My Own Devices

by Dessa

  * * *

  —

  Cheryl sent an email with the results of the first scans. I opened her message at a coffee shop. Based on the behavior of my brain in the scanner, she made a guess as to which of the two men in the photographs I was in love with: Dude A. She was right; A was X.

  She’d enlisted the help of a colleague named Phil to analyze the data. They’d uploaded all their work into a Google Drive file named Heartbreakin_DudeZ. In it, I found videos of my brain, modeled in 3-D, spinning slowly. Color splotches indicated regions of activity—as I counted backward by seven, as I contemplated the control image, and as I looked at images of X. I watched the Dude A video again and again. There it was—my brain spangled with love.

  I left my computer open on the table and walked out. I teared up standing on the sidewalk. Of course I was in love, so why would proof of it feel like a vindication? I felt like a patient who’d been told for years It’s all in your head, but finally found the blood test to diagnose her rare disease to prove she wasn’t crazy. Except in my case, I was the patient campaigning, It’s in my head—and it’s making me crazy.

  * * *

  —

  A week later, very late at night, I stopped at a twenty-four-hour FedEx Office to print out a copy of the Passionate Love Scale. For good measure, I printed out the Infatuation and Attachment Scales questionnaire too. I had just played a concert and I was still wearing heels and a show dress. A woman in formalwear at FedEx enjoys a wide berth.

  I went home and sat on the floor to spread the papers out on my coffee table. These surveys were designed to measure my feelings for X. In one sense, trying to quantify love sounds ridiculously clinical, like recruiting a bunch of owls to definitively determine how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop. On the other hand, without making careful notes in real time, subjective experiences can be difficult to compare to one another. I’d have a hard time ranking last year’s headaches by intensity, for example. I’m not even sure how long most headaches last—it’s usually only when someone asks “Is your headache gone?” that I realize it’s over.

  Fisher had used the Passionate Love Scale in her study, so I took that one first.

  Since I’ve been involved with _____________, my emotions have been on a roller coaster.

  I would feel deep despair if _____________ left me.

  Sometimes my body trembles with excitement at the sight of _____________.

  It went on for thirty statements, and I was supposed to indicate the extent to which I agreed on a scale of 1–9.

  The questions on sex and attraction were the easiest; we’d always been good at that.

  The other questionnaire was based on a slightly different model of love, one that distinguished infatuation and attachment. Strangely, it seemed both more poetic and more bodily.

  I stare into the distance while I think of _________.

  Who does that? Outside of paperback fiction, do people really do that—stare into the distance? I spent a long beat thinking on it, before realizing I was, at that very moment, staring into the distance. I marked an 8.

  My feelings for _________ reduce my appetite.

  Huh. That was true. Seeing that bit of intimate experience there on the page felt like tucking into bed alone and receiving a text message from an unrecognized number: Sleep well. Who is this—and how did they know?

  I hope my feelings for _________ will never end.

  You’re killing me here.

  * * *

  —

  I studied philosophy in college. In class one day, my instructor led a discussion on the relationship between the brain and the mind. The collective student assumption, I think, had been that the brain was where the mind lived—like a birdhouse. But the instructor poked all sorts of holes in that idea; how would a thing made out of matter even communicate with an immaterial thing? My prof presented an alternative relationship: What if mind were a function of brain? My mind was blown. My brain remained intact.

  Very casually, I started jotting down a few of my own pet theories. What if brain is to mind as hand is to fist? Like, maybe the mind is something that the brain can make of itself, a posture it can hold. We have a lap when we sit down, but not when we stand—even though we always have legs. We always have a brain but only have a mind when we’re conscious or dreaming, and not when we’re in surgery or dead.

  I was trying to change my brain to change my mind. If I could successfully modify the hand, maybe the fist would let go.

  Not all of my friends were excited about the project. I spent a lot of time confirming that I had already seen the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Some friends thought that—even if I was going to get weird and sciencey about it—I was looking in the wrong place. Love wouldn’t live in the brain.

  But being able to image love in the brain wouldn’t mean that love is an intellectual phenomenon. It wouldn’t mean that it was housed there, not discretely anyway. It just means that the brain participates in love in an observable, recognizable way. I can take a man’s pulse by putting two fingers against his neck or along the inside of his wrist or by putting an ear to his chest. The pulse is systemic. I bet love is all over my body too—leaving signatures in my hormones, my heart rate, and my cortex. Body parts don’t correlate to specific functions on a neat, one-to-one basis, where the brain is only for thinking and the tongue is for tasting and the appendix is just the screw left over. Bacteria in the gut are implicated in depression. There are olfactory receptors in your heart.

  Paper Tiger, my friend and labelmate, met me at a dive bar and let me ramble about the project for the duration of a Bud Light. He listened thoughtfully, then gently used the term slippery slope. I think he was discomfited for two reasons. First: reducing love to a biological condition doesn’t leave room for all the inexplicables of love. Second: even if love is driven by a biological engine, maybe I shouldn’t have the keys to it.

