Know thyselves

ITHACA, N.Y., the Patent Office — “The more important portion of the mind,” Sigmund Freud famously wrote, “like the more important portion of an iceberg, lies below the surface.” A romantic thought, but seriously? Advances in neuroscience, electroencephalography, digital marketing and behavioral tracking are doing for metaphorical icebergs what global warming does for real ones. And that’s good news if you, like me, approach the mind as a kind of mini-mall and prefer to know what’s what, how big it is and how much it costs without a lot of verbal voodoo or psychological hocus-pocus. Caverns once measureless to man have been thoroughly spelunked and rezoned for retail.

It’s been a long journey, and until very recently a desultory, sometimes seemingly fruitless one. When Texas Instruments debuted the first voiceless phone call in 2008, it relied on a neckband that intercepted nerve signals as they arrived at the vocal cords in order to translate thought into speech. So you had to all but speak to make it work, which is why the fellow demonstrating it looked as if he was suppressing a motor tic in his Kafkaesque face. Later that year, a research team at UC Irvine began using electroencephalographic caps to fish farther upstream, in the brain itself, and true, grimace-free telepathy advanced into the realm of the possible.

“The eventual application I see is for students sitting in the back of the lecture hall not paying attention because they are texting,” said the head researcher. “Instead, students could be back there, just thinking to each other.” It was a beautiful vision of the life of the mind, and a well-funded one, with more than $4 million from the United States military.

These strides in so-called synthetic telepathy are but spring buds, however, next to the great flowering we’ve seen in the field of brain science. “Proust was a neuroscientist,” the great Bob Dylan scholar Jonah Lehrer once asserted, in an uncharacteristic lapse of judgment. No, Mr. Lehrer, Proust was a neurasthenic pacing around in his pajamas, alternately sniffing his chamberpot for the afterstench of albino asparagus and explaining how eating cookies reminded him of home. When “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu” can tell us how to lose weight, maximize our leadership potential and negotiate with Iran, we’ll talk about promoting its author.

Even on traditional subjects such as eros and courtship, there’s nothing in traditional literature that can prepare us for the power, subtlety and range of psychological insight made possible by today’s fusion of neuroscience with supple, no-nonsense writing:

[Erica] looked furtively at Harold as he approached. Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov, of Princeton, have found that we make judgments about a person’s trustworthiness, competence, aggressiveness, and likability within the first tenth of a second. These sorts of first glimpses are astonishingly reliable in predicting how people will feel about each other months later. Erica noticed that Harold was good-looking but not one of those men who are so good-looking that they don’t need to be interesting. He was tall, which tends to inspire confidence; one study estimated that each inch of height corresponds to six thousand dollars of annual salary in contemporary America. Then he walked up and said hello.
That’s the great New York Times columnist David Brooks, whose Harold and Erica make Charles Swann and Odette de Crecy look like poured-plastic figurines thrown in free with a Happy Meal.

Symphonic and masterful as such a prose style is, it is probably transitional; it too shall pass. The great likelihood is that not only literature but language itself will soon cease to be the preferred medium for tabulating the contents of the mind. We’ll have graphical interfaces for that.

Think about it. Before the 20th century, authors used to go on and on describing the external world — objects, settings, landscapes, facial features, social milieus and so on. Then they suddenly turned inward. We know every single thought Clarissa Dalloway has on a particular day in June, but very little about what she’s wearing. What happened? Cinema happened. It conquered three-dimensional space, leaving interiority the domain of the language arts. Once we’ve conquered that too, it will be time for literature to bow gracefully out. No one can say it hasn’t had a good run! But tomorrow’s intelligentsia will read minds, not books.

The usual justification for reading novels and poetry is that it awakens our curiosity about —and moral concern for — other selves. But an app providing a “fly’s eye,” mosaic-like surveillance grid of the brain patterns of everyone in your vicinity would do that much better. No matter how much “empathy” George Eliot supposedly stirs up in a reader, she takes her time doing it and still will never be able to tell you if someone near you on the bus is thirsty and wants some of your Coke. The problem of other selves was life and literature’s “supreme mystery,” as Virginia Woolf put it:

Here was one room; there another. Did religion solve that, or love?

