Now im pleased to introduce john and doctor pascual is the professor of neurology and associate dean for clinical and Translational Research at Harvard Medical School who served as the chief of the division of cognitive neurology and the Barrington Allen center for noninvasive brain stimulation act the medical center. John robison is a world recognized authority and the best times author of raising cubby. Hes from the college of william and mary. Ththe members of the number of e details his experience of the study led using the magnetic stimulation, the new experimental brain therapy. The hope of the doctors and scientists must understand and then address some of the issues at the heart. The Washington Post praises he takes readers for a ride through the science and leaves us wanting more. Hes explaining physical concepts and doesnt shy away from asking hard questions. This is a truly unusual memoir both poignant and scientifically important. Please join me in welcoming john robison and l. Virus. [applause] thank you all for joining us tonight. Id like to point out looking at us here you cant tell who is the privacy professor and the inmate and in fact that was in part one of the changes from this expansion of emotional sensitivity and range that ive experienced through this. This book of mine. One thing its not is a story of curing autism. Thats what this is about and its not. What this is about is a therapy that in my opinion is one of the most powerful tools available to no scientist today but no one knows about and the reason that no one knows about it is because it draws electricity from the ball and sends it to the brain you can make changes. But the effects of these experience experiments were life changing and i think that although im autistic and i talk about why. Tuesday emotion for folks like you is a magical thing. It was magical and wonderful but at the same time as devastating an overwhelming. It was a metaphor for what we can do elsewhere because it isnt just an autism therapy. Its something looking at epilepsy and if it can stop seizures it is going to save peoples lives. Now it is being used to treat depression and anxiety over the country. All over the country. They are looking at it powerfully remediate symptoms of intellectual disability, and isnt that kind of amazing . Thats one of those things that was never touchable by psychiatry. And you might wonder how i got involved in this. And its kind of funny, you know, i was starting to speak in public after the publication of look me in the eye. And i was at a college in western massachusetts and what looked like a graduate student approached me and asked me if she could hand out flyers for a study she was doing. There she is. Stand up so they can see you. You ought to be able to do this. There she is. She got it all going. [applause] so she announced that she was a post doc at this medical center, and i didnt even know who that was and by the time she had told me about this, i was convinced not only i wanted to hand out flyers but i wanted to try this myself. I had so many questions and she suggested i could beat her boss meet her boss. I went home and looked him up and i found he is a professor knows hes the dean and scientist and head the center of the beth israel hospital, and she is at the hospital at harvard. And i thought shit, i hope it is chased them away with my weakness. They were the only autistic people that were prepared for that. So i guess what i will do as i will have the fellow who thought this whole thing up to you how he described t it to me when we met. They made the connection and a in a stud the study to the cos to understand the goal of the study. It involves talking with the subjects and explaining to them what youre doing and he said he wants to talk more so we thought that is part of what we are supposed to do. They are using medicine to do anything other than the discovery to the medical technology. It was very, very brief. And thats rapidly changing currentcurrent in the field is perpendicular to the field that is very strong but very brief. Potentially it is using electricity to modify and work ultimately through the electoral to become. [inaudible] if we know how much electricity and others will use this approach for therapy but even before that we can use it to understand how the brain activity relates to the given behavior. That is the type of study that we are interested in that lindsey was spearheading that they had to do fundamental in the question in the mechanisms of learning and elasticity and autism disorders are a normal and abnormathe normaland abnorme abnormal are they the result are too strong. Its the ability to relate the learning to speak and finding the right words. What we try to do is modify activity for a little bit of time, a few minutes. It is a destruction and we know that is the case. We told him what it will look like and if yo it would come ino the lab. We have researche the research t those different areas. We make sure that by the time its done the effect is gone and follow enough. We had the description of what was going to happen and the thinking was that they would have me look at the figure figud the spaces and different patterns. Before the stimulation i would see these patches to make a pasg have to push a button if it was sad and angry, whatever. I looked at those things and i have absolutely no idea what i was seeing. I have no idea what im seeing and they tried to reassure me saying there are no right or wrong answers and i thought thats crazy of course, there is nobody that can test without right answers and in a sense it made me feel good and to see that. What does it feel like getting zapped, they have a quail that is the size of the little smaller and they hold up to your head and they have cameras that are looking at me after they shot a bunch of images of my brain so they had a really precise map of where my brain was relative to the features of my face and they could locate exactly where they wanted us to stimulate. They turned on and it started firing energy one pulls a