by Dessa
A couple of days after our call—after it had sunk in that I’d be working with a real PhD at a real research institution—a nagging guilt prompted me to write Cheryl:
My brain, which I enjoy most of the time, might not be strictly neurotypical.
In reading a 2016 study titled “Regulation of Romantic Love Feelings,” I noted that people with mental disorders were disqualified from participating because “many mental disorders are associated with emotion dysregulation,” preventing such subjects from representing healthy controls.
I explained that when I was twenty-three I’d had a hypomanic episode and spent a few days in a psych ward. I was diagnosed with something called cyclothymia, which I conceptualized as a kid sister to bipolar disorder. It had been successfully treated by regulating my hormones with a simple birth-control pill.
Cheryl replied and assured me that an episode more than ten years ago wouldn’t disqualify me out of hand. And nobody is really neurotypical to begin with. A favorite expression in her lab (borrowed from the Homestar Runner cartoon) was No two brains are not on fire.
In person, Cheryl has buzzed hair and a dancer’s build. She’s an unusual kind of beautiful, a kind that makes you want to keep looking to figure it out. When I met her she just so happened to be wearing a black turtleneck like in the “Nothing Compares 2 U” video—but she’d look like Sinéad O’Connor wearing anything, I decided.
She was an unusually attentive listener. I got the feeling she wasn’t a total stranger to complications in romance herself. She reserved a scanner for the day after Thanksgiving.
* * *
—
Two nights before the first scheduled scan, I encountered an unexpected complication: X himself.
I don’t want to talk too much about him, because X has already been kind enough to let me write about my half of our experience. But a quick description is in order, so here goes. His eyes tilt up at the edges, which I have always thought looks sort of feline. He smokes cigarettes. He buys a beverage every time he has to get gas; he just loves beverages. The charisma that I mentioned earlier—it’s nuanced. He isn’t the dude holding court at every party; he’s the guy the whole party wishes would overthrow that dude in some social coup at the cocktail table. Whenever a funny story is told, people often look to his face first, to see the reaction blooming. He laughs with distinct ha ha’s, like he’s reading a manual on how to laugh, and this cracks everyone else up. He has broad shoulders and large hands that are always warm. He cries when he’s sad. He can dance, but usually only does joke moves. He casually studies history and he’s got some pretty radical ideas about the government. Although he can get a lot of it, he’s bad with money. Same with women.
Over the years, we’d hidden most of our feelings from the rest of the crew—partly out of a desire to keep the peace, and partly out of pride. A tour van is a confined and poorly ventilated space, easily poisoned by anyone’s low mood. I often took long sad walks before showtime, sometimes indulging in tears, sometimes furious with myself for losing my composure.
X and I hadn’t spoken too much since I’d been in New York. But something small had happened that made him want to call. He explained over the phone that a mutual female friend had recently told him that she was ready to settle down. She was really going to give her all to her next relationship, she’d said—it was time. Listening to her, it suddenly occurred to him that I might be feeling the same way: that a clock buried inside me might be chiming. If so, this could be the last opportunity to give us one more try.
I was stunned. This was the call that I’d been trying not to hope for. We made plans for dinner the night before Thanksgiving.
I thought he should know about the project before we met. I sent him a text explaining all of it: the neurofeedback, the fMRI lab, the brain waves, the team of scientists recruited to help excise my love for him. I told him that as an art project, I was excited and proud of what I was doing. But it could also, like, work. So if we were really going to take another shot at it, I might have to change course.
I watched the little chasing dots that meant he was writing.
Very cool. Very very you.
Charming and heartbreaking.
In the days before our dinner (date?) I turned myself inside out trying to consider the situation from every possible vantage point. Was there some middle ground? Could I use neurofeedback just to remove the painful part of the love—the resentment, the jealousies—and leave the rest intact? But a tiger defanged isn’t really a tiger anymore. If my love for X was rendered tame and gentle, I wasn’t even sure I’d recognize it.
The brain project had reinvigorated me; I hadn’t been as excited about anything in years. My life’s interests—philosophy, science, art, the mechanics of human connection—they’d all seemed to coalesce in this one endeavor. And I’d started to really look like the woman I’d hoped to become: an artist living in New York who maneuvered on subway platforms with enough confidence to be approached by lost tourists for help. A few times, while studying the limbic system or reading about the history of lobotomy, my enthusiasm had welled up with such force that it was barely discernible from nausea. And now it seemed I had to choose. I might not get another shot at either the brain project or at a reconciliation with X. And I couldn’t do both.
As a girl, I remember watching one sequence in The Little Mermaid with special distress. It’s when Ariel becomes human—where her tail splits into legs and she can’t breathe underwater anymore and they take her voice away. I hated that moment, when her tail tore in two. Because she’d given too much.
X arrived twenty minutes late to dinner.
I’d picked a restaurant where I didn’t think we were likely to be recognized by people who listen to our music. It was mostly empty. He ordered appetizers. We talked about small things: shared status reports on our families, our careers.
