Introduction to Computational Neurobiology

It sounded simple when the Doctor said it: You ask him what we are doing.

Over the next few days I started framing the question, but every time I got near Alex, it jumbled with a bunch of reasons not to ask. His eyes were gooey, and not just in a sad way. We thought it was conjunctivitis but turned out it was an infected tear duct. He tried to clean it up but at breakfast there was still a pearly film over the bottom half of his pupil and yellow gunk caked in his eyelashes. Rachel said it was disgusting and could be contagious and he should go back to his room. For me, it just heightened his weakness rating, and my aversion to hard questions in case they made him cry.

And: who was I to ask?

And: maybe I didn’t want to know.

And (of course): I got distracted by other things.

When I came in for my next lesson, PW was sitting straight-backed at one of the desks. In spite of his colourless demeanour, he affected a series of well-worn retro tie-dye T-shirts featuring designs and decals ranging from iconic to kitsch—Michael Jackson, Darth Vader, Malibu sunsets, an acid house smiley face that I thought was a Pac-Man. For a minute, in the beginning, I thought he was gay, but he didn’t feel gay, and I didn’t dwell on it. Today it was a V-neck Snoopy in shades of purple and fluoro blue. Wearing a headset plugged into my tablet, he continued to tap and swipe as I sat down next to him, and then cleared the screen and removed the headset.

‘Something different today,’ he said. ‘You ever meditate?’

Do I look like someone who meditates?

He saw my lip curl but was undeterred, tilting his head and staring at me too long like he was processing a new data entry. I knew what the others meant about PW, but I saw something like the way a dog stares when it wants to be part of the human race. ‘Or not,’ he said, ‘not yet…I’ll lead in.’

I shrugged.

‘Let’s make the links.’

Whatever.

‘A couple of weeks ago we were talking about magnetism and electrical currents, and we got on to the electromagnetic activity in the brain. You remember that?’

‘Sure.’

He did the recap thing at the beginning of every lesson, reeled off a set of facts and paused when he wanted me to fill in the word:

‘So, the human brain contains about a billion…’

‘Neurons.’

‘And the neurons are electrically charged by…’

‘Ions.’

Sometimes he threw in an oddball like: ‘Last Monday I was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of…’ ‘Wonder Woman.’ I had a jackpot memory, he said (deadpan; the same way he’d break the news if I had an inoperable tumour).

‘What it means for us is that we can record activity, neural oscillations, better known as…’

‘Brainwaves,’ I interjected. He hadn’t even told me that.

‘That’s right…Through a technique called EEG. Heard of it?’

‘Yeah, I think so.’

His tone changed at that point. He paused, weighing up what should come next, then when he spoke it was tentative, like he was trying to sell me something without being exactly sure of the product. ‘It is limited, what we can do. We can observe different levels of activity, create cluster maps; but we need to know the source. We have only really just started to do that, develop the algorithms. We’ve come a fair way with sleep stages…’ He tilted his head again, gauging my reaction. ‘You with me?’

I nodded. ‘Sort of.’

He nodded back. ‘You can imagine the complexity,’ he said. ‘The last algorithm to determine the signal location of a brainwave was half a million lines long—’ He broke off into some of the mathematical concepts for a while, then stopped himself mid-sentence and picked up the headset. ‘May I?’

I assumed he was going to put it on, but instead he reached over to me (he had a lemony smell) and placed them on my head, pressing gently on the forehead and behind my ears. Nothing went inside my ears; there was just the headband.

‘Where are the earpieces?’

‘You don’t need them.’

‘So how will I listen?’

‘You’re not listening. Watch.’ He plugged it into the laptop. And then tentative again: ‘Its function’s not audio. It’s biofeedback.’

He was observing me to see if I understood, as he would have if he’d been explaining trigonometry. When my face remained blank he turned his attention back to the computer, pushed a few keys. After a minute or two he said, ‘Not quite,’ and then: ‘Yes, there you are!’ It was language I’d heard before, from Helen. Hold off, not quite there yet, okay, there you are…

On the black screen there appeared a series of animated data visualisations. The first was a bar graph, separated into different bands of fluoro colours labelled theta, alpha, beta, delta and gamma, each bar in constant flux. He pointed his marker to it, and he tapped his hands on the desk as though mimicking a drum roll.

