I found myself hoping that one day Winifred would fulfill the promise she and Leonard had made to each other the fateful night when Leonard tumbled into the gray zone. With his wife beside him, he would return to India, where their journey had begun so many years ago. The singular arc of their lives would come full circle. Winifred would take her husband home.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  READING MINDS

  The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

  —Isaac Asimov

  Sitting in the smallest, and quite possibly the most quintessentially French, five-star restaurant in Paris recently, I couldn’t help but marvel at how much gray-zone science had rippled outward to embrace our quest to understand consciousness itself. L’Hotel is nestled in the heart of the Left Bank of the Seine and has been serving culinary miracles for two centuries. It was early July and a beautifully warm Paris evening. The street outside was filled with the hustle and bustle of Parisians making their way home from work or heading out for the evening. Inside the restaurant, red and black velvet chairs were scattered around small round tables, each adorned with an array of large wineglasses atop crisp white cloths.

  My friend and colleague Tim Bayne ordered snails. Tim is a professor of philosophy from New Zealand whose research focuses, among other matters, on the nature of cognition, how it relates to language, whether we have control of our thoughts, and whether modes of thought are culturally specific. He’s written extensively about gray-zone science and has always been an enthusiastic supporter of our research.

  Opposite Tim and I sat Axel Cleeremans, a Belgian psychologist and world-renowned expert in how learning—with and without consciousness—happens in the brain. Axel and Tim, together with their colleague Patrick Wilken, have produced the excellent Oxford Companion to Consciousness. Rounding out our little group was Sid Kouider, a cognitive neuroscientist from Paris who does EEG research on young infants to try to understand how and when consciousness emerges. He, like the others in our group, is obsessed with liminal states, the elusive boundary between brain and mind, being and nonbeing, consciousness and the abyss.

  Our first course arrived: snails from the Seine stewed in royal-pink garlic. The dish was exquisitely presented and clearly designed to offer us a glimpse into the chef’s approach to the art of cuisine. Soon the laughter flowed as easily as the wine. We were celebrating! Along with a number of our colleagues, we had recently been successful in securing money from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) to run a program of meetings on the subject of brain, mind, and consciousness—two or three intense workshops a year in international locations of our choice.

  The previous year, CIFAR had launched a global call, asking for “Four Ideas to Change the World,” and had received 262 applications from twenty-eight countries on five continents. Our program on brain, mind, and consciousness was one of only four to be funded internationally.

  That night in Paris, the four of us focused on the promise of new technologies to help us finally begin to get insights into what parts of the brain need to be working, or connected, for consciousness to emerge. My team’s work with the Alfred Hitchcock movie in patients closely paralleled Sid’s recent research in five-, twelve-, and fifteen-month-old infants. He and his colleagues had recently shown that an EEG signal that is indicative of consciousness in adults is already present in these tiny infants, in much the same way that we’d shown that an fMRI response related to consciousness is present in some of our patients during Bang! You’re Dead.

  Axel and Tim were convinced, but the four of us debated the findings nonetheless. So-called physiological “signatures” of consciousness—whether they’re derived from EEG, fMRI, or any other method—invariably spark serious debate because people rarely agree on what exactly they mean. Do those squiggly lines on the EEG trace represent consciousness itself, or are they merely the neural signposts telling us that consciousness is present? Does it matter? If the signposts are there, then we know that the patient (or the infant) is conscious, whether or not we have accessed their consciousness itself.

  By analogy, imagine that we were trying to hunt down the physiological “signature” of a particular memory—say, where and how your memory for the title of this book is stored. In the neuropsychological literature, this elusive brain signature is often referred to as the engram—I say “elusive” because we still don’t know where or how memories are stored in the brain. We could monitor your brain, using EEG or fMRI, as you sought to recall the title of this book, and no doubt we would see a series of squiggly lines or colored blobs at the exact moment that the words Into the Gray Zone popped into your head. But what does that signature represent? Is it the engram? Probably not. Rather than representing the essence of the memory itself, what we would likely be looking at would be the brain processes for delving into your memory to retrieve a previously stored item, the experience of finding out that you know something that you weren’t previously sure you knew, or a multitude of other possibilities associated with the experience of retrieving a memory. And consciousness is no different. When we seek to measure consciousness, we invariably find that we are measuring brain changes associated with the experience of being conscious rather than consciousness itself.

  This lively and enjoyable discussion in the best of surroundings was made more so by the constant flow of exquisitely prepared food and fine wine. As the evening progressed, and the wine took hold, we contemplated a future where technology might so progress that the division between the biological and the technological would blur. Our work was pushing us up against an imminent future when telepathy would be possible, not through a magical melding of two minds, but through technology: supercomputers in the palms of our hands that can decode our thoughts and convey them to another being.

