by Matt Richtel
It’s the proverbial gray matter, the most evolved part, he explains, the part that makes us human. “It’s where the action is.” Abstraction, language, how we make decisions, organize our time, focus.
He moves his finger lower down on the brain, toward the stem. This, he explains, is the figurative and literal lower region. The reptilian part of the brain that resides in most animals, highly evolved primates and otherwise. It told our forebears whether to run when they saw a lion or perk up at the sound of a bird that might be food.
“It controls quick reactions to things. It deals with basic stuff, like seeking mates and reproduction. It’s been preserved throughout evolution.”
Among Dr. Gazzaley’s many research areas, he has explored the tension between these relatively primitive parts and the more evolved regions, including the frontal lobe. How we balance the tension between the short-term demands of our reptilian senses—run!—and our longer-term desires, goals, and commitments that we try to set with the more evolved parts of our brains.
It’s why I’ve come to visit him on this gray day in early December 2012. I’m trying to better understand why two rocket scientists are dead. Was it because Reggie, for some reason, lost his focus? Was he distracted? What was happening inside his brain? Can the research being done here, and by a new generation of neuroscientists, prevent similar tragedy? Does science offer any solace, some hope, for the families of Keith and Jim?
More basically: What is attention?
DR. GAZZALEY SMILES.
“What is attention? Attention is a complicated thing.” He pauses. “It has many subdomains. It falls into an aspect of cognition that’s related to the selection of information to be processed.”
Oft cited on this subject of attention is William James, a philosopher and physician at the end of the nineteenth century, and the brother of novelist Henry James. William wrote of attention in 1890: “Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession of the mind in clear and vivid form out of what seem several simultaneous objects or trains of thought.”
Everyone might know what it is. Might. But, as Dr. Gazzaley notes, more than a century after Dr. James, what we think we know, or what we once thought, has many strata. It’s complicated.
Dr. Gazzaley says that attention is also “absolutely critical for all high-level functioning,” a cornerstone of what it means to be human. He’s not just saying that our attention allows us to survive—say, by being able to attend to a threat or perceive an opportunity. He means that attention allows us, in a “uniquely human” way, to set goals and follow through on them without being distracted by every bit of stimulation around us.
“It allows us to interact with the world through our goals and not be led by or be a slave to our environment. It has allowed us to do every remarkable achievement—creation of society, culture, language. They are all dependent on being able to focus on our goals.”
To illustrate how attention works, Dr. Gazzaley has an idea. He suggests I come to his next First Friday cocktail party, his monthly hipster soiree.
Learn about attention at a party?
“I’ll show you the cocktail party effect.”
CHAPTER 4
REGGIE
MOM, WHAT’S GOING TO happen?” Reggie Asked.
“Everything’s going to be okay, Reg.”
Mary Jane’s voice could strain a bit when she got excited.
She and Reggie, in particular, had a playful relationship. He’d tease her, gently, but he was always listening and always attentive.
He sat in the passenger seat of his mom’s Chevy Blazer. It was just hours after the accident, and Mary Jane was driving him home from the hospital. She’d decided to take an alternate route, using side roads, circling around a chunk of Valley View Highway, so Reggie wouldn’t have to pass the site of the wreck, where mop-up and accident reconstruction were still under way.
They hit the crest and started sloping back down toward Tremonton. They passed through Beaver Dam, a small town. It was light now, raining.
Waiting at home was Reggie’s dad, Ed. He wasn’t sick with worry yet. He’d been heading out the door to work when Reggie had first called from the side of the road. Initially, he had just said he’d been in an accident, and Mary Jane had told Ed it didn’t sound that bad. Reggie said someone had swerved into his lane and that he was unhurt. So Mary Jane sent Ed off to work at the machine shop where he was the foreman.
But as soon as she got to the scene and realized what had happened—that two men were dead—she called Ed, and he went right home to wait. There still wasn’t any indication Reggie could be at fault, but Ed obviously wanted to be there for his son.
