A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention (8 page)

“Where are his glasses?”

Gone. This was all of Keith that remained.

She couldn’t bring herself to eat. She didn’t pray. She had become something akin to a zombie. More visitors came to the house.

Megan showed up. Her life was already out-of-balance and now her dad was dead. When she was a little girl, she and Keith would go geocaching together. He’d wake her in the middle of the night and they’d use the big Deep Space Hunter telescope to look at a comet or other celestial event. They would throw the softball around in the yard. They played video games, the first being an early
Star Wars
game that they could play against each other after Keith used his wizardry to connect two computers together—an early, jerry-rigged, multiplayer game.

Megan looked up to him. “I wanted to be a rocket scientist, like my dad. That’s what I wanted to be, if I wasn’t going to make the Olympics.”

But things started to sour for Megan, and in her relationship with her parents, in high school. Maybe it was because she switched to a bigger school or maybe because she got her first boyfriend. Her grades dipped into the regular B’s, then got worse. She swam less. Then, partway through high school, she said she was raped by a boy who lived near the big church. The boy had plied her with beer, she recalls. Her recollections were fuzzy; they came in and out. In the end, nothing came of the allegations; she felt her parents weren’t supportive.

Her grades worsened. She stopped swimming, thanks in part to an injured shoulder. On her high school graduation night, not long before the accident on Valley View Drive, her boyfriend got down on one knee at a campsite and proposed. Megan went home to show her parents the ring; she said her mom didn’t approve. On the other hand, because of their souring relationship, Megan had asked her mother not to come to her high school graduation. As to her engagement, she said, her father seemed mostly supportive. “I don’t think either of my parents liked him,” she said of her fiancé. “My dad kind of went with it.”

Megan thought of her father as a tether, and he was gone.

She needed something to wear to the funeral. She was low on funds. Leila looked inside Keith’s wallet; as she suspected it would, it kept $100 in $20 bills—what Keith usually carried. She gave it to Megan to go with her aunt to the mall to buy something black.

Among the visitors to the house was Tom Higgs, Keith’s boss—
putative
boss, really, given that Keith was the guy at the office answering questions. When Tom got to the O’Dell’s, he saw Leila in the living room, shaking.

“She couldn’t focus,” Tom recalls. It was like trying to talk to someone who didn’t have a reason to take the next breath.

“CAN WE SEE HIM?”
asked Jim Furfaro’s mom. She meant: Jim’s body.

The mortician nodded grimly.

Jim’s mom stood behind Jackie at Allen-Hall Mortuary. The Furfaro family made their visit shortly after the O’Dell clan.

Jackie already had her game face on, an almost impassive look, the grief held tightly inside. After falling apart, turning hysterical, when the officers first told her in the classroom at Utah State, she recovered her outward composure.

“In the end, I was embarrassed that I’d fallen apart in front of anyone who knew me. That isn’t my thing.”

After she told Cassidy, she put Stephanie to bed. The older girl, upstairs in her room, attempted to be brave herself, tried to sleep. She could hear the relatives downstairs, talking about it. She had put her hands over her ears and held them tightly, trying to make it all go away.

A bit later, Jackie climbed into bed and pulled Jim’s heavy terry- cloth robe over herself. Eventually, unable to sleep, she took NyQuil. And then there was a pitter-patter of feet, and Stephanie crawled into bed and they sort of slept the rest of the night under the robe that smelled like Daddy.

In the morning, Jackie disengaged from the family that had gathered to pay respects and take her to the mortuary. She went into the bathroom, got in the shower, and sobbed. Heaved. Leaned against the wall, let the grief out. She reappeared thirty minutes later, drained, back in a modicum of control.

Then, at the mortuary, they put her through the same paces as they had Leila, just an hour earlier. Jackie filled out paperwork and picked out a casket.

“Can we see him?”

Jackie wasn’t particularly religious. Jim was a confirmed Catholic. But he and Jackie weren’t into anything organized. Jackie had a general belief in God, tempered by a scientist’s view of the world. As often as not, though, she relied on herself. She was the rock, a role she’d always taken to and sort of relished.

“I always felt like I was the shoulder.”