  Twenty years from now, so-called brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs, will be as commonplace as smartphones, flatscreen TVs, and iPads. A BCI takes a reading of a brain response, analyzes it, and turns it into an action that reflects the user’s intention. That action might be as simple as moving a cursor across a computer screen or as complex as manipulating a robot arm to bring a cup of coffee to your lips. Interfaces based on EEG technology already exist. One system presents people with a screen display of letters from A to Z and asks them to focus their attention on specific letters. Columns and rows of letters flash in a seemingly random order. As the letter that the person wants to convey flashes, and the person focuses attention on it, a tiny electrical signal known as the P300 is emitted by the brain—the brain’s equivalent of an “Aha!” moment. Something we’ve been expecting has finally occurred. EEG detects that brain signal, and via some fairly sophisticated analyses, software can decode what letter flashed at the exact moment that the signal was emitted and then type that letter on a computer screen. It’s not the fastest way of communicating—it takes several seconds to type each letter—but with some training most of us can use it to spell out a phrase such as “Hey! I’m conscious” in minutes.

  Many challenges are still to be overcome before these systems will allow patients in the gray zone to communicate routinely with the outside world. To use the speller described above, you need to be able to focus your attention on one letter at a time, and that means you have to be able to fix your gaze, not something most people in the gray zone can do. But we and others are designing new systems based on sounds rather than visual cues. You’ll simply have to listen out for the letter you’re trying to convey.

  As we saw in the last chapter, EEG itself has some technical limitations, caused in part because the tiny electrical signals emitted by the brain have to travel through the skull and the scalp before reaching the detecting electrodes. One way around this is to place the electrodes directly on the brain’s surface—a complex neurosurgical procedure for sure, but one that can produce miraculous results. At the Brown Institute for Brain Science in Providence, Rhode Island, Cathy Hutchinson, forty-three, had been unable to move her arms or legs for fifteen years, yet she was taught to control a robot arm using just her brain. A sensor implanted in her brain and connected to a decoder turned her thoughts into instructions to move the robotic arm. Cathy, a post office employee, was a single mother of two when she suffered a catastrophic brain-stem stroke in 1996. The stroke left her locked in—unable to move any of her limbs and unable to speak. But with the aid of the advanced BCI, Cathy was able to steer a robotic arm toward a bottle, pick it up, and drink her morning coffee.

  This new technology may soon allow people in the gray zone to take online courses, type e-mails, hold conversations, and express their innermost feelings. Challenges remain, both technical and ethical. Brain surgery is risky, and implanting electrodes on the surface of brains should not be undertaken casually. Cathy Hutchinson could control her eyes, and with some clever engineering she could slowly pick out letters on a keyboard, allowing her to communicate that she was conscious and consented to the surgery. Presumably, after fifteen years with no mobility in her arms or legs, she thought it was a risk worth taking.

  Can you imagine the implications for people in the gray zone, or in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease? We’re poised on the brink of a world where electrodes implanted into the brain may allow patients who have not been able to communicate their wishes for decades to reassert their autonomy, to take control of their lives and once again guide their own destinies. Those who have been voiceless will speak again, those who have been unable to move will move again, and those who we thought were gone forever will be brought back into the here and now, to exercise their right to be treated as real people with plans for their futures and memories of their pasts.

  The gray-zone technology of reading minds has found a fascinating application in an unlikely field: forensic investigation. In 2015, my team came across a man in his twenties, Dan, who had been shot through the head, in Sarnia, Ontario. He was critically ill and on life support at a local hospital. It was a rare event: Ontario is generally a safe and peaceful place. Dan was left with a catastrophic brain injury, alive but nonresponsive. The bullet entered his forehead right between the eyes, traveled through his brain, and exited between his parietal cortex and his temporal lobe. No one knew who shot him. What if we scanned him, established that he was actually conscious, and then asked him who had done it?

  A recent episode of the TNT TV show Perception used our research to build a plotline involving almost exactly this scenario (www.intothegrayzone.com/perception). The technology exists. A successful interview of a crime victim in the gray zone can be accomplished. It would take a bit longer than it did in the Perception episode, and the main characters might be a little less glamorous, but where the victim is the best source of the truth, fMRI can establish who has committed a heinous crime.

  Was Dan that victim? We rushed to get permission to scan him. Major ethical hurdles had to be overcome. Why were we doing this? It obviously wasn’t purely for research purposes. It wasn’t clinical either. It was to solve a crime! How could we persuade our ethics committee to let us go forward? Who would give consent? Who was Dan’s substitute decision maker? What if the substitute decision maker was the perpetrator of the crime? How would we know?

  Our admittedly vague plan was to get a list of all of Dan’s friends and associates, and then, with Dan in the scanner, start by asking him to imagine playing a game of tennis if he knew who did this to him. If he answered yes, we’d start going down the list: “Was it Johnny? Imagine playing tennis for yes, imagine moving around your house for no.” Then, “Was it Dave?” And so on. We became tremendously excited. It could work! Our research methods could solve a crime.

  Then Dan recovered. A few days into our deliberations, he became conscious. He was able to raise his hand on command. We’d missed our chance to reach out to him and see what he could have told us using just his brain. It was fortunate for Dan, but part of me was disappointed.

