Brain Storm (13 page)

Five or six other white lab coats followed them into the elevator. She stood in front of the control panel and spoke in a conversational tone, as if they were alone. “I live on Five. That’s Neuroimaging. If we have time, I’ll take you down to Neuropsych on the third floor.”

“This whole building—it’s all brain science?” he said, as they stepped off on Five into a vestibule with a huge, square metal door.

She unclipped her ID badge and plugged it into a slot in the door.

“Neuropharmacology, neuropsychology, neurophysiology, neurobiology, neuroimaging, neuromagnetism. We just had the Decade of the Brain.” She chuckled. “Now, my colleagues and I are neuromaniacs in a building full of big brain toys.”

She led him down hallways and past signs:
MAGNETIC RESONANCE PHYSICS
,
MAGNETIC RESONANCE SPECTROSCOPY
,
POSITRON EMISSION TOMOGRAPHY
,
FUNCTIONAL MRI
,
ELECTROPHYSIOLOGY
,
COMPUTED TOMOGRAPHY
.

“And Mr. Whitlow,” said Watson. “I know what you want to do, but I’m unclear about just how it helps him.”

“You file a motion notifying the court and the government that at trial you intend to introduce expert testimony of the defendant’s mental condition. Let them think you’re going for a traditional mental defect or disease. You request that he be transferred to the Federal Medical Center in Rochester, Minnesota. It’s hooked up to Mayo’s. There, he is screened, scanned, and tested. We get the images and the test batteries piped back here via file transfer protocols and display them on our systems and monitors. Not only do you get free testing, you also get an extra forty-five days to accommodate the travel and the testing. After that, he comes back here for trial. They do the scans and the procedures, we interpret the results.”

“What kinds of tests?”

“Day one, cerebrospinal fluid, urine, hair sample for gas chromatography and drug testing, tissue biopsies for genetic and biological markers. Day two, we do the psychological testing and profiles: Wechsler, Halstead-Reitan Neuropsychological Battery, Bias Profiles, automaticity testing. Day three, neuroimaging, CAT, MRI, fMRI, PET, MEG, ABC, DEF, GHI … Do you know what any of this means?”

“Not really,” said Watson. “But, you’re looking for what? A disorder
of some kind? Insanity? Oh!” he exclaimed, his palm to his forehead, “the seizures. He’s had seizures. He takes medicine. Dilantin.”

“Nice,” she said. “That may help. Slim chance of a lesion. We can tell Arthur that’s what we’re looking for, or we can tell him we’re pursuing the seizure business.” She turned right down another corridor. “If we are lucky enough to find an abnormality, we have half a dozen neuropsychologists who could testify about the behavioral repercussions.”

“This guy is creepy,” said Watson, “but pitiful, at the same time. I can’t really describe— Well, he has this tattoo that says ‘Jesus Hates Niggers.’ ”

“Mmm,” she said, “possible religious delusions.”

“Yeah,” said Watson. “And he—”

“Quiet,” she said. “You’re telling me too much. I’ll get my data from the scans.”

They passed a vault with huge block red letters that said:
CAUTION
:
EXTREMELY POWERFUL MAGNETIC FIELDS
and a special icon resembling the radiation symbol.

“MRI,” she said with a wave. “Magnetic Resonance Imaging. We call them magnets. As for insanity, that’s what we call a ‘soft’ disorder. Most of them went out back around the era of the Twinkie defense. Remember the trial of Dan White for killing George Moscone, the mayor of San Francisco, and Harvey Milk, the city supervisor? Mr. White got three years for a double homicide, because his lawyer successfully argued that junk food had addled the defendant’s brain and predisposed him to murder. Then we went through the Menendez phase, where it was abuse that created killers, not Twinkies. But even there the defense was neurological. In the first Menendez trial, they had experts comparing the violent responses of the defendants to the gill-withdrawal reflex of sea urchins. But if all else fails, we could have one of our therapists elicit some soft recovered memories of abuse.”

She pointed at a vaulted door with block red letters. “Another magnet.”

“Can we go in and see one?” he asked.

She stopped suddenly and looked him up and down. “Pen, watch, belt, phone. You probably have keys. We’re talking about extremely powerful magnetic fields. The walls, ceilings, and floors around here are eight feet thick. If you have any metal components in a prosthesis, a pacemaker, orthopedic screws, shards of shrapnel in your eyes, those pretty much get ripped out of you. No, you can’t go in.”