‘Meet your brainwaves.’

When I say drum roll I mean just tap-tap-tap. This was all very calm and careful and normal. If they were after someone to deliver this new information without causing alarm, PW was their guy.

I was only now starting to twig. Stage one in the penny dropping: there you are. The headset—this is me, my brain—the different bands rising and falling, and the larger graph—a circular shape with ten axis points representing the same bands, from high to low, the chart constantly morphing in colour and shape.

This thing on my head is monitoring my brainwaves.

‘It measures the voltage intensity and fluctuations. The software is breaking down the millions of neural signals according to their cycles per second.’

He gave me a minute to take it in, looking relieved when eventually I came up with a question. ‘So what does it mean?’

‘They represent the levels of activity, the different frequencies. Twenty words or less: beta has the fastest frequency, delta is your deep sleep; alpha and theta are somewhere in between.’

‘They’re all going at the same time.’

‘That’s right. There are several patterns interacting. The predominance of one pretty much determines your state of mind.’

It took a while, and even then there wasn’t a lot to my response: ‘Out of control…’ I said.

He took it literally. ‘Not really.’ And he dived into an explanation of how different areas of the brain emit different signals. ‘That’s where the algorithms come in, trying to locate the source. Once we know that, we can find ways to better interpret the meaning. There are certain structures, in the subcortical region—’ He pulled up the brain map and circled a section with his finger. ‘There are well-known patterns we can detect here. But, like I said, it is limited, what we understand about the neural sources. We know beta is left hemisphere and theta is right, but it is as broad as that.’ He shrugged and smiled. ‘There are people working on it.’

By now his voice had faded into a background noise. I didn’t really understand what any of it meant, but already I was somewhere else, mesmerised by the dancing rainbow on the screen.

PW had to tap my arm to snap me out of it. ‘So try doing something,’ he said. ‘See what happens.’

‘Like what?’

Returning to his opening play: ‘Meditating is a good one.’

I thought about it for a moment. ‘I don’t know how to do that. Can we do something else?’

‘Sure. Focus on something, an object…’ He put his water bottle in front of the computer.

‘You want me to think about the bottle?’

He shrugged. I didn’t get the sense he had any real plan. ‘As best you can.’

I stared at the bottle trying to keep one eye on the screen. On the bar graph my beta shot up and the circular shape pulled to one side and flatlined.

‘Is that bad?’

‘No, it means you’re focused.’

‘So that’s good? That’s what you wanted me to do.’

‘Well, you are hi-beta.’

‘So that’s…not good.’

‘It indicates a state of agitation. If it is persistent, it isn’t good. It is a stress response. A stress hormone is flooding your brain.’

‘So that’s bad.’

He shrugged. ‘It is notable, that thinking about a water bottle brought it on. The theory of brain plasticity is that there are things they can do, to tune, reset….’ He saw me stiffen. The shape blew out into a sort of starfish. ‘That’s not what this is about. This is about you being able to observe it and get a better understanding. That is all.’

To prove it he moved back to the maths. ‘Let’s talk about the algorithm. If we go back to the ionic currents,’ he minimised the screen and turned to the brain map on the whiteboard, ‘here, in the frontal lobe…’

And there was the shift: just like that, I thought, from lab rat back to student. I started taking off the headset. He stopped me.

‘You can leave them on, if that’s okay.’

I obliged, wearing my headset as we worked on the whiteboard. It was only then that the realisation came. Stage two, the bigger picture, our story here at the School: we weren’t watching my brainwaves anymore, but this thing was still on my head and someone else was watching, or recording. Someone sitting at a different interface, in a different room. I thought back to the day I first put the headset on. Noise-blocking, surround sound, Tod had whispered. And then just the pretty noises that switched off once the images started. Later there were the video games and the music, so it seemed to come with a legitimate purpose. But that was not the purpose, not the music or the games. The function isn’t audio. It is biofeedback. And I was the bio; we all were. We were dutifully putting on our hi-tech headsets, because what teenager wouldn’t, and—

I started to put it into words. ‘Whenever we wore them, whenever we wear them…’ He waited for me to finish my thought, a glimmer in his eyes urging me on. (I am not really sure why, but through all this, there was never a minute I didn’t feel that that PW was on my side.) ‘Whenever we wear them,’ I repeated, as it sank in, ‘we are being tracked.’

