Brain Storm (35 page)

A door opened somewhere down at the opposite end of the hallway, and closed. Silence. They stared into each other’s eyes across the table.

“I have a keen capacity for rationalizing and for blaming my irresponsible behavior on others,” he said. “This is all your fault. None of this was my idea.”

They met halfway across the table, grabbing at each other’s body parts through their clothing. He opened her lab coat, unbuttoned the blouse, pulled frantically at a pewter-colored, strapless underwire bra.

She froze in mid–heavy breath. “We need to go somewhere,” she said. “Now.”

Watson smoothed shirt flaps over the rise in his pants while she made herself presentable for the journey. The hallways were dark, lit only by utility lights and exit signs.

“Where are we going?” he whispered.

“The storage room,” she said. “Behind the primate labs.”

Downstairs, they nervously searched the high-ceilinged lab for signs
of human beings and crept among the cages, making their way to the back of the lab. She opened a heavy steel door, then slammed and locked it behind them and cut the lights, leaving only glowing yellow horizontal bars streaming in through the ventilation slots from the primate labs. They pulled at each other’s clothes again and sank slowly onto a padded mat.

She straddled him and prepared to make the necessary port connections, male and female adapters ready, I/O enabled, server/client, master/slave. Just a couple of high-end biological machines preparing to hot-dock with cable modems and access each other’s front-end processors.

Over the low roar of ventilation fans from the next room, Watson could hear the ululations of macaques, baboons, chimps, and vervets shrieking and catcalling as if they knew exactly where their betters had headed. Elsa and Cham were their neighbors, and the whole primate community was having a real howl fest over the arrival of this new hairless species who had to put on airs and reproduce in private.

She dismounted and used his chest as a pillow, panting softly against his sternum. “Let’s suffer for a minute.”

She sat back on smooth oval haunches and swayed slightly. He had been lip-biting and sucking through the pewter lace, which looked frilly and fragile as ashes and had somehow survived mutual disrobing. She reared back, freeing her hands, grasping the underwires and undoing the front clasp, so he could have at his two globular obsessions.

Her scents, her perfume, mingled with the ancestral odors wafting in from the primate labs—the reek of monkey urine and the ripe aroma of fermenting banana peels. Water trickled through troughs and drains leading from the hosed-down cages. For just a moment, he was able to see Palmquist as nothing more than a really smart animal. Her odors, her breathing, stray moans, soft grunts of pleasure. A certain avidity or concupiscence, which aroused him at first then put him off when it acquired the ardor of selfish aggression.

This is the way it happens
, he thought, momentarily having an out-of-body view of two primates grappling and clawing at each other.
Put yourself in a certain circumstance, then a spark touches off combustible passions.

The adultery nightmares would be true from now on.
“Are you ready to be faithful to one woman?”
His father would have his answer now.
“I
had sunk to the state of a beast that licks his chaps after meat.”
More monkey calls from the next room. He was sure he picked out Cham’s voice, howling, even though his head was immobilized in its crown vise. “I know you, Watson!” he was saying in monkey talk.

He felt a chill spread inward from his extremities. He would live the rest of his life inside this very small braincase, behind two eyes, where he would never be able to escape self-loathing inspired by what he was about to do. He had a sudden desire to wait just a minute or two. See if he could recapture the reckless abandon that had brought him here in the first place.

She sensed something was wrong and energetically headed south to remedy the situation.

“Momentary systems failure,” he warned. “I need to think for a minute.”

“He’s thinking again,” she said. “And I don’t have my equipment down here. Where’s a gal’s functional MRI scanner and CRAY T3E supercomputer when she needs it?”

She settled herself alongside him and touched her head to his.

“Why?” he said into a clump of dark, fragrant, damp tresses just behind her ear. “This never happened before.”

“Somehow that makes me feel worse,” she said.

“I mean,” he protested, “I normally don’t think about it while I’m doing it. But this time, I’m asking myself—”

“This’ll be good,” she murmured into his chest, “especially if you’re looking for an answer anywhere above the waist or outside the septal pleasure centers.”

