GoatMan

  “Right. And those stories become our memories. So I can imagine if I were a goat, I wouldn’t be telling myself stories. There may be things that have happened, but I probably have a much more indistinct recollection.”

  If the professor could switch off my sense of language—not just my ability to speak but my sort of internal mental language, too, the blur of words and pictures that I use to mentally represent and manipulate a situation I’m remembering or imagining—then that’d be a step closer to really being a goat.

  “Joe, could you switch off my language centre and make me lose my ability to use language?”

  “No.”

  Arggghhh! Why is everything so bloody complicated?! (That was internal mental language.)

  He continues: “In the brain, there isn’t a language centre—about two-thirds of your brain, if not more, contributes to your ability to use language. There is Broca’s area, which, among other things, seems to be important for people’s ability to produce speech. So you can stimulate that and get a subject to stop speaking.”

  Well, perhaps that’s a small step towards a goat state of mind.

  “Could we try and see if we could stimulate my Broca’s area? Is that possible?”

  “We coooould. We’d have to go through a bunch of safety things, to make sure it would be a reasonable risk. But getting speech arrest is super hard. I can give you a feel for it, but the odds of us actually getting it in any reasonable period of time are low.”

  Dr. Devlin is not very positive about the chances of managing to target Broca’s area without having done an MRI scan of my brain first. That is pretty much out of the question, as an MRI costs rather a lot.

  “But if we do get it, it happens in two ways. One way is that it’ll affect the motor area, and this sounds like the subject is having a stroke. It’s sort of slightly unnerving to see.”

  He hurries to reassure those present in the room: “But it doesn’t feel like that at all—it just feels like you’re trying to speak but it’s not coming out right, that there’s something interfering. The other thing it does is it can get you to that tip-of-the-tongue state, you know, when you have that word and you know it begins with a p, but you just can’t think of it.”

  Errm, I have that a lot anyway. He gives me a screening form. It has a list of medical conditions that I shouldn’t have personally or that shouldn’t run in my family, and a list of things I shouldn’t have done in the last twenty-four hours, like having drunk three or more units of alcohol and so on.

  As I ponder which boxes to tick, Dr. Devlin is explaining about the procedure.

  “There’s a nonzero but very small risk that TMS can induce seizure. So that’s the hard-core risk. Medically speaking, having a seizure is not a big deal, but for normal people, particularly if you don’t have seizures, it would be quite scary.”

  My girlfriend is listening carefully. I imagine she’s asking herself what her man is doing to himself for his stupid goat obsession. “And there are some factors, like if you’ve had a lot of alcohol in the last day or if you’ve had a lot of caffeine in the last hour, that temporarily increase your risk of a seizure.”

  Was it one pint I had last night or three? And I did just have a coffee. Oh, well, what’s the worst that could happen? A seizure! I tick no to all the questions and hand the form back to the professor, who hands me another form so I can give my informed consent for the procedure.

  The TMS machine has a foot-pedal control, and when he steps on the pedal, a loud click sounds from the magnetic coil, sort of like the sound a high-voltage spark makes jumping a gap.

  “The magnetic field will affect nervous tissue and muscle. So if I just pop it on my arm—” He puts the magnetic coil against his forearm, there’s the click, and his hand sort of clenches briefly. “Do you wanna try it?”

  I hold out my arm and he applies the magnetic field, and the muscles controlling my fingers clench of their own accord. I’ve had a few electric shocks in my time, and the effect is a bit like that: an involuntary jerk, but without so much shock. He puts the coil against the side of my head.

  “Ready?”

  “Mm-hmmm.”

  Click.

  The side of my face sort of spasms, like a nervous tick, and weirdly, I feel somewhat uncomfortable inside my teeth.

  Getting the nerves in my arm interfered with.

  “Yes, well, your fifth cranial nerve is there, too, so sometimes you’ll get a metallic taste in your mouth as well. So that’s only doing one pulse at a time. For speech arrest, we’d normally set it to do ten pulses a second for two or three seconds. So if you want to try?”

  He twists the dials on the TMS machine up to maximum power, and the room starts shaking (not really). He demonstrates what the coil does now: tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick, it goes when he stands on the pedal.

  “Do you want to feel it on your arm first?”

  “Yes, please.”

  He holds it over my forearm again and: “Tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick.”

  My hand spasms. It looks a bit like I’m playing the piano with my right hand, the fingers moving up and down with the clicking of the TMS machine. If I were playing a piano note eight times a second, I’d be up there with the world’s fastest pianists.

  “Funky, isn’t it? It would start to fatigue your muscle, but it doesn’t do that to brain cells.”

  He then puts the coil to the side of my head.

  “Who’s that trip-trapping over m—”

  Tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick.

  My mouth sort of twitches around with the ticking and my eye muscles sort of quiver, and there’s the weird pain in my teeth.

  “How’d you do? Discomfort?”

  “Yeah, a little bit. It sort of went down into my teeth again.”

  “OK. Well, the secret with speech arrest is to get you to say something overlearned, because if you just talk, you’d tend to stop anyway and we wouldn’t know if it worked.”

