Brain Storm (19 page)

“Right here,” she said, touching his scalp, “a microthin wire in your motor cortex.”

She stepped back and took his right hand in her own soft, dry hands. “And another one here,” she said, touching the back of his hand, below his forefinger, “where the muscle contracts and moves your index finger.

“If the wires to my recording device are the same length, I can tell you precisely, in milliseconds, how long it takes from the moment cerebral activity begins in the motor cortex to the instant the finger actually moves. It ranges from five hundred to six hundred milliseconds, over half a second.”

“Where’s the motor cortex?” he asked, hoping she would lean over and touch the top of his head again.

“Wrong question,” she said. “The right question is: When are you subjectively aware of your brain’s intention to move your finger?”

Watson made a face.

“Hold on to yourself. This won’t make sense,” she said. “It goes against everything you’ve ever learned about thought and behavior. But pay attention, because it’s important, and it’s hard science, not a theory. I can prove this to you. You become consciously aware of your intention to move your finger approximately three hundred milliseconds, or almost a third of a second after cerebral activity for the finger movement begins in the cortex and approximately two hundred fifty to three hundred milliseconds before your finger actually moves, assuming you choose not to interfere with the original signal.”

Watson made an even uglier face, while hers took on a certain radiance as she warmed to the task of explaining how brains work.

“Uh-huh,” he said with a nod.

“You just said uh-huh to a trap,” she observed. “What is the
you
in assuming ‘you’ choose not to interfere with it?”

“Uh,” said Watson.

“ ‘Uh’ is right,” she said. “If you questioned the population on the subject, you’d probably get at least half of them to reject Cartesian dualism—the spirit or ghost in control of the brain machine—but then they fall right into what we call Cartesian materialism, meaning they still want to think that some central part of the material brain is in charge of all the other parts.”

“And that’s not true?” he asked, almost wistfully, sensing that he was about to lose a cherished notion under the advancing army of her remorseless logic.

“We live and breathe Descartes,” she said. “Even if you’ve never heard of the guy. Mr. Think-Therefore-I-Am. His shadow falls over all of law and medicine. Descartes claimed that he’d had a series of dreams and based his philosophy on them. Revisionist psychoanalysts have concluded that Descartes probably suffered undiagnosed epileptic fits. He created an entire philosophy to explain the terrifying chasm that epilepsy had opened between his thinking brain and his uncontrollable body—a dream solution to the problem of failed self-control. So—” she chuckled “—the classic formulation of the mind-body problem was probably inspired by brain damage. Does irony come in more delicious flavors?”

“But human consciousness?” said Watson. “You can experience it, analyze it, study its electrical activity. But you can’t
explain
it. What’s the word? Ineffable. That’s it. It’s ineffable.”

“Right,” she said sarcastically, “like the Hebrews couldn’t say Yahweh. Because it’s your faith, which is a word you use to mark off parts of nature you will not try to explain. You need to go off and join one of those neurophilosophy sects, where they sit around all day reading Thomas Nagel and asking themselves, ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ We are talking about one hundred billion neurons, one hundred trillion synaptic connections, with each connection capable of assuming different strengths. A combinatoric universe, but, so far, no evidence of a central processing unit. So the narrative which most accurately represents the neuroscientific sequence of shooting a man goes like this: One, a burst of neural activity in the motor cortex initiates movement by sending a message to the trigger finger. Two, after three hundred milliseconds,
the defendant becomes subjectively aware that an impulse to kill has originated somewhere in his brain, and that a signal is being sent to his trigger finger. Three, during the two hundred to two hundred fifty milliseconds after awareness and before actual movement occurs, other parts of the brain decide whether to interfere with or counteract that signal, which was launched preconsciously, almost half a second before. Four, the brain either stops the action, or allows the trigger finger to actually move.”

Watson squirmed in his chair. “Isn’t this just a fancy elaboration of what used to be called unconscious behavior?” he asked, slightly exasperated by her millisecond hair-splitting.

