This Is Your Brain on Rhythm
Hipster neuroscientists tackle learning how to pay attention
“This is Mickey Hart’s brain.”
Mickey Hart was the drummer for the Grateful Dead. An image of his brain appears on a twenty-four-inch computer monitor. To its right, another monitor, a sleek thirty-two-inch Mac, features a splash of windows — email, news sites, a work project.
Mickey’s brain is red on the top with blue sticking out on the bottom.
“The red is the cortex.”
Few know more about Mickey Hart’s brain, about the brain in general, than the man pointing to the monitor. His name is Adam Gazzaley. He’s a neurologist, an MD, with a PhD in neuroscience. He runs the new neuroimaging lab at the University of California at San Francisco, one of the world’s leading scientific institutes.
Dr. Gazzaley’s lab is housed inside the Sandler Neurosciences Center, a five-story, 227,000-square-foot research facility that opened in May 2012. Located minutes from downtown San Francisco, a baseball’s throw from where the San Francisco Giants play, it is a gleaming example of a new dedication to understanding the workings of the human brain. That pursuit itself is nothing novel, of course, but now, a new generation of powerful technology lets researchers see the inside of the brain, watch it work, literally, and observe when it fails to work.
Dr. Gazzaley’s lab contains around $10 million worth of equipment that the researchers speak of only by acronyms, the fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), the EEG (electroencephalography), and the TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation). With the machines, the scientists study blood flow in the brain, look at electrical wave patterns, and create images of ultra-thin slices of neurological tissue. The various techniques let researchers understand which brain regions control what functions, and how tissues and tasks get impacted by different activities, say, when a person tries to multitask.
Mickey Hart’s is one among many brains Dr. Gazzaley has imaged. The pair have been working on a pop science project together in which Dr. Gazzaley shows what Mickey’s brain looks like while he’s drumming, trying to elucidate not just the brain of a rock star but that of an aging one.
They do presentations where Mickey drums and Adam shows off images of the percussionist’s brain taken in real time using sensors attached to Mickey’s head. Your Brain on Rhythm.
Dr. Gazzaley himself might pass for a hipster musician. He’s a youthful-looking forty-five, with short-cropped silver hair — not gray but silver — that looks like it’s been dyed to get attention, even though it’s been the same color since it prematurely aged in his early thirties. He wears a serpentine ring on his right index finger. He tends to sport black jeans that are on the tight side, and a silk shirt. His car is a BMW M3 convertible, the super-fast kind. He’s become friends not just with Mickey but also with the lead singer of Thievery Corporation, a rock band, as well as some of the tech billionaires who attend the late-night parties he holds on the first Friday of each month.
A few months earlier, Dr. Gazzaley had gone to Germany to speak at a conference. At the airport in Berlin, a woman at immigration control asked him his business. He explained that he’s a scientist.
“Really?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“You don’t look like one.”
Dr. Gazzaley travels a lot. He’ll put on 150,000 miles a year on airplanes, give or take. He gives upward of fifty talks.
“Sometimes I ask myself: ‘Why do I constantly put myself in these stressful situations?’ ” he says. “It’s not like I have to do it.”
The toll that Dr. Gazzaley is referring to comes in large part from the challenge of juggling all of his responsibilities. The thirteen people he supervises, the constant fund-raising, the media appearances. He regularly forgets where he parked his BMW in the adjoining parking structure because he’s so busy thinking of other things when he gets out of the car and walks into work. Or he’s fiddling around on his iPhone. Once, lost in thought while brushing his teeth, he put moisturizer on his toothbrush, not toothpaste.
Dr. Gazzaley isn’t particularly absentminded. He simply feels like he’s experiencing a pressure so many people feel in their everyday lives — to keep up, push on, achieve.
“Everyone feels that burden in their own way of trying to squeeze as much out of our brains per unit time as possible.”
We’re all struggling to maximize our attention.
Attention.
Dr. Gazzaley is one of the world’s foremost experts in the science of attention. He’s consumed with how we focus, what causes us to lose focus, get distracted. The paper that first brought Dr. Gazzaley his notoriety, published in 2005, showed the key parts of the brain circuitry involved when a person ignores something, or tries to ignore something. That science of ignoring is a key part of the attention conversation.
