My Own Devices

by Dessa

  The goal was to find the regions of the brain that were associated with romantic love—not just with recognizing faces, or the act of recall in general—to isolate the love alone. When it was over, each subject got fifty bucks.

  After scanning dozens of people, Dr. Fisher believed she’d found what she was looking for: the physical regions of the brain that activate in love.

  Reading her work, I imagined my own love like a taproot in my skull. If I could find it, maybe I could pull it out.

  * * *

  —

  My X is a good dude. If you’ve met him, you probably like him. He’s a musician with a ferocious stage presence and he’s pretty magnetic offstage too. I used to tell him that, on account of his double allotment, there must be someone somewhere who had no charm at all—who lived his whole life without a single clever thing to say.

  I understand the mechanism of charm because I have a good deal of it myself. I can maneuver through boardrooms and ballrooms and basement rap shows and expect to be pretty well received. But that trick—getting people to like you a little bit right away—is not achieved simply by administering a small dose of the same magic that could get them to love you for a lifetime. They are different compounds entirely. Charisma is an excellent attractant, but lousy glue.

  X and I were both twenty-one years old when we met. He’d been rapping for years and I’d just started. On our first date, he drove me to a bridge and led me out onto a ledge where we could sit side by side. We passed a bottle of whiskey back and forth, laughing, flirting, and watching the river rush below us whenever it became uncomfortably intimate to look at each other. X wasn’t a romantic by any classical standard—you’d never get a box of chocolates from him—but he’d fold a bandanna around my wrist so that it made a perfect little cuff with a feminine dart that extended over the back of my hand like a Victorian gown. He’d write me drunk and lovesick when he was out on tour. He’d swipe an entire bag of tiny saltshakers from an airplane catering cart because he knew how much I liked miniature things. I, meanwhile, cut up band T-shirts to make him a quilt that looked like blood spatter. I brought him home to meet my family, whom he delighted. At Christmas my uncle gave him a real sword. After admiring his full sleeve of tattoos, my dad decided to get a sailplane on his own shoulder from the same artist.

  Soon after we started dating, the guys in his musical collective asked me to join the group. Of nearly a dozen members, I was the only woman. We all performed together, drank together, recorded songs and burned them onto CDs together. I was in X’s bed the morning of his very first cover story in a newspaper. We’d been sleeping on a mattress on the floor when one of our crewmates shot an arm into the room, holding up a copy—X’s face in full color across the whole front page. We all started screaming at once; I scrambled to find my clothing so we could go out and celebrate.

  We lasted a couple of years, I think, before breaking up the first time. The exact details are blurred by all our subsequent reunions and separations, but I suspect that in his most insecure moments, X thought I was too good for him and was worried I might leave. And in my most frustrated moments, I wondered if he might be proving himself right on both counts. I got impatient with his lateness to dinner, his lateness on rent, his carelessness. And I got mean, started keeping track of missed calls, canceled plans. He withdrew, spent long hours mysteriously after work, started lying to stay out of trouble with me, eventually slept with someone else.

  Most couples would have simply parted ways, but X and I were in the same rap crew. He encouraged me to stay in the group, even when we were fighting. “This is your thing as much as it’s mine.” In hip-hop, loyalty is the king of the virtues. Sometimes it felt like we were forged out of something more durable than love—or maybe loyalty is just love fossilized. In any case, we were honor-bound. Even at our lowest—and I admit to sinking to some vengeful lows—music came first. Both his and mine. When X got offered a big headlining national tour, he asked me to open for him. Even though I’d called him names, even though I ground my heel into the soft spot of his guilt, he chose me. Because I’d just released a record and that meant it was my turn.

  On the road, I was angry, hurt, self-pitying—and in love. He was aloof, guilty, evasive—and in love. The reviews started coming in: the critics liked us. We finished the run, came home, wrote more music with the crew, recorded, toured. My temper cooled. His contrition was graceful. We decided to take another shot at romance. And we crash-landed in the same crater we’d blown out the first time: I became a petty accountant, auditing his evenings. He couldn’t lift his eyes to meet mine.

  In our late twenties, almost simultaneously, we each found someone else—someone who seemed like a more natural companion. Those relationships turned into loving, adult partnerships. And then, as soon as they were over, the old love reared up some laser-guided boomerang ghost. And it made us miserable again.

  X and I were only good at the feeling of love, not the behavior. Which is like knowing how to dive, but not how to swim.

  * * *

  —

  I first read about neurofeedback as a treatment for traumatized veterans and kids with autism. Those patients would sit with electrodes on their heads while a computer analyzed their brain waves. The computer would trigger sounds and lights designed to recondition the way their brains worked: to promote some brain wave patterns and reduce others. Practitioners claimed that neurofeedback could help people with migraines, dyslexia, Alzheimer’s, lockjaw, insomnia, PTSD, epilepsy, eating disorders, emotional anxiety, and healthy people who just wanted to improve their memories. Neurofeedback was supposed to be able to target specific regions of the brain. I wondered if it might be able to home in on the ones in Dr. Fisher’s study, for example: the taproot that kept me in love.

