Game Changer (49 page)

In the final analysis, all that I am sure of is that
something amazing is going on, something impossible, and something far beyond
my ability to understand, whether this something is God or physics.
 

The novel describes precise locations in the brain
responsible for spirituality. While some progress has been made in unraveling
where this spiritual function might reside in the brain, these locations have
yet to be mapped out. This being said, I postulated that this would involve
multiple locations, rather than a single location, after reading articles like
the one excerpted below, from a piece in the
Huffington Post
(April, 2012) entitled,
No God Spot in Brain,
Spirituality Linked to Right Parietal Lobe
:

Scientists have speculated that the human brain features a
“God spot,” one distinct area of the brain responsible for spirituality. Now,
University of Missouri researchers have completed research that indicates
spirituality is a complex phenomenon, and multiple areas of the brain are
responsible for the many aspects of spiritual experiences.

“We have found a neuropsychological basis for spirituality, but it’s not
isolated to one specific area of the brain,” said Brick Johnstone, professor of
health psychology in the School of Health Professions. “Spirituality is a much
more dynamic concept that uses many parts of the brain. Certain parts of the
brain play more predominant roles, but they all work together to facilitate individuals’
spiritual experiences.”

In the most recent study, Johnstone studied 20 people with
traumatic brain injuries affecting the right parietal lobe, the area of the
brain situated a few inches above the right ear. He surveyed participants on
characteristics of spirituality, such as how close they felt to a higher power
and if they felt their lives were part of a divine plan. He found that the
participants with more significant injury to their right parietal lobe showed
an increased feeling of closeness to a higher power.

Aluminum foil and laser printers
:
I had fun writing the scene in which Kevin Quinn is turned
into an aluminum foil mummy. It turns out that aluminum foil really does block
electromagnetic signals. Like Quinn, I had thought this was a myth, but my research
indicated it wasn’t.

But I had to prove it to myself.
So I did the experiment Rachel recommends in the novel. I parked myself on the
couch and called my cell phone from our landline. Then I placed a single sheet
of aluminum foil over my cell and called again, responding with a triumphant,
“Yes!” when the phone didn’t ring. My wife, long used to being married to a
writer, now takes anything I do in stride, and looked on in amusement.

“Working out a scene?” she
asked.

“Yep,” I replied. “Did you know
that aluminum foil is a real thing?”

With respect to laser printers,
when I was an undergraduate at Ohio State, my father owned a company that sold
copy machines, faxes, and other business equipment. His biggest client was the
General Electric jet engine plant, which was a massive (and incredibly cool)
complex of buildings. He had placed over a hundred copy machines there, spread
out over many, many acres and many, many giant buildings. The repair technician
he sent when a copier had an issue was rubbing many of the GE people the wrong
way, and they weren’t happy with the level of service.

So during one of my summer
breaks from college, he decided to make me his secret weapon to bring his
company back into good graces with GE. He gave me a crash course on copy
machine repair and sent me to the GE plant every day as the maintenance, repair,
and customer good will technician. Most of the tweaks required to optimize
copier performance were simple. For anything that wasn’t routine, he would send
a real repair technician to fix the problem. But I was really there to be
charming and polite and helpful and repair the damage to the relationship
another tech had caused.

Why do I mention this? Because
copiers and laser printers work the same way, and I haven’t taken this
technology for granted since the days at GE. Both devices lay down an electric
charge on a drum in the precise pattern of the document to be printed, and then
suck up toner. It occurred to me when writing
Game Changer
that this would be a useful analogy to use when
thinking about how the nanites could quickly be directed to assume complex
patterns.

The BRAIN initiative
:
This is real,
and the blog post that Rachel read to her class, likening this effort to the
NASA moon launch, is also real. As discussed, this was written by Francis
Collins, who led the Human Genome Project.
 

As Collins wrote, the goal of this initiative is to produce
the first dynamic view of the human brain in action, revolutionizing our
understanding of how we think, feel, learn, remember, and move. This is a
massive, expensive project, and a very big deal.

I won’t spend further time with it here, but I would direct
you to HumanConnectomeProject.org, or you could Google
The BRAIN Initiative
, or these specific articles: 1)
The $5 Billion Race to Map Your Brain,
and 2)
Whole mouse brain mapping within
reach
.

A
sleeping giant
:
Kovonov was attempting
to motivate America to get off the sidelines and unleash its full might to
destroy an enemy. This is precisely what the Japanese did during World War II,
although in this case it wasn’t on purpose. America had chosen to sit out this
war at the start. But this changed dramatically after Japan’s attack on Pearl
Harbor. A Japanese admiral, realizing the grave mistake his country had made,
was alleged to have said, “We have awakened a sleeping giant, and have filled
him with a terrible resolve.”

The Kovonov character would no
doubt be aware of this history, so I chose to have him call this to mind by
characterizing his actions as
kicking
awake a sleeping giant
.

Fly
drones and fly catching
:
I put very little material into the novel about the science of fly drones, but
the pursuit of Micro Air Vehicles is a real thing, of course. Drones have
become impossible not to notice, and before I turned to neurobiology, I had planned
to write a novel based on a future in which MAVs had been perfected.