He nodded. ‘OMR,’ he said. ‘Observe, monitor, record.’

Thinking on this now, I will generalise and say that adolescents have very particular concerns with privacy: lay a finger on their phone and they’ll rip your head off; covertly track the inner machinations of their mind, and they’re cool with it. In questioning PW as the plot revealed itself (or as he revealed it to me), the feeling was more excitement than anger—excitement that I was the one uncovering a hidden truth. We all knew there was one; but I was getting the scoop. And it fitted with my narrative, or at least I could work it in: handpicked youth, handpicked brains…I accepted it all without prodding for purpose—that wasn’t my priority. This was: ‘Are you showing the others?’

‘No.’

And the big question: ‘Why me?’

He took a while on this one. ‘He asked me to.’

I don’t have to tell you how good this made me feel. Me. Handpicked out of the handpicked. My next question was more just to test the boundaries. ‘What if I tell them?’

‘You mean what would happen to you?’ He looked away; the sense I got at this point was that this was very much someone else’s game and someone else’s rules. ‘You’d have to look at your contract.’

And of course, there lay the answer. I couldn’t discuss my treatment: as between the School and DG, and as such it must remain. I’d had my warning, so it would mean I was out, once and for all. I had a flash of home, and then I looked around the room, envisioned beyond the door and through the curved corridors: all this for my silence. And what I thought was, open and shut case. Fair trade.

I wish we could show you.

For the weeks that followed I met with PW and put on my headset and watched as the software broke down the millions of neural signals according to their cycles per second. He took me through the basic science of wave propagation and psycho-acoustics and I got to know my patterns—when I blinked, when I focused on a thought or tried to clear my mind of them, and finally I agreed to give it a go: to meditate myself out of hi-beta. PW knew more than he’d let on, guiding me with chakra points ‘like mental stepping stones’.

‘Chakra points. You buy that shit?’

He shrugged. ‘I think it’s useful for things like this. You see that?’ he said, pointing to the alpha jumping up and down. ‘That is spontaneous wandering.’

‘That’s bad…’

‘No, it is a default activity. It is good. It processes your experience. You need to do that.’

My issue was when I had too much beta. I went beyond hi-beta, PW said, into hyper-beta (the resting state of paranoid schizophrenics, I later learned).

‘You should see what happened when you got to the end of Miles Davis.’ The others went into low alpha, but me, I surged into hyper-beta. He almost smiled then. ‘It’s like you were wrestling every bar of it to the ground.’ (I remembered finding the last part a struggle.)

That brought me to the question: ‘So…when I lose it? I mean like lose it…’

He nodded. ‘Any kind of explosive behaviour, sure, we’d see a beta spike. Any kind of over-arousal, hyper-alertness…But remember we see the same kind of spike with complex thinking. It isn’t all negative. If we could track the brains of the dead geniuses we’d see a trail of hi-beta. Isaac Newton, massive rage issues.’

‘Kurt Cobain,’ I added.

He nodded. ‘Kurt too.’

‘What about this here?’ I asked. It was the last of the band frequencies, a lime green that barely registered.

‘Gamma.’

He explained the deal with gamma: it is so high we can barely detect it and we don’t know what part of the brain it is from or how it’s generated. Some even question its existence. ‘It is a bit of a Mecca of brainwaves.’

I had no ambitions of Mecca. I was just happy to have my own label. I was a beta-boy. That gave me plenty to focus on, playing through the events of the last few weeks and pinpointing my beta bursts—the obvious ones: in the corridor with Greg, my midnight session in the Doctor’s office. But others too. Bush-bashing on the first field trip, sitting outside Rachel’s door, moving wooden animals around an imaginary stage, and yeah, Miles Davis… All those times the heart started beating faster and I could feel it moving, gravitating, some kind of energy, good or bad, good and bad…the buzz in the brain, the electric charge. Every adrenaline rush, every shower session, the beginning of a berserko: hi-beta, hyper-beta—whichever way, I had too much. In hindsight, of course, it raises more questions than it answers. But give me a sixteen-year-old who delves deeper into their motivations than the pattern of their brainwaves and I’ll eat my laptop.