  As a woman who weighs 142 pounds, drinking a Maker’s Mark on the rocks at a dive bar will give me a blood alcohol content of about .03. But drunkenness isn’t just the biological condition of blood alcohol content. Drunkenness is our perception of the alcohol in the blood. Love is not equivalent to those patterns of brain activity that Fisher found, or the ones that Cheryl saw in my data. Love is the associated experience of that activity. I don’t think anything exists completely apart from our biological selves—and that doesn’t have to make it less magical.

  As for Paper’s second concern—about playing God—well, I didn’t really care. I was too tired of playing sad.

  * * *

  —

  My dad’s wife, Leslie, is a food scientist. She probably helped design some of your favorite snacks. But she can’t say which brands, because her job is cloaked in intrigue and nondisclosure agreements. She has excellent posture, glasses, and a chestnut-colored bob. She and my dad spend their winters in Florida. They have room for guests and a tropically colored set of towels for every visitor. Penijean and I would do the neurofeedback there, an easy drive from her home in Tampa and better than sequestering ourselves in a hotel room or in my one-bedroom apartment.

  I flew down a day early to shop for provisions. Penijean had said that she liked Scotch and almost all foods, except corn in soup—a texture thing. My dad and I went straight from the airport to the grocery store. It was late by the time we joined Leslie in the kitchen for a nightcap.

  My dad has a shock of salt-and-pepper hair that resists styling. It’s puckish, as if he’s always just parachuted into the conversation. He made himself an iced martini in a green glass heavy enough to be called a goblet. It was the only one like it in the house, purchased for fifty cents at a thrift store. He’s always been particular about glassware.

  Leaning against the sink, with his thinking face on, he asked questions about Penijean�
�s visit. I wasn’t totally sure how it was going to go, I said. I regurgitated all I’d learned about fMRIs, biofeedback, and neurological anatomy. But really, I just knew she was going to hook a bunch of wires to my head to try and change my brain waves. The rest was still a little hazy.

  I didn’t say as much to my dad, but on the phone with a friend, I wondered: If I stopped loving X and then met with him again after this whole thing was over . . . would I fall for him again? And if so, would it be a new love or a return to the old one? Would it be a second round of love at first sight or like an alcoholic falling off her wagon?

  Penijean pulled up the next afternoon in a Honda with vanity plates: EEG TCHR. She brought cucumber-flavored sake as a gift. My dad told her that she could eat anything in the house and then opened the refrigerator to give her a rundown of the contents of the door, the shelves, the crispers. Leslie had already laundered the guest linens. Penijean said many thank-yous, but not so many as to make it weird. She was good with parents.

  A few hours later, I sat in my dad’s home office, in a high-backed chair I’d dragged in from the dining room. Penijean orbited around me, affixing wires to my head. First she scrubbed little spots of my scalp with abrasive paste—which felt like hair gel loaded with fine sand. Then she stuck an electrode to the freshly scrubbed site with a daub of conductive putty. The electrodes were just smaller than dimes, each attached to a colorful wire. On my dad’s desk, she’d set up a small black box that said BrainMaster and had a white circle on the top. Inside this circle was a port to plug in each electrode. The circle, I realized, was meant to represent a head—my head, at the moment—as seen from above.

  When I was all wired up, nineteen electrodes measured my brain waves through my scalp. There was also one that served as an electrical ground—that electrode went at the front of my head, where a unicorn horn would be—and one on each earlobe.

  “Which gender binary option would you prefer, male or female?”

  “Female.” She typed into her laptop.

  “Are you right-handed or left-handed?”

  “Right.”

  “When is your birthday?”

  “May twenty-third, 1981.” Penijean’s software recorded my age to two decimal places. I was 35.56 years old.

  The feed from each of the electrodes showed up on her screen as a squiggly line, like a lie detector test in the movies. Following her instructions, I sat as still as I could hold for three minutes, eyes closed. Then another three minutes as still as I could hold, eyes open. My contacts clouded, blurring the roses of my father’s rug.

  And that was it, at least for the first evening. Penijean said she had to send the data to the Netherlands for analysis overnight. When she had a sense of my baseline brain function, she’d be able to set the parameters for the brain training. Penijean started the upload. I poured us drinks. My dad made tacos.

  The way Penijean described it over dinner, brain training wasn’t like training a dog to fetch or stop barking—promoting some behaviors and discouraging others. It was more like training a muscle for strength and flexibility. In my case, we’d be focusing on the parts of the brain associated with love, pain, and addiction. Penijean wouldn’t be programming me with certain thoughts or feelings. Instead, her goal was to get my brain fit enough to respond appropriately to my circumstances. Our hearts should race and pound when we’re at the gym. But at home on the couch, we should settle into a resting pulse rate. Similarly, when I’m in a viable romantic relationship, the loving parts of my brain should engage. But when I’m not, they should, eventually, chill the eff out.

  Penijean blinked a lot, often while emphasizing a point—it was a little rabbit-like and a little I Dream of Jeannie. I’d venture a guess that the blinking was one of those gestures that began consciously and then slipped below the waterline into a habit of genuine expression. I did that with my handwriting: I deliberately changed my lowercase a as an adult, and waited for the change to sink in through my hand, up to my shoulder, and into my head where it could live with the other native shapes.

