“Isis, this is Bacchus. Bacchus, Isis. I’ll wait while you both appreciate the irony.”
“We’ve met, sort of,” she explained, to my great surprise. I would not have guessed she’d remember my face, stripped of the Halloween, months later, when I’d never so much as told her my name. Impressive.
I was entirely caught up in her eyes. “Hi.” It was sheepish, I confess. I was distracted, held elsewhere by the wonder of seeing her standing right in front of me, a glorious apparition. I reached toward her, hand trembling, and she took my hand in hers and tugged it hello.
Ben was unaccustomed to seeing me silent. “Er… Isis owns some technology we’re investing in. We announced today, so we’re celebrating.”
“What sort of technology?” I managed.
“We’re creating a drug to treat PTSD through neural protein inhibition.”
“Wow. How’d you get involved with that?”
“I invented it.”
There must have been a little puddle forming beneath me on the stool.
I opened and closed my mouth once or twice, trying to speak, before I stammered out a second “wow.”
“So why are all men liars?” she asked. She tucked a thick strand of black hair behind her ear; I followed her hand and got distracted by the plumpness of her lips.
Ben snickered. “Let’s find a place where we can all sit.” I shook off my shock, she ordered a drink, and we located a table toward the corner and camped out there. I’d let her walk ahead of me, glancing down at a bubbly ass as it passed me by. Stop, Bacchus. His straight friend was meeting us, remember.
“Bacchus and I just like to debate our respective grand theories of sexuality.”
“I like it,” she said simply. It made me smile.
“We do it so much we may be tired of it,” I explained. “But it’s an academic interest of ours, for obvious reasons.”
“Are you gay as well?” she asked.
“I’m somewhere between gay and straight.” I didn’t dive into the explanation, as I usually would have. I couldn’t tell why.
“Ah.”
“Honestly, I don’t think I can talk about sexuality until I understand how you’re going to treat PTSD with a pill.”
She started to laugh. “Well, not a pill exactly. At the moment I’m working on an injection.”
“A brain injection?”
“Yes.”
“That’s a bit terrifying.”
“Oh, certainly. I hope it won’t be an injection in the end…”
Glasses continued to clink against their ice around us and spiffy yuppies of unknown sexual orientation began to fill the bar. The place flooded with warm light spilling off faces and onto soft tones of gray, reflecting off red leather cushions on couches against the wall. The warmth of the light made her skin look darker, almost Indian, and her hair spilled out behind her, waves of glare emanating from it.
“Every memory,” she began “is really just a connection among the neurons in your brain.” This, I’d heard – neurons reach through dendrites and send electrical signals amongst them. When you learn to swing a bat, the neurons that instruct your arms and shoulders to move the swinging way get sort of used to speaking with one another, and they grow, for lack of a better word, closer, so the connection grows stronger. The neurons that perceive the need to swing the bat grow into these, and after 4 years of baseball practice your body just starts swinging when it sees a good pitch. Eventually, you don’t think it through the way you did at first (“good pitch! Arm up, hip turn, pull bat, flip wrists, follow through”). You just swing.
She continued. “To remember a moment, the neurons related to that moment – the ocular ones for what you see, maybe the tasting segments of the brain if you’re eating, or the pain receptors if something hurts – weave themselves closer together, forming a relationship, so that they’re more sensitive to the newly-related ones going forward. Now when you fire on one of the circuits in that relationship, the others fire too. Basically. This has been known for decades. It’s referred to as long-term potentiation.”
“Okay.” I supposed Ben knew this intimately, having had to assist in the decision to fund her research at some point, and he was quiet. I wondered if this work was the source of the new neurological principles he had begun to spout.
“Long-term potentiation requires the synthesis of new connections and the related biological materials, for example building a new receptor at a particular spot on a neuron or increasing the quantity of neurotransmitters that allow your neurons to communicate, all by synthesizing neural proteins to strengthen connections. The neurons can transmit more voltage if they create these additional connections. This well-known process is for creating a memory, though, and I’m concerned with recalling it.” She smelled like apricots. I’d been trying to put my finger on it since she arrived. Apricots.
“So, during a fellowship where I had this nice lab for research, I was thinking about riding bikes – I mean, you know how they say once you learn you never forget? I started thinking, why is that different? I was thinking about how I used to make these bracelets in high school, weaving together thread in a particular braid to make a particular pattern, but I couldn’t then recall how to make the braid. In both cases, I’d done the activity enough times to consolidate the memory, in other words form it as a long-term memory. I wondered why I could get on a bike and ride it without having done it in ten or so years but couldn’t do the same with the bracelets. It seemed like in one case the neural connections had stayed in place, but in the other they’d just vanished, maybe cannibalized by other processes and protein synthesis to make more important memories. But you see people biking all the time, you know, maybe that was it. Anyway, I decided to look into whether there was any protein synthesis – a building up, so, also potentially a resistance to cannibalization of the memory – happening when you saw a bike, in other words whether protein synthesis had a link to memory recall as well as memory formation. I decided I’d block protein synthesis and see what effect that had on recall. In rats, of course. I still haven’t managed to get the FDA to let me plug a protein inhibitor into a human brain just to see what happens.”
