After On

by Rob Reid

  This is also why Mitchell abstains from the dating scene. Aloof as he is to new friendships, he’s even more reserved toward romance. Certain courtship phases consist of little more than frustration and embarrassment, after all. There’s also a dark and painfully morbid side to this aversion, which he prefers not to contemplate. The net result is that thanks to Falkenberg’s disease, he’s all but regained his virginity, despite being in peak sexual health. This is why any nightspot, gym, or Whole Foods can make him feel like that hypothetical meat-craving vegan at the cookout. It’s nothing icky or volatile. And his mindset is that of the abstainer, not the deprived. But the feeling’s acute, depressing, and ever-present as a pebble in a shoe.

  But now—according to Dr. Martha’s vague comments from a few days back—Ellie’s work might help free him of this, and even save his life! Or, help Dr. Martha save his life? Or…something. But how could motes be tied to his bizarre condition? Or is there a connection to Ellie’s other work? Something new is brewing in her research. Kuba mentioned this in passing a few days ago. Plus, there was his odd statement about motes being connected to consciousness in the meeting with Pugwash. Intrigued by this, Mitchell did some digging this afternoon and found an online interview with Ellie. It mentions a big academic paper she’s about to release. Riding the expensively preserved elevator with its Hoover-era accordion gate up to Kuba and Ellie’s floor, Mitchell glances through it again, looking for clues.

  NeuroBeat: The Ellie Stanislaw Interview

  NeuroBeat: Let’s open with the obvious question: what is a “mote”?

  Ellie Stanislaw: Motes are very brief neural events that unfold in tiny spaces in the brain. And I believe they’re the core building blocks of emotional states in humans and other mammals.

  NeuroBeat: So they’re components and not emotions in their own right?

  Ellie Stanislaw: They’re actually both. It’s like how blue is a color in its own right—and meanwhile, as a primary color working with red and green, it can also create millions of other colors on your computer monitor.

  NeuroBeat: Interesting. So motes are the primary colors of emotion. Are there also three of them?

  Ellie Stanislaw: Four, actually. And, akin to primary colors, they combine in sophisticated ways to create a spectacularly varied emotional palette. The four basic motes are happiness, sadness, anger, and surprise. Those primaries mix and match in packets of twelve that pulse through the mind in repeating patterns. Each mote lasts about a millisecond, so a twelve-pack plays out over about twelve milliseconds.

  NeuroBeat: Twelve milliseconds is brief.

  Ellie Stanislaw: Very. To put it into perspective, a NASCAR driver swerving around a wreck might react in 125 milliseconds. So a solitary mote is well below the threshold of conscious perception. But the patterns typically repeat. Often just once or twice, but sometimes hundreds, or even thousands of times. And a long repetition pattern is not something you’d miss. Indeed it is, quite literally, an emotion.

  NeuroBeat: You said motes also unfold in tiny spaces.

  Ellie Stanislaw: I did. And that’s why I was lucky enough to discover them! When I first moved out here, I housed with a bunch of other penniless grad students. A very interdisciplinary crew! Upstairs, there was a UCSF bioengineer and a physics postdoc from Berkeley. And one night, the three of us got to talking about the limits of neurological imaging, which was basically MRI and MEG [or magnetoencephalography—Ed.].

  NeuroBeat: And where did they come up short?

  Ellie Stanislaw: Well, MRIs reveal tiny things, down to the millimeter scale. But their exposures are slow, lasting a thousand milliseconds or more. Whereas MEG’s the opposite: fast, but with lousy spatial resolution. So we could see small, slow things with an MRI. And big, fast things with MEG. But there was no way to see small, fast things. So my housemates decided to build a mashup of the two technologies. And two years later we had the world’s first MEGRI in our garage. A total Frankenstein contraption!

  NeuroBeat: And it turns out the brain is full of small, fast things?

  Ellie Stanislaw: Yes—like motes! And it was pure luck that I was the one to find them. I was like van Leeuwenhoek getting to be the first person to see bacteria through a microscope. But strictly thanks to sharing a house with two geniuses!

