Brain Storm (41 page)

“Certain circuits become more active according to the PET images, especially those older, lower parts of your brain where things like fear—primary emotions—originate. But the frontal cortex comes into play, too, because it regulates impulses and powerful emotions by way of feedback circuits wired to the amygdala and the limbics in general. That’s just one visual stimulus. The standard protocol includes dozens more. Heartwarming images of mothers cuddling infants at their breasts. Sunrises, concentration camp survivors, crying children, blooming flowers, smiling faces, angry faces, and so on—all presented in controlled environments and accompanied by standard narratives designed to activate certain specific cognitive pathways in the human brain.

“We compile those images of brain activity and assemble an individual neurofunctional profile for each subject. We capture and record images of how the individual brain responds to stimuli, the very same stimuli and the very same test we administered to five thousand other people, including one or two thousand repeat felons, who heard exactly the same voice describe exactly the same snake, under exactly the same controlled circumstances.

“We assemble a database of such profiles. Then, we teach a computer to catalog the profiles, looking for similarities and differences. We teach it to sort and compare and compare again, using the same kind of compare-and-contrast cycles the brain itself uses—what we call recurrent networks—and we find out who has certain predispositions and
who doesn’t. Then we measure how well the subjects control those predispositions, by looking at the prefrontal cortex and the way it is wired to the limbics, specifically, you guessed it, the amygdala.”

Watson stared at the PET image of Whitlow’s brain. “Can those colored blots tell us just why he shot this deaf black guy?” he said with a chuckle.

“Not quite,” she said, “but I can tell you plenty about him. As you’ve already seen, he exhibits hypometabolism in the forebrain, which means his frontal cortex doesn’t get quite enough blood and oxygen to control those impulsive behaviors we talked about earlier.

“Male. Unformatted. Biological markers for sex and violence found in tissue biopsies and cerebral spinal fluid, including low serotonin metabolite levels in his CSF. He has genetic Type-2 alcoholism—the worst kind—check the low P-300 brain waves. Dysfunctional D2 dopamine receptors. Low MAO platelet levels. There is evidence of transient depression, no surprise for an accused murderer awaiting trial.”

Watson stared blankly into the images of colored brain slices on the monitors.

“Got all that?” she asked, with a sly, sideways glance.

Monitors sprang to life with more vivid color images. She pointed at one screen after another. “PET, CAT, echoplanar fMRI, MEG, SPECT, and EEG. Visual depictions of glucose consumption, electrical fields, magnetic fields, and blood flow—all capable of individual display or superimposition. What do you want to know?”

“Is he crazy?” asked Watson. “I mean, in addition to having a hard mental defect.”

“The lesion is confirmed by scores on the Halstead-Reitan and Luria-Nebraska Neuropsychological Batteries. Multiphasic personality inventories show elevated antisocial tendencies. Modern Racism Scale in the upper five percent. Solipsistic, narcissistic, atavistic, autistic, sadistic, in short some of the worst istics we’ve seen since the government started reimbursing us for finding them under the Federal Omnibus Scanning Technology and Forensic Applications Act of 1999.”

She winked at him.

“Final diagnosis?”

“A classic Mitgang-Munchausen subanthropic homunculapathy. He’s even worse off than you are.”

Watson looked at her uncertainly.

She kicked him under the table. “I made up the last part, ya big dope. Just kidding.”

She rolled a pencil between her lips and smiled at him. Her lips … “Stop me!” cried child Watson’s inner adult, as he felt himself lean forward, quelling the urge to gorge on ripe, moist crescents smudged with burgundy lip color. She leaned over a printout of James Whitlow’s EEG and read the interpretation to him. He wanted a peek at the pewter-colored lace nests where his twin obsessions were hiding out. A glimpse past the collar of her lab coat, down her throat, and into the neckline of her blouse revealed burgundy lace—a new color scheme—that matched her lips.

“Elsa,” he said, “we need to go somewhere, for some grooming and maybe lice picking?”

“Can’t,” she said. “Too many other primate scientists still working, and I don’t think you’re ready for group sex.” She raised an eyebrow. “Besides, last time you spent half the night complaining about how we needed to get to work and the other half asking your brain why it wanted to get laid in accordance with the Coolidge effect. So this time we are doing our work first. And if you fire up the guilt networks again, I’m putting you in the tube and taking some functional MRI films, so I can show them to my students.”