“Not shocking.”
“I taught about seventy rats to associate a particular tone at a particular decibel with a painful electric shock.”
“You’re lucky I hate rats.”
“I’m lucky most people hate rodents, as is every neurological researcher. So okay, we spent weeks getting the rats used to the tone-shock progression, so that they tensed and held still when they heard the tone. Then I injected their little brains with a chemical known to inhibit the synthesis of neural proteins. When I played the tone, they had no reaction. No tensing, they just went about their rat business as though we hadn’t tortured them for weeks with that very noise. But the craziest part was that when the chemical wore off and they heard the noise, they still didn’t react. The inhibitor had essentially erased the memory of what we’d made the tone mean.”
I leaned back against the cushions behind me and looked at her, wide-eyed. The implications were… well, mind-blowing… but they crawled toward common sense. To rewrite one’s “memory” to be more convenient for one’s present circumstances – every time one recalled it – was what classical historians always did with their histories and what my grandmother was doing with her concept of her cousin’s living situation. How could she think of that woman as just a roommate?
I turned to Ben, “I’m livid with myself for letting you guys get to this first,” and back to Isis, “Please continue. I assume given Ben’s investment that the rats could still make memories after you’d drugged them?”
“Yes. In fact, I’d trained them to be afraid of a few other sounds in exactly the same way, and they remained afraid of all the sounds I hadn’t played when they were injected with the inhibitor. They simply couldn’t rebuild the memory of that particular tone with the injection, to those particular auditory nerves, and so the memory o
f the pain association vanished. I sat staring at the wall and drinking coffee for almost two full days after the experiment, trying to decide what to do next. But the more I thought about it, the more it made evolutionary sense – I just hadn’t imagined the degree of sense. If we kept perfect copies of every single day of our childhood, we’d never use most of them. Hell, do you ever need to know what your fourth grade classroom looked like?
“We’re actually rebuilding memories every time we remember them, and we’re rebuilding them with reference to what our priorities are when we recall. This way we only spend the proteins and the energy to recall what we really need. You may remember the day in fourth grade when your teacher chastised you, and how she chastised you, because since then you are always careful not to do the thing you got chastised for. But the vast majority of people could not recall the twenty other kids in the room when it happened, and maybe not even the teacher’s face. And, realistically, we probably aren’t remembering the chastising itself exactly as it happened, we’re remembering a version of it that has been useful to us since then to avoid taking the action that warranted reprimand.”
“Well that’s the first thing you’ve said that’s not blowing my mind. People hear what they want to hear, see what they want to see, etc. I recently experienced this very phenomenon when I totally ignored key behavioral clues in someone, until I magically remembered them after I knew that person was a shit.”
“Oh, I mean, the most poetic thing about this experiment is that it’s already proven its own validity. As it happens, someone did basically the same thing I did with the rats 50 years ago.”
Ben sipped at his drink. Mine was empty, but I hadn’t noticed. For the first time in months I had absolutely no desire to escape. “You’re joking.”
“Hardly! No, the old experiment used a different kind of shock as opposed to my chemical to inhibit the proteins, but the result was the same, it showed that memories were reconsolidated, well, recreated periodically. But other researchers didn’t get exactly the same result when they tried, and his whole process was dismissed as mere error.”
I finished for her, too excited to hold my tongue. “And no one wants to believe that they can’t rely on their own memories as representations of reality, so why would any scientist want to support research that proves that is precisely true?” I was utterly oblivious to the crowd thickening around us.
“Exactly. I had a lot of trouble publishing at first myself, a lot of people told me I was completely crazy. But eventually some were recreating the experiment, and I finally got published.”
“Way to fight the good fight,” I congratulated.
“Thank you. I fight for irony.” That made me smile. “It took me a long time myself to wrap my head around the thought that the memories I cherish – and therefore recall – most are probably the most fanciful.”
Ben finally piped up. “We’ve looked into how prevalent the fancification of memory actually is. There was a team of psychologists who did a study on memories of the September 11 attacks.”
“Flashbulb memories,” she interjected, “very vivid, detailed recollections, usually of a very traumatic event, when your body is most prepared to go into protein synthesis overdrive. That’s evolutionary too – things that almost kill you are generally worth remembering so that you can avoid them in the future.”
“Indeed.”
Ben took over. “The September 11th, shall we say, witnesses, gave the researchers as detailed a description as they could of the day in a survey. The psychologists sent the surveys back out to the same people as time passed. After a year, 37% of the details in their collective recollections had changed. After 3 years, about 50% of the details had changed. In a lot of cases this was just tighter narration, but in a lot of cases people changed stuff like where they were standing when the towers fell.” Ben’s interest was not in the money. He was as fascinated as I.
“You can imagine if you walked a path close to where you were in New York daily, you might tie your memory of a falling tower to a point on that path from thinking about it there so often,” he said, his enthusiasm apparent.
