Thinking about thinking
The "Jennifer Aniston neuron"?
That seems ridiculous. But Koch is mapping the firing of single neurons. He works with epilepsy patients who, before they have surgery, need to have really detailed electrical maps of their brains made to locate their seizures and locate normal brain areas. Koch shows people a photo of Jennifer Aniston, and one neuron fires at it. And doesn't fire at anything else. They don't fire at photos of blondes, or girls with cute noses. Only Jennifer Aniston.
He also found a Bill Clinton neuron. And that's really surprising, because you shouldn't be able to have neurons dedicated to one thing. We have 100 billion neurons, but we have more than 100 billion experiences during our lives. Yet there it is. That has something to do with consciousness, though we don't fully understand it.
What do dreams have to do with thinking and consciousness?
Most of us like to believe our brains don't trick us. We live our lives based on this idea that we experience things as they are. But dreams are incontrovertible proof that our brains do trick us. When we have them, they demand all our attention. They are ecstatic and terrifying. And we all do it—we all dream. So it must be necessary and important.
So why do we dream?
There have been long debates about that. Some researchers think they are ways of dumping wakeful experiences we don't need. Others think they are a way of processing experiences, kind of rehearsing our reactions to them so we can better cope with them. I spoke with one researcher, Bob Stickgold of Harvard, who may have evidence of this. He's identified this phenomenon: hallucinations as we drop off to sleep after practicing a new skill. He studied people playing Tetris, the computer game where you have to fit different-shaped blocks into a wall very quickly. And going to sleep—this has happened to me; I was a Tetris addict—you can't get pictures of these Tetris blocks out of your head. They keep falling, and you keep turning them to fit them in. Bob has also shown this happens with a skiing simulation game called Alpine Racer. Maybe this is a way our brain can rehearse things so we can better perform them when awake.
That's perhaps a continuity between our waking and sleeping selves. But there are other states of mind you explore that don't even have continuity among oneself: multiple personalities.
They don't call it that anymore. David Spiegel, a psychiatrist at Stanford, told me, "We changed the name because they don't have more than one personality. They have less than one." It's fragmented. Now it's called dissociative identity disorder.
A lot of people don't think it exists. That such people are just putting on an act to get attention.
It's certainly a hot-button topic. And I'm not 100 percent convinced. But I spent a week with this middle-aged artist on Long Island in New York, Judy Castelli, and I watched her shift from one personality to another. It was all pretty normal, except for this dramatic switching. She suddenly started talking like a child. She told me that at one point she had 44 personalities, but she thinks that after years of therapy, that number has dwindled a bit. Three or four of them were adult Judys, she said, and some are more comfortable talking about mental illness, and some are more shy.
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