  NeuroBeat: So, could you give us an example of how motes combine with each other to make complex emotions?

  Ellie Stanislaw: Sure. If you’re in a state of unadulterated joy, your mote pattern might theoretically be a perfect string of twelve happiness motes. And if you’re in that state for precisely one second, about eighty cycles of those twelve-packs will rocket through your brain. Now, that’s a radical oversimplification. Just as you rarely see something that’s perfectly blue in nature, unadulterated joy seems to be rare in human minds. More likely, we’ll see nine or ten happy motes, with other things mixed in.

  NeuroBeat: And what’s an example of a common emotion that’s not a primary?

  Ellie Stanislaw: One that we’re starting to understand a lot better is fear. Fear comes in lots of flavors, but they’re all a mix of sadness and surprise, often with a dash of anger. Another example is indignation. That’s lots of anger, and a bit of surprise, with some sadness mixed in. And also, some happiness. Which makes sense when you consider that some folks really seem to enjoy being offended!

  NeuroBeat: Wow. You have just taken all of the fun out of indignation for me.

  Ellie Stanislaw (laughs): Yeah, it can feel a bit dehumanizing to realize that emotions are so…digital.

  NeuroBeat: But so is life itself, which all derives from the four-letter code of DNA.

  Ellie Stanislaw: Exactly! And with motes, the important thing to bear in mind is that we don’t experience indignation as X parts surprise, Y parts anger, or whatever. We experience it as a unique, distinctive, and very poignant emotional state. Just like when you see something lime green on your monitor. You don’t mentally convert it into RGB values and say, “Oh how boring. Fifty parts red, fifty parts blue, and 205 parts green.” No, you say, “Wow, look at that lime greenness.”

  NeuroBeat: So have you mapped out a complete periodic table of emotions?

  Ellie Stanislaw: That’s definitely a long-term goal. But for now, there’s literally one machine in the world that can detect these things, and it can be finicky. Also, we can’t induce arbitrary emotions in our subjects. Not yet, anyway! So although we try to guide people through different emotional states when they’re being imaged, we’re ultimately limited by what they happen to be feeling and their willingness and ability to report that to us.

  NeuroBeat: And that ability is MIA when a mote pattern is too brief to perceive.

  Ellie Stanislaw: Yes. And that happens constantly because most mote patterns only repeat one or two times. Which means our brains go through countless emotional states that we don’t even perceive! The most fleeting emotions often accompany, and, I believe, enable analytical thought. And that’s been the subject of all of my published work to date. The connection between motes and decision-making.

  NeuroBeat: Now, rumor has it there might be a sort of foundational mote pattern that’s key to booting up the whole system in infancy.

  Ellie Stanislaw (laughs): That’s not a rumor—I told you that before you started recording! But as I also told you, that’s the subject of a paper I’m publishing in Nature Neuroscience next week, and I promised not to spill too many beans on it before it comes out.

  NeuroBeat (also laughing): Well, it was worth a try! Any chance we can discuss it after it comes out?

  Ellie Stanislaw: Absolutely. I’d be delighted.

  Mitchell rings the bell. The door opens, and Harley Da Housepet—a critter formally assigned by her vet to the genus “SPCA special”—bursts forth in an explosion of ecstatic recognition. Tail aflutter and grrr-ing a joyous urrrrrr sound, Harley impatiently waits for Mitchell to pat his upper leg—her signal that she’s allowed to jump up. A quick tap, and her front paws are resting
on his thigh, her back paws on the floor, as her tongue laps the air in a touchingly hopeless attempt to kiss Mitchell’s distant face. Twenty-five pounds, short-haired, satiny soft, and of a fox-like, russet color, Harley is a rescue, and terribly shy toward almost all people and dogs. But Mitchell patiently won her trust and affection. His visits now begin with these detonations of joy. Suffering his own odd form of social isolation due to Falkenberg’s disease, Mitchell treasures their friendship as much as Harley does.

