John Elder Robison (born August 13, 1957)[1] is the American author of the 2007 memoir Look Me in the Eye, detailing his life with undiagnosed Asperger syndrome and savant abilities, and of three other books.

[5] He is the elder brother of memoirist Augusten Burroughs, who also wrote about his childhood in the memoir Running with Scissors.

[7] In 2011, Robison was featured on an episode of Ingenious Minds, which discussed some of the transcranial magnetic stimulation experiments he underwent to improve his social cognition.

In the 1970s, he worked as an engineer in the music business where he is best known for creating the signature special effects guitars played by the band KISS.

[9] In Look Me in the Eye, Robison describes growing up with no diagnosis of his autism, but aware that he was different, and how he was first diagnosed by a therapist friend when he was 40 years old.

[2] Robison is also the author of Be Different (2011), a how-to guide for grown-ups with autism; Raising Cubby (2013), the story of raising his autistic son;[10] and Switched On (2016), which tells the story of his participation as a research subject in brain studies using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School.

[16] Since 2012, Robison has served as a member of the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.