No, but science did. Tear down this wall, Ms. Woolf. The twilight of literature is the dawn of true fellow-feeling.

Yet this is no time to wax triumphant, however breathtaking the advances. Yes, neuroscience tells us the precise meaning of such experiences as becoming angry or falling in love. Yes, database marketing tracks our development as economic and ideological subjects. And yes, cognitive science with its electrode caps and beeping monitors can read our minds and will make us all fluent in telepathy. But these separate achievements belie a deeper failure of integration. The problem with the conquest of consciousness, from a managerial perspective, is that its explorers and generals, so to speak, continue to work in silos, instead of squeezing in next to or on top of one another in the cockpit. (Wipe the smirk off your face, reader. You try devising a multipronged cross-platform coordinated assault on the human mind without mixing metaphors.)

If you can convert thoughts into electric signals, you can convert electric signals into thoughts. And as any tin-pot tinkerer can tell you, it’s 10 minutes’ work to transform a transistor radio into a two-way transceiver. Ergo, by an incontrovertible syllogism, it should be pretty easy to convert electrode hats into two-way devices we can program people with. The step after that will be to make the technology wireless. Democracy will become more streamlined and efficient, our citizenry more agreeable. Casual social encounters, on the other hand, will take on the quiet, competitive ferocity and rewarding intensity of chess, as people prowl around one another, “thought-grappling” for dominance.

From a direct-marketing standpoint, as soon as your thoughts can be tracked (and then programmed), it will be far easier for the entrepreneurial and creative classes to sell you things and thus meet your needs. You will no longer have to endure listless, irrelevant pop-up ads, or watch trailers for films you won’t like. Instead, an energetic and winning 3-D hologram of a guy, product in hand, clambers over the windowsill of your smart screen and follows you around the house saying “you know you want it.” And naturally, you do.

People want to be free, and so does information, including information about people, and what they do and desire and think. As the utopian dream of free thought and radical transparency becomes a reality, however, we need to think harder about security. For all the rhetoric in the air about “thought crimes” (usually from apologists!), we hear precious little about how to prosecute them successfully — or better, how to stop them from even being contemplated in the first place. It is absurd that novelists and neuroscientists can help themselves to our thoughts but police have to stand around staring at our actions. It is equally absurd that government agents can rifle through our toiletry bags at the airport, but not look directly into our hearts, or examine, at will, the contents of our character. Our protectors should have the tools they need to do the things they need to do, whatever those tools and things may be.

The risks should be neither downplayed nor dismissed. One is that police work may become so sedentary and contemplative that TV shows like “Cops” will seem like arid stretches of an Antonioni film. Kids slumped on the furniture like sea lions for hours on end barking periodically for snacks will claim to be playing cops and robbers. Another concern is that when bad guys make the leap from thought into action, actual cops will rouse themselves with a wheezy reluctance, and lumber after them only halfheartedly.

But neurotransparency’s revolutionary potential far outweighs its risks. Knowing thyself has always been our civilization’s greatest goal, and it is finally within reach. The Quantified Self movement — which advocates ramping up the great tradition, passed down from Benjamin Franklin through J. Alfred Prufrock to Oliver Burkeman, of minutely measuring your life even as you lead it, except using state-of-the-art gadgets, apps and data streams instead of dinky coffee spoons — is on the right track. But it, too, is bedeviled by silo thinking. Quantified Selfies are by and large content to watch themselves through the same narrow lens as today’s database marketers — the lens of behavioral monitoring, that is, as opposed to the wide-angle neural-surveillance panopticon of tomorrow’s law enforcement.

As walls become windows, the self that matters most — yours — burns brighter than ever. Think what true self-knowledge can mean, reader. You know you want it.