Jackie walked into the viewing room. Jim lay on a gurney, covered with a comforter. Not a sheet, which struck Jackie, but a comforter, light-colored with a flower print. They pulled back the cover.

Dried blood trickled from Jim’s ear. His right eye was missing. She touched his chest and head and hair. He was cold. She thought:
He looks pretty good, given what they told me about the accident
.

She whispered: “Good-bye.”

CHAPTER 7

THE NEUROSCIENTISTS

I
’M A TREE FREAK.”

A twenty-foot-high triangle palm stretches up from its pot in the middle of the main floor of Dr. Gazzaley’s studio loft. The palm divides the kitchen from the living room, which has a sleek black couch and a small Japanese maple in the corner.

The couch faces a gas fireplace, a light blue flame burning. Over it hangs a glossy painting called
Three Oaks
with three trees floating in the air against a yellow backdrop. The puffy trees look like brains.

Alternative rock with an electriconic beat pulses through the loft.

“The band is called Metric,” says Dr. Gazzaley. It’s a new track, which is one of his rules when it comes to music: He won’t put a song that’s been out for more than a year on the playlist. “I’m very into new bands.”

Dr. Gazzaley pushes a button on the fireplace. A screen descends until it covers the top half of the fireplace, including the three oaks. It displays high-definition images shown from the projector hanging from the ceiling across the room. It’s also connected to the PlayStation 3 so that he and his girlfriend, Jo Fung, can play video games, their current favorite being Assassin’s Creed.

Checkerboard windows stretch from the floor to nearly the loft’s roof. They look to downtown San Francisco on a clear, chilly night. The street below the loft hums with activity, twenty-somethings giddy on martinis. This is the Mission District, a gentrified hotbed of sushi, tapas, hip Mexican restaurants, and upscale furniture stores.

Inside the “Gazzloft,” the energy is starting to heat up. Tonight marks the party’s fourth anniversary, and the host certainly wouldn’t miss this Friday, even though he’s already logged a huge day.

It began in Florida, where yesterday he spoke to a group—“the college of neuropsychopharmacology, something like that,” he says. He could be excused for being tired. He got up at three a.m. California time. As soon as he flew home, he met an NBC crew, which asked him to scan the brain of a multitasker for a segment for
Dateline
and the
Today
show.

“I’m always in a hurry,” Dr. Gazzaley says. And he doesn’t do anything halfway. “I don’t like to take on anything I can’t blow away.”

He says his drive comes from a passion for science that had him, as a kid, taking the bus two hours a day to and from a working-class neighborhood in Queens, New York—the son of blue-collar parents (mom was a bookkeeper, dad worked for the transit authority)—to the world-class Bronx High School of Science. Despite excelling there, and getting high SAT scores, he didn’t get his first college choices. It intensified his drive, made him want to prove himself, but, he says, it also freed him to approach problems in his own way. “The system failed me, so I decided I didn’t need the system.”

He feels a buzz from his phone. He extracts it from his black jeans and reads. “Oh, look at this!” He holds up the phone and shows the text:
I’m coming. Look out!

It’s from Philip Rosedale. “He created Second Life,” Dr. Gazzaley says. It’s one of the biggest virtual worlds ever created.

Dr. Gazzaley walks to the kitchen counter to show the text to a handful of people who have come early to eat prosciutto and soy chicken from Whole Foods. “It’s going to get crazy,” Dr. Gazzaley says. In addition to Rosedale, he’s expecting a bunch of hipsters, rockers, and entrepreneurs: the guitarist from Counting Crows and the lead musician from Thievery Corporation; the guy who created Digg (an Internet service that hundreds of millions of people use to rank whether or not they “like” something on the Internet); owners of some of the swanky nearby restaurants; and a gorgeous woman from the Caribbean named Rio, who professes to “be in love with Dr. Gazzaley’s brain.”

BEFORE THE PLACE EXPLODES
, Dr. Gazzaley says there is time to explain the “cocktail party problem.” It is among the most fundamental precepts in attention science. As he talks, he makes a show of shifting his eyes to one of the handful of pre-party attendees, a pregnant woman named Kat who oversees HR for Burning Man.