“It’s all over the place, actually, when we got to looking around for it. We found literally hundreds of studies by psychologists showing how you could use misinformation to, say change witness testimony about the sign at an accident scene, or have them swearing there was broken glass in a spot where there was none. Just, over and over again. The use of eyewitness testimony in court becomes almost laughable when you read so many of these.”
“This is going to sound ridiculous,” I said, “but I sort of know. I mean, obviously I didn’t know your experiment would turn out as it did or that these studies are out there,” I nodded toward her, “but I once wrote a thesis on how Roman historians reconstructed biographical stories based on their conceptions of what was ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ and how looking at the differences between personalities drawn as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ revealed what sort of characteristics Romans thought were ‘good’ and ‘bad…’ This is a large part of the reason I no longer believe in good and bad.”
“You don’t think a child molester is bad?”
“Child molesters disgust me, literally get sick at the thought of them—”
“Sorry—”
“No, no. Don’t be, I just want to explain. They disgust me and I believe they are bad for society and there are few people I’d want to ostracize more, and I will call them ‘bad’ in some context I’m sure at some point in my life. But all of that is what I, growing up in this society, think about child molesters, subjectively. Now, given that child molesters traumatize whole generations of societies, I’d imagine most historical cultures might also be disgusted by or despise child molesters, also subjectively. But if you take an example like San Francisco’s finest gay architect instead, my subjective feeling is that that is a ‘good’ thing, making beautiful things in the world, living a happy life in a fine City. Now, if I ask the pastor in my hometown in Mississippi if the flamingly homosexual architect living in San Francisco, having lots of gay sex but making beautiful buildings, is ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ he’ll say ‘bad,’ because in his world gay is so bad that it trumps everything else. But in my book, gay is neutral, or realistically positive, since it means I have a greater chance of acceptance from señor Architect DeGay.”
“Hey, don’t hate on straight people! I live with three great friends who are all lesbians and I totally accept them.” Ah, so that explains the “straight” girl repeatedly appearing in the Castro.
“I wouldn’t have supposed you didn’t. My point is only that the words ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mean only ‘positive to me’ and ‘negative to me,’ not ‘positive’ or ‘negative.’”
“‘Tis nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so,’” she said. I had to think about the quote for a moment, and then it dawned on me that she had understood me perfectly. Usually I was watching the eyes of the people around me gloss over the minute I mentioned something that happened 2000 years ago, but she drew an analogy from 400 years ago. And she wasn’t arguing with me. And she seemed interested in the conversation. Usually when I tried to denounce the use of “good” and “bad” as ultimate descriptors I had to fight for the rest of the night with “Was Hitler bad?” and things like that. I was ravenously curious about her work, though, and pleasantly surprised to find that what I wanted to say was, “Tell me which proteins you’re working with” rather than plunging into my usual diatribe about Roman sex. At the time, though, I felt she was so invested in my academic postulations that it felt rude not to continue my diatribe.
Mystified, I rambled on, “So, yeah, thesis was on this writer around 400 A.D. who profiled the rulers over the previous four centuries. The short version is that they thought being active was good and being passive was bad – Romans, I mean. In everything. Sex, war, oratory, the Senate house. Activity was linguistically and philosophically tied to penetration. So, in the biographies, good rulers penetrated in any
of those contexts, and the bad rulers were penetrated in any of those contexts. Like, in the biographies, Marcus Aurelius, the quintessential ‘good’ emperor, never even lost a battle, was never beaten or stabbed, was always obliged when he spoke, and was only ever described as active sexually… that is, he put his dick in stuff of whatever gender and never had anyone put a dick in him. Commodus, by contrast, gets beaten up, loses in battle, and loves taking it up the ass. These stories are products of hundreds of years of societal recollection, and given what you know about memory it shouldn’t be terribly surprising that Romans’ ‘history,’” I made air quotes, “has a very specific method of describing a person as ‘good’ or ‘bad.’”
“No. And I suppose no women are in these biographies, because why remember women as good…”
“Actually I chose this text of about a hundred supporting the same idea – that penetration, including sexual penetration, was the line between active and passive, and therefore ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ for the Romans – because there was a female ruler in it.”
“There was a female ruler in the Roman Empire?”
Ben stood up. “I’m going for another round. You guys?” She nodded. I no longer heard the room around me or saw anything other than her attentive face, even though I thought I had sobered up.
“I’m okay for now,” I said, content in my present circumstances. She shook her head, and he walked away. “Um, right so, not a female ruler of the Roman Empire, she was what they called a client-queen. The whole society was strung together by a hierarchy of patron-client relationships that stretched from the town baker up to the emperor. That was the channel for much commerce, for military protection, for news, even, and part of the reason such a vast empire lasted so long… but that’s a different topic. The point is, toward the end of the Empire it was too big to really rule centrally, and when Rome conquered or got sick of administering a new territory, it would establish a patron-client relationship with a local ruler. This ruler would then pay mafia-style tribute to Rome and would be permitted to rule his own territory in his own way so long as he avoided stepping on Rome’s toes. He could even conquer new territory elsewhere and Rome basically just started counting that as part of the Empire. The set of biographies covers some of these figures too.”
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