Watson held on to the pens in his shirt pocket and walked on by.

“Then there was the Crocodile Man,” she said, “another real-life case. The defendant picked up two hitchhiking teenage girls and beat them over the head with a stonemason’s hammer, stopping just short of killing them. The defense called an expert witness from Harvard Medical School, who used a book called
Violence and the Brain
, written by two Harvard neurosurgeons, to argue that the defendant had an organic brain syndrome called ‘episodic dyscontrol syndrome.’ It was based on the old triune brain model. It doesn’t matter whether you call it super-ego, ego, and id, or neocortex, limbics, and brain stem, the theory is that there are violent urges from our collective reptilian unconscious hiding like trolls under the bridges of our higher brain parts. And when the neurological functions responsible for holding these paleopsychic urges in check malfunction, out comes the Crocodile Man. So it’s not attempted murder, it’s episodic dyscontrol.” She tittered. “The judge and jury’s eyes glazed over, they nodded their heads, and the defendant got a suspended sentence and six years’ probation for bashing in the skulls of two girls.”

Watson wondered if the syndrome could manifest itself sexually, in which case he could recall a few episodes of dyscontrol back in college. He pointed at a white vault emblazoned with
PET
in red. “I know it’s a scan of some kind,” he said, “but what does P-E-T stand for?”

“Positron Emission Tomography,” she said. “PET scanner. Probably one of the first scans they’ll do on your client. Imagine taking a big metal donut filled with radiation detectors and putting it around his head.” She made a circle around her head with her hands. “Then they inject a positron-emitting radioisotope into his veins, which allows them to take pictures of where all the blood is going in his brain and which parts are using sugar and oxygen, while he is, say, watching videotapes depicting scenes of graphic violence, scenes of children playing, scenes of couples engaged in sexual intercourse.”

“PET,” said Watson. “What about heavy petting—where’s that done?”

“In the primate labs,” she said, as if on cue, “where they keep your relatives. We have a couple of amorous baboons and a chimp named Cham, who gets it whenever he wants it by pushing a big red button with his girlfriend’s picture on it. I’ll take you down there, later … if you want.”

She continued leading him down hallways and past small cubicles where intense academics were hunched over computer keyboards and hemmed in by stacks of journals and printouts.

She opened a door. “My place,” she said, showing him a tower computer and two monitors on an L of worktables. Two of her four walls were crammed with books on shelves, including a fat tome entitled
The Amygdala
, which drew his attention more than the others.

“What’s the amygdala?” asked Watson, mispronouncing it and bending over to read the subtitle. “It’s an African antelope, right? No, wait, it’s a Chevy, came out after the Impala?”

“Remember the older, lower parts of your brain I was talking about?” Rachel said, grabbing a model of a human head, finally opening the hinged plastic skull, and removing colored brain parts, showing him two grape-shaped structures at the base of the brain. “
Amygdala
is Latin for ‘almond.’ Along with the hippocampus and the hypothalamus, it’s part of the limbic system. It’s kind of a switching station for powerful emotions—rage, violence, fear. Back in the sixties, it was all the—sorry—rage to insert electrodes into the amygdalae of violent criminals and stimulate them like rats.”

“And, what happened?” he asked.

“Irresistible urges for sex and violence,” she said, “or a total absence of urges for sex and violence, depending upon where the electrodes hit.”

“Electrodes?” he asked.

“Yup. Implanting electrodes went the way of lobotomies. Trying to stimulate something as complex as an amygdala with an electrode is a bit like trying to tweak the insides of a Pentium chip with a claw hammer.”

“Oh,” he said.

“Dramatic, fascinating results,” she added, “but wildly unpredictable. And if you can’t duplicate what you get, it ain’t science.”

She picked up one of her phones. “Hi, Walt. Hey, I’m bringing somebody down to see Cham.”

Watson retrieved
The Amygdala
and opened it, finding a lot of eight-syllable Latin derivatives fastened together like Legos.

“No,” she said, “he’s not a journalist and he’s not from the ethical groups. He’s a lawyer on our side. Do you have an estrus female? Good. Load the environment, and we’ll be down in ten or fifteen. Thanks.”

