Switched On

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 dormant, and that by stimulating the appropriate neural pathways with powerful electromagnets they could awaken this part of his brain. So began a five-and-a-half year journey, during which John became a test subject for the world's foremost neurologists in a major effort to understand, and then be able to fix, the deficits in emotional intelligence that lie at the heart of autism.