Bewilderment

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LOTS OF PEOPLE LOVED MY WIFE. And Aly loved lots of people, as if that were the most natural thing in the world. She’d had partners before me and stayed on good terms with most of them, even with one woman who’d broken her heart. Flirting was a part of her job. I watched her work hallways full of legislators and ballrooms full of donors as if they were all her dear friends.

She was on the road a lot, directing her NGO across ten midwestern states. For the first two years of our marriage, it used to kill me. She’d call me from some budget interstate hotel to say, We went to a great little Italian place downtown, and when I croaked a casual, “We?” she’d say, Oh, didn’t I say? Michael Maxwell’s in town. My ex from grad school? And that would be another eight hours of night thoughts I didn’t need.

Her ten-state area hosted an equal-opportunity harem of devoted women and men. Some of these friendships I knew about; others came as surprises, at her memorial service. The one time I asked whether she was ever tempted to stray, her jaw popped open in astonishment. Oh my God. I am so not built that way! I’d split into little pieces if I ever tried that.

I settled into a manageable mix of jealousy and thrill. Lots of good, kind people wanted my wife. My wife seemed to want me. Nature, as Aly often showed me, was quite ingenious in keeping people just happy enough.

So it didn’t surprise me when she came home late from the farmers’ market one Saturday, bubbly from a round of flattering attention. I ran into Marty Currier at the Apple Lady’s stand. We had a quick coffee. He wants us to be in an experiment!

Martin Currier was one of Wisconsin’s high-profile scientists: senior research professor in neuroscience, National Academy of Sciences fellow, Hughes Investigator—the kinds of recognitions I dreamed of winning once but never will. He was one of the few people in town Aly could bird with and learn something from. They’d go out together in all seasons, and it made me nuts.

“Does he, now? I’m sure he’d like to experiment on you.”

She grinned and tucked into her pugilist stance, circling her fists in front of her face, bobbing and weaving. She always held her small fists way too close together when threatening to rabbit-punch me. I loved that.

Come on, buster. We should try it. He’s doing wild things.

The Currier Lab was exploring something called Decoded Neurofeedback. It resembled old-fashioned biofeedback, but with neural imaging for real-time, AI-mediated feedback. A first group of subjects—the “targets”—entered emotional states in response to external prompts, while researchers scanned relevant regions of their brains using fMRI. The researchers then scanned the same brain regions of a second group of subjects—the “trainees”—in real time. AI monitored the neural activity and sent auditory and visual cues to steer the trainees toward the targets’ prerecorded neural states. In this way, the trainees learned to approximate the patterns of excitation in the targets’ brains, and, remarkably, began to report having similar emotions.

The technique dated back to 2011, and it claimed some impressive early results. Teams in Boston and Japan taught trainees to solve visual puzzles faster, simply by training them on the visual cortex patterns of targets who’d learned the puzzles by trial and error. Other experimenters recorded the visual fields of target subjects exposed to the color red. Trainees who learned, through feedback, to approximate that same neural activity reported seeing red in their mind’s eye.

Since those days, the field had shifted from visual learning to emotional conditioning. The big grant money was going to desensitizing people with PTSD. DecNef and Connectivity Feedback were being touted as treatments to all kinds of psychiatric disorders. Marty Currier worked on clinical applications. But he was also pursuing a more exotic side-hustle.

“Why not?” I told my wife. And so we volunteered in her friend’s experiment.