The short of it was there was a profound and liberating simplicity to it. Beta was the reason I did what I did—beta was the reason I was me.

For the next few weeks, a load was lifted. That was my initial takeaway from the meet and greet with my brainwaves: I was off the hook. It was hands down the best tick-a-box diagnosis I’d ever had, because this one I had seen for myself. There was the odd day when I didn’t have enough of it, when I dipped into the mental fog (Ritalin is all about the beta boost). But whichever direction I moved—morphing according to voltage—I noted it and brought it back to my sessions with PW.

I jumped in too deep. When I should have been in the now of alpha, I was assessing oscillations. It was all I am experiencing the release of neurotransmitters. I am in the drop zone. Never just I am.

And then it started slipping out in conversation.

In the courtyard: ‘Way too much talk, Tod—hi-beta…’

‘What the fuck?’

I didn’t realise I’d said it. ‘Nothing.’

My new world started leaking through into my old one. Even without the headset, I started visualising the activity, estimating the amplitude. Like the separation between church and state, there is a sound structural reason to let the executive centre do its thing. Observe, record, interpret and decode, all that, but do it at a distance. The self-monitoring started to swallow me up. When I put the headset on, it was like I could hear it, the infrasound.

Looking back on it now, I see it was an early warning sign of what happens when a guy like me messes with different levels of consciousness. The end of my first year of university, in a cannabis-induced rut, I met a woman called Fiona who suggested that I keep a notebook by my bed and write down my dreams every morning. Because I very much wanted to get into Fiona’s pants, I dutifully did that, my regular reports back to her providing a justification for ongoing contact. Day by day I remembered my dreams with increasing clarity, able to scribe page after page of stuff and nonsense from the garbage pit of my subconscious. Then a strange thing happened. The dreams started to appear throughout the day—like visions, mundane and outlandish—as though a portal had been opened and a black, viscous substance was seeping through into my only sunlit place. In a perplexing blurring, I began to question whether memories were dreams or dreams were memories, until day seven when I started babbling like a garbled mess and Fiona stopped taking my calls. I never even copped a feel. (I probably don’t need to paint a picture of my psychedelic bender with a bucket of magic mushrooms in the summer of that same year.)

Anyhow, it was something akin to what happened with me and my brainwaves. A portal leakage. I got too close. Staring up at the night sky I felt myself putting beta to bed, slipping into the hypnagogic drumbeat of delta, queasy on the crest of a slow-motion undulation…My chakra points vaporised in the border zone, leaving just the echo of a mantra:

I am an ocean…I am an ocean…I am an ocean.

Out of the corner of my eye I could see Tod staring. I’d done it again.

He reached over to pat my hand. ‘Sure, why not?’ Even on the question of sanity, he was prepared to give me the benefit of the doubt. ‘I am an ocean too.’

Suffice to say, by the end of a six-week intensive with my brainwaves—in spite of the answers they offered—I was feeling a bit suffocated. They were the invisible new friend sitting on my shoulder; or, in this case, a group of semi-clad back-up singers lounging against the cushion of my meninges. Like any relationship, things had been great in the beginning, fresh and new, but it turned out there was no off button. First with Tod, then with Alex and even Rachel, for a couple of weeks I was just watching people’s lips move while the nag in my brain jumped up and down: ‘Look at me, look at me…’ I even gave up a shower session to sit cross-legged on my mat and try to find a way to get past my root chakra, the pelvic plexus.

I needed space. PW picked up on it. We stopped looking at the charts and graphs, and moved away from anything to do with oscillations and waves.

‘I think we need to put it in perspective.’

It was a sound strategy: pick a subject to show me and my brainwaves up for what we really amounted to: an infinitesimal speck in the universe. Physical cosmology. He launched straight into it, pulling up an image of the farthest galaxies, each dot of light an individual galaxy some ten billion years old. He grounded us down in particle physics and the Big Bang and the mystery of dark energy and we went gangbusters, safely fumbling from the basic ratios through to equations denoting the cosmological constant and the expansion of the universe…It wasn’t a great leap to get back to where we started (from the vibrations in the fabric of space-time to my own mind-body vibrations) but it was the circuit-breaker I needed. Me and my brainwaves back on level ground.

