Inborn

"What makes you so special?"

He gave me a long look, like he was considering the question seriously, though I thought he must be thinking I was crazy.

"I'm sorry," I added out of embarrassment. "You're... awesome. Everyone likes you. They pay attention to what you say, like they think you know something the rest of us don't. Like you understand something we don't. Well, I want to know what it is."

He shook his head, looking in the distance. "Yea," he said.

After remaining silent for a little while, a look came across his face and he got up. "Here, let me show you something." His confidence made me follow as he guided me to a spot on the train platform.

We were on a raised track passing over a busy road, the train station an open-air bridge. Touching my shoulders, he placed me directly in the center looking out over the traffic. There was railing to prevent people from falling, but I started to feel a bit dizzy from the hight.

"Look at them." I did. The way the traffic was coming at me, I felt as if all the drivers were looking back at me, although I knew this wasn't likely.

 

"Make them look at you." I didn't know what he meant. "Raise your arms. Wave to them." Feeling a little stage-fright, I did as he instructed. Someone honked. I didn't know if it was directed at me or not. "See? They like you. Let's give them a little more."

He came to stand next to me, and gave me one earphone of his headset. He put in the other.

I put in my headphone. He had chosen some dance music to play from his phone. There was something in the music that made me smile real big and want to wave at the cars some more. He was doing the same thing.

He started dancing, and it was contagious. We were a two-person show, and they were our audience. I didn't know how many were really watching us, but I felt like we were communicating something to them. As I danced, the headphone came out, but I just kept dancing. I noticed more honking. They were happy: they were happy to see us happy.

 

He took the headphones out of his phone, and started playing music on the speakers. It was hard to hear over the noises of the street, but we kept dancing anyway. Eventually, the song changed to another.

It was just then that our train came. We ran to the door and found seats. We were laughing, and breathing hard from the exercise.

"Did you feel it?" he asked, after we had sat silently for some time.

"Feel what?"

"You told me I know something other people don't. I was trying to show you what it is. There's a feeling, when you get on a stage, or a soapbox, or shout from a street corner... when everyone is looking at you, and some of them understand you, and agree with you. It's a feeling like... like bringing a light to the darkness, like standing up tall and giving a sign to others, that they can do the same. I think it's an instinct. Our ancestors did better when they stood up and shouted the truth. It makes us feel good. But you need to do it once, to get that feeling, to understand. People who never try, they don't know how good it feels. You don't need to have much of a message to be a good leader. You and I weren't doing anything but dancing, but people paid attention. I'm not special; not really. But I understand how this works. That's why people listen to me. I hope that answers your question."

I didn't know what to say to that. Did I feel what he felt when we were dancing over the busy road? I wasn't sure.

metatelepathy

[Continuing from the previous entry.]

As I drifted to sleep that night, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was still connected: my brain was reproducing the feeling, just like when you close your eyes after a long day of hiking and still see the trail in front of you. I was seeing different chess positions, and felt her reactions buzzing in the background. Even the alien abstract thoughts were being reproduced, rolling around and snapping chaotically. I felt like my brain was trying to make sense of them as I lay there in the dark.

The next day, I took out the chess set again and played a game against myself. I knew I wasn't playing nearly as well as when I was connected to Chrissy, but I thought that I wasn't playing like myself, either. I hadn't totally lost the chess instincts that I stole from her.

If we played chess a few more times, I could see that I would be at her level even helmet-free... at least if I kept practicing. And she wasn't even trying to teach me-- in fact, she had tried hard not to give me all her skills. With a good teacher, the helmet would be far more effective at transferring complex skills than any traditional method.

I skipped my classes that day, spending the time writing a primitive skill-transfer program for the helmet. The basic idea was clear: record expert brain activity at a task, and then stimulate the same activity in a novice. Unfortunately, to do it well, you would need sophisticated matching techniques to determine when it's appropriate to nudge activity in a particular direction. The best way of doing it would involve detailed mind-to-mind translation dictionaries identifying what activity patterns represent "the same" concept. I was still using the simple literal translation technique I had used with Chrissy any my other sync experiments.