Can we ignore what we want to, even need to, in order to survive? One experiment after another of his explores how we focus, what takes us away from what we profess to want to focus on, and whether our attention limits might even be expanded.
He’s spent four years on an experiment looking at whether a particular kind of scientifically engineered video game could improve the attention span and memory of people over the age of sixty. He’s been on pins and needles lately, hoping the results of the experiment could land in Nature, one of the leading scientific journals in the world.
And he’s trying to distill all of these ideas into easily digestible chunks — science meets pop science. For instance, when he first showed off Mickey Hart’s brain, during an AAR P event in New Orleans, Dr. Gazzaley kept bringing the conversation back to attention and distraction.
Wearing a baggy shirt and orange-tinted glasses, Hart was fitted with a wireless sensor on his head that fed his brain waves into a computer. The signal was then transmitted to two giant screens on the stage.
For his part, Dr. Gazzaley spoke into a wireless mic and paced, holding an iPad to control what images of Mickey’s brain appeared on the screens.
“These are the theta waves,” he told the audience. “These are associated with attention and concentration.”
Back in his San Francisco office, Dr. Gazzaley pulls out a white plastic model of a brain. He pulls the hemispheres apart. He holds the left half in his left palm. He runs his other hand across the outer part, the wrinkle near the front, the red place he’d described earlier in the virtual version of Mickey Hart’s cortex.
It’s the proverbial gray matter, the most evolved part, he explains, the part that makes us human. “It’s where the action is.” Abstraction, language, how we make decisions, organize our time, focus.
He moves his finger lower down on the brain, toward the stem. This, he explains, is the figurative and literal lower region. The reptilian part of the brain that resides in most animals, highly evolved primates and otherwise. It told our forebears whether to run when they saw a lion or perk up at the sound of a bird that might be food.
“It controls quick reactions to things. It deals with basic stuff, like seeking mates and reproduction. It’s been preserved throughout evolution.”
Among Dr. Gazzaley’s many research areas, he has explored the tension between these relatively primitive parts and the more evolved regions, including the frontal lobe. How we balance the tension between the short-term demands of our reptilian senses — run! — and our longer-term desires, goals, and commitments that we try to set with the more evolved parts of our brains.
It’s why I’ve come to visit him on this gray day in early December 2012. I’m trying to better understand why two rocket scientists are dead. Was it because Reggie, for some reason, lost his focus? Was he distracted? What was happening inside his brain? Can the research being done here, and by a new generation of neuroscientists, prevent similar tragedy? Does science offer any solace, some hope, for the families of Keith and Jim?
More basically: What is attention?
Dr. Gazzaley smiles.
“What is attention? Attention is a complicated thing.” He pauses. “It has many subdomains. It falls into an aspect of cognition that’s related to the selection of information to be processed.”
Oft cited on this subject of attention is William James, a philosopher and physician at the end of the nineteenth century, and the brother of novelist Henry James. William wrote of attention in 1890: “Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession of the mind in clear and vivid form out of what seem several simultaneous objects or trains of thought.”
Everyone might know what it is. Might. But, as Dr. Gazzaley notes, more than a century after Dr. James, what we think we know, or what we once thought, has many strata. It’s complicated.
Dr. Gazzaley says that attention is also “absolutely critical for all high-level functioning,” a cornerstone of what it means to be human. He’s not just saying that our attention allows us to survive — say, by being able to attend to a threat or perceive an opportunity. He means that attention allows us, in a “uniquely human” way, to set goals and follow through on them without being distracted by every bit of stimulation around us.
“It allows us to interact with the world through our goals and not be led by or be a slave to our environment. It has allowed us to do every remarkable achievement — creation of society, culture, language. They are all dependent on being able to focus on our goals.”
To illustrate how attention works, Dr. Gazzaley has an idea. He suggests I come to his next First Friday cocktail party, his monthly hipster soiree.
Learn about attention at a party?
“I’ll show you the cocktail party effect.”
Excerpted from A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention by Matt Richtel, published by William Morrow on September 23, 2014.
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Top image credit: Arc Eloctronica, via creative commons
