As nonverbal cues became increasingly legible to him, Mr. Robison also realizes that a longtime friend has been subtly mocking him for years. Mr. Robison’s marriage to his second wife, who suffers from debilitating depression, starts to decay. “When Martha had her down days, I was no longer able to jump out of bed and go to work,” he writes. “As soon as I got up I’d feel panic over her sadness.”

Most profoundly, he discovers that neurotypical humans are not, as a rule, happy.

“I had created a fantasy that seeing into people would be sweetness and love,” he writes. “Now I knew the truth: most of the emotions floating around in space are not positive. When you look into a crowd with real emotional insight you’ll see lust, greed, rage, anxiety, and what for a lack of a better word I call ‘tension’ — with only the occasional flash of love or happiness.”

Arthur Schopenhauer couldn’t have said it much better himself.

“Switched On” is subversive in more ways than one. In this age of heightened sensitivity to neurodiversity, one of the most uncomfortable notions you can raise about Asperger’s is that it can cruelly obscure the most basic elements of personality. The very idea is offensive and wounding to many people, because it frames a difference as a deficit; to wistfully suggest that a person with Asperger’s might be someone else without Asperger’s is to denature them completely, to wish their core identities into oblivion.

“Asperger’s is not a disease,” Mr. Robison wrote in “Look Me in the Eye.” “It’s a way of being. There is no cure, nor is there a need for one.”

In “Switched On,” Mr. Robison, 58, retains his Asperger’s pride. Part of him even fears he’ll lose his special gifts, on the (beguiling, I thought) theory that “perhaps the area that recognizes emotions in people was recognizing traits of machinery for me.”

But he is also torn. He did not come of age when “neurodiversity” was part of our vocabulary of difference. He did not come of age when “Asperger’s” was part of our vocabulary at all. He received his autism diagnosis at 40, and he has many memories of being bullied, losing jobs and mishandling social situations because of his inability to read others. His family is also a frightful caldron of mental illness, which further colored his self-image until he received his diagnosis. (For further details, see “Running With Scissors,” written by his brother, Augusten Burroughs.)

Mr. Robison still believes autism is not a disease. “But I also believed in being the best I could be,” he writes, “particularly by addressing the social blindness that had caused me the most pain throughout my life.”

But if the effects of Asperger’s can be mitigated, what consequences will that have? And what does it mean for the future of the neurodiversity movement?

It’s an extremely delicate question. TMS is still not an federally approved therapy for autism. Mr. Robison is cautious to note that he responded more powerfully to it than the other participants in his research group, and that the young adults were the least responsive. (He seems especially wary of using it on young people, wishing to see their minds flower into whatever they are meant to be.) He frets, too, that its ephemeral effects may strike some people as “a cruel joke.”

Mr. Robison has led such an unusual and varied life — from fixing guitars to working on games for Milton Bradley to writing books to running a car repair shop — that his brain may have been an optimal one for rewiring.

And he is still a man with Asperger’s.

While reading, you start to realize, a bit queasily, how shrewd it was for the team at Beth Israel to seek out Mr. Robison for its study — as soon as Mr. Robison began blogging about it, the researchers’ office was inundated with calls from prospective volunteers. The book can read like a love letter to his doctors at times, if not outright advocacy for their research.

Mr. Robison’s experience may be sui generis. Or it may augur something much larger. With any luck, therapies in the future will allow people like Mr. Robison to both preserve their strengths and make the world an easier place for them to negotiate. “Different, not less,” as the autism activist Temple Grandin likes to say — but with better amps to improve the sound.