second. Every time there was one i would feel a little tap on the top of my head and it wasnt painful, it wasnt pleasurable but what it did is they put my mind in mutual. They assured me i wouldnt feel anything in my head from this but it wasnt so. What happened was i was thinking about what i was going to do next when i left and the fox wouldnt stay in my mind. Ive tried to count the pulses and i would count one, two, three, four so then i kept sitting there and all of a sudden it went off and stopped in half an hour had passed and they rushed me over and had me do the looking at the faces and stuff again and i didnt think i did any better and then its time to hand me over to ask questions to see if im ready to go home. He looks at me and says its thursday and i said while im selfemployewell i amselfemploy good attention that i can see if i screwed this up i could be heading to a locked cage in the basement. I answered the questions good enough and he let me go. I started out driving home and i had been at the hospital and nothing had happened and i thought what kind of a crazy fool was i to think that they were going to zap me like that. It was going to advance science and i really believe Nothing Happened and i turned on my ipod and i was playing music because back in the 70s i was a sound engineer and used to play all the clubs up and down for how to record and they were known for singing part of the side track on saturday night fever and i listen to them sing and it was like i heard when i was 18yearsold. I could listen to each individual instrument and each individual singer and i havent had that ability but thats what made me a star in producing music back then. I asked him why he thought that happened and nobody knew. We did one of the experiments and couldnt change me at all as i could see a. Some of them made me happy and cheerful or anxious. He said when good things happen to you we have to be thankful because you could just as easily have a bad thing happened to you. I said in my going to be seeing the boxster is and he said i dont think that will happen but you could be anxious or unsettled. Some of the simulations truly turned my life upside down over a period for years when we did this they were simulations where i saw into people just like seeing into their soul into those experiences were temporary but they changed me forever. And you know something people find hard to believe, they think how can a momentary experience change you forever let me give you an example that you are somebody that is colorblind. In all of your life you get to o the night chant here about the beautiful sky and the pretty graphs and you dont see it, you see shades of gray and after a while you get the behaviors and start to think its making me mad. I dont want the evidence of my eyes and they go on and switch the color on and all of a sudden you realize its real and you walk out of the lab and a few days later the color fades away. You are going to conduct the rest of your life with the full knowledge of what it was a. Youre not going to be mad anymore because you will know that the thing they were talking about it youre going to be different forever. So how could see emotions change me in the same way . Ive wrestled for years the answer my question i asked myselmyself have i fantasized al this and do i imagine that i saw a motion, no, the changes in my life were too obvious and too striking for it to be by imagination and other people of course have had the same effect now. The two keep listening why interrupt. [inaudible] we put a lot of time and a lot of care and effort about what account for what affects. You walk out of there and feel great. If you are leveraging anything you can bring to the table from biology to medicines and find the medicine and you get a better. It changed me and was changed me is the tapping sensation. The way they ask the questions is interesting but thats not what im after what we were after his are there mechanisms that are normal or different. We didnt know where we were stimulating or predicting. So reading the story gives you a different perspective from somebody who is a participant and is telling you things you would never think of even asking. I had to ask the questions, not the answers. I know what i want to find at a given time in the lab but for the most part, we forget that moment in time it may have effects that we can capture but that will change you and have an impact on who you are in a lasting way to. You make somebody able to realize a under certain circumstances i can forget the meaning of intentions and just go by the outcome and if you were trying to tell me that you didnt thats okay with me. What are thfor the insight on te that have it but realized the we need to ask those questions and we dont ask how it may change somebody in this life because frankly, we dont hear them. We explore the individuals and its all about the person. In the experiment we often times try to identify what is common among the participants and blur the differences. What this book is its an enormous call to action. The. What we would expect the. Of difficult subjects and mechanisms that last a certain time and may last longer. With that they cannot acquire knowledge or skills that are. But the first thing you learn interferes in the next thing and the next one and the next one, so depending on the study of the Life Experience it can become an enormously disruptive way of the brain functioning. It might change forever. Hispanic its okay if we are. We want things to impact our brain does not change us forev forever. We didnt expect to have that degree of effect but the question is the mechanisms are better than normal in some people. So i could change more than anyone ever anticipated and that actually makes me think of something that i really great debt and that is when we first met, he had read my book with me in the eye and he told me he was drawn to talking with me in part because of my description of how i became a digital engineer designing sound effects that Milton Bradley. Ive been in engineer