  Following her instructions, we drank the cucumber sake mixed with champagne, a drink that seemed native to nowhere on the planet. It was excellent. My dad, a minor Francophile, toasted tchin-tchin. There was a good chance that Leslie had formulated something on the dinner table. The taco shells, maybe. She’d done a lot of work on desserts too—my favorite. She’d helped fix canned frosting after Johnny Carson had been unable to spread it with a paper knife on live TV. It’s amazing what scientists can do.

  * * *

  —

  A seminal experiment in neurofeedback—the one that served as proof of concept—involved dosing cats with rocket fuel.

  The space race of the 1960s was in full tilt. Rocket fuel was already known to be seriously toxic stuff—a convulsant that killed people. The U.S. Air Force asked researchers to investigate: How did the poison work and how could it be guarded against? How much exposure could a crewmember tolerate before it impaired his or her performance? Before he or she had a seizure? Before death?

  Led by Dr. M. B. Sterman, a team of researchers experimented on cats, administering toxic injections and then noting the order in which symptoms appeared. Before the animals convulsed, they exhibited panting, vomiting, and, chillingly, something that the scientists described only as “escape behavior.”

  Three of these cats had a strategic advantage, however. They’d already participated in an earlier experiment—one designed to promote activity in a part of the brain that inhibits movement. (Our brain does a good deal of inhibiting—it blunts the sensation of the rings on our fingers, for example, and keeps us still while we sleep.) In this first experiment, researchers wired up the cats with electrodes to monitor their brain waves. Every time the cats’ brains produced a particular inhibitory rhythm, the cats were rewarded with milk. Soon, their brains were consistently exhibiting this milk-getting, movement-inhibiting pattern. And the cats themselves—while well-fed—were freezing in weird postures.

  This course of feline neurofeedback, it turns out, changed the way that this trio of cats responded to the toxic injections in the rocket fuel experiment. Their seizures were delayed—they’d become cat ninjas who didn’t succumb to convulsions when the other test subjects did. Their brains had been trained to inhibit movement, and that’s exactly what they were doing: inhibiting the spasms of the induced seizures. If not perfect immunity, they’d built up an impressive tolerance to iocane powder.

  In a feat of jargon, the study was published under the scintillating title “Electroencephalographic and Behavioral Studies of Monomethyl Hydrazine Toxicity in the Cat.” It was kept sealed for forty years, made public only in 2010. The copy I read online was stamped with For Reference Only Do Not Remove.

  The next and natural question was: Could this neurofeedback stuff work on people? A twenty-three-year-old woman became the first human test subject. She was an epileptic—a natural candidate for a course of treatment that had proved helpful with seizures. Generally scientific papers don’t indulge in much hyperbole, but her case study described the observed results as “striking” and reported “a marked suppression of seizures.”

  I myself was struck by the last sentence of the abstract, which read simply, “Changes in sleep patterns and personality were noted also.”

  * * *

  —

  Sitting side by side at the kitchen island the next day, Penijean and I reviewed the Netherlands analysis over coffee.

  Healthy brains activate whatever regions are needed for a particular task and then allow those regions to disengage when they’re off duty. The database in the Netherlands had compared my data to the behavior of a bunch of other brains owned and operated by right-handed, female people my age.

  Penijean was diplomatic, but to me it looked like my brain was a tweaker spun out on cut Ecstasy and chewing on its own cheek. The multipage report showed hyperactivi
ty in region after region after region. I was stuck in patterns that were unwarranted by my surroundings, hypervigilant. But of course, most of the people who came to Penijean would demonstrate some unusual brain activity—that’s why they’d seek out treatment in the first place. She used my information to dial in the settings of her brain-training software, sort of like setting the resistance on a weight machine. We were ready.

  This time I dragged my chair just a few feet away from the flat-screen in the living room. I held the jars of paste while Penijean wired me up. With Leslie’s help she plugged her laptop into the TV and a multicolored image of my brain appeared on-screen, as big as a basketball. It was pixelated, like a brain made out of stacked dice. Penijean could rotate my brain to look at it from all angles—in profile, from above, or from below, as if we were standing on my heart and looking up through the drainpipe of my spinal column. The 3-D pixels were called voxels. Each one corresponded to a five-millimeter cube of my brain, 6,239 cubes in all.

  Colors swept over my dice brain, waves of green and blue and yellow, but mostly waves of red. Red meant high levels of activity. Green was where I wanted to go.

  On her laptop Penijean clicked a button to start the brain-training session. A pleasant chiming started, like a malletted run up a vibraphone. It stopped abruptly, then started again. Penijean explained that this noise, this feedback, would be triggered only when my brain waves fell within desired thresholds. I’d hear the chime only when the loving regions of my brain went green, approaching normal levels of activity. Penijean didn’t use a game program like Lynette had described—all I had to do was sit in my dad’s chair and not fall asleep. I didn’t have to do or think anything. My brain would learn by itself.