“Well,” he said. “I mean … Why?”

She sighed and laughed into his flesh. “I think we will have an easier time figuring out why Mr. Whitlow shot the hearing-impaired African-American. I think you’re trying to commit a hate crime against your wife, but your central nervous system lost its, uh, nerve at the last minute.”

“But I—”

“What I’d really like to do is get some films for my graduate students: ‘Class, these are PET scan images of a male brain examining itself, doing system diagnostics on the components in charge of its libido. Notice the well-developed neural networks for self-deception, denial, repression, and sublimation. Notice the circuitry laid down by therapeutic remorse and crabbed rationalizations.’ ”

“Knock it off,” said Watson. “I changed my mind. I think we better just get to work.”

“That’s right,” she said. “We’re supposed to be building a neuropsychological defense so we can save the life of a hate killer and help him get out of jail sooner. It’s important, urgent work for the higher good, but I think we are entitled to a break now and then.”

“And I should be …”

“You should be home helping the wife put the kids to bed. But you’re not.” She lifted herself onto an elbow and looked at him. “You’re here with these,” she said, cupping her breasts in the palms of her hands and holding them out to him. “Another stone Pavlovian breast man,” she said. “I keep hearing about these ass men,” she complained, “but I’ve never met one.”

She settled back onto his chest and giggled.

She managed to be frivolous and relentlessly scientific at the same time. The day’s tumultuous events had left him craving human affection. He had wanted her badly, and then raw guilt—not virtue!—had intervened. He’d brought her gifts celebrating her grant proposal—couldn’t she indulge him an episode of soul searching?

He was risking his marriage, his children, his peace of mind—all for his first adventure in adultery, which so far felt morally monumental, something she failed to appreciate. He needed some grand passion to blame for his behavior, or at least explain it; but she was not cooperating.

“It’s easy for you,” he said. “You’re not married, you don’t have kids.”

“Nope,” she said. “Tried that. Failed before making it to the kid part. Now it’s too late. Kids would be like kryptonite to my career.”

“Maybe I’m heading for divorce,” he said.

“Whoa, Bud,” she said. “Don’t leave that baby on my doorstep. Keep this in perspective. I have a better question for you. Why are you asking your brain to explain itself? Don’t let me discourage you from trying. Neuroscientists find these performances infinitely amusing.”

“So,” he asked, disgust creeping into his voice. “ ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’ That was just the brain of Socrates giving off static? Self-examination is, what? Impossible?”

“Not impossible,” she sighed, “so much as completely unreliable. You’re asking a biological machine to step aside from itself and give an objective assessment of its operations. If you were the HAL 9000 series
in
2001
, you’d patiently explain to me and astronaut Dave and your wife how you’ve got to do what’s best for the mission. But really, you’re doing what’s best for HAL.”

“What about—?” he began and trailed off. “How shall I say this—”

“I think the concept you’re after is called free will,” she said. “No, wait, you and Whitlow are both Catholic boys, been with the Jesuits. It’s the soul you want to know about? Right?” Her tone of voice suggested nothing could be more prosaic and unimaginative.

“Yeah,” said Watson.

“Dualism, remember?” she said. “Ghost in the machine. You want to say that the Material Girl has a spirit inside of her brain, which somehow hovers around in there but also issues commands and supplies thoughts to the brain. Am I right?”

“I guess,” said Watson, unable to come up with a plausible objection to the straw man under construction.

“About the only thing most neuroscientists can agree on is that this soul of yours is an untenable hypothesis. I can think of five or ten good arguments against it, but let’s use a simple one for starters. In
Consciousness Explained
, Dan Dennett uses the analogy of a cartoon featuring Casper the Friendly Ghost. You want to say you have a soul which is immaterial, not physical, made of some spooky ectoplasm that evaporates when you die and drifts off to heaven. Have it your way. You have a spirit that isn’t made of atoms or electrons or molecules because it is intangible.”

“OK,” said Watson.