“
Pre
conscious,” she said. “Not unconscious. Big difference. By definition, you’re unaware of unconscious thoughts. Preconscious cognition is brain activity that occurs
before
you are aware of it. The scary part is that it initiates actual movement in the physical world. Your consciousness, if you want to call it that, simply observes activity which originates somewhere else in your brain. Whether consciousness actually modulates brain activity is a question for neurophilosophers. Many doubt it.

“Think of your brain as a complex arrangement of networks and parallel processors. From time to time, some are conscious of themselves, but most aren’t. Imagine a three-hundred-millisecond moral void which opens just after the brain triggers behavior and before the brain becomes consciously aware of it.”

“And for Mr. Whitlow, this means what?”

“Mr. Whitlow sees his wife in bed with another man,” she said, folding her arms and pacing. “He is provoked, enraged. The law describes his mental state with catchphrases: it’s a crime of passion, it’s voluntary manslaughter, he lost his self-control in the heat of the moment. He goes on autopilot. He points his gun and pulls the trigger.

“According to the federal government’s theory, Mr. Whitlow sees his wife in bed with a deaf, black man. He is provoked, enraged by his wife’s infidelity, but he does not go on autopilot. Instead he takes an additional mental step, that of being motivated, at least in part, by a hatred of deafness or blackness. He points his gun and pulls the trigger. And,” she continued, putting her hands on the armrests and leaning over him, “until Mr. Whitlow tells us something different, this all happened in three hundred milliseconds. One third of a second?”

Watson’s mouth fell ajar, he looked up into her face. “You should be a lawyer.”

“No way,” she said. “Too much work, not enough pay. And dull as dry toast.” She laughed. “Unless, of course, the lawyer has the good fortune to happen his way into a criminal case with neuroscientific possibilities.”

“Of course,” he said.

“Now,” she said, “back to Mr. Whitlow. A good brain scientist might ask about the timing, the sequence, the neural hardware required to transmit these two emotions or motives—rage and bigotry. Where do they originate in the human brain? What neural networks conduct them to the level of what the law calls ‘consciousness’ or ‘intent’? What if rage caused by marital infidelity originates in the amygdala, and bigotry descends from the prefrontal cortex? Rage triggered by a front-row view of your spouse’s infidelity is not the same thing as hate inspired by bigotry. Rage for one reason, and hate for another reason? Can the brain produce them simultaneously? Can they coexist in what you folk psychologists call subjective consciousness? Can they coexist in the subjective consciousness in the space of one third of a second? What if one, neurologically speaking, overwhelms or displaces the other?”

“You’ve convinced me,” said Watson. “I vote for acquittal.”

“Why?” she said. “You don’t understand the first thing about how brains work.”

“But it sounds so good,” he said.

“You’re nice,” she crooned. “Do you want to see pictures of the nice magnetic fields a nice brain like yours gives off?”

“Why not?”

“OK,” she said. “This sensor net allows me to take a simultaneous thirty-two-channel EEG. And, if you want the jumbo, bonus, extra-special value of an EKG and skin galvanic response, I need you to get the tie off, unbutton your shirt, and undo your belt buckle.”

He glanced up at her.

“Don’t worry,” she said with a smile. “It’s science. I’m a doctor. And you? You’re a big blob of protoplasm. An unformatted human male from one of what I call the corrupted zones of human endeavor—the law.”

He draped his tie over one of the armrests and modestly left the shirt flaps closed after unbuttoning.

She tore two foil packets open and expertly smeared clear jelly on several leads. She parted his shirt with the backs of her hands and started pasting leads on his torso. He felt goose bumps ripple across his chest like a cool breeze, then the tiny, cold shocks of jelly.

“That preconscious lag works both ways,” she said. “Not just from the brain to the body, but from the body to the brain, and from the environment to the brain.

“Stimuli, sensations,” she said, pasting an electrode on each shoulder. “They get processed preconsciously, important mental decisions and representations are made before the brain is self-consciously aware of them.”

She gently set the clutch of wire leads in his lap.

“This is …” he began, then took a breath.

“Harmless,” she said. “Completely harmless. A free look at the magnetic fields generated by your own brain. It’s like being one of the first people to look into a microscope or a telescope.”