“What’s going to happen?” Reggie again asked his mother. “I don’t want to go to jail.”
EVERYTHING WAS GOING TO be okay, she told herself. Reggie was a polite boy, and the son who’d already survived a few challenges—the concussions in football; that goofy, lovable awkwardness; the odd birth. The day he was born, in late January 1987, Mary Jane’s doctor wanted to be there for the birth, but also to leave on a family vacation. He induced labor by stripping Mary Jane’s membranes at his office and, several hours later, Ed hustled her to the hospital. The baby came a few hours later, on the early morning of January 28. They had to suction his head to get him out.
“He came out with a cone head.” Mary Jane laughs when she tells the story. “I told the doctor to put him back in because he wasn’t done yet.”
She and Ed hadn’t yet thought of a name. A black-and-white television hung in the corner of the delivery room showing Pope John Paul II. His name, in Italian, was Giovanni Paolo II. It sounded a bit like Reggie.
“It was kind of sacrilegious,” the devout Mormon says of naming him after a pope. “But it just kind of fit.”
Reggie had been the second-to-last child of six, the siblings spanning in age from Vicki to Phill to Jake to Nick, who was eighteen months Reggie’s senior and his pal and constant competitor. Later came Whitney, born in 1999, when Reggie was almost thirteen. The Chevy they drove was nothing fancy, a standard model. But “standard” by then included some remarkable safety technology, like an antilock braking system, which allowed for swifter stoppage time and had first been developed in the 1960s. It had power steering. These were technologies that had been part of a profound effort to make cars and roads safer—along with airbags and billions spent to widen and improve roads. And yet traffic fatalities continued to be a tenacious problem.
The car didn’t have a navigation system. Those were in their infancy, with the first TomTom GO GPS first appearing in the Netherlands in 2005. Soon they were everywhere. That’s how fast things were moving on the technology front.
Mother and son drove home from the hospital mostly in silence. When they got to the red-brick house, Reggie marched right up to his room. He lay down on the twin bed that was pressed against the far wall and turned on his side, away from the door. He put his cell phone on the bed, behind him. He was exhausted, terrified, and unable to find any rest or peace. At the hospital, Rindlisbacher had suspected that might happen.
“Reggie’s probably going to have trouble sleeping. Can you get him something to help, if he needs it?”
This room was a particularly tough place to let his head clear. Not because it wasn’t quiet, but precisely because it was so quiet. Hardly any traffic, not even birds, not at this time of the day, in the drizzle. Through the window next to his bed, he could see the wooden jungle gym with the green slide, next to a one-bedroom brick cottage in the family’s backyard that had in years past been home to local missionaries.
Reggie tossed and turned. He looked at the ceiling, the red trim on the closet door, the bullhorn that hung over his bed, the radio station sticker on his door. His phone rang. He turned over and, without looking at it, sent the call to voice mail. It rang again. And then it started ringing regularly. Word was spreading. Reggie prayed. Please let me go back and do it over. I would trade anything to go bac
k.
HE TRIED TO FIGURE out what had happened, to piece it together. The last thing he remembered before the wreck was being on the opposite side of the road. But he couldn’t figure out if he’d been the one to drive there, or if something had hit him or someone had pushed him there. Try as he might, he couldn’t remember any sound of cars colliding.
His first vivid memory afterward came as he walked from his truck toward the Saturn. There was this stout man with a handlebar mustache who was getting off the phone with 911.
“What happened?” Reggie asked.
The man was Kaiserman, the farrier. He responded: “You just hit that car.”
TOM HIGGS, A MANAGER of advanced engineering at ATK Launch Systems, saw Brian Allen stand and walk to the center of the room, right in the middle of a dozen cream-colored cubicles. Brian looked grave. “That wreck—I think Keith and Jim were involved,” Brian said. He was one of Keith’s best friends.
