Gray Matters

Our brains are plastic; it's fantastic

PATIENT X

Elon Musk is the Interrupting Cow joke.

I was midway through a zombie-themed post (TBC) as the start of a series on a monsters/metamorphs when Musk—as he does, Moo!—inserted himself with his usual sick plot twists. Now my newsfeed is all about the first brain implant of his Neuralink chip, and I have ever more to fret about in what seems the inevitable inextricable merge of humans with our devices.

Why should we lazy tech junkies have to reach out and touch our screens, or navigate floating commands in our field of vision via the unpopular Google Glass, when we can go direct from our minds via…telepathy? From NPR:

As he announced the human implant surgery, Musk said his company’s implant product would be called Telepathy.

“Enables control of your phone or computer, and through them almost any device, just by thinking,” he tweeted Monday evening.

The proper verb, morphed by Musk himself, is now I guess “Xed,” but even he can’t let go of this word “tweeted” any more than I want to hand over access to my whacky brain waves. Can you imagine if your nasty tangle of thoughts, unfiltered, just automatically came to fruition in the real world as if encapsulated in cartoon bubbles. I have enough trouble muting my thoughts when trying to meditate for 10 minutes, let alone honing the power of concentration it must take to shut out neural noise and get my brain to focus on the one thought I’d need to rise up in order to properly command a device.

These Neuralinks so far are focusing on voluntary quadriplegic test subjects age 22 and up who can’t control their bodies—unknown who patient x is (reportedly “recovering well”)—but down the road the goal is to expand to anyone who wants to buy an extra layered superpower, like Musk himself who mentioned in 2022 he might already have one.

Research in computers and neurology has been converging for decades, including the burgeoning field of decoding the brain’s electrical activity around words, impulses and images. Increasingly, that work has included an implantable brain-computer interface, or BCI.

Much of the ongoing research has sought to bring people affected by paralysis and blindness new ways of interacting with the world. But implants have also long been seen as having the potential to “enhance” people who aren’t affected by such serious conditions.

Musk has previously spoken about the idea of a “neural lace” that could add a symbiotic digital layer to the human brain and merge artificial intelligence with the brain. And while the current Neuralink trial would seem to stop well short of those lofty goals, speculation about his remarks crystalized around Neuralink in 2017, when he confirmed his ties to the then-new company.

“Imagine the joy of connecting with your loved ones, browsing the web or even playing games using only your thoughts,” Neuralink said in its video, showing images of a smartphone seemingly connected to a person's mind.

Brain implant research has raised many questions, including whether (and where) humanity should draw the line in our integration with technology.

Here’s the device introduction with a prompt to participate in the PRIME study, namely Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface.

If your head aches just considering this, you’re not alone. Two states so far are drafting legislation now to protect access to our private thoughts, aided by the work of the Neurorights Foundation. At play here is not just the risk of projecting thoughts out, but the device’s ability (or whoever commands it) to decode and potentially change thoughts from outside in. I worry way less about our power to control devices than the growing power of the devices to control us. And what now if the device is in us, is us. If we’re worried about encryption, identity theft, dual authentication, imagine a world where we willy-nilly expose our innermost cogitation. It’s as if we’re increasingly interested in turning ourselves inside out and exposing and unravelling the most vulnerable seamy side, neurotic thread by weird thread.

Ever the DIYer, I don’t need an implanted chip to decode and change my brain when I can do it right from here with some magazine clippings on a vision board. Neuroscience is a growing body of knowledge that I have been applying in my amateur fingerpainty way to my brain for years.

DR. DIY

“It is what it is” has to be the most insipid expression in English, ranking up there in the pet peeve ether with talking about weather with strangers in elevators. I get the intent, and the Zen vibe, and of course everyone should be a little more Zen, but… let’s counter that inertia impulse to roll over and accept things as they are or how they seem to be derailing in a big way beyond our abilities. How about trying to actively change them for the better?

Change is hard yet I thrive on it. Get used to it: the ground we walk on is far from solid, I tell my girls. The earth didn’t always look like this; tectonic plates shifting as we speak. As Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher, supposedly said, “change is the only constant.” (Which is not, mind you, an endorsement for Neuralink but a plea to do our best to take the reigns of at least the relatively tiny acreage of our own little universes).

I wrote about fitting your life into shapes and the self-help industry loves a Venn diagram. I made concentric rings on a paper and just the act of drawing had me committed to real progress on myself, my family, my house, my work in rapid succession, ring by outward bound ring.

With a house teaming with teen hormones rising and mine amuck from perimenopause, it’s amazing to see how good or bad days can change on a dime depending on mere chemistry. My boss asks me often if I might write here about how we are nothing if not the sum of our chemicals, just a fizzy beaker of ever-shifting formulas. I’m increasingly interested in the power we have to change our brains and the balance of these chemicals. I was going to complete my lapsed color trilogy series with red (after blue—water—and green nature) but now I am moon-pulled instead to GRAY.