  “Hey there!” Ellie leans over Harley and greets Mitchell with a delighted hug. Eternally playful and just this side of six feet, she wears her shimmering auburn hair well below the shoulders and has scarcely aged since high school. “Kuba’s in the kitchen,” she adds. As Mitchell shuts the door, someone buzzes from the street. “Dinner bell!” Ellie proclaims, and Harley barks her delight, as the sound often heralds the arrival of treats.

  Soon they’re huddled around steaming plates of blazingly spicy Hunan food stacked atop a wobbly Ikea dinette Ellie bought right out of undergrad. Like all the furniture here, it falls way short of the actual apartment’s glorious standards. It’s not that she and Kuba can’t afford better (because they sure can). They’ve just been too busy in the eighteen months since their wedding to upgrade their consolidated postcollege durables.

  They’re finishing off the dumplings when the talk turns to whether Phluttr could imaginably want to buy them. “I guess it’s not out of the question,” Kuba says. “Because it sounds like they’re really pushing some edge technologies forward. In that accelerator Pugwash mentioned.”

  “The PhastPhorwardr,” Mitchell groans. “What a name!”

  “Almost as bad as Emotional Decisioning,” Ellie teases. Kuba laughs, and Mitchell jokingly gives her the finger. This was the original name for their technology, which they abbreviated to “E-D” in press releases drafted in the days leading up to their launch. Ellie brattily waited until the near-last instant before mentioning that anyone remotely connected to medicine would assume they’d developed an erectile dysfunction product (she couldn’t help it—this sort of thing is just her idea of fun). Mitchell then came up with “Animotion” in a diving save that he’s really quite proud of.

  “By the way,” he says, recalling something Pugwash mentioned, “was Animotion a…band or something?”

  Kuba fails to stifle a grin, and Ellie laughs until her hot and sour soup almost exits her nose. Detecting joy among her favorite humans, Harley jumps up to bark and wag along with the fun until shushed. “One-hit wonders,” Ellie finally says. “New wave. And the DJ must’ve played their song ten times at our prom.” Their class had a weird thing for eighties music. “You never could remember a band name!”

  “We didn’t have the heart to tell you,” Kuba adds. “You were so happy with the name when you thought you made it up.”

  Mitchell’s now aching to mention Dr. Martha’s surprising hint at a link between his disease and Ellie’s work. But as she asked him not to mention it yet, he proceeds indirectly. “Kuba mentioned something about motes driving consciousness,” he says to Ellie. “What’s that about?”

  She turns to her husband. “Bad boy,” she scolds playfully. Then back to Mitchell. “I have a paper coming out next week which’ll talk about this. It’s still under wraps, but the ideas are no secret from friends and family.”

  “Cool, tell me more.”

  “Well, my starting precept is that young infants aren’t actually conscious in any meaningful sense of the word. Which may sound strange.”

  “A little weird. Why do you say that?”

  “It goes back to this huge neural imaging study that wrapped up at UCSF just as I was starting my dissertation work. It strongly suggested that newborns give equal weight to all sensory input. Every photon. Every sound wave. Every fleck of sensation from every teeny patch of skin. It all seems to be experienced with identical intensity.”

  Whoa! This sounds a lot like the great blurring episodes Mitchell experiences right before losing consciousness during a Falkenberg’s attack. He listens closer.

  “And in my view,” Ellie continues, “that undifferentiated flood isn’t consciousness.”

  Feigning calm, Mitchell asks, “Because…?”

  “It’s just way more information than human minds can parse. Even a very robust adult mind. I mean, tune into your own experience right now. I doubt you’re even registering 1 percent of your sensory input. You’re heeding the part of your field of view that I’m occupying, plus the sound of my voice. But you’re blotting out almost everything else. And not because I’m so fascinating! But because a human conversation’s plenty to keep track of. And if you tried to heed every photon, sound wave, and nerve ending that you can access at once, you wouldn’t really be aware of any of it.”

