“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.”
“So when I say, ‘Fuck Arthur,’ that’s low serotonin talking,” he said.
She laughed. “Another neuroscientist called the brain a loose confederation of neural systems,” she continued. “People vary in their ability to achieve unity among the competing factions. Ask an alcoholic, ‘How much do you drink?’ Or ask a guy, ‘Hey, why do you cheat on your wife?’ and watch the many-chambered self swing into action. The brain will acquit itself. It will offer plausible denials, explanations, excuses, and promises. It will lash out in anger, make exceptions for itself, deny any data that does not comport with its view of itself, even pour itself a drink to help figure things out.
“Speaking of which,” she said, crawling off of him and reaching for the bottle of wine he’d brought her. She found her lab coat and fished a book of matches from the pocket, struck a match and lit a Bunsen burner. Watson found the plastic corkscrew, tore the foil, and opened the wine. She poured two healthy servings into Gage Institute plastic cups. Then they crawled together in the penumbra of a blue tongue of light from the hissing burner she’d rigged up—the lab equivalent of a hearth—which cast deep, blue-black shadows in the curves and hollows of her marvelous skin.
Watson wondered if he might take another run at her but was afraid he would only embarrass himself again on the threshold of adultery, succumb to phantoms prefigured in nightmares and the circuit breakers and system BIOS interrupts installed by nuns, which locked up instead of processing urges to break the Seventh Commandment.
“Cheers,” she said, touching her cup to his and studying the NIH logo on the side. “We will now asphyxiate neurons by drinking fine French wine from Decade of the Brain cups.”
She curled up in the inverted V of his arm and torso. She set the rose he’d given her on his chest and started plucking petals off one by one.
“He hated him,” she said, “he hated him not. He hated him. He hated him not. He hated him.… Just what sort of professional alliance do we have here?”
He watched the fan spinning overhead, sipped from his cup, and considered his place in the universe.
“So, I won’t ask if you’re religious,” he said. “You don’t believe in … higher beings, or whatever.”
“You mean, does God exist?” she laughed. “Can’t we skip the petty shit and go straight to the big questions?” She sipped and licked a stray drop from the lip of the cup. “As a scientist, I pay God the highest professional compliment—I spend my life studying His work and I never concern myself with His personal qualities. Instead, I trust myself, and I ask myself: ‘Do I seem to have a soul?’ And so far, based on what neuroscience has taught me about the human brain, my answer is no, I do not have a soul.”
Watson drank and studied her half-lit curves swelling voluptuously out of the shadows. He wondered if he could shed his soul as easily as an old T-shirt, lose the capacity for guilt and self-doubt, stop worrying about adultery, and get on with the business of propagating the species. After that, he could return to his most recent chosen profession: defending murderers.
“Just how do a hundred billion neurons cooperate to produce the interior life of the mind?” she asked. “We don’t know yet. But when the explanation comes, I assure you the pure science of it will be more magnificent than any soul.” She held her cup to his lips. “Besides, biology is more fun. Remember the MEG—the magnetoencephalography?”
“How could I forget?”
“OK, that device—the hair dryer—was recording magnetic fields from your brain. But we use another device to create magnetic fields, and we can aim them into your brain, use them to stimulate areas of the brain, produce or mimic cerebral activity, noninvasively.”
“So,” he said.
“So,” she said mischievously, “I aim my MEG stimulator at your lateral hypothalamus, and just when you start having an orgasm, I blast your limbics with a powerful magnetic field and it touches off urges so powerful they override your moral viruses.”
“Is it safe?”
“Harmless,” she said. “I’ve done it at least a half dozen times.”
Before he could think about that one, she leaned down suddenly, kissed him on the cheek, and murmured in his ear, “When we get to know each other a little better, after we reach a certain level of trust,” she said, “you’ll let me put a little canula down into your septal area so I can inject some acetylcholine in there while we’re doing it.”
“And what would that do?” he asked, suddenly aroused by her suggestive tone, but wincing at the thought of a hole being drilled in his skull.
