The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2020

by Michio Kaku

  At first, the doctors assured us that this inappropriate behavior was a passing recovery phase of traumatic brain injury, or TBI. The lewd remarks eventually subsided, but his behavior took another ominous turn. “He always had a wild streak,” Caroline told me. It’s true that before the accident, Conway had loved flouting the rules. He’d cut across an empty park on his motorcycle to avoid traffic, or build a towering bonfire in his backyard for kicks. “But there was no violence,” she said. After the accident, Conway flew into rages so vicious the hospital staff put a cage over his bed to contain him. When he finally left the hospital, Conway attempted to return to his former life, but he struggled to run his business and pay the bills. He and Caroline’s marriage began to fray. Hopes for a full recovery waned, and eventually Conway’s neuropsychologist confirmed our fears that the personality change might be permanent. “He’s recovered 95 percent brain function,” she said. “But the final 5 percent, it might never return.”

  Conway found himself with a lot of time alone, and the wooded property suddenly felt large and isolating. He started to miss his old suburban block, where he’d been the neighborhood handyman. At the farmhouse, no one came with leaf blowers to fix or chairs to mend. He had no one to show his remarkable tree house to. So one Saturday morning after a heavy snow, Conway drove his pickup truck back to the old neighborhood to plow everyone’s driveways, just like he used to do. But there was one neighbor, Dale, whose driveway Conway didn’t intend to plow. Years earlier—​before the accident, before Conway moved away—​their relationship had soured, escalating into a months-long quarrel that involved calls to the police, surveillance cameras (Dale), and Christmas lights in the shape of a giant middle finger (Conway).

  Conway told me when he passed Dale’s house that day, he thought, “What the hell, I’ll let bygones be bygones, and plow his driveway too.” But Dale was there, shoveling snow. It’s not clear what happened next. According to the police report, Conway didn’t plow Dale’s driveway; he piled snow in front of it. Dale said Conway then tried to run him over with the snowplow. Dale said he had to grab the top of the plow blade to avoid being knocked over, clinging to it while Conway pushed him several feet through the snow. Dale jumped out of the way but was clipped on the head by the truck’s mirror. Conway maintained his truck never touched Dale, but the police must have believed otherwise. Conway was charged with misdemeanor battery.

  Time passed, but Conway couldn’t move on. If it weren’t for the brain injury, Conway later told me, “I wouldn’t have done what I was about to do. I would have thought, ‘This is over with, I don’t care.’” But instead, he climbed up into his tree house and got to thinking about “that motherfucker Dale” and how he was going to “pay him back.” Before the accident, Conway had never been violent. But now, all bets were off. “I thought it was right to kill him,” he later told me. “He deserved it.” Conway climbed down from the tree house, loaded a container of battery acid into the back of his truck, and headed to Dale’s.

  Dale wasn’t home, but his surveillance camera filmed Conway, with his unmistakable limp from the injured femur, pouring acid on Dale’s neatly manicured lawn and splashing it on his car, vapor swirling upward as acid reacted with paint. I’ve asked Conway whether his original intention was to attack Dale with the acid, or just to douse his yard and car. Conway vacillates; one day he would never hurt a person, another day he could. Most of the time, though, he tells me he simply felt compelled. “I both felt it was right,” he said, “yet I knew it was wrong. I guess I didn’t think too hard about it. I just thought, ‘This is what I’ve got to do,’ and did it. It was like I just couldn’t stop myself.” The next morning Dale called the police, and a week later, Conway was in jail.

  * * *

  When Conway was adopted as an infant by my father and his first wife in late 1955, they were told he was deaf. But then, after a few months in his new home, his mother noticed that he startled when she clapped her hands, something he hadn’t done before. To this day, no one can explain why he started to respond to sound a year into his life—​or what pre-adoption circumstances caused him to appear deaf in the first place.

