Ashlee Vance Quote

The perplexing thing was that Elon seemed to drift off into a trance at times. People spoke to him, but nothing got through when he had a certain, distant look in his eyes. This happened so often that Elon’s parents and doctors thought he might be deaf. Sometimes, he just didn’t hear you, said Maye. Doctors ran a series of tests on Elon, and elected to remove his adenoid glands, which can improve hearing in children. Well, it didn’t change, said Maye. Elon’s condition had far more to do with the wiring of his mind than how his auditory system functioned. He goes into his brain, and then you just see he is in another world, Maye said. He still does that. Now I just leave him be because I know he is designing a new rocket or something. Other children did not respond well to these dreamlike states. You could do jumping jacks right beside Musk or yell at him, and he would not even notice. He kept right on thinking, and those around him judged that he was either rude or really weird. I do think Elon was always a little different but in a nerdy way, Maye said. It didn’t endear him to his peers. For Musk, these pensive moments were wonderful. At five and six, he had found a way to block out the world and dedicate all of his concentration to a single task. Part of this ability stemmed from the very visual way in which Musk’s mind worked. He could see images in his mind’s eye with a clarity and detail that we might associate today with an engineering drawing produced by computer software. It seems as though the part of the brain that’s usually reserved for visual processing—the part that is used to process images coming in from my eyes—gets taken over by internal thought processes, Musk said. I can’t do this as much now because there are so many things demanding my attention but, as a kid, it happened a lot.