The horizons of neuroscience - The brain is wider than the sky

Putting the science in fiction - Dan Koboldt, Chuck Wendig 2018

The horizons of neuroscience
The brain is wider than the sky

By Paul Regier

Neuroscience research has made a lot of progress in understanding the brain and how it works. Even so, there is still much we do not know. Mysteries, like black boxes, tend to get filled with ideas. Some of these ideas get tested as hypotheses that, after plenty of evidence is gathered, may become scientific theories. Often, however, they devolve into myths and falsehoods driven by incomplete data or anecdotal evidence.

One persistent myth is that humans only use 10 percent of our brains. Essentially, the idea is that if humans only use 10 percent of their brains—and do a lot with it—there remains 90 percent of unused brain potential that conceivably could mean untapped superpowers. It is a particularly attractive myth in fiction, and many stories in movies, books, video games, and comics have used the 10 percent fallacy as a foundation. Stories use various devices, such as drugs, science, or training, to “unlock” the 90 percent, thereby facilitating various special abilities: telekinesis, ultra-fast learning and planning, a perfect memory, or even magic.

The truth is the whole brain is active most of the time. Consider a relatively simple task such as reading this book. To provide a broad overview, areas of activation and not the complexities that occur at each area to process information, each of which would require an entire chapter, will be the focus. While reading, visual information enters the eyes and is relayed by the optic nerve through the optic chiasm, where information from the left side of the visual field viewed with the left eye crosses over to the right hemisphere; the same thing happens with the right. After the optic chiasm, the visual information is carried by the optic tract to the visual part of the thalamus, called the lateral geniculate nucleus, which relays the signal via the optic radiation to the visual cortex. In order to understand the visual information received, the signal is processed by the visual cortex and passed on to the angular gyrus of the left interior parietal lobe. This area does some higher-level processing (e.g., categorization, conceptualization) before sending the information to Wernicke’s area, which finally recognizes the visual information as words on a page. Finally, if you speak aloud as you are reading, Broca’s area and the motor cortex also get involved.

In order to make sense of each sentence and the chapter as a whole, you need to keep track of everything you have read. Memory is governed by areas of the brain such as the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. Then several other cortical areas get involved as you imagine the mental and physical representations these words represent. Thus, the result of a basic action like reading activates a large portion of the brain: areas involved with vision, word recognition, language comprehension, memory, and executive function.

Brain regions important for reading text are more active functions, requiring conscious attention, but there are also subconscious processes that either support some action or are required just to exist. For example, if you are reading while sitting in a chair, the cerebellum and motor cortex work together to maintain balance and coordinate little muscle movements to keep the book in your hands. Even if you haven’t been paying attention, your ears have been receiving sounds, which are interpreted by the auditory cortex. To top it all off, your heart and breathing and other autonomous actions that you rarely think of are being controlled by the brain stem.

It is remarkable: Just by performing a simple task, most, if not all, of the brain is active in a matter of minutes, processing specific stimuli and information, important for both conscious and subconscious processes.

Neuroscience in fiction

I mentioned that the 10 percent myth is particularly attractive in fiction, and it makes sense if a potential future version of our reality might allow a protagonist to have superpowers. Often, however, stories based on the 10 percent myth do not present a potential future vision; instead they offer an alternative universe, wherein human brains have untapped powers ready to be unlocked, but that’s not fiction, that’s fantasy. In fantasy writing, there could be a whole world of beings with brains ready to be unlocked, but fiction about humans should present the possible, at least on some level, even if extreme cases must rely on time and technology to change enough for something fantastical to occur.

Even without having to reach into the far future, neuroscience research has shown that deviations from normal brain structure can lead to interesting and advantageous behavioral abnormalities. For instance, evidence suggests that, compared with the average person, Albert Einstein had a thicker corpus callosum, which is basically an information highway between the two brain hemispheres, and this may have contributed to some of his genius. Recently, scientists have discovered a handful of people with an extraordinary ability to recall the events of their lives, a condition called highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM). Simply prompted with a date, people with HSAM can recall what day of the week it was and what they were doing. It works the other way as well. Ask them when they first heard a song, for example, and they can tell you the exact date, the day of the week, and what they were doing. On average, people with HSAM are 87 percent accurate with their recall of these types of personal memories. This extraordinary memory recall might appear to resemble the idea behind the 10 percent myth, but the ability seems to be specific to autobiographical memory, as initial tests indicate that individuals with HSAM do not have better cognitive or memory abilities—other than autobiographical—compared with the average person. The underlying neurobiology that drives HSAM is just beginning to be understood, but initial evidence points to structural abnormalities in the brain. In other words, their brains probably developed differently, and their brains might even resemble those of people with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Current technology, such as transcranial magnetic stimulation, which noninvasively stimulates parts of the brain, offers hints of potential exploitation of HSAM. If this ability’s neurobiological underpinnings could be isolated, future technology might hypothetically induce it. Taking it a step further, the hypothetical technique to create HSAM might be applied to other parts of the brain, creating superior processing of other types of memory, cognition, or even vision. Technology offers potential ways to augment parts of the brain. External hard drives or SD cards might be connected to memory centers in the brain, allowing for extra storage and quicker and more accurate retrieval of information. A fully external visual system, like a digital version of the pathway described earlier, might allow for a greater visual field and for generally enhanced visual perception.

On the flip side, there are numerous examples of losing brain function or structures that result in behavioral changes. The literature on animal research is full of examples, wherein scientists deactivate certain parts of a brain to better understand the function of a brain region. However, this damage can occur naturally in humans, as well. One poignant example is a true story about a railroad construction foreman, Phineas Gage, in the early 1800s. While setting a charge in a rock with a tamping rod, a spark ignited the blasting powder and shot the rod through Gage’s head, entering at the cheek, destroying his left eye, going through the frontal part of the brain, and coming out the top of his head, landing many yards away. Remarkably, he didn’t die. The doctor who saw him after the accident reported that Gage was talkative, though a bit tired, as Gage told the doctor about the accident. The doctor was skeptical of the story until Gage threw up, and the doctor noticed bits of brain in the mess. Gage lived for twelve more years, and some people might use this story as evidence that the 10 percent myth is at least partially true. But losing part of his frontal lobe changed Gage. He became childish, impulsive, and profane to the point where friends and acquaintances reported him as being “no longer Gage.”

The 10 percent myth may not be true, but neuroscientific research has numerous examples of deviations in behavior driven by changes in the brain: damage to the brain, developmentally different brains, and structural and functional changes caused by disorders and disease. Results from scientific studies can be just as interesting for the basis of a story, and a solid scientific foundation allows for a more believable fiction world and shows that the writer has taken the time to understand the mechanisms that affect those living in that environment. Thus, whether hindering or enhancing a character’s neural abilities, the neuroscientific literature offers plenty of validated information to help with the creation process.