  I was skeptical, though, of anything billed as a cure-all. And some neurofeedback products sounded pretty damn SkyMall (looking at you, NeuroSky MindWave Mobile BrainWave Starter Kit). On the other hand, there are plenty of legitimate therapeutic regimens that treat a wide array of health issues; exercise, for example, can combat everything from insomnia to diabetes. And all new interventions seem weird before they’re widely adopted. The guy who discovered that a broth made of mold could kill bacteria had a serious public-relations challenge ahead of him. But then, hey, penicillin.

  Google yielded plenty of people selling treatment services, but I couldn’t get a read on what the scientific community thought of the approach. Was this stuff real? Or were these clinics peddling snake oil to the desperate and hopeful? A search through the online archives of the New England Journal of Medicine had only one article, more than ten years old.

  From what I was able to discern, the critics held that the technique wasn’t proven effective for all the claims it made. Even when it seemed to help patients, their case studies were uncontrolled, so the results could be attributed to the placebo effect. Meanwhile, advocates said haters gonna hate—neurofeedback works, even if we don’t understand its exact mechanisms. (Aspirin has been sold commercially since 1899. We learned how it worked in 1971. People have been drinking willow tea, the closest naturally occurring compound, since the Middle Ages.)

  Online, I found a woman named Lynette Louise who seemed to be a celebrity of the neurofeedback world. She’d appeared on Fox News and on a Bravo TV show where she hooked up the former guitarist of Matchbox Twenty to an EEG machine, monitored his brain waves, and told him the imbalanced performance of his left frontal lobe would affect his relationships. I wasn’t quite sure what I was watching. I wrote her and asked if she’d talk to me on the phone. She graciously agreed.

  I asked what she told people at dinner parties when they asked her what she did for a living.

  “I travel all over the world and try to enhance people’s brain functions. Successfully—I’m really good at my job.”

  She explained that her system uses simple games to change people’s brain w
aves. On-screen the patient might see a game, like Pac-Man, for example. And the gobbling avatar moves faster when the brain focuses in a certain way, generating a particular pattern of brain waves.

  She said that whenever we do or think anything, our brain waves change. “When you go to ask me the next question, your brain has to shift from focusing on listening to me to focusing on asking a question—that would be accompanied by brain wave change.”

  I asked if she ever did neurofeedback on herself, if she’d mastered all her games. “Are you like a pinball wizard?”

  “That wouldn’t make sense,” she said. “Because the point is change. As soon as somebody’s good at it you raise the bar. Just like every game in the world.” Right, I thought. The point is therapy, not arcade bragging rights. A weight that was easy to lift wouldn’t be worth lifting.

  I stammered a little while explaining that I was trying to fall out of love. “Do you think that neurofeedback could be useful for somebody trying to do that?”

  Her answer was immediate and confident: “Absolutely.” She said that falling out of love is a lot like quitting an addiction. “In fact, you are addicted—when you’re having trouble falling out of love you’re addicted to the highs and lows of the relationship, the adrenaline rush, and the whole cycle that you were caught in. Otherwise, you would have just been logical and said, ‘You know, it’s over,’ and walked away.”

  I asked if she’d ever worked with someone trying to make my kind of change.

  “I’ve worked with people to become better at love,” she said. She mentioned the Matchbox Twenty guy, who’d apparently been competing on some sort of dating show. “But I’ve also worked in the other way. As a matter of fact, I’ve helped my son with it.”

  “Really?” My voice jumped, like a kid who’d finally browbeaten a parent into agreeing to buy a puppy.

  She didn’t offer any details, but said her son was almost exactly my age, thirty-four.

  I did not ask if he was single.

  I tentatively suggested a potential meeting. Lynette did not seem particularly enthusiastic. I got the sense she didn’t have time to take on another passion project; her website (which branded her as “the Brain Broad”) implied she was already busy building a small empire—books, public demonstrations, a strangely campy video series in which she traveled with a wheeled suitcase shaped like an enormous brain to arrive at the doorstep of a family with a struggling child. One video opened with a green-screened clip of Lynette flying, Superman-style, through a waterfall. Turns out, according to the site, Lynette did stand-up on the side. Also, I got the sense Lynette wasn’t especially impressed with me. My fascination with her work probably wasn’t any more flattering than the last caller’s. If she’d wanted to, she could have a line of heartbroken girls on her lawn every morning.

  * * *

  —

  As a musician, I’ve got a decent following online. I tested the waters with a small ask.

  @dessadarling: Anybody out there with access to fMRI or EEG who wants to trade an image for backstage passes to a rap show?

  Enter: Penijean, my first collaborator and the woman I’d eventually ask to affix twenty-two electrodes to my head to eradicate my feelings for X.

  i’m a qEEG specialist working with the most cutting edge brain imaging tech currently available. i will totally hook you up.