working for the pink floyd sound company into the touring band was all analog circuitry and the world was in that time growing digital and everything was microprocessorbased. I didnt view the Older Technology of the 50s and 60s and that is what we used on the stage and amplifiers that i had a chance to get a job. The only thing was they wanted a microprocessor familiar engineer digital designer to design digital sound effects. It maybe was the arrogance of the youth from me to be a digital designer so i went to the University Research center and looked at books on design and study them for a couple of weeks and i went down there to Milton Bradley and for them i was a digital designer and they hired me and all my life i sort couldve lived with the feeling i just bullshit my way through the job and quick Milton Bradley because i thought i was a fraud. Actually it was this fellow he here. If it isnt the story of being fraud. That is the kind of thing you sometimes see in the descriptions of behaviors that you learn to the skill in two weeks and he sai said maybe you didnt know as much as some other person but youd knew enough to do the job. If it was just luck and bullshit you would have failed but instead you made yourself an analog engineer and been a digital engineer after a couple of weeks and made yourself other things and that was first of all the first time in my life i ever really have somebody recognize that it was a gift and not just a cheap trick to get a job. What a remarkable gift to some of us autistic people have and he said to me a little later we have no way of knowing how many people are offered ability like that for all we know theyre in the fields in india and china and we may never find out. And this is the most remarkable story. If you were told about the studies i took part in and read this book of mine you would never know they were the same. The only points of comparison are that both articles describe things like looking at faces and stick figures and awe. But beyond that, the experiences are totally different and i think that wha thats what he ao is when they set up an experiment in medical research, it is a very tightly designed thing and sometimes there are effects that are almost magical. What happened with me was the success beyond the wildest dreams of any therapist but the thing is he wasnt an autism therapist or my doctor treating me. He was a fellow engaged in research that i believe can and the effect on me with a stunning side effect that none of us expected and i think the lesson to take away from that is that sometimes scientists may structure studies at the outcome of the study that really meaningful and may be something that is totally out of the bounds of what they expected. Its the human experimentation and acted. Its an opportunity to give us insight. I think that is absolutely the case. Hispanic you couldnt have known the question. You had no idea what would happen to me like that. There is another aspect at least a couple of other aspects, one is the responsibility that comes with the potential consequences that we may not anticipate that are important to be aware of and that often gets passed and there are things we just dont know or make sure the person understands what that really means and thats important in your book. Its important to realize and there is another important takehome lesson for us for seeing the colors and the notion that there is a reality of moments when you become aware of something and people have seen the experiences like that by chance and experiments and in the one case it at a moment of insight led to function in a different way that was more adaptive in a way that it wouldnt have been able to do. And that is interesting. Is it the experiment that did it or would you get an opportunity without which may be wouldnt have happened so in that sense it did do it in a different way than we often think of the effect. Its a curious thing that ive often wondered why am i the one that was so affected by this compared to other people in the study and of course i think that im the only one who went into the study that was one kind of engineer and then another kind of an engineer and a banana automobile restorer and book writer and photographer indicted on all these Different Things successfully and as he said to me, i wouldnt be likely to have been successful in all those things if i just bullshit my way through so somehow i have this gift of acquiring the skills and it appears that is related so maybe im more changeable than others. Its found to be abnormally good for the individuals disorder unto others that have high iqs so why is it that you are able to then extract that momen momef experience and change th changey that you live in that impact and another participant that has been in the moments of insight and thanks to you, weve heard them but the effect was much less transformative. I think its a waste of illustrated the therapeutics or they couple the simulation with the appropriate behavior and the appropriate intervention and maybe by chance that what happened in your case. You were able to come up with putting yourself in situations that let you to these emotions and to tell stories and get the close reactions and that behavioral intervention into is benefitinhisbenefiting from thef insight. But we speculated about as maybe some of the young people in our study that ar were on the autism spectrum or werent very social might have been stimulated in the same way as me and they might have had stimulations that switched on their ability to see emotion in people coming too. But they went home and read books and give video game videod on the internet and by monday it wore off and they went to school and it was as if nothing had happened and i am completely the opposite. I am the most inquisitive subject they ever have. So im like completely the opposite. What i did receive was expert advice and thought from the most knowledgeable people in the subject at the time. Its a mess i used to turn myself into a digital engineer 20 years before and its a really good