Watson returned
The Amygdala
to its niche on the shelf.

She regarded him with sham suspicion. “You’re not one of them whirling-dervish, bug-fucking animal-rights activists, are you?”

“I love animals,” he said. “Medium rare, rolled in olive oil, cracked black pepper, and chopped garlic.”

She laughed. “Leave your stuff here,” she said, pointing at the table. “We’ll tour.”

They walked past more red-lettered vaults and office spaces.

“Do you know what a CAT scan is?”

“Yes,” he said. “Of course I do. It’s … like X rays, only better, right?”

“I thought so,” she said. “The young, healthy, immortal male. Imagine I wanted to slice up your client’s brain into forty-eight very thin horizontal layers and look at them to see if there are any structural abnormalities or lesions. Now, imagine you can slice it on any plane, transverse, sagittal or sideways, coronal, even diagonal if we had to. We can do that.”

“Wow,” said Watson.

“That’s the boring part,” she said with a laugh. “Because now imagine shaving his brain into even thinner slices, but instead of static structural images, you construct temporal images so you can observe function over a period of time, whether it’s measured in glucose uptake, oxygen consumption, blood flow, or electrical or magnetic activity, and then make a movie of various functions occurring in all these different slices.”

“Heavy wizardry,” said Watson.

“That’s still boring,” she said. “Because now take a scan of a slice with very precise structural detail, such as MRI, which has a spatial resolution approaching one to two millimeters, and then take another scan which is sensitive to function, like PET, and superimpose the PET picture showing function in the slice on top of the picture showing the structural detail, and voilà, you have a very good idea which neuronal groups are active at any given time.”

“A brain movie,” said Watson.

“Now,” she said, “cut to the chase. Suppose I administer some standard behavioral testing or cognitive testing, but I couple it with neuroimaging. I make a movie of the brain working while it solves problems or reacts to controlled stimuli. And from the data and the images we assemble a neurofunctional profile of your client’s brain. Then
a powerful computer using recurrent networks compares his profile to thousands of other brains and profiles. We record the subject’s responses to, say, black faces as opposed to white ones, his capacity for empathy when confronted with images portraying human suffering, his attraction or revulsion to depictions of violence.”

“A Clockwork Orange,”
said Watson.

“Better,” she said. “That was behavioral modification. Imaging techniques noninvasively detect and diagnose behavior at its source, inside the human brain.”

More labs, offices, testing booths. They stopped in front of an elevator bank and waited, while she paced and held her chin in her hand.

“Seizures,” she mused aloud. “Very nice. Maybe we can argue he has Tourette’s syndrome.” She assumed a lawyerly demeanor. “ ‘He calls everybody a nigger, Your Honor. He can’t help it.’ ” Her eyes opened wide. “We could put him on the stand and have him call me a nigger, you a nigger, the judge a nigger. ‘What’s more, Your Honor, he is afflicted with religious delusions. He thinks Jesus will save everyone except for us niggers.’ Did he say how many seizures he had?”

“Sounded like not very many and they’ve been controlled with medication for six or seven years.”

“Did he stop taking his meds?” she asked. “Did he take them the day before? The day of?”

“I asked him that,” said Watson. “He, uh, doesn’t remember.”

“Oh, good,” she said warmly. “We not only have a lawyer smart enough to ask, we have a client astute enough to not remember.”

They rode the elevator to the second floor. She put her badge in another white door. This one said
PRIMATE LABS
,
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
.

They entered a huge, high-ceilinged room, warm and humid—unlike the air-conditioned chill in the rest of the building—and lit by blazing drumlights. He heard screeching and smelled urine before he saw the deep cages lining the walls: a sauntering baboon, a pair of orangutans grooming each other, chimpanzees hurling monkey epithets at him from perches in artificial trees. Ventilation fans hummed overhead. Four-foot-high interlocking partitions divided the cavernous room into examination areas and controlled environments.

He followed her to a large glass booth. Someone had taped a printout page on the booth’s door with
CHAM
’
S HOUSE
written in black marker. Inside,
he saw stacks of computer equipment, monitors on steel shelves, and the back of what looked like a barber chair with hairy limbs strapped to it.

Rachel walked around to the front of the chair and smiled at Watson as he followed her.