Tom and the rest in the group had wondered why Keith was late, and they’d heard separately that there had been an accident on Valley View Highway. It was the route many at ATK took to this isolated desert spot situated roughly between Tremonton and Brigham City. You had to be in the middle of nowhere when you were building and testing rocket boosters—not just for the space shuttle, but for military missiles, too.
Brian had no further information, and returned to the phone to try to find out what happened. His seat was located near Keith’s in the mostly uniform batch of cubicles. But Keith’s work area stood out, for two reasons: He had a bigger cubicle, reflecting his status as a senior analyst and lead engineer, and his space appeared to be a mess. It was packed with piles of papers, journals, and reference materials, each standing two or three feet high. Stacks on the floor, stacks on the cabinets. To get Keith’s counsel, you kind of had to sidestep your way into his cubicle to avoid the papers.
And that’s what people did: came to get Keith’s advice. They’d do so for engineering, of course. But they’d seek his help for physics and even software coding, a tribute to a rare depth and breadth of scientific capability. Over in the production group at ATK, a whole different division, they sometimes had trouble with a machine that inspected the booster rockets’ O-ring grooves to make sure there was no corrosion. The production guys actually would turn to Keith to fix the software.
His chief charge, though, was designing the next generation of rockets. When the government or a defense contractor put something out for bid, the engineering team would use their computers to simulate new designs; the idea was to push the limits of physics and math, and of known resources and production capabilities, to create new generations of powerful, stable rockets.
There were major-league stakes: intellectual and scientific, financial, and, less often discussed, military. ATK and its denizens might’ve bragged about their relationship with NASA and the space shuttle, and they were absolutely integral in helping redesign its boosters. But the engineers also spent time designing strategic rockets under defense contracts, something perhaps less politically correct to advertise: Trident missiles, ICBMs, Minutemen. Nuclear weapons. The most powerful and deadly things in the world.
Until several months earlier, Jim had worked in the same bunch of cubicles as Keith. Then he moved to another part of the building to take over a managerial position on a key project: developing a new, more powerful booster for the space shuttle.
Brian, Keith’s close pal and Jim’s friend and colleague, returned to his cubicle to take a phone call and, less than a minute later, returned to the open area with an update. He was practically matter-of-fact about it—a reflection of disbelief or, perhaps, the communication style of the engineering culture.
Jim and Keith were dead.
VAN PARK STOOD AT the podium, shuffling papers, as the fifth-period students began pouring in. A boy approached.
“Coach Park, did you hear what happened to Reggie Shaw?”
Van shook his head.
“He got into a really bad accident.”
It was early afternoon on September 22, a few hours after Reggie’s car swerved left of center.
Van wore khakis, a golf shirt, and tennis shoes; he stood six feet tall and weighed 185 pounds, fit, his head a bushel of blond hair. On the wall of his classroom hung two flags for the Utah State University Aggies. There were posters warning students about the dangers of drugs and STDs. And there were three framed nature pictures, each one urging excellence with a word: Challenge, Determination, and Success.
It was room 157 at Bear River High School—coincidentally, the room that Reggie had taken his driver’s education class in during his sophomore year.
Van took a deep breath. The longtime health teacher and varsity basketball coach occasionally heard the rumors that whipped through Bear Valley High—so-and-so lost his arm in an accident, or so-and-so got arrested—and he always moderated his reaction until he heard what had actually happened.
Two thoughts went through Van’s mind: I hope Reggie’s okay, and, Valley View Drive can get real slick when it’s wet. It must have been one of those bad roads.
The boy reporting the news to Van had no further information—was Reggie okay, had anyone been hurt? Shrug. Van glanced out the window, into the seminary, a Mormon teaching center where students are allowed to spend a period each school day learning the gospel and earning credits toward seminary graduation.
Van tried to put these thoughts about Reggie out of his head, even as the rumors continued to swirl throughout the day. But Reggie had graduated only eighteen months earlier. And this was a small town in every conceivable way—size, population, culture. They supported one another, helped out in all the small-town ways. There were also dark secrets people didn’t much talk about, along with a gray market of gossip that could spread the ill-informed rumor as fast as any IM or text network.