“Oh, nothing much, really,” she said with a soft chuckle. “Multiple orgasms lasting thirty or forty minutes or so. Pleasure so intense you can’t stand it, and then we dial it back a notch to where you can just barely stand it. And then we do it again.”
“I’ll call for an appointment,” he said.
She regarded her cup again and sipped. “Why go looking for a soul when simple biology makes us stand back in awe?” She curled up again in the hollow between his arm and his torso.
“I talked to Whitlow this afternoon,” Watson said. “He has a lot of questions about what they are doing to him up there. He wants to know what they are looking for, and I was wondering the same thing. What are they looking for?”
She arched her neck, and her silhouette moved in the shadows cast by the Bunsen burner.
“To an extent,” she said, “the government is looking for the same thing we are, and they want to make sure they get to see it first.”
“Help me out,” said Watson. “I guess I understand why we want to test him, because we are looking for a mental defect, right? Something that made him unable to control himself or appreciate the nature of his actions, right?”
“Right,” she said. “But not something soft. Not abuse or Twinkies or insanity. We want something hard.” She reached down between his legs.
“We want a defect we can point to on a scan or an EEG or an MEG and say, ‘There it is—a structural defect in the frontal cortex, or decreased blood flow to the forebrain, which interferes with the normal mechanisms of impulse control or the ability to perform moral judgments—what you might call a conscience. That’s tangible. We can show it to the jury. I can explain to them how decreased blood flow to the forebrain or a lesion compressing the forebrain will impair executive function.”
“OK,” said Watson, “we are looking for a mental defect—that’s a defense, right? There’s no such thing as an insanity offense, is there? So how will the government use this data?”
“I work for prosecutors all the time,” she said. “I’m on your side this time, because I can double my exposure by taking either side of high-profile cases. Look at the underlying crime—murder. Think about this. I argue as a defense that the perpetrator has a biological or congenital defect, a structural malformation that makes him impulsi
ve or antisocial or unable to appreciate the consequences of violence. OK, maybe the jury says, ‘Yeah, the poor guy didn’t know what he was doing because his brain is defective.’ Or, maybe they say, ‘This is voodoo science from experts paid to say this stuff and get the guy off. We don’t care if he has a brain tumor, he’s still guilty.’ Or worse, they say, ‘You know, that woman doctor is right. He’s a brain-damaged psychopath. Let’s put him away for life.’ ”
“OK,” said Watson, “then we would lose.”
“But we can lose twice,” she said, her eyes narrowing in dark slits. “At the penalty phase, the prosecutors will remind us that he’s a guy with a history of violent, impulsive behaviors. He hurt people. He painted swastikas. These days, he’s using the n-word and killing a black. A jury found him guilty of manslaughter or murder. Now the judge will sentence him. And what factors does the judge consider at sentencing? Probably the number one consideration is: Will this criminal be reformed? Or will he be back as a repeat offender? Did he make a mistake? Or is this something chronic? What will the government do with all of your expert testimony about neurological defects at a sentencing hearing? Huh?”
She rose back up, astraddle his torso, and smiled down at him, waiting for him to make connections.
“Oh,” said Watson.
“That’s right,” she said. “Now the government shows your PET scans, your MRI scans, and your expert opinions to the judge, and says, ‘There’s no hope of rehabilitation here, Your Honor. This is congenital. It’s biological. It’s structural and nothing short of psychosurgery is going to cure this animal. He is a super predator. A hate machine. An automaton without a conscience, incapable of remorse for his crimes.’ ”
“Eeesh,” said Watson. “I never …”
“Think of Mr. Whitlow the way the government thinks of him, the way I think of him: He’s a big mouse with an advanced brain. He’s an unreasonably dangerous machine. Something has malfunctioned, causing his brain to issue socially unacceptable commands to the rest of his body. So now what? How best to remedy this essentially biological problem? Confine him? Why? So that all of his disordered mental processing will be turned inward on itself and on others with similarly disordered mental processing? Why? What a waste. It costs a lawyer’s annual salary to house an inmate in a federal prison.”
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