He explains that he’s illustrating the cocktail party effect.

“I can look at Kat and still be listening to whoever I’m talking to,” Dr. Gazzaley says, then shifts his eyes back to me. “Or I can look at whoever I’m talking to but shift my attention so that I’m listening to Kat.

“It’s an exercise in selective attention.”

What he means is that people have a powerful, even extraordinary, ability to direct their attention to control it. At the same time, he says, the cocktail party effect shows the limitations of attention; after all, you can’t pay attention to two conversations at once. In fact, it’s so limited that if you’re really listening to the person in front of you, there are generally only two things you can pick up in a different conversation: the gender of the person speaking or, in some cases, the sound of your name.

“There’s an illusion that you have a whole field of attention,” Dr. Gazzaley says. The reality is that you can focus your attention on one very specific thing, not everything in your field of vision. Dr. Gazzaley says the meaning of this principle is actually open to interpretation. On one hand, it shows you can control and focus your attention. But seen another way, the exercise shows how hard it is to spread your attention. It is more like a laser than an overhead light.

Is that good or bad? “It depends on whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist,” Dr. Gazzaley says.

In short, attention is extremely powerful and extremely limited. That idea, as embodied by the cocktail party effect, is fundamental to modern attention science, and it seems so obvious. But it was quite revelatory in the middle of the nineteenth century. Up to that point, there was a general belief that the brain was “infinite” in its power to take in and process the world.

IF YOU TOUCH YOUR
foot, you feel it. Immediately. Right?

Until the middle of the nineteenth century that thinking symbolized the prevailing scientific thought about the human neural network. In a nutshell: Scientists believed that a human’s reaction time was immeasurably fast—infinite, as some scientists put it. A person felt a prick and instantly recoiled, or saw a snake and leapt, or heard the sound of thundering hooves and stepped back off the street.

What could prove otherwise? Try a “galvanometer.” It was an early device used to detect and measure the magnitude of an electric current. Such gadgets were also employed to measure speed; how fast was a current traveling? The devices took various forms, but basically they used twisted metal coils to detect an electrical signal. When a galvanometer detected a signal, it created a magnetic field. The magnetic force, in turn, would cause a little pointer to move, allowing a researcher to measure when a current first appeared, and when it dissipated. Early researchers used them in the field of ballistics to, say, measure the pace and trajectory of a bullet.

Hermann von Helmholtz used one to measure the reaction time of a frog.

Helmholtz was an associate professor at the Prussian University of Königsberg and one of the leading scientists of his day. He used an electric current to stimulate an amphibian’s calf, then employed the galvanometer to measure how long it took the electrical current to run along the sciatic nerve. What he found changed the way scientists viewed the human brain. He discovered that what had looked instantaneous from the outside, was, in fact, anything but, and not even close to light speed. It took time for the current to travel to the brain.

He tried it on a human being and discovered the same thing. Roughly, he estimated that “neural conduction time” was around one hundred meters per second. It took twenty milliseconds for information to get from brain to calf. (By comparison, light travels at about 300,000 kilometers per second.)

Helmholtz’s use of the galvanometer symbolized not just how scientists were measuring human capacity, but why. The researchers realized that the machines people were building—those mechanized tools of productivity, war, and science—were so powerful that they were moving faster than people could keep up. This was a defining moment. Scientists were putting new technology to work to understand the capacities and limits of the human brain at the very moment that technology was putting those limits into sharp relief.

“It was not obvious that people were slow to respond until the 1850s. The increasing use of machines began to make this obvious,” says Michael I. Posner, a professor emeritus of neuroscience at the University of Oregon, who is one of the modern pioneers of attention science and a student of its history. The relatively slow reaction time of humans “wasn’t clear until the pressure on people started to rise.”

Through the nineteenth century, technology quickly evolved. In 1837, across the ocean, Samuel Morse unveiled his first telegraph device, and five years later “Morse convinced Congress to provide $30,000 in support of his plan to ‘wire’ the United States,” according to a history compiled by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It notes that in May of 1844, Morse gave a public demonstration, sending a message from Washington to a train depot in Baltimore. The message read:
What hath God wrought?