In search of my own brain

In an excerpt from "Mind Wide Open" Steven Johnson details his attempt to catch his own mind in the act of thinking.

By Steven Johnson

Feb 18, 2004 | Several years ago the neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp began researching that most elusive of aesthetic experiences: the "chill" that you feel in your spine listening to moving passages of music. Panksepp's studies make a convincing case that the shiver of pleasure we experience while listening to our favorite music is the release of endogenous opioids, the same molecules implicated in social bonding, parental love, the "runner's high" -- and, of course, in narcotic drugs like heroin and morphine. Panksepp has found that animals appear to have chill responses to music as well. In one widely cited study, he played dozens of records to chickens attached to equipment designed to record their shivers of pleasure. (The chickens turned out to have the strongest positive response to the late-era Pink Floyd record "The Final Cut.")

Now imagine taking Panksepp's experiment one step further: instead of a chicken's brain listening to Pink Floyd, imagine peering into a brilliant composer's brain as he or she dreams up a new composition. Thus far, most brain-imaging research has focused on normal brains and on brains that suffer from some kind of disability. But we also have the opportunity to scan brains that are unusual in the sense of being unusually gifted. What vista into the world of inspiration will this open up to us?

I don't know firsthand what moments of true musical inspiration feel like. For me, inspiration revolves around words and sentences, and not melody and harmony. I'm not imagining myself to be a literary Stravinsky, but stringing text into narratives and arguments has been the most fluid of my mental faculties for as long as I can remember. Could brain science have something useful to say about this talent? I wanted to know what was happening in my head when a new insight arrived, usually half formed and barely grasped: a vague connection between two ideas, a new way of introducing a troublesome chapter, a phrasing for a sentence. For reasons probably both genetic and cultural, I am not much of a mystic, but these flashes of insight were the closest thing I had to the experience of mysticism. These sparks were the transcendence that Keats sought when he commanded us to "open wide the mind's cage'd doors." An idea shoots in front of my mind's eye seemingly out of nowhere. Where did it come from?

How extraordinary that we can even begin to answer this question! We can only speculate where new ideas come from in the sense of their evolutionary roots, and we don't really understand how the firing of neurons creates the rich subtleties of ideation. But we can determine, with split-second precision, the parts of the brain that are active in the creation of a new idea. We can map mental processes as ephemeral as having a hunch. On a fundamental level, we can tell where the hunch comes from. All it takes is a brave, nonclaustrophobic subject and a $2 million magnet.

I thought I was precisely that brave, nonclaustrophobic subject until they strapped my head down to the mechanical gurney, and I began sliding into a two-foot-wide tube, with only a mirror the size of a playing card supplying me with a glimpse of the outside world.

There's no better way to say it: I was having my head examined. Mechanically speaking, the exam was being conducted by a five-ton GE Twin-Speed fMRI scanner. My guide through the world of advanced brain scanning was Joy Hirsch, director of Columbia University's Brain Imaging Group, who had graciously offered to help me in my pursuit: to see the brain, from the inside, as it comes up with a new idea.

A week or so before my appointment with the scanner, I suggested an experimental structure to Joy: we would begin with my reading a series of nonsense sentences, followed by my reading someone else's prose, and then I would read a passage of my own work -- a passage from this book, in fact. In reading my own passage, I hoped to spur one of those imaginative leaps: something about the words would make me think of a new line to add, or a new way of phrasing the idea, or some other unpredictable insight. If all went well, the machine would take a snapshot of that idea forming in my head. fMRI scans can capture subtle shifts of activity within a three-dimensional model of the brain by measuring levels of oxygenation in the blood of nerve cells. It is not a perfect view by any means -- you have to have roughly 500,000 neurons active in an area for the scan to register them -- but it is as close to pure vision of the mind's inner life as current technology allows us.

When I arrive for my session, Joy and I sit down in her office. She explains that each stage of the experiment will involve three sections of forty seconds each: rest, activity, rest. The scanner will start up, and I'll do my best to think of nothing for forty seconds. Then the stimuli will begin -- the flashing checkerboard or the text -- and I'll process that for another forty seconds. And then I'll think of nothing again. Each 120-second stage will be repeated twice.

As Joy lays out the sequence, I start to worry that I won't have time to actually think while in the machine; I don't want to spend the whole forty seconds reading, particularly once we get to my own words. I want to have the words trigger some new idea or association in my head. So Joy agrees to make a last-minute addition: a final stage during which I'm shown a single sentence from my book and given the entire forty seconds to ruminate.

Then Joy walks me through the risks. "We're looking at your brain here. So there's a very small chance that we might see something in these scans, some abnormality."

I nod. "You mean a brain tumor."

"Sometimes when we do work with experimental subjects -- people who come in to help with our research, and who don't have any symptoms -- they say, 'If you see something in there, don't tell me.'"

"Hey, if you see something in there that you don't like," I smile ruefully, "by all means let me know."

Then she moves on to the dangers associated with the scanner itself. "It is a fundamentally safe procedure, noninvasive." I think of a news story from a few years back in which hospital staff had left a metal trash can in the room with an fMRI. When they began scanning a patient, the magnetic field triggered by the scanner being switched on turned the trash can into a lethal projectile that killed the guy instantaneously.

I choose not to bring this up.

A minute or two later, we walk over to the fMRI room. The machine itself looks like an oversized clothes drier -- about ten feet high with a huge GE logo embossed above the hollow tube at its center. I lie down on the mechanical gurney, and the technician gently tapes my forehead to the cradle at the end, hands me a pair of earplugs.

And then I'm in.

Next Page: Welcome to the machine

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