There was just one thing that kept niggling, whenever I put the headphones on: the fact that someone, somewhere, was watching, recording, making judgment.

For that I came up with my own solution.

Up until this point, Dr J and I had largely stepped around the subject of my brainwaves. When I brought it up after PW’s big reveal, he had been interested in my reaction and said we could incorporate it into our ‘work’. When I then resisted coming back to the ‘work’, i.e. the task of recreating my fucked-up childhood on the imaginary stage, he asked me to consider my reaction: ‘Imagine the headset is on. What would the graph tell you?’

‘You watch it?’ I asked. ‘The graph?’

He shook his head. ‘I get reports.’

He talked about my ‘range’, and my ‘little peaks of theta’. During video games there was a distinct levelling out in fluctuations and when I listened to the Beach Boys I sat on the alpha-delta cusp for eleven seconds. But he didn’t want to dwell on my brainwaves. He didn’t want us to go too far ‘off course’. The course for him was still the same. We were up to Brian.

He held firm.

‘What happened, what he did…I want to bring it a bit closer to the surface.’

I thought of the old western movies, a knife plunged into the gut of a staggering cowboy, and I remembered watching them and thinking—just pull it out. But you can’t. You can’t just pull it out, because it might well kill you. And I wondered now if it was worth the risk, and I felt that longing that I felt all my life: you would do it if someone could just tell you it will be all right.

I was trying to read that into his words when he suggested a way forward. ‘Let’s come at it another way: you be Mary.’

More out of exhaustion than anything I sat back down. I hadn’t been Mary before. I let him go. He asked her the same questions and I gave him answers or I just thought them to myself:

Horoscopes. David Attenborough. Madonna. Yum cha.

Just meet him, baby. He’s different. He was; Brian was different. He looked better, sounded better. He bought her a necklace and took us to laser skirmish. He didn’t use; he didn’t even drink. His dad had overdosed in prison. He told the story and Mary cried. That poor little guy…He started staying over that night, then he brought his things. I asked him where he lived and he said he was between places. There was a bend in his smile but she didn’t see it. She wanted to believe; so did I. It didn’t start with a push or a cut and there was never any sorry or any crawling back. He made her crawl. And I watched on. He lived with us for eleven days.

And the third question. The day he left. ‘You’re in the flat… Where is he? How do you feel about him now?’

‘That’s two questions,’ I said. ‘He’s in the kitchen.’ And we left it at that.

It was my turn.

‘The brainwaves: why did you tell me?’ Everything seemed suddenly to hinge on it. My place, my existence here, my survival… Why me?

‘You look concerned,’ he said gently. ‘Don’t be. Trial and test, that’s all.’ Then came a broad smile. ‘Here’s something: your measurements. I have an explanation for that appetite of yours. In just over two months you have grown 3.6 centimetres.’

He could see he had my interest, and he could see that I was pleased. But it wasn’t just measurements I needed.

‘I want a report,’ I said. ‘Like you get. I don’t want to watch the graphs anymore. But I want the report. I want to see what you all see.’ When he hesitated, I pointed to the contract on the table. ‘It’s in there: School to provide student with copies of written records and reports…’

He nodded, impressed. ‘So it is. Fair request.’

We sat for a bit, mulling over where we had landed.

Finally: ‘I’d like to keep this up,’ he said. ‘Any other questions you have…Turn this more into an open book, so to speak—a sort of conversation among equals. How does that sound, Daniel?’

It sounded fine. And I had a question ready.

‘You told me you were wrong—when I asked why you’re here. What were you wrong about?’

The answer was that he thought he could find a cure for something, but it was not a cure at all.

‘Was it a drug?’

‘It was a new way to name things, a new way to use old drugs.’

I shrugged. ‘So now you find the right way.’ I could tell there was more to it, but there was another question I wanted to ask. ‘You say I can ask anything?’ I said.

He smiled. ‘Within reason.’

The boy is untied and taken to a room. A man in a suit enters. He asks him to think about the purpose of his existence, and offers him just one wish. It takes the boy only six seconds to decide what it will be.

It wasn’t just a wish. It was an acceptance of his offer. Basic bargain theory, quid pro quo…

‘I want to know what happened to Rachel.’