I made a few recordings of myself drawing different things. I wasn't a really good artist, but I wasn't bad either, and I thought that maybe the motor control needed for drawing would be simple enough to transfer from one person to another. Ideally, the software would learn the connection between visual imagination and motor control, and then another person could run this, the software hinting at what lines to draw when they imagined what they wanted to make a picture of. My one-day effort had not produced anything this sophisticated. Instead, you could play through the memories of me drawing two different things (a face and a house, both of which took me about an hour) and hopefully learn something. I only included recordings of a few brain regions, though: I certainly didn't want to be posting all my thoughts online. The visuals, motor control, and sensations from the hand would have to be enough.

Other people were posting recordings of things like dreams, so my software wasn't really anything new at this point-- though I did include some basic features which would make it better than the normal EMNSA playback mode. The speed of the playback would attempt to adjust based on how well a person was syncing to it, and the recording would stop if you got too far off track, allowing you to restart a few seconds back to try again.

I posted it on a popular EMNSA forum and went to bed.

It was a few days before I saw Chrissy again, because of my class schedule.

epitelepathy

[continued from here]

My uneasy feeling soon passed, though, just as the worry I had initially felt had. Being hooked up to Chrissy was, actually, quite nice: she's a very positive person. Syncing to her could be addictive.

<<So...>> she sent, <<What should we do?>>

I hadn't really thought about activities. My mind went to the closet where I kept some board games, and I felt a jump of excitement from her. She was seeing my mental images. I thought about what games I had, and when I got to chess, I felt a warm/bright feeling from her. I was a bit surprised; I didn't actually play much chess. I liked the feeling from her, though, and got up to get the game.

She got up too, heading to the closet. Of course she knew exactly where it was; she saw my mental image, and probably got a sense of direction from me too. We both stopped briefly when we noticed the other, but then started walking together to the closet.

When you do a sync on the whole brain, it's easier just to go with the flow and do the same thing as the other person. Syncing individual regions such as motor control, its quite easy to resist the weak output of the EMNSA. With each additional region, though, the influences stack... I wasn't just getting motor shadows consistent with walking, I was also getting shadows of her proprioception, sense of balance, some degree of planning consistent with walking, and who-knows-what mysterious influences elsewhere.

I'd guess that if two people spent enough time in sync, they'd become the same person. Their brains would detangle the web of abstract concepts, re-learning associations so as to become mutually understandable. They would pick up thinking styles and ideas from the other, until finally they would start behaving in the same way even when not connected.

While this is interesting, it's not the most useful type of neural connection. I was doing a sync because a sync is easy. You don't have to set up a one-to-one correspondence between brain regions, though: you can hook up regions in one person to entirely different regions in the other. This is known as a heterogeneous connection, or "het" for short.

A het is the same type of connection people use to connect to external hardware. You don't always want a robotic arm to follow the motions of your arm when you're running it. Instead, you hook it up to some patch of brain region, and then you learn to control the activation in that patch. Neural plasticity allows us to re-learn what parts of the cortex are connected to, if we're patient. When a het connection is established between people, you can do things like map the whole cortex of one person down to a small portion on the other person's. (You lose quite a bit of detail, of course.) In theory, your connection to the other person could be like an extra sense. If you could train enough, you could recognize what is going on in the other person's brain without being forced to have the same thing happen in your brain, like with a sync.

A well-trained het connection could allow people to work as a more effective team, in ways a sync cannot. The military has been interested in them for that reason, although the area is quite new and hasn't yet produced anything really interesting. The technology hasn't been around long enough to know very much (although expensive research-level gear has been available much longer than consumer-level wireless headsets like mine). Perhaps two people doing a sync can learn to cooperate better than we think. Perhaps het training for complex connections is much more time-consuming than for the simple ones people already do. No one has used an EMNSA regularly for an extended period of time. It's all open at this point, which is why I've been so excited to see how it develops.

She got to the closet first, and opened the door for me, allowing me to grab the game. This delicate little dance was humorous, especially with the added feature of directly sensing everything that the other person did, and we both felt each other's little bubble of amusement rise to become laughter. I wanted to kiss her. The thought was clear enough that I couldn't cover it up, and I felt her reaction to it as well. She wasn't offended by me being too forward-- she was even a little curious. But not right now. Right now she wanted to play chess.

