Chapter 1: Discovery
Tuesday, April 11, 2039, MIT Computational Neuroscience Lab, Morning
The data made no sense.
The data made no sense.
Anya stood in her darkened lab, examining neural signals moving through the glowing hologram of a human brain. Forty-seven complete scans from Imani’s Neural Resonance Imager. Petabytes of data capturing every neuron, every connection, electrical impulses cascading through the brain in real time.
Three months of this, and she still couldn’t see why dementia patients failed to make memories and became confused even though their neurons kept firing. All she had to show for it was eyestrain and headaches.
Fuck. It has to be in there.
She didn’t notice the lab door opening until hallway light washed out the projection. Scowling, she turned.
“Coffee?” Ted’s voice emerged from the silhouette as he entered, closing the door behind him.
“God, yes.” She took the cup from his weathered hand, gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. The feel of his beard and the taste of bitter black coffee yanked her back to the world.
“Still chasing the ghost?” He smiled.
She groaned. “Don’t even use that word. People and their ‘ghost in the machine.’ This is all there is.” She waved her hand at the brain. “Neurons and action potentials.”
Ted frowned, his gaze taking in her stained black jeans and loose shirt. “Did you remember to eat? I packed lunch.”
“I gave it to that woman out front. She needs it more than me. Have you seen her dog? Poor thing is wasting away.”
“You’re losing weight, Anya.”
“Maybe if you brought your mother’s onigiri,” she laughed. “Besides, there’s a vending machine down the hall. Microwave burritos for the win.”
He grunted, turning to the holographic brain. “I never get tired of seeing this.” He stepped closer, tracing neurons with his fingertips. “Figured out the hard question yet?”
She scoffed lightly. “Ted, imagine you could see into a computer chip and watch the electrons. Could you tell what code it was running?”
“Probably not.”
“We’re looking at the hardware that implements a human mind. How the hell do I find the software?”
Ted sighed. “Maybe you should go back to simpler models. Isolate a single structure and study it. Something publishable that the grant committee will understand.”
Anya turned to him, her eyes burning. “No! That’s incremental bullshit, and you know it. They’ve been doing that for decades and it doesn’t provide any insights into how thinking actually works. The answer isn’t in one part; it’s how it all functions as a whole. It’s the Gestalt. “
Ted held her gaze for a moment, then smiled. “You’re right,” he said softly. “You got to go for it.”
“You think, if we map all this, every neuron in someone’s brain, we can capture the essence of what makes them human?”
“If we understand how the brain thinks, maybe we won’t need to talk about ‘essence.’”
She crossed her arms and stared at the hologram. “I have to figure out this Alzheimer’s thing. It’s giving me headaches.”
She made a hand gesture, splitting the hologram into two brains. “Look, healthy on the left, Alzheimer’s patient on the right.”
In the healthy brain, colorful signals moved in a constant, fluid wash of light. The brightness was steady, a continuous hum of activity.
But the patient’s brain looked... wrong.
“Do you see that?” Anya narrowed her eyes. “The light isn’t steady. It’s shimmering. Flickering.”
“Sensor noise?” Ted asked.
“Maybe. It looks like a bad refresh rate. Like the data is dropping frames.”
She watched the patient’s brain pulse. It wasn’t the smooth glow of the control; it was jagged. Bursts of light that didn’t seem to go anywhere, creating a strobe-light effect in the parietal lobe.
“Wait.” She reached out and adjusted a glowing control floating in the air next to the brain. “Let’s see what’s happening in the gaps.”
The display slowed to near-frozen individual frames.
Now, the blur resolved into details. Neural cell bodies pulsed with activity, sending waves of color flowing down axons into other neurons.
She reached into the image and made a gesture like she was pinching her fingers together, then stretched her hands apart, zooming in on a small section of the patient’s brain.
“A bright pulse traveled down the axon. It was strong. It moved perfectly. But when it hit the synapse, it didn’t trigger the next neuron.
It just vanished.
“There,” she whispered. “It didn’t drop the frame. The signal just... stopped.”
“Ted, look at the healthy one.” She pointed to the left. “Signals from these two regions arrive at the target at the same millisecond. They add up. They reinforce each other.”
She moved back to the patient’s brain. “But here...” She pointed to the failed connection. “See? That signal is much slower than its partner.”
The pulse of light crawled down the length of one axon while another flew down a different path. They arrived at the target at different times.
“They don’t sync,” she said. “The first one fades before the second one arrives. The signal dies.”
“Out of phase,” Ted said quietly.
“Yeah, it’s like pushing a swing. Push at the right moment, it goes higher. That’s resonance. But if your timing’s off...” She mimed a mistimed push. “Nothing.”
Ted leaned closer. “You’re saying the problem isn’t the connections. It’s the timing? That makes sense. In computer chips, we have precise clocks. If different parts of the chip fell out of sync, it’d crash and burn.”
“I think so, Ted. Let’s see.” She spoke to the air. “George, compare healthy control to Alzheimer’s patient. Color-code by signal transmission speed.”
Ted laughed. “You’re calling it George now?”
“Beats ‘computer’. I’d sound like Trek if I did that.”
As they spoke, the healthy brain shifted to synchronized blues and greens, waves pulsing in rhythm. The patient’s brain showed many different hues. Where they didn’t match, signals stalled, faded. Stopped propagating around the brain.
“Jesus,” Ted breathed. “They’re completely out of sync.”
“Yes! Billions of pathways in our brains have to coordinate. If the timing breaks down...” Anya’s hands moved through the hologram, pointing out the cascading failures. “Thinking breaks down.”
“George, correlate temporal variance in signal propagation with cognitive test scores across all clinical trials.”
Silence. She tapped her foot impatiently.
“The greater the variance, the lower the scores. Correlation coefficient zero point seven three. Highly significant for this type of physiological effect.”
Anya turned to face Ted, eyes wide. “Ted. I think this is it. Thinking isn’t about which neurons fire. It’s about when they fire. Just like a computer chip, you have to have the right timing, everywhere, all at once.”
“Temporally synchronized architecture,” Ted said. “Without it, thoughts can’t form or keep going. It’s totally logical.”
“Do you think you can model it? A brain?”
Ted whistled. “That’s a really big lift. I’ve got the computer power but... I’d need the complete architecture. Exact propagation speeds, connection strengths...” He paused. “Imani’s neural imager could give us that, right? Like this but mapping everything?”
“I think so. You’d have to work out the simulation system but with this data, I bet an AI could extract the behaviors of the parts of a brain. Then it’s a matter of scale.”
Ted stared at the hologram, the implications locking into place. “Anya, if we do this... we wouldn’t just be modeling a brain.”
“No.” Anya met his gaze, her eyes fierce. “We’d be building one.”
Anya pulled out her phone and texted Imani: “Need to talk. New theory on brain function and more. Need much more NRI time. Call me ASAP.”
(End, Chapter 1)
Please leave a comment if you’d like clarifications or have suggestions. It’s truly a work in progress.
Your comments will help improve the experience for everyone.
-Ted
Interspersed with the chapters, I'll be posting other information, like "What's a Neural Resonance Imager?" for those that want to dive deeper into this universe. These will NOT be emailed, in order to maintain the continuity of the story.