Richard Powers - Bewilderment

I settled into a manageable mix of jealousy and thrill. Lots of good, kind people wanted my wife. My wife seemed to want me. Nature, as Aly often showed me, was quite ingenious in keeping people just happy enough.

So it didn’t surprise me when she came home late from the farmers’ market one Saturday, bubbly from a round of flattering attention. I ran into Marty Currier at the Apple Lady’s stand. We had a quick coffee. He wants us to be in an experiment!

Martin Currier was one of Wisconsin’s high-profile scientists: senior research professor in neuroscience, National Academy of Sciences fellow, Hughes Investigator—the kinds of recognitions I dreamed of winning once but never will. He was one of the few people in town Aly could bird with and learn something from. They’d go out together in all seasons, and it made me nuts.

“Does he, now? I’m sure he’d like to experiment on you .”

She grinned and tucked into her pugilist stance, circling her fists in front of her face, bobbing and weaving. She always held her small fists way too close together when threatening to rabbit-punch me. I loved that.

Come on, buster. We should try it. He’s doing wild things .

The Currier Lab was exploring something called Decoded Neurofeedback. It resembled old-fashioned biofeedback, but with neural imaging for real-time, AI-mediated feedback. A first group of subjects—the “targets”—entered emotional states in response to external prompts, while researchers scanned relevant regions of their brains using fMRI. The researchers then scanned the same brain regions of a second group of subjects—the “trainees”—in real time. AI monitored the neural activity and sent auditory and visual cues to steer the trainees toward the targets’ prerecorded neural states. In this way, the trainees learned to approximate the patterns of excitation in the targets’ brains, and, remarkably, began to report having similar emotions.

The technique dated back to 2011, and it claimed some impressive early results. Teams in Boston and Japan taught trainees to solve visual puzzles faster, simply by training them on the visual cortex patterns of targets who’d learned the puzzles by trial and error. Other experimenters recorded the visual fields of target subjects exposed to the color red. Trainees who learned, through feedback, to approximate that same neural activity reported seeing red in their mind’s eye.

Since those days, the field had shifted from visual learning to emotional conditioning. The big grant money was going to desensitizing people with PTSD. DecNef and Connectivity Feedback were being touted as treatments to all kinds of psychiatric disorders. Marty Currier worked on clinical applications. But he was also pursuing a more exotic side-hustle.

“Why not?” I told my wife. And so we volunteered in her friend’s experiment.

IN THE RECEPTION AREA OF CURRIER’S LAB, Aly and I chuckled over the entrance questionnaire. We would be among the second wave of target subjects, but first we had to pass the screening. The questions disguised furtive motives. HOW OFTEN DO YOU THINK ABOUT THE PAST? WOULD YOU RATHER BE ON A CROWDED BEACH OR IN AN EMPTY MUSEUM? My wife shook her head at these crude inquiries and touched a hand to her smile. I read the expression as clearly as if we were wired up together: The investigators were welcome to anything they discovered inside her, so long as it didn’t lead to jail time.

I’d given up on understanding my own hidden temperament a long time ago. Lots of monsters inhabited my sunless depths, but most of them were nonlethal. I did badly want to see my wife’s answers, but a lab tech prevented us from comparing questionnaires.

DO YOU USE TOBACCO? Not for years. I didn’t mention that all my pencils were covered with bite marks.

HOW MUCH ALCOHOL DO YOU DRINK A WEEK? Nothing for me, but my wife confessed to her nightly Happy Hour, while plying the dog with poetry.

DO YOU SUFFER FROM ANY ALLERGIES? Not unless you counted cocktail parties.

HAVE YOU EVER EXPERIENCED DEPRESSION? I didn’t know how to answer that one.

DO YOU PLAY A MUSICAL INSTRUMENT? Science. I said I might be able to find middle C on a piano, if they needed it.

Two postdocs took us into the fMRI room. These people had way more cash to throw around than any astrobiology team anywhere. Aly was having the same thoughts about her impoverished NGO. I hoped envy wouldn’t cloud our brain scans.

I braved the scanner first. Aly sat with Martin Currier in the control booth behind a bank of monitors. That seemed suspect to me, but he was the one with all the research awards. The earpiece I wore inside the fMRI tube instructed me to relax, close my eyes, and listen to my breathing. They fed me some stimuli, for calibration. There was a bit of Moonlight Sonata and a snippet from something harsh and modern. They told me to open my eyes. A screen above my face showed, in turn, images of a bluebird on a branch, a happy baby, a magnificent holiday meal, and a close-up of a fractured forearm with bone coming through the skin. After that, I was told to close my eyes for another minute and mind my breathing again.

Then came the real experiment. Aly and I would each be given a random feeling from the eight core emotional states in Plutchik’s typology: Terror, Amazement, Grief, Loathing, Rage, Vigilance, Ecstasy, or Admiration. We’d have four minutes to inhabit our given mental state. Software would make a three-dimensional map of part of our limbic system while we were absorbed in the task.

They gave me Admiration . I closed my eyes and settled into vague thoughts about Einstein, Dr. King, and Sydney Carton. But off in the booth, my wife was watching the ebb and flow of my feeling. The thought of her made me remember an evening we’d lived through together, in the depths of an upper midwestern winter four years before.

Aly had just been appointed midwestern coordinator, and the man replacing her as state supervisor was proving to be inept. In Maryland for the organization’s three-day biannual national meeting, she’d spent hours on the phone nursing her successor through various crises. While there, she caught a nasty cold. Ice storms delayed her return flight by half a day. I picked her up at the airport at nine at night, little Robbie in tow. In her absence, he’d developed an ear infection. He howled until after midnight, when Aly let her sick and weary head touch the pillow at last.

The phone woke her at one-thirty in the morning: her hapless new state supervisor, calling in a tizzy. The police way upstate in Rhinelander had found a truck with a dozen caged dogs left for hours in subzero temperatures in a Walmart parking lot. They traced the truck to a sprawling puppy mill, which they shut down. Hundreds of dogs flooded into Oneida County’s sole overwhelmed shelter. The locals reached out to Aly’s NGO, although such a problem lay way outside her rights-oriented organization’s bailiwick.

Her successor wanted to know who to dish the crisis off on. Aly told him, What are you talking about? Go up and help them out . The man said that was way below his pay grade. They talked for twenty minutes, with my zombied wife never once sounding anything less than rational. The man still refused. So at sunrise Alyssa packed a backpack and got in the car to drive three and a half hours on icy state roads by herself. I kept asking, “Are you sure ?” Not exactly the support she deserved.

She returned forty-eight hours later, after shepherding two hundred dogs to shelters across upper Wisconsin. She got out of the car looking like a Central Casting nineteenth century French peasant dying of consumption. She went straight to wailing Robin and comforted him for an hour. Then she wrote a speech she had to deliver in Des Moines the next day. After midnight once again, she looked at me with comically crossed eyes, proclaimed herself tuckered out , and slept for five hours before getting up to drive to Iowa.