  Growing up, Conway struggled with school. He assumed the role of class clown, relishing the attention he’d draw every time he gathered a crowd in some muddy spot after a fresh rain to drop wriggling earthworms into his mouth, grinning while the other kids squealed. Conway’s outlandishness made him popular with his peers, but teachers were less impressed. They nearly flunked him in every subject, making it clear to him that he was just another cutup with no promise. He managed to graduate from high school, but then drifted from city to city. He worked odd jobs and took some college classes in Idaho toward a nursing degree to prove his teachers wrong and dispel the unspoken suspicion of disability that had haunted him since infancy. Maybe Conway worried that these suspicions were true. Maybe that’s why, when he had his first seizure as a young adult and was diagnosed with epilepsy, he wanted to keep it a secret.

  Conway worked to get his epilepsy under control and a few years later moved to the small town of Cheney, Washington, to apprentice as a motorcycle mechanic. That’s where he had his first motorcycle accident, when he was in his mid-twenties. One day, he was testing out a customer’s bike when an elderly woman backed out of her driveway without seeing him. The trunk of her car clipped the motorcycle, catapulting him into the air. He crash-landed in a heap fifty feet down the road, leaving him in a wheelchair for weeks. He also suffered a brain injury that made it more difficult for him to concentrate and possibly worsened his epilepsy but—​unlike the later drunk-driver collision that left his brain in shambles—​didn’t seem to change his personality.

  After months of rehab and a full physical recovery, Conway left Washington, eventually moving to Chicago in the early 1980s to try his hand at trading commodities. A friend introduced him to Caroline, who seemed different from the other women he knew. She owned a condo in a tony suburb, had lived in Europe, loved to cook elaborate meals, and was studying commodity trading in her spare time while managing the accounting for a film company. Conway felt he’d hit the jackpot—​she didn’t treat him like the women who had loved him before, women who had left him because they dismissed him as too wild, too unstable, and too stubborn to change. “Conway was different from the other guys,” Caroline told me. “He was fun. He would try anything. I loved dancing and he danced like you wouldn’t believe—​that’s to say, terribly. But it didn’t stop him. I loved it.” Conway’s commodity trading effort failed to get off the ground, so he bought a Snap-on tool franchise—​a perfect fit for his automotive know-how and entrepreneurial spirit. Caroline landed a job in the R&D department of a major corporation. The future was bright, and three years later they were married. In Caroline, Conway had finally found someone who realized that his good traits outweighed his bad ones.

  When I was a teenager and Conway was in his forties, our father’s mind fogged over with dementia and Conway became the closest thing I had to a dad. On a family vacation, he showed me how to drive on country back roads before I turned sixteen (I hit a mailbox). A few years later, he taught me how to ride a motorcycle in a parking lot (this time, a tree). Conway didn’t see the point of many social conventions, which as a teenager I found refreshing. When he locked himself out of the house one night, he just shattered one of the door’s glass panes and fixed it the next day. He used a circular saw to cut pork roasts. I remember him once crawling under the table at an upscale restaurant to play hide-and-seek with a bored kid. After college, he bought me a motorcycle and we would take weekend camping trips to the northern reaches of Michigan.

  By 2006, a year before his personality-shattering collision, Conway and Caroline were twenty years into their marriage, living in a two-story house in the suburbs filled with furniture Conway made after teaching himself carpentry. Conway’s business had been decidedly a success—​his office walls were decorated with plaques for some of Snap-on’s top sales awar
ds—​and Caroline was approaching the end of her career. That spring, they bought their nineteenth-century farmhouse and prepared to retire. That’s when Conway hopped on his motorcycle one evening to get ice cream and cigarettes and didn’t come back.