There’s actually gray and white matter in our brains, but gray matters more for this conversation since it’s where the neurons are, packed into the outermost parts of the brain and innermost spinal column. Ten percent of the brain matter makes up most of its functionality. Neurons are where the magic happens:

This coating of neurons surrounding the cerebrum is known as the “cortex,” taken from the Latin for “bark.”

In the spinal cord, gray matter is conversely located towards inner regions and forms a “butterfly” structure.

I love the how-to videos I’ve seen with neuroscientist Dr. Tara Swart, on neuroplasticity and the power we have to hack our own beautiful butterfly brains, because it’s not enough for me to read self-help and do something that gives a rush of good intention for a moment—I want the data and evidence behind it, or at least a kickass female PhD. While you can’t create new brain matter and are slightly more locked into who you are by the age of 25, you can always forge new neural pathways. I think of neural pathways like any path: the more they are used, the more established they become. You can make new connections and soon master new habits. Rather than questing for happiness, the very idea of which drives me nuts, I believe you can simply awake and decide, that very day, to be happier. So on that front, I have a calendar notification set daily to remind me first thing to spend just 10 minutes meditating, visualizing, manifesting, practicing gratitude, setting intentions. Law of Attraction stuff. What you focus on expands.

The vision board alone I swear by for putting something tangible to this process, as does Dr. Swart. Since Mod Podge is my secret sauce, I made a collage from old Life magazine clippings a few years ago with images and words encompassing life goals big and small, right down to salary and returning to skiing for the first time in decades, prioritizing romance after divorce. The real work begins, however passively, when you simply look at the collage daily. Seeing these words and images repeatedly forges those pathways of possibility and the more you look, the more the route to achieve them becomes clear until…one day I looked at the vision board and realized all of it had come true. So it was a time for a new board, this one focused on love and the signposts to guide me to my best match. Not just the traits someone would have but how they would make me feel, so when I meet this dreamy person it will be as if I conjured him myself; he will seem familiar because I kind of have.

Details from the vision boards of Life (left) and Love (right)

The brain is a muscle we have to stretch and exercise like any other to keep it strong and agile long-term.

From SimplePsychology:

Although there may not be any proven treatments for gray matter diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, there are some lifestyle changes that could be adopted to help keep gray matter strengthened and potentially lower the risk of developing neurodegenerative diseases:

• Meditation and mindfulness

• Physical activity, specifically aerobic exercise

• Games which can stimulate problem-solving, attention and creativity

• Maintaining an uninterrupted sleeping pattern

• Eating a healthy diet with plenty of vitamins

• Avoiding alcohol and other mind-altering substances

• Wearing a helmet when completing activities such as cycling so as to avoid damage to the brain

• Hobbies which can train fine motor skills such as calligraphy, knitting, or painting

• Learning new skills or learning new information to stimulate the mind

Talking about these brain matters with my aunt in Lake Tahoe lead us down an equally interesting rabbit hole of smell. She and my uncle, both retired doctors who never really retire, have been sleeping with a smell machine, dispensing strong but pleasant odors of citrus and such that are supposed to enliven them even in REM. They were inspired by the incredibly positive test results from a small study released this summer. From a piece on this, also from NPR:

Each night, a different scent would waft through the bedroom. And over the course of six months, there was a 226% improvement on a learning and memory test among those who slept with a strong nightly scent compared with those that diffused distilled water every night. [Neurobiologist Michael] Leon says the scents were stimulating the memory centers of people’s brains as they slept. The results were published recently in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience. Now, the study was small, just 43 people. And their data collection got interrupted by the pandemic. Still, Leon says, it jibes with the understanding of how smell is connected to learning and memory.

Smell hasn’t been big on my list since I’m somewhat nasally-muffled but why not try. In the meantime, I puzzle, craft, read, NPR, and, most importantly, write these newsletters that tickle my brain in wholly new ways and create new divergent discoveries weekly.

Our gray matter is wholly underutilized (we tap into about 10% of our brains here at the height of the earthly food chain) which makes it pretty cool to see Scar-Jo as Lucy who reaches the unfathomable 100% brainpower and spirals out to the Big Bang. Speaking of chemistry, this happens when a bag with a massive amount of powerful drugs ruptures in her stomach.

As her brain capacity increases, Lucy can pass through dimensions, mastering control over her body, other bodies, the material world, space itself, defying the laws of science and gravity, attaining the powers of time travel…and achieving the very thing supposedly packaged now in a Neuralink: telepathy.