She put on her favorite mock-professorial pose, pushing her horn-rims down her nose, tugging her chin, and peering at him.

“When Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister looked into the telescope for the first time, he warned the astronomers around him that these instruments would have a morally bad effect upon men because they would see things beyond the powers of their inner faculties of discernment. The invention of the microscope prompted a similar response—terror—and it was banned. Goethe said only a superhuman culture could harmonize the inner truth of man with this inappropriate vision from without. And remember old Michelangelo had to sneak around under cover of darkness for anatomy lessons on corpses? Why? Because the Church outlawed human dissection. They didn’t want to know if men dissected looked very much like their cousins, the animals. Imagine what old Goethe would have said about this gizmo? Talk about an inappropriate vision from without! And we are”—she grinned—“the superhumans?”

“I’ll be watching myself think?”

“Not quite,” she said, “that might put us both to sleep. But you’ll be seeing visual representations of the magnetic fields generated by your brain. We put each other under the hair dryer all the time around here. But even slight movement in the torso causes artifact in the tracings, so I must restrain your arms and legs. May I?”

She showed him the Velcro flaps of the wrist restraints on the arms of the device.

“Sure,” he said uncertainly. “Why not?”

The flaps were thick and strong, and she expertly bound his arms and legs. If he really wanted to, he figured he could free himself, but when he tested his hypothesis by flexing his right bicep against the Velcro, he realized he was held fast—just as she was finishing up his left leg.

“Trapped,” he said, playfully struggling.

“Like Cham,” she said.

She reached down and picked up the leads from his lap, plucking and sorting them like the stems of flowers, setting one tangle back in his lap. She spread the sensor net with her hands and leaned over him, brushing his cheek again with glands that had nourished the human race from day one, putting the web of electrodes over his head, and gently pushing him back under the hood of the device.

“Sometimes sensory input is processed in that preconscious lag I was telling you about,” she said, still leaning over him, adjusting the leads, touching his hair, his neck, “until the mental activity acquires a certain momentum. The autonomic nervous system comes into play before the brain is self-consciously aware of the parallel processes, what is sometimes referred to as ‘losing control’ or ‘losing your head.’ ”

She checked the connections on the armature overhead.

“Mr. Watson,” she said, lowering her face and looking at him intently, “according to the readings I’m getting, your brain registers intense pleasure when I lean over you.”

“This thing is
on
?” he gasped.

She walked to the door of the vault, turned, and smiled. “Not yet.”

She slipped out and appeared on the other side of the window at the console. He heard a distant hum and watched the monitors come to life. One displayed shapes of the human head from different angles with what looked like topographic maps in different shades of pastel and citrus colors. Another monitor was full of squiggling lines. A third was blank.

She came back through the chamber door, stooped, and put her head next to his, looking out through the window with him at the monitors.

“Those colored patterns represent magnetic fields of different strengths, a direct measure of the neuronal activity in your brain. You are one of the few people on earth who’ve had the pleasure of witnessing
images of their own neuromagnetism unfolding in real time. The squiggles on the other one are the EEG. All recorded and stored in the computer. I can print color films for you.”

She came back around to the front of the chair and lifted the remaining leads out of his lap.

“I told you to undo this,” she said, looping her little finger under the tongue of his belt and tugging it free. “You disobeyed. I need a lead on top of each thigh for the skin galvanic responses. Now I’m getting lubricant all over your belt.”

“Hey,” he said weakly, surging against the restraints.

“Relax,” she said. “Don’t be a stress puppy. I’m a doctor.”

She dabbed jelly on the two remaining leads, brushed his pants open with the backs of her hands, and pasted the leads in place.

With her hand on his thigh, she glanced out through the window as the third monitor blinked and then displayed horizontal rows of squiggles.

“Um,” said Watson. “I think …”

“That’s it,” she said, smiling at him again. “You’re hooked up. A Neuromag 278-channel MEG, a simultaneous 32-channel EEG, and a 12-lead EKG, and skin conductance response all being recorded, analyzed, and stored in our computers—the first components of your neurofunctional profile. What’s it feel like, watching all that magnetic and electrical activity roaring up and down your spinal column between your brain and your erection?”