Not only could fly drones and other
MAVs be used in surveillance, they could be used to inject poison, could be directed
into jet engines to down planes, and could engage in all sorts of other mayhem.
I threw myself into the subject for almost two months, during which I read
books on the subject and spent many hours attempting to come up with an
overarching plot.

But try as I might, I could never
find one that really grabbed me. Finally, I gave up, and turned to neuroscience
as the basis for a possible novel. But while writing
Game Changer
, I still had drones on the brain, and realized they
could work quite nicely in a supporting role, although I chose not to go into
any technical detail.

With respect to killing and
catching living flies with one’s hands, these passages are accurate. I know,
because I captured flies this same way as a kid. I’d have other kids try to
catch one, which couldn’t really be done without the
sliding a hand on a smooth surface
technique. When they were unable
to do so, I’d bet them that I could. I won a number of bets this way, and
couldn’t resist including this in the novel—the technique, not the bets :).

Israel,
the Mossad, and US Intelligence
:
Meir Dagan really was the head of the Mossad from 2002 until 2010, and really
did have a framed black-and-white photo of his grandfather, just before he was
killed by the Nazis (and the results of the Stanley Milgram experiment that are
described are accurate, as well).

Anything in the novel about Israel and the Mossad that wasn’t
obviously fictional
—
like
their Matrix Learning Manhattan Project, and so on
—
was factual. Israel is as tiny as
described, has as scant a population, and is surrounded by countless larger
enemies determined to destroy it. The Mossad has become almost legendary in its
excellence as a spy agency, as described. Finally, the country does contain
perhaps the most highly educated population, per capita, of any country in the
world, and has become a world-renowned center of innovation. I drew on two
books for much of this information:
Spies
Against Armageddon
, by Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman, and
Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle
, by Dan
Senor and Saul Singer.

The US Intelligence Community is as
unwieldy of a behemoth as described in the novel, with seventeen separate
agencies, almost thirteen hundred government organizations, and two thousand
private companies, operating from over ten thousand locations spread across the
country. In 2010, the
Washington Post
published the results of a two-year investigation of the US Intelligence
Community entitled, “A hidden world, growing beyond control,”
which is quite eye-opening. Here is how
this lengthy story begins:

The top-secret world the government
created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so
large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs,
how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how
many agencies do the same work.

These are some of the findings of a
two-year investigation by
The Washington
Post
that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United
States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough
oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is
that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that
its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

Neuroscience
and the law
:
I touched upon this briefly in the novel, when the
decision was made to fake Quinn’s death rather than disclose the possibility of
false memory implantation, so as not to throw a lifeline to criminal defense
attorneys throughout the country. This is another area I find fascinating, but
I couldn’t spare the space in the novel to address it more fully.

David
Eagleman does discuss this extensively in his book
Incognito,
however. In addition to his other duties, Eagleman is
also director of Baylor
College of Medicine’s
Initiative on
Neuroscience and the Law
, and has lectured on these issues all over the
world. Here is an excerpt from this section of his book:

The biggest battle I have to fight is the
misperception that an improved biological understanding of people’s behaviors
and internal differences means we will forgive criminals and no longer take
them off the streets. That’s incorrect. Biological explanation will not
exculpate criminals. Brain science will improve the legal system, not impede
its function. For the smooth operation of society, we will remove from the
streets those criminals who prove themselves to be over-aggressive,
under-empathetic, and poor at controlling their impulses. They will be taken
into the care of the government.

But the important change will be the way we punish the
vast range of criminal acts
—
in terms of rational sentencing and new ideas for
rehabilitation. The emphasis will shift from punishment to recognizing problems
(both neural and social) and meaningfully addressing them.

Miscellaneous
:
The information about Alan Turing, his contributions to computer science and
the war effort, and his recruitment of non-typical code breakers, is accurate.
If you haven’t seen the movie
The
Imitation Game
, about Turing and his efforts to crack the Nazi Enigma
Machine, I can’t recommend it more highly. One of the best movies I have seen.

Adolf Hitler did survive multiple assassination
attempts over many years. Had just one of these succeeded who knows what the
world would look like today.

The transparent roundworm, C. elegans, has
played a vital role in neuroscience for many decades for the reasons given, and
does, indeed, possess just three hundred and two neurons.

The information about girls
outperforming boys when it comes to reading is accurate. Not only this, it is
often difficult to get boys to read at all. I’ve written articles for
Today’s Parent
and others on this
subject, since my
Prometheus Project
kids series has been touted by both parents and educators for its appeal to
reluctant readers (and interestingly enough, gifted students at the same time).

Microneedle arrays
are
being developed for painless
delivery of medications.

The information about the
Advanced Airborne Command Post
(the E-4B jet), and
the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group is accurate.

The information about the
vulnerabilities of facial recognition, including CV Dazzle and the use of
remote control bulbs to blind cameras, is accurate, as is the discussion of the
Chinese torture called
Death by a
Thousand Cuts
.

Finally, the symptoms experienced
by al-Bilawy after Rachel Howard activated all of his nanites at once are all
actual symptoms of what is called a Tonic-clonic seizure (previously called a
Grand mal seizure), although these would typically not all occur during the
same episode, nor be as severe.