question because you know there was a time that i had performance reviews and companies and people told me you are not a team player you cant work in a group. Alternately i quit working in grid environments and electronics because i couldnt handle the social situations that i go into the lab with these folks and they do experiments with me and a year later my social skills are such that im invited by the director of the National Institutes of health to get more involved in the service in six years later, i served on the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee where he produced a pla we prodr autism in the u. S. Government. The government bureaucracy of 30 some people how can i make that transformation for being so socially inept to being a key player in such an environment as that and that is the magical thing about this. But it came at a high cost. It came at the cost of having my marriage fell apart, losing many of my friends. Being more emotionally insightful. When they told me about that as the goal i thought they were essentially talking about is changing Emotional Intelligence and its one of that. Its one of the scientists havent done. And i thought what cannot be except a good thing but you know when it happened to me the morning after the first experiment they did when i had that feeling i walked into the waiting room at my car company and i saw these emotions coming at me and i looked in peoples eyes and i saw happiness and fear and anxiety and worry and i talked to people and i had to step outside because it was almost reducing me to tears. And the idea that i was disabled not just the normal give and take of the car dealership i realized that its not just a gift. Its it can cost you and to see the people i thought were my friends were laughing at me to think, to see people who came in to see me at work and looked at me like i was some kind of a lesser animal hell do you think that made me feel. So, ones may be wonderful because of what i could do it was incredibly painful in other parts of my life and i realized that maybe being autistic and oblivious was a protective thing to me all these years and then one of the other participants in the study when i wrote the book and i sent him a copy. He said i used to look forward to the New York Times magazine now i dread it and pick up the magazine and read stories. But. But they didnt even expect that would happen. Its a remarkable thing. Should we ask questions . It is established. It is a tool in a specific area its different in the areas thas that we were targeting in the case of the studies we were talking about but in those instances, you need to apply for several weeks in the case from four to six weeks what is really remarkably different in this case is the effect of something from affecting all of us in the short effect. Its coupling the simulation very shortly with appropriate behavior one could get away with less but have a similar kind of effect and that idea in the objective report of the life that is credited in the book is something that was embraced and therefore theres a number of studies that have been done to combine things like the function for recovering or improving the onset of dementia so there are lessons one can extract from the sharing of insight from the participant that goes beyond what your expecting a and they listen to those things and compare them to the questions to be asked in the new experiment and in doing that again, be careful with the study. Can you tell us what else they are studying, because it is a lot more than autism. It is basically what we would think of as disorders of the brain, both neurologically and psychiatrically, increasingly as the disorders rather than thinking of parkinsons disease you can think of the difficulty moving quickly or controlling your movements and rigidity. The different symptoms that make up the psychiatric diseases. Its going to allow to modify therefore we can target it and ask the questions where it might be helpful so it is a proof of depression or migraine or pain or other types of pain is being explored for the cognitive onset of dementia being explored for parkinsons its powerful if we know where the issues are coming from and its being done in the same way but its not the same i used to [inaudible question] [inaudible question] well, one of the things that i learned from being around the scientists, that there have been a number of studies that show. But the actions often are not visible to the watcher, and in addition our responses, we may not have emotional reactions to something we see that triggers a reaction from somebody else. And so, we absolutely have very strong emotions, but we do not a lot of times have the expected visible emotional responses, and what you may be touching on there is when i write something in words,words, i have all of my ability to convey emotion and feeling, and when i put it on a printed page, you read it. But i do not have the ability oh, i did not at least at the time, to convey emotion to you in my spoken facetoface conversation, so i seemed maybe more detached and aloof than i was actually feeling. People often thought that i was indifferent or disconnected or uncaring and it would hurt my feelings. They wouldfeelings. They would say that stuff about me because, in fact, i was the opposite. Indeed, i think what happened after the experiences is that i was better able to connect with people and convey that. I do not believe that i feel more so much as i connect better, but with respect to feeling more something that is curious is in my photography i started printing things with brighter, more intense brighter, more intense color and sharper contrast. Why that is a mystery. That is curious. Wait. Wait. There is the fellow with the microphone there. Trying to capture you for cspan. Okay. My question is about the difference between temporary inside the results in learning versus something that changes your function . You are describing i think you have called it temporary inside. And i can understand how that would work because i have