  Dan wasn’t the patient to show us that fMRI can contribute to forensic science, but sooner or later another patient will come along. We’ll get to someone who is unable to communicate by normal means but whose mind will be readable with our rapidly advancing technology. It hasn’t happened yet, but it will.

  The questions we have tackled and the technologies we have developed with gray-zone science have opened up a whole new world of scientific possibilities. Our Alfred Hitchcock experiments may be able to give us some answers to what’s going on in the brains of patients with cognitively debilitating neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease. When people with Alzheimer’s watch a classic thriller from the Master of Suspense, is their experience like yours and mine? Or is it more like an infant’s—sounds and visual cues echoing through the brain but the subtleties of the plot not registering? If so, can we develop assistive technologies and therapies that are tailored to each patient’s actual experience of the world rather than the experience that we assume they must be having as we look on as observers from the outside? The recent documentary Alive Inside, which won the Audience Award at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, chronicles the astonishing experiences of several people with Alzheimer’s disease whose lives were turned around when they were played music that they had known and loved. Each patient made a personal connection with their music, with their past, with some aspect of their being that those close to them thought had been lost. The film beautifully renders how music has the capacity to reawaken our conscious selves and uncover the deepest parts of our humanity.

  In addition to research into the deterioration of consciousness in conditions such as Alzheimer’s, promising work is being done on what some call animal consciousness. Are other animals conscious? Most people tend to think that apes, dogs, and other higher primates possess some form of consciousness, but clearly it’s not exactly like ours. We know that the scaffolds of consciousness are there, but they are not as integrated and established as in the human brain. Koko, the western lowland gorilla who was born at the San Francisco zoo, has been able to learn the meaning of thousands of hand signs, as well as many English words. Yet most agree that she does not use grammar or syntax, and her linguistic abilities do not exceed those of a young human child. Likewise, many animals, including dogs, can be taught complex sequences of actions in response to commands, yet their behavior is afterward bound by the sequence—they can’t spontaneously elaborate and improvise on the behavior (for example, performing the sequence in reverse) the way a human being can.

  Seated across from one another at our L’Hotel dinner table, Tim, Axel, Sid, and I pondered the subject of animal consciousness as it relates to adult consciousness, infant consciousness, and machine consciousness. It always amazes me that most scientists, however well versed they are in the world of consciousness research, still resort to discussing the “consciousness” of their own pets. The truth about what these creatures are capable of is often more complicated than you might think.

  Although other species may be capable of rudimentary forms of thought including deception, the mature manifestations of these phenomena appear to be ours alone. Can the members of other species think about their own consciousness as we do, traveling backward in time to ponder their past and forward to plan their futures? We can’t say with certainty, but we would all agree, I think, that emotional experience is not uniquely human. Few dog owners would say that their pets don’t express strong emotions. But the complexity of human emotion and our ability to communicate our feelings via art or music is surely unique. And in other species, consciousness does not appear to involve as much interaction with the minds of others. From infancy onward we invest much of our time and energy in attempting to identify what others are thinking, what their motives might be, whether they love us or not, and what they’re likely to do next. Whether or not you know it, you spend much of your life trying to understand the conscious states of other people and trying to communicate—or hide—your own.

  Emerging technologies will undoubtedly one day allow us to read the minds of others. Not in the rudimentary sense that we do already—decoding yes and no responses based on changes in fMRI activity—but in the sense of interpreting and understanding exactly what another person is thinking based solely on some sort of readout from his or her brain. The ethical conundrums that this will produce will be immense in business, politics, and advertising; there will be an insatiable (and sometimes sinister) appetite for access to the thoughts of others. The way that the world operates will radically change, much as it has changed since the advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web. But we will adapt as a species, and these changes will just become the way things are: the tools that our children will use from birth, and the technologies that will define the blueprint for the generations that follow.

  The advent of increasingly autonomous machines capable of initiating their own courses of action will inevitably require that they be imbued with a sense of moral responsibility, one that is in many ways superior to our own. We humans have an unusual (and at times unnerving) knack for doing things just because we want to. These may be wrong, immoral, illegal, or illogical, but still we often choose to do them. What in our DNA allows us to go beyond what is logically right and do what is patently wrong? Discovering the origin in ourselves of this tendency to waywardness may help us to safeguard against the same impulses in machines.

  As we mull the nature of consciousness and the ability to act on our thoughts (a capacity that some call agency and that many gray-zone patients often lack), it is worth considering: Do we have free will? While many great minds have wrestled with this thorny problem, the answer may be even more complex than we think. Winifred and Leonard show us how our consciousness frequently spills over into the lives of others. Rarely can we fully describe or understand ourselves without reference to our relationships and the impact that we, as conscious beings, have had on the world around us. We are our brains, but we’re also the memories, attitudes, opinions, and emotions that we imbue in others. Even in death we often continue to inspire, mold, and affect the lives of the people we leave behind.