first.
A young man in a gray flannel robe, sat calmly before a table, in front of a marvelous black box. He wears a cap that looks like it’s made of gauze. A bundle of snake wire came out of it, protruding from the back of his head. He is waiting for something.
ONE Researchers in a white lab coat, walked over to the table and stood in silence for a moment. The man stared at the box. For a moment, nothing happened. Then the man blinked and looked a little annoyed. The researcher asked what happened.
“In just the first second,” he said, “I saw an eye — an eye and a mouth.”
The researcher swaps the box for another object. This time an orange soccer ball. There was a pulse, and again it was clear that something was going on in the man’s head. “How do I explain this?” he says. “Just like last time, I saw an eye — an eye and a mouth, tilted to the side.”
Strictly speaking, this man is a robot. His gyroscope, the meandering ridges that run along the base of the brain on each side, are fitted with electrodes. His doctors implanted them because they thought they would help find the cause of the man’s seizures. But the electrodes also offer a rare opportunity – not only to read signals from the brain, but also to write them to it. A team of neuroscientists, led by Nancy Kanwisher of MIT, is investigating the so-called fusiform facial region, which becomes active when a person sees a face. Their question is, what if they reverse the pump? Deliberately activating that area — what will the man see?
You don’t have to be a cyborg to know that you must never trust your lying mind. It hides from you, for example, the fact that all your perceptions are delayed. Turn photons into sight, fluctuations in air pressure into sound, aerosol molecules into odors — how long does it take for your imperfect sense organs to pick up signals, translate them into language of the brain and transmits them to umbrella-like neural networks that compute incoming data. The process isn’t instantaneous, but you never know about the synaptic transformation going on, the electrochemical breakdown that makes up your mind. The truth is, it’s visual effects – and you’re both the director and the audience.
You perceive, or think you perceive, things that are not always “really there” — nowhere but inside your head. That’s the dream. That’s what psychedelic drugs do. That’s what happens when you imagine your aunt’s face, the smell of your first car, the taste of a strawberry.
From this perspective, it’s not really hard to accept a sensory experience — a perception — into someone’s head. I did that with you in the first few paragraphs of this story. I described how the robot would dress, told you what the room would look like, told you the soccer ball was orange. You’ve seen it in your mind, or at least some version of it. You heard in your ears, research subjects talking to scientists (even though in real life they were speaking Japanese). It’s all good and literary. But it would be nice if there was a more direct route. The brain is keen to turn sensory information into mind; you have to be able to exploit that possibility, to build a whole world in which, a simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
