Robison didn't fully understand what they meant until he received transcranial magnetic stimulation, a noninvasive procedure in which areas of the brain are stimulated with electromagnetic fields to alter its circuitry.
Neurologist Alvaro Pascual-Leone, who treated Robison, explains TMS as a "tool that allows us to introduce a small amount of current into specific parts of the brain without having to use surgery to do so. ... By introducing current in it, we can probe the function of certain parts of the brain [and] we can even modify how different parts of the brain work."
Robison says that the treatments left him with a sense of empathy that he'd never experienced before. But, he adds, not all of the changes caused by TMS were welcome. Ordinary conversations would leave him feeling emotionally overwhelmed, and, in some cases, his memories of past events were tainted.
"It's like I lost a protective shield," he says. "All these memories that hurt me because I was like the butt of a joke or something, I now realize that I just kind of went through life and people maybe said mean things about me but I never knew, so it didn't hurt. Now, stuff like that, it really hurts a lot."