  “Can I say a fairy tale?”

  “Anything.”

  Dr. Devlin positions the TMS coil on my head, over the spot where he judges the patch of a million neurons lies that plays some role in my ability to talk. I start recounting a fairy tale I deem appropriate for the occasion.

  “Who’s that trip-trapping over my—” Tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick.

  “—bridge? said the troll.”

  “OK, so you did stop. Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  It could have just been my natural stilted style of speech, but it could have been that the language network in my brain was being disrupted. Physically, the side of my face had spasmed, and my metal fillings felt like they were dissolving on my tongue, but mentally, I’m not sure what happened. I’d stopped saying in midsentence a phrase I knew very well.

  “Could we try it again and I’ll count?”

  We try it again. Dr. Devlin isn’t convinced he hit the spot that time, but when I review the video later, there is a slight slurry stutter as I say the numbers. Maybe that’s just how I talk, with a slur, or perhaps there was some interference with my Broca’s area. He recounts what happened last time he tried speech arrest without the aid of an MRI scan: he tried for forty-five minutes, and at the end the subject was really unhappy. I can empathise. After just a few bursts of TMS, the windowless fluorescentlit experimentation room is starting to feel like somewhere I want to escape from.

  Even though I promised I wouldn’t, because Dr. Devlin said he “avoids research into consciousness like the plague,” I decide to ask him directly about this idea of getting closer to the experience of another animal by manipulating one’s brain. Is it…possible?

  “It’s tricky. Because at some level you’d think it should be theoretically possible, right? It’s all the same tissue, serving the same function; there’s nothin
g really fundamentally different about the biology of us and another animal. You can imagine it might be more theoretically plausible with a mammal like a goat than, say, a reptile, where there’s just so much difference in the tissue and the evolutionary experience. The problem is, without being able to know what the experience of a goat or whatever is like, it’s not clear how you would know whether you’d succeeded.”

  He has a point. It’s also a point made by the philosopher Thomas Nagel in his essay “What is it like to be a bat?” We know it must be like something to be a bat (or a goat), but what exactly? Nagel claims we can never know, that it’s logically impossible. Well, screw you Nagel! I’m going to try anyway.

  Dr. Devlin continues: “But you could imagine that if you could start to deactivate parts of the brain, that might be a fairly crude approximation. For instance, if you could just turn off language in a person. We can’t do that at the moment, but imagine you could. If you could turn it off and turn it back on, you’re getting there, right? Because then you could ask your subjects, ‘What was that like?’ And you could give them various tests that you would think it would be hard for them to remember without a language, and when you’d turned it back on, test them to see whether they could understand them or not. But we can’t do that now.”

  “So basically I should come back in fifty years, and then maybe you’ll have the thing that can help me experience what it might be like to be a goat?”

  This is what’s called a leading question, the sort necessary when asking a person who’s spent their entire professional career carefully avoiding wild speculation to do just that.

  “I can’t help but think this is probably true. Whether fifty years is enough? There’s a new technique called optogenetics, which is a way of introducing a particular gene into a cell and that gene lets you turn those cells off and on with external light sources. Now obviously ‘external’ would be an issue at the moment, and we’re not doing genetic engineering with humans. But you can imagine having the right frequencies so you don’t have to worry about whether there’s a skull in the way. Then you’re getting somewhere. How you then pick just the right cells out of a bunch of ten billion, I don’t know, though.”

  This is what I’m after: solutions! All that’s needed is for me to undergo some genetic engineering to make my brain cells possible to turn off, probably with a microwave laser aimed at my head. Alas, I’m pretty sure the pesky ethics committee wouldn’t like that.

  “There are a lot of clever people out there trying to solve these problems—well, not all of them are trying to solve the problem of goat minds—and though I can’t imagine the nature of what the solution will be, I can’t help but think it’s moving in the right direction. Just put the project on hold for fifty years.”

  Fifty years. I’d be such an old goat. If it’s not possible at the moment to physically alter my perception (without tripping my balls off), I can at least alter my context and way of moving, like the Yukaghir shamanic hunters. I need to get rid of these roving hands with their fiddly fingers, which can’t help but do ungoatlike things like holding pens and grasping door handles. I need to get rid of my hands…and replace them with hooves, so I can gallop along and leave my human troubles behind me…

  1 Dr. McElligott’s goat expertise has more to do with pragmatics than an overriding passion for goats. As an ethologist (a scientist who studies animal behaviour), he’s chosen to work with goats because they’re neophilic. That is, when presented with a novel situation (like the specially constructed equipment he uses in various experiments), they’re less inclined to just ignore the experiment and cower in the corner than, say, sheep. This curiosity makes them interesting from a cognitive point of view and easier to study.

  2 You could actually say “less positive” as opposed to “negative” cognitive bias, because experiments have suggested that people with mild depression are actually more realistic about their chances in life. For example, they are less likely to think buying that lottery ticket is worthwhile and more likely to think that yes, they might be the one in the one in three who will get cancer.