had similar experiences on medication. But you are also talking about going places like seeing people, and it sounds as though your actual functioning is different, like you are actually able to see emotion that you did not see before, which sounds different than just knowing, like understanding better that the emotions are there, there, you seem to actually be able to pick up on them better, so i am wondering if there is both are going on. Well, my ability to meet people i have never met before and say and do the right things to establish a relationship with them is undoubtedly strikingly improved over what i was before, even though i wasi was successful as an engineer and i was successful and my technical work, i was more respected for being smart and technically capable than i wasi was embraces a guy you would want to be friends with. A lot of times i could not say and do the right thing. Now, i certainly had friends. But my friends accepted me. They thought i was okay. If i became more sensitive and caring, that was good, but they liked me anyway. The place where it made a striking difference in my opinion was those people i would have meant before who have talked to me for two or three minutes and thought, he is a jerk and gone away. As are the people i would have called failed interactions before, and i have nowhere is near as many failed interactions after. And there was, as i described, a time when i felt it was like an esp ability that faded away, and when it faded away i was kind of terrified for a little while because i thought it made me smarter and now i am getting dumber and where is it going to stop. Am ii going to come out of this with less emotional insight than i had when i started. But over the following summer and ability seems to build and me to connect with people, and it is almost like it stimulated me, and there was an effect of the treatment the dissipated and maybe the lesson that my mind got from the treatment allowed me to build something that i could sustain on my own. Would you say that is well, a moment of insight definitely happened. Trying to resolve the process, it can lead to more insight. How long that moment lasts, the effect on the brain could well be related to his lasting elasticity that as long. It is like they are there beyond where you would expect them on the inside alone, although obviously moment of insights that become ways for ability, different strategy and function and truthfully line. If you think of what may be blocking a better behavior and being routed into maladapted changes that limit our brains ability to function in a more adaptive and better way, the moment of insight may just be what we need to allow the brain to grow a different way. We dont know ultimately, but it is possible what it does is disrupt paths that have become so ingrained that they actually are think of it is bad habits. And so by disrupting that it causes the brain to come up with a different way to do it, and that may just even by chance be better. Well, we will take that one. And the one in back next. The way you to describe this is almost like you get the entirety of being able to feel empathic or an empathic response a day or so after the treatment. And i guess what i am asking is, the way you said you improved is almost like you are building skills based upon the memory of what that feeling was like. My question would be, would you ever appreciate repeat that experience in order to get that feeling back . I started the study, i felt that there was anything that was broken in me. I felt that i was really held back in my life by not being able to make that initial connection with people, to not say the right thing and form friendships. I had a small number of friends. But i felt there was this whole universe i couldi could never connect with because i could not say or do the right thing. The other thing that happened to me was, as i got older, i realized that i could easilyi could easily internalize bad stuff that people said. You are no good. I felt bad the moment i heard that kind of stuff. But all of my life i would here, we love you so and you are so smart and great, all the stuff we have heard our parents and husbands and wives. They did not make me feel good, but all the bad stuff people would say to me made me feel bad immediately. I thought maybe that is what is broken and this mechanism in me. Maybe there is a whole world of sweetness and light, and if something happens to make me more sensitive, maybe i would get these happy, sweet messages and i would be happier. And, youand, you know, i said to you when i drove out the 1st night, what kind of fool was i to think i would be changed. I felt the same after emotional insight kimmel live in me temporarily. I thought, how could i have been so foolish as to think that there is all this beauty and light in the world. I see fear and anger and upset and distress and every negative emotion that you can imagine and beauty and light and love. And i realize that that is why that kind of stuff dominates the news, because those are the emotions that are out there, and i said, that had been kind of a protective shield for me. I did not pick this stuff up. The year after doing that tms, the economy collapsed command i absorb so much negativity that i just became suicidal. I thought my life would end, and you know, i had survived several economic downturns in my business, and i business, and i just sailed through them because i was autistic and oblivious. People could come in and say they are going to foreclose on my house tomorrow. I wouldi would say, well, today we are going to put a water pump on. Maybe it was not compassionate, but it was logic and it was real. I could not absorb most peoples fears, but all the sudden i did, and it was devastating. Today i dont feel broken in that way, and i know that if i were to go back to the lab we could most likely reactivate those areas and i could look in your eyes and know what you are thinking, but i dont feel the need for it anymore because i know that i can goi can go out there and have a conversation