  The next step was delicate. I had to make sure Penijean wasn’t crazy. And I had to explain the project without her thinking I was crazy.

  Her online bio said she was a neurofeedback practitioner and she had all the right letters behind her name to prove she was licensed. She was familiar with my music, she wrote, had even used some of it while teaching a seminar.

  On the phone Penijean had a melodic, gentle voice that reminded me of a good kindergarten teacher. As she described the technical and philosophical details of neurofeedback, the warm lilt seemed incongruent with the complex subject matter: like a friendly doctor patiently explaining brain function while pointing to a model of your cortex that he made out of noodles and construction paper. Penijean was a remarkable teacher, though. She anticipated my questions, and whenever I stumbled over a new concept, she served up an alternate, creative analogy to clarify. I had the feeling that if I were a long-haul trucker she’d use highway metaphors, and that if I were a chef, we’d be talking about “oven-thinking” versus “stovetop cognition.” Penijean might be better with words than I am—and I’m vain in that department.

  Penijean lived in Florida, but had an upcoming trip to New York. I had plans to leave town just after her arrival, but we arranged to meet before our ships passed. I told her that if she’d like to, she’d be welcome to stay in my apartment while I was away.

  When I opened the door for her, my eyes were trained on the empty space several inches above Penijean’s head. I’m tall and she was quite petite, a little bit elfin, in a pretty way. She looked like Ani DiFranco, the early- to mid-career Ani with big eyes, dimples, and a figure like a slimmer version of her own guitar.

  The first words she said seemed strange—something an aunt might say to you in the receiving line at your wedding. As I stood there in my windbreaker, feeling uncomfortably tall, she smiled and said, in that distinctive voice, “Look at you.”

  We chatted about New York and about brain science, I gave her the keys to my apartment, and we cemented plans to meet again. We both assessed the other to be a functioning, trustworthy adult. We were not too crazy to work.

  * * *

  —

  Some moments resemble their cinematic representations so closely that it’s hard not to imagine yourself on-screen. Emotional goodbyes at airports, for example. Or feeling blue and finding oneself actually sitting on the couch and finishing a pint of chocolate ice cream straight from the carton—movie shorthand for the blues.

  As my research got more serious, I entered the Learning Montage: the portion of The Pelican Brief or Erin Brockovich where the protagonist puts on a pair of glasses we haven’t seen her in before and goes to the public library, pulling book after book off the reference shelf. She runs her finger down the pages, lightly mouthing as she reads, face framed with flyaways from her messy ponytail. Oh, is it closing time? I hadn’t even realized it had gotten dark. The handsome young clerk/fussy matron gives her five more minutes to scribble on her legal pad—she’s almost got it.

  I studied neuroanatomy on the train, learning the shapes and functions of the anterior cingulate, the somatosensory cortex. Broca’s area above my left ear made speech, but Wernicke’s area understood it. A woman had been born without the amygdalae and had never been afraid, couldn’t identify fear in others. She’d been mugged more than once, presumably because she couldn’t detect the imminent danger. Or maybe she could, but wasn’t much distressed by it.

  I learned that many of the parts of the brain that were associated with romantic love were also implicated in cocaine addiction, with the circuitry most sensitive to rewards.

  I was vivified with new purpose, excited and engaged in a way I hadn’t been in a long time. I made a plan with three steps.

  Following Fisher’s method, I’d image the love in my brain in an fMRI scanner. This would be the BEFORE image.

  I’d undergo a course of neurofeedback with Penijean to try to dissolve the attachment.

  Then I’d get back into the scanner and image my brain again. My AFTER picture.

  It’d be just like the diet testimonials in the magazines. Except instead of trying to lose ten pounds to look great on the beach, I was trying to lose a decade of accrued feelings to get on with the rest of my life.

  * * *

  —

  To get my before picture, I had to convince someone to let me into a world-class research lab, lie down in her fMRI machine, and contemplate pictures of my ex-boyfriend.

  Enter: Cheryl, my second collaborator.
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  A daisy chain of people, mostly strangers, facilitated our introduction after I put out a call on Facebook. Cheryl specializes in human vision, working at the Center for Magnetic Resonance Research at the University of Minnesota. When we spoke on the phone for the first time, I explained Fisher’s work as well as I could. She’d already had the chance to read through it, she told me. Because she’s a scientist, she had some skepticism, she said, but it sounded interesting. “You’re not over the guy yet, right?” I assured her that was quite correct. Cheryl agreed to take me on.

  I told her I’d email some photographs of X and of another man—a control, just like in the Fisher study. The control was someone I’d known for a long time, had worked with, found attractive, but someone with whom I was not in love.

  “You shouldn’t tell me which is which.”

  “Great idea.”

  We were both psyched about a single-blind study in which the researcher was the party ignorant of the experimental stimulus. I sent X’s photos in a file named Dude A and called the control Dude B.