“OK, what do the government’s experts want to do?” asked Watson.

“The government’s neuropsychologists are going to be saying that the lesion does not affect Mr. Whitlow’s ability to appreciate the consequences of his actions. All these frontal lobe theories we’ve been throwing around are still new and arguable, but I’m pretty sure that we’ll get our evidence in, and they will try to refute it with their experts.”

She opened a folder and went in search of a report. Watson tried to catch her eye, but she was all business in a chilly way, and he wondered if it was only because it was daytime and business hours at the institute.

“They will also try to get some new-wave stuff in. You heard me mention the Modern Racism Scale? Pretty soft stuff. It’s a tricky test designed to deceive the subjects into confessing their true racial attitudes. Still very subjective. So a new test has recently been devised.”

“To measure racism?” asked Watson. “C’mon.”

“It can be done,” she said levelly. “No question about it. In fact, we can measure your attitude about almost anything, noninvasively.”

“How?”

“Remember the first three hundred milliseconds? The gap between
stimulus and response, between intention and deed? The preconscious?”

“Yes.”

“I sit you in a chair in a controlled environment with a color monitor in front of you. I put what we call a good-bad response box in front of you, which is an input device to the computer. It has two buttons, one for your right index finger, one for your left. I start showing you words—good ones, like
beauty, peace, friend, flowers;
or bad ones, like
nausea, evil, cancer, death.
I measure exactly, in milliseconds, how long it takes you to judge the valence of the word, usually about five hundred milliseconds, half a second.”

“OK,” said Watson.

“Now, guess what happens if, a hundred milliseconds before I present a good word or image, I flash a bad word or image on the screen for two hundred milliseconds, just long enough for you to see it, but not long enough for you to think about it, and then I present the good word or image?”

“I throw up?”

“No.” She laughed. “It takes you longer to decide that the good word or image is positive. It’s called stimulus onset asynchrony. Let’s keep it concrete. When we showed Whitlow a gorgeous high-res photo of a blooming orchid, it took him half a second to punch the good button. If we flashed a picture of a white face for two hundred milliseconds just before presenting the orchid, it still took him only about five hundred milliseconds to punch good for the orchid. If we flashed a black face for two hundred milliseconds before presenting the orchid, it took him almost one whole second to make his decision, because his brain must first override the initial negative associations of the first image.”

“He’s a racist because he can’t push buttons fast enough?” asked Watson.

“It’s good science,” she said. “John Bargh at NYU. Russell Fazio at Indiana. If the subject has positive feelings about the first image, or ‘priming image’ as we call it, and has the same positive feelings about the second image, the ‘target image,’ then he responds quickly. If one is negative and the other positive, there is a measurable delay. Furthermore, the longer the delay, the more powerful the positive or negative associations adhering to the first, or prime, image.”

“This is all going to mean something soon,” said Watson. “I can feel it.”

“Whitlow is a Pavlovian racist,” she said, “with powerful, immediate negative reactions to black faces. That’s no crime in itself, I guess. But I think the prosecutors will attempt to bundle these test results in with their psychological assessments, to show that any impulsive act undertaken by Whitlow against a black person would be accompanied by intense racial animus.”

“But wait,” said Watson. “Doesn’t that mean he can’t help it? His racism is involuntary?”

“Look at your statute,” she said. “It makes it illegal to intentionally select a victim
because of
the victim’s race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, gender, disability, sexual orientation, et cetera. It’s a two-headed crime. There’s the selection, which can be intentional, and there’s the motivation, which, according to the government, may be voluntary, involuntary, conscious, unconscious. Doesn’t matter.”

“You’re sure you aren’t a lawyer?” Watson asked. “This stuff is science fiction,” he said.

“The science is not fiction,” she replied. “The only question is whether it is admissible evidence in a federal murder trial. If it comes in, I can’t take the stand and say it’s bad science, nor can I prove that Whitlow has automatic positive feelings about black people, because he doesn’t. He has automatic, powerful negative feelings about them.”