  * * *

  My first day of neuroanatomy class was just weeks after Conway’s accident. While he lay in the hospital in restraints, lashing out indiscriminately, I’d just begun graduate school in neuroscience—​a career I was pursuing because I thought it would help me make sense of our father’s dementia. And now I thought it would help me make sense of my brother’s brain injury. I donned a smock in the chilled air of the basement dissection laboratory and fished a rubbery gray-brown brain out of a bucket of foul-smelling formaldehyde. After placing the brain on a metal table, I ran my gloved hand across the rounded corrugations and traced their grooves, feeling a slight pressure as the clefts parted to allow my finger to pass. I found the precentral sulcus, a deep fissure roughly dividing the prefrontal cortex from the rest of the brain, and followed it forward to the inferior frontal sulcus, a lesser cleft demarcating the prefrontal cortex’s outermost third. I paused on this region. It seemed familiar. It was the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. I had my finger on one of the brain regions damaged when Conway’s skull collided with the pavement.

  The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is part of the frontal lobe, a massive chunk of tissue behind our eyes involved in so much of what makes us human: cognition, movement, memory, personality. The frontal lobe is also the brain area injured in one of the most famous cases in neuroscience. In the forested hills of Vermont on a fall day in 1848, twenty-five-year-old Phineas Gage crouched over a hole, holding a thirteen-pound iron rod. The foreman of a team excavating for a railroad, Gage was preparing to blast away rock by filling a hole with an explosive powder, piling on sand, and tamping it down. His three-and-a-half-foot-long iron tamping rod, tapered to a javelin’s point, must have hit a rock, sparked, and ignited the exposed powder, sending the rod flying. It sailed through an inventory of body parts I would soon be quizzed on—​the zygomatic arch of his left cheek, the left orbit, the cranial vault, the Sylvian fissure—​before piercing his frontal lobes and exiting the top of his skull. The rod landed sixty feet away on the forest floor, “greased with the matter of the brain.” The exact anatomical damage Gage suffered is difficult to reconstruct (though neuroscientists have tried) and far more extensive than what my brother suffered. But there is little doubt that the iron rod penetrated Gage’s frontal lobes, the same region damaged in my brother’s brain.

  According to his doctor, John Martyn Harlow, Gage had been “a great favorite” with his men and in possession of “a well-balanced mind . . . a shrewd, smart business man.” After the accident, he was “fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity . . . impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires . . . at times pertinaciously obstinent, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operation, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned.” His doctor observed that, “The equilibrium . . . between his intellectual faculties and his animal propensities, seems to have been destroyed.” His friends simply declared that he was “no longer Gage.” Textbooks indicate that Gage then drifted from job to job, including appearances at Barnum’s American Museum in New York with his iron rod by his side. He confabulated, brawled, drank, and acted impulsively, showing little concern for the future. About a dozen years later, Gage ended up under the care of his family in San Francisco, and after a series of sudden convulsions at the dinner table, died.

  Gage’s case has since taken on mythic proportions in neuroscience as the first to link brain damage to personality change. And because Gage became impulsive, his story more specifically suggested that the frontal lobes were the seat of self-control.

  As I watched Conway fail to return to his previous life, phrases from Gage’s report ticker-taped across my mind (“impatient of restraint . . . capricious and vacillating”). Conway and Caroline’s relationship strained because of Conway’s volatility (“fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity”); his once-successful business (“a shrewd, smart business man”) slowly fell apart. Conway had always had a devil-may-care attitude, but the brain damage intensified it. He became far more impulsive, making poor decisions even when he could clearly articulate the pros and cons of each choice (“the equilibrium . . . between his intellectual faculties and his animal propensities . . . destroyed”). I foresaw a life, like Gage’s, filled with drifting and frustration.

  * * *

  By January 2008, three months after the accident, Conway had come home. He had physically improved and was eager to return to work—​with good reason. He hadn’t been working during the months of recovery, and as a small-business owner without any employees, that meant no revenue. Then, in the midst of the financial crisis, Caroline’s R&D job was eliminated, so she was let go after twenty-four years, just months before she would have been eligible for full retirement benefits. They had to borrow to cover the farmhouse’s mortgage payments.

