Upon hearing the words, George had assumed they were metaphorical; they weren’t. But before he’d be allowed to view the objet itself, he first had to show how big he thought an actual brain was.
“What do you mean?” he asked, and the lead researcher—the unit’s ad hoc MC—took first one hand and then the other.
“Set your hands to bracket an imaginary brain, perhaps your own.”
George did as he was told, and the MC took a picture with his phone to document it. “On average,” he went on to say, “people will estimate an organ roughly twice as large as what it actually is.” Pause. “No smirking, please.” He made a fist and gestured for George to do the same, then bumped their knuckles together. “That’s how big the average adult brain is,” he said. “The size of two fists.” He unclenched his hemisphere to reach for the photographic evidence he’d snapped a moment earlier. “Now how’s that supposed to fit into your favorite hat?” he asked, opening pincer fingers against the screen to blow up the image.
“Um,” George said.
“Because that’s where the brain has to fit,” he said. “It’s inside your head, and though it might seem like the cathedral of all knowledge, its cupola is little bigger than side-by-side cup holders.” He took a scripted pause. “Think on that and be humbled, human.”
Having concluded the canned intro, the tech signaled, and the Glass Brain was wheeled out, jiggling slightly like stiff Jell-O whenever the casters rolled over an uneven seam in the floor. The eponymous object was an actual brain removed from a once-living human. The lipids (fats, basically) had been removed and replaced with a transparent hydrogel that left the crisscrossing fabric of neurons in place, but now visible for detailed study. Using fluorescent dyes of different hues, it was possible to light up and trace the axons of individual neurons, a feat demonstrated by turning off the lights. And there it was, a pale thread, squiggling and branching and looking like nothing so much as the root system of a tree, but lit in firefly green: a lightning strike, frozen horizontally. A voice joined them in the dark: “The floating light bulb used in cartoons to symbolize the moment of discovery? There it is. And we can do that with each neuron in that bundle that warehouses every hope, dream, joy, and moment of despair that makes us who we are.” Pause. “You’ve heard of reverse engineering? Well, this is the first step in doing that for the most precious thing any of us has.”
And then the lights came back up, amid silence and blinking, the audience of one given a moment to think about what he’d seen, to imagine that pale thread of green light winding through the hopes and dreams inside his own head.
“We’re the Connectome Team,” its leader said. “Our goal is to determine if the way information is encoded in the brain is structural. There’s no obvious, anatomical hard disk in the brain, so where does the information get stored? Our hypothesis: it’s in the arrangement of the branching neurons and the spaces defined by the synapses, like bar code, but in three or four dimensions and with a resolution on the nano scale. Our support: recent studies showing that new thoughts create new pathways and hence new structural patterns.”
“But what—?” George began to ask, only to be cut off by the answer.
“If it’s structural,” the team leader continued, “then it should be readable postmortem—with the right scanner.”
The Glass Brain was the first of many astonishments, and it took real willpower not to go running ahead of his tour guide to see what came next. For example: a rack of caged mice, half of which seemed to be conjoined pairs, attached by their heads. Upon closer inspection, it was clear that these mice had not been born this way.
“Okay, okay, okay,” the researcher in charge said, “I know what you’re thinking,” he added, unironically, and as if he’d had his fill of animal rights activists protesting what he did for a living. “This is serious science we’re doing here,” he insisted. “So if you’re thinking about throwing around the v-word . . .”
“You mean vivisection?” George asked, looking up from the glass cage he’d been smudging with his nose.
The spokesresearcher started waving his arms, crossing and uncrossing them like he was trying to stop traffic. “Transneural communication, thank you,” he said. “We’re trying to see if something one brain learns can be transferred to the other, without being taught separately.” He then explained how they blindfolded and anesthetized one mouse in each pair while the other was taught to run a maze, followed by reversing the procedure to see if the second mouse could run it faster than the first.
“And . . . ?” George prodded.
The researcher’s lips grew noticeably thinner. “Promising,” he said, leaving it at that.
Next door, two human subjects were seated back-to-back, wearing skullcaps sprouting cables like high-tech Medusae. On a screen visible to George but hidden from either of the wired-up test subjects, a game of Pong seemed to be playing itself.
“The gear,” a researcher said, waving his fingers over his own head, “is like this combination EEG and TMS—that’s transcranial magnetic stimulation. The two go back and forth in a feedback loop, one subject sending, the other receiving, then vice versa. The result? Telepathic Pong, even though neither knows consciously that’s what they’re doing.”
The researcher went on to explain that by monitoring the subject’s heart rate, respiration, and skin conductivity, they’d shown that subconsciously, the subjects’ bodies knew who was winning and who wasn’t. In follow-up surveys, the losers reported feeling inexplicably “down” for a few hours afterward, while the winners volunteered for more testing.
“So what does this prove?” George asked naively.
“Prove?”
George nodded.
“That we can do this,” the researcher said, pointing to the screen. “And it’s cool.” He paused. “Watch this,” he said, hitting a button that sounded an alarm, making the players flinch, while the white blip on the screen went sailing past the nearest virtual paddle.
“Okay,” George said, noncommittally.
“The days of the joystick are numbered, my friend,” the tech predicted.
George tried imagining the mental space he’d have to be in to prefer having electrodes implanted in his brain to holding a physical controller. Sure, the implants might free his hands for eating or drinking or . . .
“Oh,” he said.
“Yep,” the tech said. “The joystick’s dead; long live the, um, ‘joy’ stick, if you see what I mean . . .”
George wanted to say that a blind mole rat could see what the tech meant but opted for the closed-lip/thumbs-up combo.
“Not that jerking off is all this is good for,” the tech hastened to add. “If that was the case, Elon wouldn’t be betting big on developing a neural interface to link computers and humans, right?” He paused and then whispered behind his hand, “Next stop, the singularity.” He winked.
Though George recognized the reference to the merger of human and artificial intelligence predicted by futurists such as Ray Kurzweil, he couldn’t help thinking “the singularity” could be taken several ways, especially given the joystick conversation, if you saw what he meant.