The Tannhauser Gate
Chapter 3
“…nature’s laws are deterministic and randomness surfaces owing merely to our ignorance of the underlying boundary conditions” Laplace, 1814
When I got home that night, Anne and Victor were sleeping in each other’s arms. I stood in the doorway and enjoyed the sight of them for a while. The peaceful humming of mother and son asleep. I went to the living room and stretched out on the couch. Biggie, our dog, jumped up to me and wagged and wiggled his whole body. He must have been asleep, but now vigorously greeted me with his loving affection.
We lived in a small two-bedroom in a modernized part of town that used to be industrial and working-class housing. Now, the former factories had been replaced by hipster restaurants and specialist shops with anything from delicate teas to expensive bicycles. Given its heritage, the neighborhood however still was quite diverse giving rise to its intense and beautiful atmosphere. Walking the streets you would meet anyone from drug addicts and criminals to students and families. It all seemed to resonate in perfect harmony.
Our ground floor flat overlooked XX-Dark — one of the most well-visited swingers clubs in Copenhagen. It was an interesting scenery playing out front as the dark grew upon the day and the club came alive. I always wondered about the small talk going on in the cigarette ‘breaks’ that people had. What topics do you discuss? But mostly I enjoyed the entrance of the sneakers. The newcomers who were uneasy and snug alongside the building to make a stealth entrance. Passing by a few times until the time was ripe. The approach made them look very suspicious, people in the neighborhood knew exactly who belonged, so any attempt to casually strawl along the streets was inevitable to fail.
I put on Nils Frahm and let my thoughts wander to the dreamy rhythms. They were about the grant and the trip before us…
Three weeks and a Christmas race later, we sat on the plane to Boston. Vic had fallen asleep on Anne. I had a wine and watched the sunset that we seemed to chase across The Atlantic. I had never been fond of the concept of flying in an airplane, but I treasured the experience of being above the clouds. Up here, there was peace and godsend scenery. A clarity and perspective that was hard to come about elsewhere.
I wanted to make the most of my stay at MIT. Josh and I had been on the phone several times over Christmas. He was a postdoc like myself, working hard towards tenure. Our collaboration was born from the theory I worked on, and the methods he developed. Individually they were interesting, but in concert they could be groundbreaking — at least so we agreed.
The pathways and processes Josh and I studied spans the retinal output and the projections throughout the posterior regions into the visual cortex and short-term memory networks. In each stage of the brain that the information travels by, the neuronal assemblies contribute uniquely to the gradual accumulation of the increasingly complex mental image that eventually is fully assembled from the primitive photonic impulses generated in the retina. The end station of this magnificent process is the short-term memory where we become conscious of the object of our perception. It is one of the most profound and complex engineering problems solved seamlessly within a few hundred milliseconds, all the time, over and over again.
As unnoticeable this process is, as impactful and relevant is it to our mental capacity and wellbeing. It is analogous to the foundation in a skyscraper that our interaction with the world rest on. In particular, the attentional component was the focus of my work, ensuring that at each stage the relevant information is prioritized from the vast amount of sensory material available at any given moment. Understanding this mechanism in more detail was of great scientific value, and in addition, held immense potential for therapeutic interventions.
The theory I worked from allowed measurements of location specific neurons using EEG, essentially allowing to tap into the individual processing stages. This had previously only been possible with intra-cellular methods by inserting probes directly into the brain tissue. Therefore, these studies were rare and originated primarily from animal studies and from people who underwent brain surgery in the relevant area.
An interesting discovery made by accident from intracellular monkey studies revealed that the rhythmic activity within each information processing stage is unique and distinguishable from the others. The original purpose of the studies had been to study the preferred geometric properties of the neurons. But a technical error in the setting of the equipment meant that the frequency of the stimuli flashing before the monkey had been changed on that day. Subsequent analyses revealed that the neurons in response yielded orders of magnitudes higher output, leading to the discovery that individual stages have preferred, signature frequencies.
This was very useful for my work. I essentially knew that in the mish-mash of signals of the EEG recordings were the specifics of each individual stage. I needed to tease out this information to understand the influence of that stage more specifically, but it turned out to be a more complex than first anticipated.
The experiment I developed presented repetitions of stimuli with different frequencies to increase coding from one stage over the other, essentially trying to tease out the imprint of each particular stage. I expected the relative signal in the EEG from the individual stages would increase for stimuli presented with the signature frequency of a particular stage, so that it was possible to analyze them separately.
This was the plan. Beautiful and well thought through. But what often happens with plans is that are beaten by the cruelty of reality when brought to life. The analytical work required to isolate the individual stages in the massive data set was too mathematically complex and computational heavy. It required a science in it is self to realize.
Josh and the group at MIT seemed like the perfect partners in crime for this. They had developed methods exactly for such problems, and their high-powered computational machinery and elegant mathematical methods where waiting ahead to crunch the data.
We left the glittering light beams from the eluding sunset as we started our descend towards Logan International. Penetrating the skies until the city of Boston emerged below us.