“More evidentiary theory,” moaned Watson.

“You got it,” she said. “And now that you understand automaticity testing, if you’d like to make an appointment, I’ll rig you up and test your automatic, preconscious attitudes about your wife by slipping in a photo of her two hundred milliseconds before I show you a picture of that spitting cobra. You want?”

“Poor taste,” he said.

She stood up and began stacking folders.

“Elsa,” he said, “I …”

She smoothed his hair with her hand. “Cham, you have pretrial and motions in limine due. I have a shitload of Whitlow data to wade through.”

“How about tonight?” he asked. “Late?”

“Male mice on nitric oxide,” she said. “Can’t. I’ll call you, OK?”

S
he didn’t call the next week, and neither did Sandra. Watson had to call the Memsahib to set up treaty negotiations on neutral ground. He had sent flowers, which hadn’t helped. So far they could not agree on a location. Before long, they would be attending peace talks in Paris and fighting over the shape of the bargaining table. So far it was a case of trying to install Mistress 1.0 before uninstalling Wife 1.0. IRQ conflict.

He followed proper male protocol and threw himself into his work, efficiently cross-linking his career aspirations with his sexual drives in that harmonious state of being the Greeks called eudaemonia and Freud called sublimation. But he was having serious withdrawals from Sheila and Benjy—kid-flesh cravings. One of life’s greatest pleasures was snagging a cooing nine-month-old from the crib at dawn, wrapping it around his head, and giving the little squirmer a serious belly raspberry while it giggled in his ear. Talk about fun! Then, off to work. But Benjy had been moved to the alpha male’s house, being protected from convicts, criminal defense lawyers, and belly raspberries by R. J. Connally & Sons. Watson could imagine R.J.’s consternation over his son-in-law’s dalliance with the criminal law. Real Money was nowhere in sight, unless Watson became a working fool of a criminal lawyer and hung out
with the likes of Gerry Spence and Alan Dershowitz. Otherwise, Watson was off on what R.J. would call a preposterous departure from the true calling of Real Money.

Watson spent the week researching, drafting, and filing his pretrial motions. Then he received copies of Harper’s handiwork: The government’s filings were cookie-cutter motions and memos—a secretary had probably changed the names, the case numbers, the style and headings, from forms filed in other cases. Boilerplate legal jargon full of string-cited cases, little or no application of the law to the precise facts of the individual case. Watson’s memos were handcrafted gems, written by the winner of the Ignatius University School of Law’s Computerized Legal Research & Writing Award.

After he finished drafting and filing his responses to the government’s motions, his thoughts turned to Palmquist, but every time he clicked on her in his Personal Information Manager, he willfully clicked
NO
when the software asked him: “
DIAL WORK NUMBER FOR THIS ENTRY
?” The last thing she’d said to him was “I’ll call you.”

Finally, one afternoon, his monitor beeped at him and he spotted E-mail with a Gage Institute return address. He clicked on it, feeling like a lovesick swain in days of yore breaking the wax seal of a perfumed envelope. Maybe his obsession had not touched these photons and screen blips with her fingers, but his bloodhound was in full cry at the mere sight of her name in electronic print. Craving purple prose poured from the portals of her soul, he found instead fat blocks of single-spaced print detailing the forensic implications of subarachnoid cysts. Not so much as a “How are you?” or “When can I see you again?” If he couldn’t quite work up the moral nerve to mount the comely brain scientist, just what did he want from her, anyway? he asked himself. Declarations of love? Admiration? Professional respect? Reciprocal infatuation?

He thumbed through the folder of his-and-her medical records she had given him during his last visit. “Patient tearfully stated that she could not possibly have … any … sexually transmitted disease because she had … never had sex with anyone except her husband”? He resisted the empathy required to imagine himself receiving such a diagnosis, the rush of attendant physical and mental symptoms induced by truth, betrayal, jealousy, hatred, desire for revenge, all converging at once. He moved on to her typed Whitlow notes instead: “The arachnoid cyst compresses the frontal lobes of James Whitlow’s brain, restricting blood flow, lowering metabolism, making the so-called ‘executive functions’
in the frontal cortex less active and less capable of controlling violent or emotional impulses.”