TREMONTON HAD BEEN CLOSE-KNIT since it was settled in 1888 by folks of German descent by way of Tremont, Illinois. The settlers were largely Protestant, as compared to their Mormon neighbors. In 1903, when they formally incorporated as a township, they called their new home Tremont. But the postal service in Utah feared confusion with the town of Fremont. Hence: Tremonton.
Then Tremonton started to receive a heavy dose of Mormons, spreading out from Salt Lake City. They made significant outposts in Brigham City, just twenty minutes from Trementon, at the base of the mountains, and in Logan, the region’s hub, which held a larger temple. It was a place for marriages and sacred ordinances, not an everyday churchgoing experience.
Logan was at the base of the mountains, too, the ones that defined Utah in so many ways. When the prophet Brigham Young reached the base of the Wasatch Mountains, he reportedly declared, “This is the place.” The mountains proved a natural border of sorts. They helped explain why the community could grow so close, the families in the cities so interdependent, and their ideas in some ways so insular. It wasn’t easy to go over the mountains—either coming in or out, bringing ideas or taking them away.
Tremonton lay on the valley floor, making it good for farming. For many years, it had an odor, a pleasant one—sweet and a little moldy. That was the product of the sugar beet plant located two miles north of town, its aroma carried easily even with a light wind. The farms, like the seven-hundred-acre one that Reggie’s maternal granddad, Wilford, once tended, grew beets, mostly, and corn and wheat. There were cattle ranchers and dairy farmers, too.
Everyone knew everyone, proverbially, and, in the case of the Shaws, it was probably closer to literally. Mary Jane and Ed had gone to school there, and married at a little reception center on Main Street when she was barely eighteen and he was nineteen. Wilford, Mary Jane’s dad, who was known widely as Wit, was gregarious and easygoing, a pillar in every way.
Ed’s family had a rougher go. His mother had had a debilitating stroke when Ed was eleven; one of seven children. The four older ones had more or less left home, but that left Ed at home with a mother who had lost her ability to speak a
nd walk, and a father with a serious drinking problem. He wasn’t a binge drinker, and not a mean drunk, but he’d be tough to match for consistency. He managed to get himself to work every day, as a driver and odd-job doer for one of the town’s wealthy businessmen, and then he’d come home at night and head for the bottle.
His drink was whiskey. He’d hide it in the car. Every night, numerous times, he’d say: “I’ve just got to go to the car.” He thought he was being sneaky, but he fooled no one.
With his eye on the bottle, it wasn’t on Ed. The young man would spend many nights away from home with friends; his absence, he said, unnoticed. He smoked cigarettes, and he drank. He stayed in school, mostly to play sports.
Then he met Mary Jane and got married, and she got pregnant. He was determined to be a more attentive father than his father had been to him. He swore off smoking and drinking.
As a family, Mary Jane, Ed, and their six kids had a reputation for kindness and for their love of sports—the kids playing, and everyone watching and rooting. They’d go to the Utah State football games and travel to Las Vegas for the regional basketball conference championships. The TV was always tuned to some game or another. They never missed a game of Reggie’s.
While he wasn’t a star, Reggie was a good enough athlete to develop his own modest reputation in the sports-crazed community.
Maybe that’s why, on the morning of September 22, news spread so quickly that Reggie Shaw had been involved in a bad wreck. Maybe it’s because everyone thought that Reggie was such a good guy.
INDEED, FOR VAN, HIS old basketball coach, Reggie stood out because he was, in addition to being a strong guard with the will to rebound, a decidedly decent person. Van and his wife, Lisa, a French teacher at the high school (her classroom is directly above her husband’s) privately said how they wished they’d find someone like Reggie for one of their daughters. To Lisa, Reggie was a model kid: friendly, widely liked, quick-witted, but never seeming to crave the limelight. He got B-pluses and A-minuses in French, and, even though he was a jock, he “didn’t mind being called on in class.” Lisa thought of him as “the all-American boy.”