“As a brain scientist, I need to know where this intangible soul hooks up with brain tissue. Does it hook up with the dendrons? Is there a synaptic interface where soul meets neuron? Is it somewhere in the anterior cingulate sulcus, because that part of your brain lights up under the PET scanner or the fMRI when you’re wrestling with moral problems? How does something that is immaterial act upon a material brain? Kids never ask: How is it that Casper glides through walls and floats through trees but can still catch falling objects or tap somebody on the shoulder? Is Casper an insubstantial ghost, or a physical entity who can bring you a toy? How does that work? Is the soul something less than vapor? Or can it actually block the neural impulse to open your fly or pull the trigger?

Watson ransacked his brain for adages interred long ago with the memories of decrepit nuns—they had soothing voices, cool, chalkdusted
hands, and white, smooth faces framed by black-and-white veils.

“OK, forget soul, then,” Watson said. “The law assumes your mind is in charge of your body and it holds you responsible for your behavior.”

“Free will,” she said. “That’s where you should have started.”

“OK, then. Free will.”

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” she said in a mocking tone, “the defendant’s bigoted brain is inhabited by an essentially benevolent spirit called free will which failed to properly interact with the other components of the mind-brain continuum, causing a temporary lapse, a corruption of somatic-marker signaling, during which time a .357 magnum appeared at hand and bullets were discharged.”

“We don’t even have free will?”

“Folk psychology again,” she said. “It’s a nice fiction. Perhaps a necessary fiction—that a certain part of your consciousness can stand aside from itself, assess and control its own performance. But a brain is a symphony orchestra with no conductor. Right now we’re hearing an oboe or maybe a piccolo make an inquisitive flourish of self-examination while the rest of the instruments are off soaring in a different crescendo. What’s left of you is an extremely complex balance of competing wet biological parallel processors in that electrochemical batch of elbow macaroni fermenting between your ears, which is ultimately in charge of your body, but by definition cannot be in charge of itself.”

“But—”

“There must be something more,” she said mockingly. “There is. Survival and fitness. And after that, there is only pleasure. It shows up on an EEG as big delta waves on the lead to the septal electrode.

“The brain is notoriously bad at explaining itself. It’s not to be trusted. When it lacks important information, it makes up stuff until it has a narrative. Survival often requires that it quickly, instantaneously, make sense of the body and the environment—even if it must confabulate to achieve a cohesive narrative. Phantom limbs, hallucinations, suppressed memories, false memories, false perceptions, rationalizations—anything to fill in the gaps.

“You’ve heard all about left brain and right brain? Sometimes to cure severe epilepsy, a neurosurgeon cuts the cable that connects them—the corpus callosum. And then, in essence, you have two separate brains, yes? And what, two souls? Or are you going to tell me that there is only one intangible soul or executive free will and it ‘resides’ on the left side
with the language centers? On the right side with spatial perception? Meaning it can’t talk?”

“I didn’t say it couldn’t talk,” he protested. “I’m saying it’s a mystery.”

“Neurochemical mysteries, maybe,” she scoffed, “which split brains, damaged brains, really smart brains all feel compelled to explain.” She rolled her head back for a look into his eyes. “There is almost always some explanation, isn’t there? The brain almost never says, ‘I don’t know,’ when asked about its own perceptions. I’ve seen stroke patients insist that their hemi-paralysis is purely voluntary, and they’ll get around to moving that other half of themselves as soon as they are in the mood. It’s called anosognosia—the vehement denial of paralysis seen in some patients who suffer strokes on the right sides of their brains.

“So,” he said uncertainly, “I should give up trying to explain myself. Worrying is just my limbics malfunctioning?”

“Actually, anxiety activity occurs more often in the paralimbic belt, the insular cortex, the posterior orbitofrontal cortex, the anterior cingulate cortex, and the anterior temporal cortex. But go ahead, worry some more, if you want. I just wish I could get some films of it. Have you ever had a serotonin level done?”

“No,” he said, almost annoyed.

“Serotonin acts as a brake on violent impulses in the brain. Low serotonin levels in humans are also highly predictive of impulsivity and violence, the sorts of things your client goes in for. Your level is probably also relatively low at the moment, because you’ve just been fired by an alpha male. You are ready to take risks.”