Richard Powers - Bewilderment

“Theo. Huh. How’ve you been?” He sounded almost like he wanted to know. That came from years of studying human emotions. “I felt miserable about missing Alyssa’s service.”

I lifted my shoulders and let them fall. Two years ago; ancient history. “Honestly? I couldn’t tell you who was there and who wasn’t. I don’t remember much of it at all.”

“How can I help you?”

“I need to ask something confidential.”

He nodded and took me down the hall and out of the building. We sat in a cafeteria in the School of Medicine, each with a hot beverage that neither of us wanted.

“This is a bit embarrassing. I know you’re not a clinician, but I have nowhere else to go. Robin’s in trouble. His grade school is threatening me with the Department of Human Services if I don’t dope him up.”

He took an instant to place Robin . “Has he been diagnosed with something?”

“So far the votes are two Asperger’s, one probable OCD, and one possible ADHD.”

He smiled, bitter and sympathetic. “This is why I dropped out of clinical psych.”

“Half the third-graders in this country could be squeezed into one of those categories.”

“That’s the problem.” He looked around the cafeteria, scanning for colleagues who might overhear us. “What do they want to put him on?”

“I’m not sure his principal cares, so long as Big Pharma gets their cut.”

“Most of the common meds are pretty normalized, you know.”

“He’s nine years old .” I caught myself and calmed down. “His brain is still developing.”

Martin raised his hands. “That’s young, for psychoactive drugs. I wouldn’t want to experiment on my nine-year-old.”

He was a clever man. I could see why my wife liked him. He waited me out. At last I confessed, “He threw a thermos at a friend’s face.”

“Huh. I broke my friend’s nose once. But he deserved it.”

“Would Ritalin have helped?”

“My father’s treatment of choice was the belt. And it turned me into the exemplary adult you see before you.”

I laughed and felt better. Quite a trick on his part. “How do any of us make it to adulthood?”

My wife’s friend squinted into the past, trying to remember her son. “How bad would you say his anger gets?”

“I don’t know how to answer that.”

“He did peg that boy.”

“That wasn’t entirely his fault.” Nothing was ever entirely anyone’s fault. His hands got confused .

“Are you afraid he might hurt someone? Has he ever come after you?”

“No. Never. Of course not.”

He knew I was lying. “I’m not a doctor. And even doctors can’t give you a reliable opinion without a formal consult. You know that.”

“No doctor can diagnose my son better than I can. I just want some treatment short of drugs that will calm him down and get his principal off my back.”

The man came to attention, as he once did while looking at my wife’s brain scan. He leaned back in the plastic scoop of his chair. “If you’re looking for non-pharmacologic therapy, we could put him in one of our trials. We’re testing DecNef’s efficacy as a behavioral intervention. A subject your son’s age would be a valuable data point. He’d even make a little pocket money.”

And I could tell Dr. Lipman my son was enrolled in a behavioral modification program at U Double U. “There wouldn’t be any human-subject concerns with someone that young?”

“It’s a non-invasive process. We train him how to attend to and control his own feelings, the same way behavioral therapy does, only with an instant, visible scorecard. The Institutional Review Board has signed off on projects a lot dicier than ours.”

We walked back to his office. The trees were bare and snow crystals wavered sideways in the air. It smelled like the year would end a little early, this year. But undergrads drifted past us still in shorts.

Currier explained how much had changed since Aly and I had volunteered to be target subjects. DecNef was maturing. Discovery and validation cohorts at universities here and throughout Asia were probing its clinical potential. DecNef was showing promise in pain management and the treatment of OCD. Connectivity Feedback was proving useful in managing depression, schizophrenia, and even autism.

“A high-performing trainee—someone who shows a knack with the feedback—can enjoy symptom amelioration for several weeks.”

He described what was involved. The scanning AI would compare the patterns of connectivity inside Robin’s brain—his spontaneous brain activity —to a prerecorded template. “Then we’ll shape that spontaneous activity through visual and auditory cues. We’ll start him on the composite patterns of people who have achieved high levels of composure through years of meditation. Then the AI will coax him with feedback—tell him when he’s close and when he’s farther away.”

“How long does the training last?”

“We sometimes see significant improvement after only a few sessions.”

“And the risks?”

“Lower than those of the school cafeteria, I’d say.”

I bit down on my anger. But he saw it.

“Theo. Forgive me. I was being glib. Neural feedback is an assistive procedure. Anything happening to his brain is something he’s learning to do himself, by reflection, concentration, and practice.”

“Like reading. Or taking a class.”

“That’s right. Only faster and more effective. Probably more fun, too.”

At the word fun , a look crossed his face, and the weirdest intuition told me he was remembering Alyssa. The two of them had sat still for hours, side by side in the middle of nowhere, just looking. You don’t always get them by the specific field marks , Aly taught me, before boredom led me to abandon birding with her. You know them by the shape, size, and impression. You feel them. We call that getting the jizz .

“Marty, thank you. This is a lifesaver.”

He waved me off. “Let’s see what results we get.”

I left him at the door of his office. When I stuck out my hand, he wrapped me in an awkward side-hug. On the wall behind him was a poster of a tree-lined beach with the words:

The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels.

I was entrusting my traumatized son to a careerist neuroscientist-birder who still had a thing for my dead wife and decorated his office with cheesy posters quoting Thoreau.

YOU MEAN, LIKE A VIDEO GAME? My son loved games, but they also scared him. The fast-twitch shooters or the action scrollers where you had to jump at just the right moment made him nuts. He’d attack them with zeal, then retreat, routed, in a fury. They stood for the whole pecking order of competition that ruled the kingdom of his peers. When a certain racing game made him throw my tablet across the room and I banned him from playing it again, he seemed relieved. But he adored his farm. He could click on his fields to get wheat and click on the mill to grind flour and click on the oven to bake bread, all day long.

“Yes,” I said. “A little like a game. You’ll try to move a dot around on a screen or make a musical note sound softer or louder or higher or lower. It’ll get easier with practice.”

All with my brain ? That’s insane, Dad .

“Yep. Pretty crazy.”

Wait. It’s like something. It reminds me of something else . He paddled the air with one hand and sawed at his chin with the other—warning me to let him think. He snapped a finger. Like one of your worlds. “Imagine a planet where the people plug their brains into one another.”