Every couple has a cache of signature maneuvers in times of conflict. Some go in for theatrics—streaked mascara and hang-up phone calls; some costume their feelings as rational propositions and negotiate like lawyers at the breakfast table; some compete to be the first to leave the house in an understated exit that demonstrates their restraint and long-suffering grace. The dance that X and I do looks like one of those courtship routines of tropical birds: every time one of us steps forward, the other steps back. We’re each eager to see the other fully commit before doing so ourselves. We’ve played and lost this game before; neither of us has an appetite for uncollateralized risks.
I pushed: Okay, so he loved me and I loved him. Well, that had been true for a long time. What would be different now? Had we made any changes that could inoculate us from the old pettiness and insecurities that always undid us? Could he be faithful? Could I be kind? Was I willing to call Cheryl and Penijean and the dozen other scientists who’d been so generous with their time and just say, Uh, never mind? Across the table, he looked older. I was sure I did too.
I wore him down. He couldn’t be sure anything was really different, he admitted.
After dinner I walked him to his car. We kissed leaning against the passenger side door. Probably both of us considered having sex in the parking ramp. Instead he drove me to my parking spot. He said I should do it, I should go through with the brain stuff. If I wanted an easy exit, he was giving me one. Yes, I agreed. I should go through with it.
I woke up several times that night, tightly cocooned in my own sheets. I wasn’t tossing or turning, just spinning slowly, like a drill.
* * *
—
Before a person gets into an fMRI machine, she has to go through a little checklist to make sure she isn’t bringing any metal in with her. The machine is essentially a big, expensive magnet. By tracking the concentrations of “spent” iron (hemoglobin that’s already delivered its cargo of oxygen to brain cells), researchers can plot which parts of the brain are making the biggest metabolic dem
and—those are the ones that are most active.
If you have an old-school pacemaker or pin in your hip, the magnet will pull on it. Same with color contacts, IUDs, glitter nail polish, nicotine patches, or tattooed eyeliner. I’d been warned that any bra-and-panty sets with silvery threads running through them could heat up. I’d also been told that when the machine started, my back and legs might start to tingle. I might get a metallic taste in my mouth. When the checklist asked if I was claustrophobic, I’d circled No—but I’d never had any reason to stay in such a small space for so long before. If I started to panic, I was supposed to squeeze a rubber ball that would sound an alarm in the control room. I could take all the time I needed to get comfortable, though. It was the day after Thanksgiving and we had the research center to ourselves.
Sitting in a conference room, Cheryl explained that we’d have to take two kinds of scans. First we’d do a regular MRI to capture a 3-D image of the structure of my brain. (MRI images look a lot like X-rays, except you can see the soft tissue too—the folds of the brain, the liquid in the eyes, the tongue looking way too big to be right.) For the MRI I wouldn’t have to think about anything, I just had to hold very still.
Then we’d do the fMRI scan, the one I’d hoped would capture my feelings for X. The f stands for “functional”—fMRIs allow you to see brain activity, which can be superimposed on the still image of the brain the way a tornado is superimposed on a weatherman’s map: bright colors and glitchy swirling.
While we talked, we ate fancy candy that I’d brought from New York. Cheryl had a sweet tooth, like me, and a particular fondness for ginger halva, easier to find in Manhattan than in Minneapolis.
Cheryl had two helpers: Andrea and Jeromy. Researchers weren’t allowed to scan anyone alone, she’d explained, because if I had some sort of emergency in the machine, there had to be enough people on hand to attend to me and to let in the paramedics. She made a face that said, Rules, man.
We walked toward the wing of the building that housed the scanners. Red and black signs said WARNING HIGH MAGNETIC FIELD. Phones wouldn’t work if you got too close.
I’d forgone eye shadow that morning, thinking that metallic dust might be what made it shimmer. Before applying baby powder I’d had to Google Is talc metal? How was it possible that I’d reached adulthood without knowing what metal was?
Cheryl gave me a set of forest-green scrubs and led me to a changing room. I took off all my jewelry. My fingers were indented where the rings had been. I almost never see my hands bare; they looked like someone else’s. I pulled the bobby pins out of my hair and it fell over my face, it hadn’t been properly cut in a long time. Standing alone, in plain panties and a sports bra, ringless, and with no one to charm or persuade, it hit me that I was maybe doing something totally insane.
Andrea handed me a set of blaze orange earplugs and helped me settle onto the narrow gurney. Then she pressed the button to glide me into the machine. There was a mirror inside the scanner; when the gurney slid into position, the mirror was inches above my eyes and angled so that I could see a projection screen mounted somewhere past the top of my head. To keep me occupied while the machine calibrated itself, Jeromy queued up the animated movie Ice Age. I could see the cursor moving as he struggled with the language settings. While the whirring machine prepared to measure my brain in thin slices, I watched a cartoon woolly mammoth berate a taxonomically ambiguous yellow character in Spanish.
To be totally isolated and also closely scrutinized is a strange pairing of social variables—the ambiance inside an MRI scanner isn’t found in many other environments. The tight quarters made large movements impossible; my body trusted it was safe only because my mind constantly cooed and patted and murmured reassurances. The cheap earplugs dampened treble more effectively than bass and the world melted into a low-register slurry. I wonder if being scanned might be a tiny bit like being an astronaut: you’re tethered to the human world, but far removed from its daily business, afforded a vantage point that is rare and modern and only just barely on this side of possible. But instead of watching the blue Earth, rising as a crescent in the dark, you’re provided a view of the contents of your own helmet, your own skull—a view of the very entity doing all the viewing.