  They came up with a plan: Caroline would drive the Snap-on tool truck and accompany Conway on his route. Conway’s customers greeted him with cards, packs of cigarettes, Playboy magazines. They opened doors when they saw him limping. But the goodwill soon began to fade. Customers would request tools and Conway would forget to order them, or bring the wrong ones. He mixed up accounts, overcharging some customers and forgetting to charge others. When customers would challenge him, Conway didn’t handle mistakes the way the old Conway would, with jokes and a little store credit. He became defensive, calling his customers idiots. He would skip stops on his route because of a petty quarrel with a single mechanic in the garage. Some days he never showed up to any stop at all.

  Caroline attempted to mitigate the damage by helping out with the bookkeeping and trying to repair his deteriorating relationships, but he was too much to contain and the business too new to her. Soon, almost no one was buying tools from Conway anymore. Increasingly frustrated, he started taking it out on Caroline, often yelling at her in front of his few remaining customers. One night at home, Caroline told me, Conway hit her. It was only a matter of time before his twenty-three-year-old business shuttered. Both Conway and Caroline were now unemployed. Foreclosure threatened.

  In June 2008, after a decade of dementia, our father passed away, and Conway’s downward spiral accelerated. He began driving his pickup truck and riding a motorcycle again, without a license or insurance. On the way to our father’s funeral, he was stopped for going thirty miles per hour over the speed limit with an open bottle of Kahlúa in the car. Later that year, the day after Christmas, he got a DUI. Pre-accident Conway hadn’t been a heavy drinker. But over the next several months, Conway drank ferociously and drove recklessly. One night, he came home bloody and belligerent at 2 a.m., his pickup truck abandoned in a nearby field with a broken windshield—​events he never could explain. A year after the funeral, almost to the day, Conway was on his way to Dale’s with a canister full of acid.

  * * *

  No one questioned that Conway decided to load battery acid into his truck and drive to Dale’s. In this strict sense, Conway alone was responsible for his actions. But what ultimately caused him to act was a more complicated question, and I found the answer depended on where I decided to look. Was the most recent brain injury responsible? Or did this one compound the effects of the previous brain injury suffered two decades earlier, tipping him over the edge into criminal behavior? Did the neurological toll of a lifetime of epilepsy figure in? What about the circumstances that caused him to appear disabled at birth? Were there any genetic factors? Could you make a case that the lack of support beyond three months in hospital rehab caused the crime? That he wouldn’t have done it if the financial crisis of 2008 hadn’t led to Caroline’s job loss and their foreclosure, stirring up Conway’s anger and sense of injustice? It seems futile to sort out these complexitie
s and determine the degree to which an individual is responsible for an action. And yet, this is exactly what the criminal justice system does when assigning blame.

  “Blameworthiness should be removed from the legal argot,” writes neuroscientist David Eagleman, one of the most vocal proponents of what he calls a “biologically informed jurisprudence.” Instead of haggling over the degree of culpability, he continues, “we should focus on what to do, moving forward, with an accused lawbreaker.” A more humane legal system will “parlay biological understanding into customized rehabilitation, viewing criminal behavior the way we understand other medical conditions such as epilepsy, schizophrenia, and depression—​conditions that now allow the seeking and giving of help.” By reimagining crime as a form of disease, he proposes “statistically based sentencing,” one day using brain scans to confine those most likely to reoffend and rehabilitate those most likely to change.

  The neuroscience of crime has flourished in recent years. Some researchers have claimed that psychopaths’ brains have defects in what has been called the paralimbic system. Other researchers have claimed that reduced activation in areas of the prefrontal cortex and hypothalamus may contribute to pedophilia. Yet another team concluded that perpetrators of domestic violence had “higher activation in the anterior and posterior cingulate cortex and in the middle prefrontal cortex and a decreased activation in the superior prefrontal cortex.” Scientists have posited telltale neural signatures for “intent” and “recklessness.” As a graduate student, I felt emboldened by this knowledge and dismissive even of the law’s scientific ignorance.