with you and engage you and be my autistic self command it will be okay. You know what it was for me . It was a tool, these brief demonstrations that changed my life and do the job. I do not feel a need now, and i think i think th if you ask what kind of outcome we could hope for, i cannot think of a better one than that. I think it is really, really remarkable. It has had its ups and downs, but this book is the 1st story anyone has ever written about a transformative change. Dear description of yourself feels very much like myself. Fascinating to me to here. What difference and why would you use one of the other. Is, you have to wait for luck. Youluck. You really dont know the level of individual neurons and neurotransmitters. You can answer those questions from humans. Is there Ongoing Research . The differences applying very, very low current. And you do so whoever that positive or negative might be. Freefloating ions. More or less likely to fire. Doing so either blocks them or activates the more deactivates them, but it actually makes them artificially tired. They are quite different in the sum of the effects that have been described are similar, it is mostly size, targeted and area, the smaller we can directed in a better way, gentler, less of an impact. We also are much less clear as to what exactly is stimulated. So for the 1st question, it is true and the relevant question. People use both. We are also using both for determining brain function and behavior and therapy. There is that. In terms of animal, it is the case that in humans we cannot get at the mechanistic level the biological effect, but at the same time a mouse or rat cannot tell you how things happen over time. Very different and indeed a big challenge is how you bridge the item. What that change trying to find its way through a maze means with the reading of emotion, very Different Things. They are both important and are ongoing studies scaling it down to apply to the model and to be able to record the device with precise anatomy and so on. Imaging, life, separation, pathology, other kinds of stuff you can do. We start to see insight into the mechanism and why there is a gap there. More than we need to know. There is a persona person back theyre who had a question. You were the one. He will come around with the microphone. Is this our last question . [inaudible] one more. Okay. The thinking about the last one. It better be good, whoever has it. You describe transcranial simulation as putting up a roadblock to a connection, firing something are putting up a roadblock. Does that mean that youre creating a new connection that was never made before, orbefore, or are you inspiring the brain to take roads that were already there that it might not have taken . My sense of that, and when i talked abouti talked about this at some length, when i have the experience of the 1st seeing into people, remember that they said they would stimulate me for half an hour, and the direct would last about half as long as they stimulated. We know now, of course,now, of course, that that is not right and it lasted much longer. I did not no anything was going on. When i went to go to bed it was as if the world was spinning, and i had waking dreams or hallucinations that were so incredibly vivid. I felt like the world was spinning all around me and became scared that i was having a stroke or something. And by two or 3 00 a. M. I got up. This 1500 word1500 word missive telling you about this weird stuff is happening to me that night and then i fell asleep, and it s when i woke up eight hours later at noon and went to work and walked in the back door and looked at one of the fellows walking down the aisle and thought, he has those beautiful brown eyes. For an autistic person, what autistic person has ever said he or she has any kind of eyes at all. You know, we dont notice. And then i turned the corner and when the waiting room, and it was like a flood of emotion. So i guess when i asked, i said, what does that mean . Does it mean that those paths were always inside my brain because there was no way my brain to build do pathsthe paths in the space of ten or 12 hours. All was there . What did you say to that . There wasnt. There wasnt. There you go. That is a very good question. You need a cable to induce a currenta current in. There are no connections in the brain. So in fact, part of the reason we were doing the studies, the dysfunction was not because of a lack of existence of connections but because those connections themselves were not properly utilized. Why . For whatever reason, and some people because of behavior, insight, whatever it is, are able to learn to do better. The other extreme, the number of connections and the meshing together becomes overwhelming and it comes with significant consideration. Very complex spectrum, but for brain stimulation to work you need connection to exist. Can promote connection to become better, stronger, or the other way around, but without it is not going to work. What it says is that even if we as autistic people think, i would like to be able to see emotional signals from other people. I can do that. The idea that these experiments showed the networks to do that were in me all my life, even if i cannot access them is tremendously inspiring to me because i did not going to this thinking i wanted to cure autism. All you do this thinking, i want to make myself better in a specific way just as others of you might think, im going to walk out and be a faster runner and be smarter and in memory exercises. What he has just shown us is that there are perhaps tremendous abilities locked in our minds that we cannot access that are there, and for me this turned it on. That is what facilitated changing me, something always in me. The two projects. We have spoken about this. Unlocking abilities in the brain. And therefore it needs to be done carefully, and the experimental conditions in your book. Absolutely. And the 2nd is because of that. I want to reemphasize, it is one thing to do interventions to learn about the brain, to gain the