affected you are, probably the greater the high and the greater the low.

[AUDIENCE MEMBER] Having been diagnosed with an LD by the time I was in preschool, I was lucky enough to have a lot of early intervention which you, obviously you know, you weren't able to get, and I was kind of curious how, I guess with lack of better phrasing. about your thoughts about early intervention? Because there is an element that it does kind of take away the sort of superpowers and the uniqueness that you were talking about that made you succeed in, you know, music and engineering and things like that.

[JOHN ELDER ROBISON] Well, I don't really describe it much in my books because I didn't really…I guess understand…what it might have meant in my life when I first started writing, but all through the time I was in school, they didn't call kids like me autistic then, we were stupid, we were defiant, they called us retarded. They had a classification before autistic, which they still used, it was E-D: emotionally-disturbed, and I was in emotionally-disturbed classes for all my time at school. And those classes, to the extent that I had any ability at all, to probably talk to people, I'm going to guess that the Special Ed. teachers there…or they probably weren't called Special Ed. Teachers that early on…but whatever they were, they taught that to me.

And another thing, I think of myself as having clear, precise speech; but one reason that I have clear, precise speech is that the Amherst school system put me in this thing called Language Lab, and in Language Lab I had to sit in a little booth and wear headsets and they would push a button and the tape would play that would say a phrase, and I would repeat it, and it would back up, and I said these inane phrases thousands and thousands and thousands of times.

And so that kind of therapy I think did help me, and I think that anytime you have a young person who can't do things that are part of the basic set of skills to live in society, therapy that will teach you those skills is absolutely life-changing. If you can't read, for example, you are sunk in this society. Now there have been societies where reading was not essential but this isn't one of them, and so--to learn to read, to learn how to have a conversation.

You know one thing I now say when I go speak at, especially at high schools, and teachers say, “well what's the most important thing that I could teach a student?” I think there is no question that the most important thing that you can teach a student is how to be polite and respectful and likeable, because if a kid is a nice guy and everyone likes Joey or Mike or Jenny or whoever, if everyone likes them they're gonna get along okay, even if they can't count. A cash register can count the change for them. Even if they don't know how to do math they can still drive the bus, there's always gonna be stuff that they can do and as long as people like them, the world will take care of them.

But if on the other hand you have a kid who's, you know, really sharp with math or he's a really good reader but he's obnoxious as hell and no one likes him, that's somebody who's got a real fundamental problem. So I think the combination of deportment and being likeable and learning just the basic skills: how to read…how to read and write enough to read the road signs, write your name...and that's what you need and everything else will get you farther, but that to me is the essentials, and you know, we are still teaching that stuff when people come to college.

So are we out of time or do you want one more? Okay, she has a question.

[AUDIENCE MEMBER] Well this isn’t really a really good question because I’m not good with questions, but like all your pacing really reminded me of my brother. I'm from California, so yeah, I miss him.

[JOHN ELDER ROBISON] Well, you are in an institution where people do stuff like that there should be plenty of other people who pace around.

[Laughter and applause]

Thank you all for joining me.

[Applause]

[Music]

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