The Side Effect by Bob Reiss

Author:Bob Reiss
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780440336204
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2006-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

“You are looking at the brain’s limbic system, and the amygdala, which controls intuition.”

An hour later, fascinated, the four of us sat in professor Whiteagle’s 14th-floor study above Mercer Street in Greenwich Village, in a three-bedroom apartment, faculty housing for NYU. The apartment faced south, toward the spires of Lower Manhattan, and the gap in the sky where the towers of the World Trade Center had stood. Danny’s cousin was 37, lean, fit-looking and slightly bowlegged, like an athlete, with a black braid that matched the color of his squarish glasses. His brown and green cotton shirt hung over black jean shorts, and his feet sported Reboks. A book called Our Brain lay open on his desk, amid a clutter of potted houseplants, scientific papers, journals, university leaflets and scattered computer disks.

I’d listened to plenty of biology lectures as a college student, and in forensics classes at the FBI. I don’t think I’d ever been as interested in one of the lectures as I was right now.

“For a long time scientists thought the brain operated as a single functioning unit,” Professor Whiteagle said, flipping pages in Our Brain. “But more and more we’ve found that different parts war with one another. Maybe that’s what keeps the brain sharp.”

He held out the book to show a diagram of the brain. “The limbic system and neocortex are cases in point. The limbic system’s amygdala controls the emotional brain. The neocortex controls the logical brain. So if you’re taking a multiple-choice test in high school, for instance, and you get an intuitive feeling that answer A is correct, that’s your amygdala talking. And then, a few minutes later, when you start to question your choice and second-guess your answer, that’s the neocortex chiming in. Odds are, if you change that first answer, you made a mistake. Everyone has had that experience, of intuition being right but being overridden.”

The sketch he displayed showed the familiar three-quarter circle shape of a human brain, rounded at the top and slanted diagonally at the bottom to fit into a skull, narrowing into a stemlike protuberance running toward the spine, like a power line.

In the diagram, in protective layers, I saw the mind’s labeled hemispheres and coupling systems. The action centers, the awareness centers, the biological structure. The cingulate gyrus looked like a snake curled around the deep recesses: the ropelike hippocampus, the egg-shaped thalamus near the bottom and, extending from it, a round small point looking like a drop of water, a speck labeled “amygdala,” at which I stared.

This was the part Ray Teaks had talked about in Maryland. But so far most labels were meaningless to me.

“Have you ever heard the old saying that the human brain only operates at ten percent efficiency?” Dr. Whiteagle asked, glancing from face to face like a good lecturer.

“Sure,” I said. “That humans would be supermen if we could only access the unused ninety percent of our brain.”

“It’s bullshit. The truth is, the brain is so efficient, it only needs ten percent at one time.

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