Memoir 8: My Autistic Experience Answering the Million Dollar Question on WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE

When I realized the dark gift would prevent me from obtaining gainful employment, I turned to game shows instead.

My Aspergian ability to focus and learn fast saved me. Between Sunday, when I read the ad, and the interview eight days later, I became a passable expert in digital design. 
   .John Elder Robison, Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's

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A commonplace challenge troubling folks bearing the dark gift is gainful employment. Attaining a steady job providing a living income can be a major challenge, a consequence of our autistic brain’s social muddle.

By the time I was thirty, it was apparent I was not suited, at all, for working in an office. Nor could I function with a boss. The implicit social rules governing manager-employee relationships remained obscure to me or puzzling. A career in academia, perhaps the most obvious professional path for someone interested in unriddling autism, was thus closed to me. As were most other career paths.

I had a clear sense of what I wanted to pursue—a complete understanding of Mind, consciousness, the fundamental nature of reality, and the dark gift—but without money for rent, I couldn’t see how I could keep a roof above my head, let alone pursue clandestine knowledge. I needed to find a way to attain a large sum of money in a short amount of time to provide a financial foundation liberating me to pursue my science goals on my own terms without salaried employment.

I considered potential routes for amassing quick fortunes. Selling narcotics did occur to me. But the same autistic flaws rendering me unfit for conventional employment render me unfit for a life of crime, which requires endless social manipulation and self-manipulation for success, neither of which my autistic brain can perform effectively.

So I considered game shows. This was 2006, and out of the opportunities for cash and prizes available on American television, I quickly fingered Who Wants to Be a Millionaire as the ideal target.

You sit in a high chair, answer fifteen multiple-choice trivia questions, and take home a million dollars. It seemed the most plausible path to avoid laboring in an office.

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Millionaire had just switched from prime time to daytime syndication, hosted by Meredith Vieira. The daytime show offered four Lifelines: phone-a-friend, eliminate two choices, ask the audience, and switch the question. Perhaps the single biggest reason I decided to target WWTBAM was because every question ever asked on every episode of the show had recently been compiled into a free online database by fans. Because my darkly gifted brain is capable of super-learning and super-focus, I surmised I could study the database of questions in a concise period of time to learn how to win the million bucks.

I was also aware of the autism-generated challenges that would undermine my goal. First, I was awful at trivia, due to my afflicted memory. I couldn’t easily retain the sort of facts they ask on game shows, Who was the thirteenth president?, What is the chemical symbol for Oganesson?, In what war was the Battle of Crecy? Nor did memorizing this sort of trivia hold any inherent appeal to me.

Nevertheless, as part of my super-learning, I had developed a suite of mental heuristics that enabled me to hold large quantities of knowledge in a mental “construct,” a sort of medium-term memory structure, using focused short-term memory dynamics to sustain the construct. However, such a construct would only remain coherent and stable for two or three weeks once I stopped rehearsing the construct. After that, my autistic memory impairments would start erasing all I had studiously packed into it.

The good news was I could control when I auditioned for the show, which required taking a written test in New York. And if I was chosen to be on the show, I’d know the exact date in advance. That meant I could time my super-learning efforts so that the knowledge stored in my construct peaked on the day of my required performance. (It would do me no good to spend, say, two years studying trivia for the show, because after a couple months I’d forget most everything I’d learned.)

I downloaded the database of previous Millionaire questions and began to grind. First, I classified each question into a subject category. Then I calculated the frequency that various categories appeared on the show. American history was a top category, as was American pop culture, followed by science, art, literature, and geography. I then apportioned my study time for each category according to the frequency of the category questions and my own pre-existing familiarity with the topic. For instance, I knew American history pretty well, so even though it was a common category, I didn’t spend as much time on it as I did on businesses and corporations, which I knew not at all.

My dark gift empowers me to assimilate knowledge like a machine, part of super-learning. It is no problem for me to wake up and spend the entire day memorizing material until I go to sleep. In fact, it’s one of the most pleasant activities I engage in and always presents the autistic danger I’ll stop paying attention to relationships and the real world. (To be clear, trivia is not the sort of subject I like to grind, but super-learning itself is always a fulfilling experience, I imagine the way learning about people is fulfilling for non-autistic humans.)

I spent two months studying trivia for Millionaire according to my subject category system, before auditioning for the show in New York City. I got the call to appear on the show about four months later. The taping date was six weeks later. I spent all six weeks preparing. I restarted grinding on the subject categories according to my previous planning. But now I also scrutinized the Lifelines.

I spent the most effort prepping the phone-a-friend Lifeline, which I intended to serve as a guaranteed free answer because my phone-a-friend was my close friend and fellow mathematical neuroscientist Sai Gaddam. He and I would go on to write two books together: the groundbreaking scientific investigation into human sexuality and the sexual brain, Billion Wicked Thoughts, and our reader-friendly account of the operation of consciousness, self-consciousness, language, and the supermind, Journey of the Mind.

Sai would type on his computer whatever Millionaire question stumped me and search for the answer. This was 2006, when search engines were much simpler than today. Sai hand-programmed a search engine interface that simultaneously drew from Google, Yahoo, and Wikipedia to present answers from all three on Sai’s screen. We recognized that the real challenge was me coming up with a succinct but effective search string that I could communicate efficiently to Sai during the phone-a-friend call, which granted a strict thirty seconds before the call cut off.

So we practiced and practiced me converting tricky Millionaire questions into search strings. A typical training question: “Which of the following four singers won an Oscar but never won a Grammy?” Sai practiced and practiced speedily converting my spoken search string into a typed string and pinpointing the answer on his custom screen.

I also studied the ask-the-audience Lifeline, where every member of the studio audience gets to vote on the right answer. There was often a two-peak distribution of audience responses, which happened when there was a “trick” or “inviting” incorrect answer that duped ignorant people into choosing it—and a surprising correct answer that knowledgeable folks recognized was correct. In these double-peaked cases, it was always the lesser of the two peaks that held the correct answer.

In the spring of 2006, I traveled to the New York studios of Millionaire for my shot at autistic financial independence.