After the first scans, Cheryl’s voice came over the crackling intercom, “You have a beautiful brain.”
“I bet you say that to all your subjects.”
“Yeah. But sometimes I mean it.”
* * *
—
The strength of a magnet is measured in units called teslas. I did my structural scan in a 3T scanner. I’d do the fMRI scanning in a 7T machine. As the magnetic field strength increases, so does the resolution of the image that can be produced. The stronger the magnet, however, the more oppressive the confines of the scanner: the tunnel into which the body slides is longer. A circle of light past the tips of one’s toes is the only portal to the known world.
The 7T rig took up a whole room. It was shaped like a Little Debbie Swiss Roll, but as big as a truck. I would be inserted as the center swirl of frosting. Even when it wasn’t scanning, the 7T was loud. It didn’t hum like a normal, idling machine; it chirped and squeaked like an aviary whose birds were all hidden in the foliage. Andrea said that was the helium coolant system, which ran 24/7.
I lay down on the gurney. Andrea tucked blankets around me and slid a foam prop under my knees. An irrational, powerful affection for her swept through me—like a soldier falling for the nurse. This time she fitted a panel over the top half of my face. It had eyeholes, like a Batman mask.
She pressed the button that slid me into the machine, headfirst. My vision started to jog and drift. The world began to wind clockwise.
Over the intercom: “You okay?”
“Just—just got the spins.”
Did my voice sound like a person about to throw up? I did not think that it did. I shut my eyes. I didn’t know it yet, but every 7T scan would be like this: clockwise going in; counterclockwise coming out. I was a hairspring.
My brain swirled in smaller circles, then landed, like a leaf. I opened my eyes. The space was so small. Even if I freaked out, I wouldn’t know how to wriggle free—my face would hit the quarter-million-dollar Batman mask even before my head hit the scanner walls. It was loud inside and I was glad; I didn’t want to hear my own breathing.
A voice came over the intercom. “Ready?”
“Yes.”
Small white text appeared: Noise coming. Ticks, a loud banging, and a sustained buzz rose up around me. It was like being buried alive in a fax machine. The first image flashed, a photograph of a face that I knew very well. A familiar surge of love and pain washed through me.
* * *
—
When I am standing barefoot, my heart is about 56 inches off the ground. When Cheryl is standing barefoot, her bottom lip is 56 inches off the floor. When Penijean is barefoot, her ears are 56 inches off the ground.
The shapes and sizes of brains are variable too. If a neurologist inserted a 56-millimeter probe through the tops of our heads, she might end up in different parts of our brains.
To navigate their patients’ anatomy accurately, neurologists rely on brain atlases. Imagine a system of latitude and longitude, but that the grid sinks all the way to the core. The seminal brain atlas was created by a guy named Jean Talairach in 1967 at Centre Hospitalier Sainte-Anne in Paris. He dissected a human brain, plotting the exact location of every structure on a three-dimensional grid. The amygdala, the hippocampus, the thalamus—he could now provide precise coordinates for all of them. To use the valuable information Talairach collected, neurologists today rescale the images of their patients’ brains to fit the one that he dissected—the same way you might move a projector closer or farther from a screen to get the image to fill it entirely.
Enter: my third and final collaborator, the woman Talairach dissected.
In the days after my scans, my data was mapped to her brain. The process involved warping the images so that my skull didn’t look quite like my own anymore. Cheryl said the dissected brain had been sitting on a table for a while, so it sort of sagged. I imagined Greenland and Iceland—the parts of the globe most distended by Mercator’s rolling pin.
I wanted to know more about the woman whose brain became the standard model. But even after a sustained search, conducted in both English and clumsy French, I couldn’t find much of anything. She was sixty years old, probably Parisian. Smallish head, smallish brain. Likely an alcoholic. Had she known she was dying when she decided to donate her brain? Or could a son or daughter have made the decision for her? I wondered if she was in love when she died. I presumed a small head can hold just as much love as a standard one. Or maybe relatively more, I thought, if the love is standard sized and the head is small.
Research subjects are often anonymized in scientific literature, known only as Mr. R or M—or some other veiled handle. But I wondered if enough time had passed for the identity of Talairach’s subject to be revealed. The doctor himself was dead; I read his obit in Le Monde. I couldn’t find a living widow, but I contacted a doctor at Harvard who had studied under him. The doctor didn’t know anything about the dissected woman, but wrote me to reiterate that Talairach’s work had revolutionized his field.
She would have seen both world wars. Probably, she would have fallen in love for the first time in the years between them. She would have been twenty-one—the age I’d been when I met X—in 1928. A leap year, right before the crash.
It was strange to think that so much science rested on her one set of slight shoulders, that so many studies had been calibrated with her brain. I wished one of the articles that heralded Talairach’s great contribution would thank her too, or that the atlas carried both of their names, like the hyphenated kid of feminist parents. There were two brains at work on that table.