insight, to develop new insight was very different to say we now know this is useful as a therapy for autism. We dont. I have a nephew with autism spectrum. I wish you could tell stories. He is nowhere near as well functioning. He is doing great. Keeping three jobs. And engaging, lovely person with different emotion. We knew the therapy would make his life better. He is the 1st person are none that i would do the stimulation on. I havent. Not because i am plain nasty, because nasty, because of helping individuals with disorders. That is what moves me. But we dont know the cost and people with lower iq, lower functioning forms of autism. There is work were doing now, and the settings, setting up clinics for autism is treatment. What do you switch from . This tremendous problems. This was not free ride. Im really proud that i did it. When he asked me if i would do it again and i said i dont think i needed, that doesnt mean for a 2nd i am not really proud of what i was able to do to help with the advance of science because i believe in the promise of what pms is going to do, not just for artistic people, but for many others. Of course i see the costs and the gains in myself. On balance as hard as it has been, i am better off now. You have to read the story. It is the most complex of ever written. It is not simple at all. Who has got the best last question here . The person with the microphone is going to pick. You, there. Okay. He has got you. You mentioned that there these guys conducted you guys called it up with procedure after the study. And what was interesting was, i dont know who did this, ifthis, if it was surely or the other lady, but the area was stimulated. I thought that was really interesting because he also discussed that there are also other studies to further develop new applications for this type of technology, for instance, to help people that suffered a stroke or parkinsons disease. Enough development actually apply this as treatment for depression. Yet even gone as far as suggesting that it might be applicable as a diagnostic diagnostic tool for autism. I was just wondering, has there been more explanation regarding that . Diagnosing autism . To help use that. That was an interesting thing. They have worked on that. What they did was, they did a study where they hook electrodes to my thumb and forefinger, and then they fired a place into the cortex, the area on the top of my head that triggered the muscles in my hand, and so they turn the machine up slowly from zero until the muscle started to activate. And they can see it on the monitor. That was a really weird really weird thing because you would be watching the monitor and see a little blip and then they would turn it up a few more percent and my hand would jump like a frog off the table. It was the weirdest thing because i was not thinking move my hand but the tms made me move my fingers. How to establish thewould establish the threshold, if you will, that made my fingers twitch. And then they would apply aa burst that wasnt designed to suppress the function in that area and the burst lasted just a few seconds, and they would fire the pulse that twitched my fingers again, nothing would happen. And they would turn it up and turn it up and eventually by figure would twitch again. So maybe it was at 51 and twitched at 1st, and after they suppressed me maybe it took 75. And then they would wait ten or 15 minutes and do it again and wait 15 minutes and do it again and so on until my finger twitches returned to the baseline. And what they found was that the autistic people experience more change in that test, and we stayed changed longer than non autistic people, and what was quite remarkable in my opinion was that they collected a bunch of participants for the study in the hospital, some of which were diagnosed with autism like me and some were not, and they were able to separate by the test results on that test by how fast the people recovered, to clear groups, non autistic and autistic. And they separated them clearly, i thought that was amazing really. [inaudible question] we need to take another group of people. Figure out whether we can correctly classify them. With 98 percent. But extremely good and appropriate into different cohorts. The beauty of that is that it does not require someone being able to talk for having had multiple years of performance. Right now we diagnosed a person after seeing it child behave for a certain amount of time and trying to capture that. It takes time, and arguably it is too late if we want to intervene early and guide the development, it development, it would be nice to have a more robust intervention. And it is a tougha tough diagnosis, something that is not quite clear. And it is not capturing brain physiology but how the brain is manifesting. The potential for this type of operation, one can target other parts of the brain and collective responses with brain waves. This can apply to children all the way to whatever age in the exact same way. And so they are doing these type of studies currently. It is an important thing because it is showing the physiologic physiological difference in autistic brains. It is measurable the tool as opposed to an expression of opinions which is one of the things we have been wanting for a long time for the development of biomarkers. Biomarkers. So i have to thank all of you for coming. This is actually our only time because we are here talking together with you folks about tms and the switched on story. This is like the one and only place that we are both here. You know, the story would have never been possible. Really just all the brilliant people at the harvard medical center. Really, really cool thing. She is scared to stand up. It is just such a cool thing. Where are we going to sign books . Back there are going downstairs . It will be right up your at this table. I will have you all lineup. You can exit of the store to my left. I would like to thank you for being here. [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]
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