  3 The phrase comes from horse racing (and I shan’t apologise for using it). A goat was put in the stable with a twitchy racehorse to keep it company and calm it down. Jockeys would try and steal their rivals’ goats the night before the race so their horses wouldn’t be on top form the next day.

  4 And, of course, the parallel argument is that if the treatment of animals depends on whether they’re as clever as seven-year-old children, then humans with a mental age less than seven should be fair game for the conditions in battery farms. But then we’re speciesist, according to the philosopher Peter Singer.

  5 Yesterday, however, was the centenary of the end of the Great War, a less edifying example of our capacity for generating symbolic thoughts (like nation-states) and convincing one another to act on (and die for) them.

  6 Wearing now lives in a nursing home and has reportedly gained a kind of instinctive peace with his condition.

  Body

  London

  (getting hotter)

  The devil finds work for idle hands.

  As soon as you start approaching the world without hands, you start approaching the world essentially head—and mouth—first. And that is exactly how a goat approaches the world. Dr. McElligott had told me that goats are actually very fussy eaters. When I expressed my disbelief at this because everyone knows that goats eat anything—it’s one of the things about goats—he countered that their reputation is undeserved. Actually, what they’re doing is just exploring the world with their mouth. Sure, if after exploring they find they can eat the thing, they’ll eat it (who wouldn’t?), but he told me that if he accidentally drops a bit of dried pasta (the goats’ favourite treat) on the mucky yard floor, they won’t touch it until he’s gone and rinsed it for them. This fussiness, he says, probably evolved as a behaviour to avoid acquiring gut parasites (worms and such). If your mouth is your most sensitive manipulator and you’re a neophilic (curious) animal, then you’re going to be applying your mouth to the world a lot…giving clothes, bags, cameras, and so on a good chew, satisfying your curiosity through your primary interface with the world. What do babies do when encountering a novel object? Stick it in their mouth and give it a good gum.

  The bolts on the stable door that the goats unlocked when they wanted to stay up late? They didn’t unlock them just with brainpower, but in concert with their mouths and specifically their prehensile split upper lips. (A goat’s upper lip is split, so it acts like two very short, highly articulated manipulators.) Our own very complicated human civilisation is the product of the tight integration of our brains with our hands. This keyboard I’m tap, tap, tapping away at (with my dexterous fingers) is a tool, after all, and making tools with our hands—and using those tools to make more tools to make more tools—is how we got to where we are today. That’s the thing about brains—without some embodiment, a connection to the real world, it doesn’t matter how capable your mind is (even if you are René Descartes). Where even does your hand end and your brain begin? Sure, we say our hands start at our wrists, but it’s a lot less clear internally. When Joe Devlin made my fingers clench, the muscles he zapped were in my forearm. These muscles are innervated by nerves running from the spine, which in turn are connected to nerves running from the brain, which in turn are connected to networks of neurons lacing through it. Thinking in terms of systems, as opposed to external anatomy, I realise I have a brain that extends all the way into my hands. This firmly sticks me in the physical world. Imagining this network shifts my perspective on the brain as something located behind my eyes, looking out, to being present in my whole body. The placing of thought purely in the brain has been called “cortical chauvinism,” emphasising just how overemphasised the brain has been in efforts to understand intelligence.

  A neophilic goat exploring the world.

  It’s all very well trying to effect goat states of consciousness through muckin
g about with my brain, but without embodiment I’m never going to feel like a goat. Nowadays I’m firmly anti–powerful hallucinogens, and Dr. Devlin’s goat-perspective brain machine won’t be ready for another fifty years, so the only way I’m going to be able to achieve the shift in perspective required to look at a bolt on a door and not think of using my hands to unlock it, or a bolt on a nut and not think of using my hands to unscrew it, is to not have hands in the first place. I need to turn my arms into legs and my hands into feet, aka hooves.

  My first attempt at metamorphosis resulted in something that I was quite pleased with—until I actually tried to get inside it. It was basically a human-size pair of scissors, with the added feature of many protruding bits of hacksaw-burred metal rod. It endangered things that humans consider nice to have: eyes, fingers, unpunctured neck, and such. Taking a step in this thing was out of the question; it was terrifying just being in it. Its numerous joints made for an overriding tendency to fold up and collapse. Thus it was exhausting just to hold myself upright, requiring all my not inconsiderable strength to avoid ending up as a crumpled heap of wood, metal, and severed digits. Galloping was out of the question.

  The more joints there were, the more muscles I needed to engage to keep myself and my exoskeleton from crumpling, so for Prototype Number 2 I went to the other extreme and eliminated all joints. I focused on conservation of energy: if taking a step as a quadruped was going to be so energy intensive, I damn well wanted as much energy back from that step as possible to help with taking the next step. Prototype Number 2 was essentially two large, homemade laminated springs, like giant bows, between which I was to be suspended in a girdle. This I’d imagined would allow me to shift my weight like the pilot of a hang glider as I galloped along, my springy legs enabling me to bound over the landscape.