I was relieved. I had a co-conspirator: she was in my head and didn't really care if I had a few thoughts that might be less than perfectly decent.

Chess was interesting. I could tell right away that she was much better than me, so I was at first expecting to lose. With the sync, though, it wasn't so simple. We could only keep secrets from each other with difficulty, keeping the thoughts out of visual or auditory or emotional space where they were easy to read. She was better at that than me, and one the first game fairly easily. I started learning to pick up on her thoughts in more detail, though, and the second game was much more difficult for her. I learned that if I looked at positions, I could get thoughts from her about them. If I thought of moves, I would get reactions. I was stealing her chess instincts. She tried to stop me, but wasn't very good at it. She could hardly use the same trick on me, since I had no chess instincts to steal.

I won the second game, barely. I was ready to be done with chess, but she wasn't. We were beyond talking. She was frustrated at the loss, angry at me for stealing her skill, but aware that she couldn't blame me since she'd gladly agreed to play psychic chess. I noticed that playing chess together had trained me to recognize a few of her abstract thoughts that had seemed alien before. In any case, I could tell she wanted a rematch.

The third game was close, but she won. She thought about each move for a long time, carefully examining the consequences in an expanding tree of possibilities which went long enough that I couldn't remember it perfectly. She would forget it, too, looking away from the board and trying to think of other things while I made my move, though I was still able to use her chess instincts as before.

We were both mentally tired, and a common feeling made me switch off the helmets when the game finished. I found myself immediately wondering what she was thinking as we put the chess set and helmets away. We ended up having this long conversation about the experience and the technology and political/societal implications, and I asked her out to dinner, but she said she'd better go, and I let her walk herself home, back to my old usual self who doesn't want to be intrusive and is afraid of coming on too strong. (<- Author wrapping things up too fast, sorry.)

pantelepathy

My heart was beating fast, and all the motions of my hands felt wrong... as if I hadn't ever learned to properly use them, and was limited to trial-and-error fumbling as I put on the black headset. I was nervous. This felt big... like, bigger than sex. I sat down after getting the helmet on properly. We had our chairs facing each other, so that we could look at each other's faces during the whole thing. She looked excited. I wondered if she was as nervous as I was. I'd soon find out.

I'd ordered the EMNSA when the first pre-orders were available, partly out of a desire to support the project. "EMNSA" stands for "Electro-magnetic neural sensor and actuator". The helmets were able to both detect and stimulate brain activity. This could be used for several things, depending on what software you run. For example, there were programs which would monitor your brain activity and correct it when it went outside of set parameters. This could be used for meditation or therapy. The helmet could also record dreams or waking ideas for replay later. Most people, however, were more interested in the two-helmet possibilities, like the experiment I was about to try out.

There are many different ways to hook one human brain up to another. The easiest is known as a "sync": you set a brain region to receive signals from the corresponding brain region in another person. For example, you might sync your visual lobes, auditory, touch, motor control, or all of the above. For safety reasons, the EMNSA helmet is incapable of providing very strong stimulation. This is mostly for the best anyway, since we don't usually want to totally override the existing signals in any particular brain region. For example, if I were to sync my visuals with someone else's, I would only see a weak shadow; almost like the easily dismissed visuals you can create in your imagination.

I had done that a few times, with friends and room mates. We always did two-way syncs: it felt unfair to read thoughts from another person without opening yourself up to be read. I had also synced taste, sound, and other senses. Not touch, yet, though.... that felt too personal to do lightly. I also hadn't tried motor control with anyone.

Today, though, I would cross all the boundaries: a full-brain sync. I really wasn't sure about this. I tried to quiet that part of my mind, though, knowing that she would shortly know everything I was thinking.

Chrissy was... a girl from class. I didn't know her that well, actually, which only made this weirder. I'd been talking about the EMNSA with another classmate, and she'd been very excited to try it. She said that she really wanted one, but hadn't put the money together yet. I was happy to oblige, because I was a little bit attracted to her, and... when you get right down to it, this was really crazy. I thought we'd just sync vision or something, taking turns closing our eyes and seeing out of the other person's. The whole-brain sync was her idea, and I should have turned it down immediately.