  “You’re saying I’d be functionally unconscious.”

  “Exactly! Which is why you’re not currently registering the color of the ninth cookbook from the far left of the fourth shelf over my shoulder. You’re perceiving it. But you’re not heeding it. Just like neither of us is paying the slightest attention to Beethoven’s…” She gives Kuba a questioning look. “Sixth?” He nods. “And that’s at least a hundred beautifully played instruments we’re ignoring. Which is a ton of information! But we blot out almost everything because we’re conscious—and consciousness is at least as much about ignoring as it is about heeding.”

  “Got it,” Mitchell says. “And, back to babies?”

  “Right. Well, newborns don’t do this filtering thing. Which, to me, means they don’t do this consciousness thing!”

  “So what changes?”

  “They start having goals.”

  “Huh?” This sounds like a rather yuppie thing for infants to harbor.

  “This is really fascinating,” Kuba says, plainly (and adorably) a Dr. Ellie fanboy. “Goals are basically cognitive actors. You could almost say they make us conscious!”

  “What?” That sounds insane to Mitchell.

  “It’s an exaggeration,” Ellie says, “but only a small one. Because it’s our goals that blot out all the sensory noise that newborns can’t filter. Consider your own current mindset again. Your goal is to participate in this conversation. So you’re picking up every um and uh, and you’re blotting out Beethoven. So you’re definitely not receiving a newborn’s unfiltered blast of information. Because your goal of conversing is shaping your sensory experience! It’s drastically amplifying the tiny subset of signals connected to our words and negating everything else.”

  “So then where do goals come from? Is it from the…‘foundational mote pattern’ the interviewer mentioned in that NeuroBeat piece?”

  “Exactly—and that’s what my new paper’s about! The research is preliminary, but it’s starting to look like everything starts with frustration.”

  Whoa again—along with embarrassment and sensory shocks, this is one of the three main triggers of Falkenberg’s attacks! Mitchell’s now physically leaning in.

  “Though infants aren’t conscious in the traditional sense,” Ellie continues, “they definitely have needs and drives. And like all living things, they act on them. But infant humans have lousy motor control and no model for how the world works. And so the brain generates something very specific: six parts surprise, four parts anger, and two parts sadness.”

  “Sounds like a cocktail.”

  Ellie laughs. “Yeah, a Grump Gimlet! It’s the mote pattern of a certain kind of frustration. And when that pattern propagates in an infant’s brain, it’s followed by gales of motes of all kinds! I call it a ‘mote storm’—and nothing else we’ve seen triggers one. It includes all the patterns we’ve firmly tied to specific emotions and hundreds we haven’t yet identified. And I’m pretty sure the first time the brain generates any of those patterns is during these episodes! Then, through mechanisms I may spend the rest of my career decoding, those mote storms power up an increasingly complex emotional landscape. Emotions that bring on the earliest sense o
f self. And with it, the first inklings of consciousness.”

  “And yes, it’s safe to put infants in MRIs,” Kuba adds.

  Mitchell nods. He was too fascinated by Ellie’s model of consciousness to wonder about this, but at some point he would have.

  “Totally safe,” Ellie says. “MRIs don’t generate any harmful radiation, and we make the pods supercomfy. But obviously, we can’t keep them in there very long, which slows us down a bit. Another trick with infants is we don’t really know what they’re trying to do when they experience frustration. To our eyes, babies attempt vague actions in really bumbling ways. But I believe the early frustration is mostly about that very bumbling! The lousy motor control. It’s about viscerally learning the limits of a physical body. That I start here, and end there. I send this neural signal, and my leg moves this way, versus that way. And no matter what signal I send, my leg won’t move in this third way.”

  “That part’s really fascinating,” Kuba says. “It could mean that simple, physical failures—lots of them—literally activate consciousness.”

  Mitchell’s now transfixed. And Dr. Martha’s injunction notwithstanding, he can’t possibly suppress the burning question in his mind. “So. Is there any chance that motes are connected to Falkenberg’s disease?”