Recursion(12)
She looks at him across the table.
“Why memory? Obviously, you were into this before your mom got sick.”
She swirls the wine in her glass, sees the reflection of them sitting at the table in the two-story windows that look out into oceanic darkness.
“Because memory…is everything. Physically speaking, a memory is nothing but a specific combination of neurons firing together—a symphony of neural activity. But in actuality, it’s the filter between us and reality. You think you’re tasting this wine, hearing the words I’m saying, in the present, but there’s no such thing. The neural impulses from your taste buds and your ears get transmitted to your brain, which processes them and dumps them into working memory—so by the time you know you’re experiencing something, it’s already in the past. Already a memory.” Helena leans forward, snaps her fingers. “Just what your brain does to interpret a simple stimulus like that is incredible. The visual and auditory information arrive at your eyes and ears at different speeds, and then are processed by your brain at different speeds. Your brain waits for the slowest bit of stimulus to be processed, then reorders the neural inputs correctly, and lets you experience them together, as a simultaneous event—about half a second after what actually happened. We think we’re perceiving the world directly and immediately, but everything we experience is this carefully edited, tape-delayed reconstruction.”
She lets him sit with that for a moment as she takes another glorious sip of wine.
Slade asks, “What about flashbulb memories? The super-vivid ones imbued with extreme personal significance and emotion?”
“Right. That gets at another illusion. The paradox of the specious present. What we think of as the ‘present’ isn’t actually a moment. It’s a stretch of recent time—an arbitrary one. The last two or three seconds, usually. But dump a load of adrenaline into your system, get the amygdala to rev up, and you create that hyper-vivid memory, where time seems to slow down, or stop entirely. If you change the way your brain processes an event, you change the duration of the ‘now.’ You actually change the point at which the present becomes the past. It’s yet another way that the concept of the present is just an illusion, made out of memories and constructed by our brain.”
Helena sits back, embarrassed by her enthusiasm, suddenly feeling the wine going to her head. “Which is why memory,” she says. “Why neuroscience.” She taps her temple. “If you want to understand the world, you have to start by understanding—truly understanding—how we experience it.”
Slade nods, says, “?‘It is evident the mind does not know things immediately, but only by the intervention of the ideas it has of them.’?”
Helena laughs with surprise. “So you’ve read John Locke.”
“What?” Slade asks. “Just because I’m a tech guy, I never picked up a book? What you’re talking about is using neuroscience to pierce the veil of perception—to see reality as it truly is.”
“Which is, by definition, impossible. No matter how much we understand about how our perceptions work, ultimately we’ll never escape our limitations.”
Slade just smiles.
Day 364
Helena badges through the third-floor entrance and heads down a brightly lit corridor toward the main testing bay. She’s as nervous as she’s been since her first day here, her stomach so unsettled she only had coffee and a few pieces of pineapple for breakfast.
Overnight, Infrastructure moved the chair they’ve been building from their workshop into the main testing bay, where Helena now stops in the threshold. John and Rachel are bolting the base of the chair into the floor.
She knew this would be an emotional moment, but the intensity of seeing her chair for the first time takes her by storm. Until now, her work product has consisted of images of neuron clusters, sophisticated software programs, and a shit-ton of uncertainty. But the chair is a thing. Something she can touch. The physical manifestation of the goal she has been driving toward for ten long years, accelerated by her mother’s illness.
“What do you think?” Rachel asks. “Slade had us alter the blueprints to surprise you.”
Helena would be furious at Slade for this unilateral design change if what they had built weren’t so perfect. She’s stunned. In her mind, the chair was always a utilitarian device, a means to an end. What they’ve built for her is artful and elegant, reminiscent of an Eames lounge chair, except all one piece.
The two engineers are looking at her now, no doubt trying to ascertain her reaction, to see if their boss is pleased with their work.
“You’ve outdone yourselves,” she says.
By lunch, the chair has been fully installed. The MEG microscope, mounted seamlessly to the headrest, resembles an overhanging helmet. The bundle of cords running out of it has been threaded down the back of the chair and into a port in the floor, so the overall appearance is of a sleek, clean-lined device.
Helena won her fight with Slade to be the chair’s first occupant by withholding her knowledge about how high a synaptic number they would need in order to properly reactivate a memory. Slade pushed back, of course, arguing her mind and memory were far too valuable to take the risk, but that wasn’t a fight he or anybody ever had a chance of winning.
And so, at 1:07 p.m., she eases down onto the soft leather and leans back. Lenore, one of the imaging technicians, carefully lowers the microscope onto Helena’s head, the padding forming a snug fit. Then she fastens the chin strap. Slade watches from a corner of the room, recording on a handheld video camera with a big grin, as if he’s filming the birth of his first child.