Tunnel Vision

30

Zack’s brain was still tender from the nightmare when he awoke the next morning. It was seven thirty, and his mother had left to do some errands but had made him a breakfast of potato pancakes, turkey sausages, fruit compote, and a pot of French roast, which helped clear his head. He cleaned up and left her a note of thanks, thinking how she had gone through the fire and hadn’t run off to a nunnery. He took public transportation into town and spent the rest of the day at the Northeastern library working on his thesis.

That night he received a call from Dr. Luria. She wanted to do another test on him next Tuesday evening, if he was free. He was. In advance of that, she asked him to e-mail sample photographs of his family members, friends, pets, his home, and favorite places. Her explanation was that they were going to use them to establish a baseline for brain scans. Zack didn’t know what that meant, but he complied.

He also went online and Googled each of the key people in the lab.

Elizabeth Luria was a professor emerita of microbiology at Harvard Medical School with a long list of publications on brain plasticity and imaging in prestigious-sounding journals such as The National Review of Neuroscience, Neuron, The Journal of Neuroscience. A few were on functional MRI imaging with meaningless titles like “Temporal-Lobe Bursts and ‘Transcendent’ Experiences” and “Total Deafferentation of Posterior-Superior Parietal Lobules PSPL and Self-Transcendence.” The words transcendent and parietal jumped out at him.

Morris Stern was listed as a professor of behavioral neuroscience, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Tufts University School of Medicine. He was an expert on brain imaging and directed a lab investigating the neural basis of learning and memory. He had a long list of publications in the journal Neuroimage and Neurobiology.

Byron Cates was a professor of computational neuroscience and health sciences and technology at MIT. From what Zack gathered, he was an expert on “neuropsychological recordings” and “mathematical modeling to establish definitions of anesthetic states.” That was as meaningless to Zack as was an impressive list of published titles.

They each had research and/or teaching jobs, so this sleep study was something they did on the side during the evenings.

Sarah Wyman’s Web site listed her as unmarried and a former nurse who was doing postdoctoral studies at Tufts. On a list of her publications was a paper called “The Role of Serotonin 5-HT (1A) Receptors in Spirituality,” published in The American Journal of Psychiatry.

Spirituality? That did not seem like a topic for a doctoral thesis in neurophysiology. But he was too sleepy on Lunesta to speculate and went to bed thinking of her.