Greetings--- it has been a long time since I’ve last posted. If you are reading this, I imagine that I’ve interacted with you at some point in the in-between-time: perhaps we bumped into each other somewhere and made awkwardly polite conversation about how things have been and then continued on our ways—- perhaps we see one another almost every day, or at least once or twice a week—maybe we used to be good friends but don’t talk much any more----
we find ourselves here, as if our real-life interaction was insufficient or even destructive (if both of us were, after all, completely satisfied with our relationship with one another, neither of us would find ourselves here looking for something) and as if this virtual, one-sided interaction had the power to soothe the aching sorrow that results---
as if it could fill that void---------
that void will never be filled—- if it ever were, certainly we could at that moment die in peace---
we find ourselves here--- I have something I want to write about.
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A person can get his email onto a mailing list for the MIT brain and cognitive science department, and then he will receive periodic emails
(I think it’s rather astounding that the word periodic can mean its own opposite, specifically, it can mean “repeating at regular intervals” OR “repeating at irregular intervals”—- the same way that, rather poetically, the word cleave can mean both “to adhere” and “to separate”, as if to suggest how the two meanings encompass one another…)
alerting him when a test subject is needed—- his motivation being, of course, that labs are willing to pay their test subjects as compensation for their time/effort. Often the labs are looking for a subject for an fMRI scan—- the fMRI machine uses a magnetic field to visualize the way blood is flowing in the subject’s brain as he performs certain tasks—- if, for example, they are making the subject answer questions about moral quandaries as they scan him, they can determine which regions of the subject’s brain that are activated when he makes moral decisions.
Anyways, I am on the test subjects mailing list because it’s easy + fast money and, unlike other ways of getting easy + fast money I can think of, this way only asks you to sell your brain—- however this is not to say that it’s at all comfortable to have an fMRI scan performed on you; in fact it’s rather the opposite. They dress you in scrubs and administer a somewhat intimidating quiz about whether you have metal in your body or fit other criteria that might make the fMRI machine dangerous to you (I imagine the machine’s strong magnetic waves wrenching a jagged piece of metal out of your body with the suddenness of an alien embryo bursting forth from twitching viscera), then they scan your body for metal, and then they have you lie down on this thin little bed. Once you’re on the bed, the big robotic machine senses your presence--- it awakens and pulls you into a narrow horizontal tube where, once inside, you must lie still for about two hours as it scans your brain (not that you would have much room to move even if the process permitted you to—- the tube barely leaves room for your shoulders and your face is only inches below its roof—- there is a little mirror to ease your claustrophobia and to let you see the experimental questions/images to which you respond by pressing a button on a handheld device).
This is all rather incidental to my real inspiration for this post, which is the music of the fMRI machine-------- as the machine scans you it makes a lot of noise, I imagine there are heavy metallic rings and pieces that are rapidly shifting, expanding, and vibrating in order to maintain and modulate the magnetic fields flowing through the brain—- the machine hums and clanks electronically and the sound shakes and reverberates in the smooth chamber, and although they have equipped you with earplugs the noise is tremendous and sometimes quite shocking. What I find to be interesting is the way the sound varies as the scans progress, the way that from the seeming chaos of mechanical shrieking can emerge a thumping disco beat or a complex sequence of hesitant, twanging arpeggios---
once the machine began to emit such a comforting, melodious clicking that it seemed almost to be trying to lull me to sleep, to be taunting me with promise of my removal from this world of pervasive radiation and quiet, ceaseless processing-----
and I began to imagine that perhaps the machine was interacting with me: that it chose to generate its peaceful music as a token of gratitude for my willing submission of my brain; that over years of intimacy with the brains of humanity the machine had developed a curious sensitivity to the inner natures of mankind, such that when a person entered into the fMRI machine, the noise the machine produced was a sort of sonic reflection of the soul of the person within—- that the machine had looked into the depths of me and seen joy and tranquility------------
this, of course, struck me immediately as nonsense, but the power of the image remains, and I am trying to understand why----
as human beings we are absurdly complex constructions, formed by billions of years of cosmic lightning and collapsing stars—- we emerge from an age of dark, thoughtless history into a world of boundlessly proliferating information that we must learn to navigate in a matter of months—we are wired so strictly-— and yet we have a desire underneath all that fierce complexity to be understood, to surrender all that we are to a brief smile or a gently-spoken word, to let ourselves be contained by a phrase of music and to recognize nothing but beauty therein.
And what other than a machine could accomplish such a thing—- only the machine, God-like in its precision, empty of jealousy and judgment, could possibly appreciate the human with such purity to see neither the right nor the wrong but merely the presence, the energy………