But I hadn't.

Right.

So, having donned my helmet, I selected the whole-brain sync alignment from a menu in the helmet software, and clicked "run".

###

I immediately felt a little difference in emotion, as my nervousness and her excitement mixed together. She reacted to my nervousness with concern, and I reacted to this with more concern, and we quickly looked at each other. After staring for a few seconds, there was a sudden feeling that everything was OK, and we both started to smile. I reached up to scratch an itch, and saw her (in a faint visual overlay) do the same thing, and saw her see me do the same thing, and saw her see the same thing, and we both stopped in surprise before our hand reached its destination. I laughed. She laughed. Then we both started to say, at the same time, "Was it your--?" and we both stopped, to let the other one talk, before realizing that both of us were asking whose itch it originally was. There was no need to talk, so I didn't know what to say next. At a loss, we decided to simply wave at each other. It was perfect, like a mirror... but the extra image in his eyes, the one coming from her, wasn't mirrored. So, I saw her waving at me, with a faint shadow of me waving back at her with the opposite arm.

We stopped waving and started doing more complex arm movements, but the spell was soon broken when she started doing dance moves. They were too complex for me to easily copy, even with the shadow of her motor cortex being projected onto mine. I could have tried harder to imitate her, but instead, I said "Dance skills need a more professional sync," and smiled.

Although there are broad similarities in the different brain regions, the fine-level structures are the result of what a person has learned over their lifetime, and so will be different even between genetically identical people. Because of this, a really good sync requires software that observes the two different brains for a longer period of time, identifying how different stimuli are represented as activation patterns, and building up a dictionary to translate from one brain to the other. The more abstract a concept, the more difficult this sort of translation becomes, until finally you get to the point where ideas cannot be transferred because one person hasn't learned about a subject or thinks about it in a dramatically different way. My machine wasn't even trying to do this sort of thing.

"We could make it work with a little practice," she said. Now that we were thinking complex thoughts based on personal background material, the connection felt much more alien. The ideas in her sentence connected with different ideas in my own head, since the map was bad. These disconnected ideas didn't form a sensible concept, though, so they slipped away like dream-memories. Her thoughts were a background of confusion, rolling around with an impossible logic of their own. I was observing this, pushing the chatter of her thoughts back by focusing on my own.

"I think mostly in images," I said, voicing some of those thoughts.

The feelings coming across the connection from her got a little more serious, and I saw her look into my eyes again (saw it from both directions). She started to say something, but then stopped. Her thoughts got more intense for a little while; still not enough to really cause me problems (they probably couldn't), but enough for me to feel briefly confused. I half-heard a sound:

<<I don't think in images. I don't know what I think in, normally. I can think in sound for you, though, if it helps.>>

This put a big grin on my face. This technology was cool. It let you experience things you just couldn't experience any other way.

It wasn't her voice. I had experienced this when syncing sound with a friend of mine: I could communicate by imagining talking, and he had told me that what he heard wasn't my voice. I could actually use any voice that I chose, as long as I could imagine it. He told me that he couldn't imagine sounds that easily, though. When he tried, I couldn't even tell he was doing anything. All I heard was what was coming in his ears. So, this was the first time that I got to hear someone's inner voice like that.

I glanced down at her breasts, and she looked at my chest. I snapped my eyes back up immediately, and so did she; I was determined to ignore the slip-up and go on as if it hadn't happened. It put me back into "this is crazy" mode, though, and I was confronted with the paradox of trying not to be too obvious about my attraction while hooked up to a machine that shared our every thought.

Heh.

[Continued here.]

Spider Jerusalem, To His Assistant

[Author's note: This is a little Transmetropolitan fanfic. I started this blog to try to break the ice with writing, because I've been feeling like I want to write for a few months, but whenever I sit down to write, ideas don't come like they do when I'm not trying.]

"Why do you want to be a reporter?"

"Well..." She thought. "I thought I could help people. Reporters reveal the truth and help take down the big liars who are ruining the world. Besides, I like interviewing pe...."

"NO!" Spider Jerusalem slammed his palm on the table in an exaggerated gesture. "Don't tell me what you like, what you enjoy. If that's your motivation, you'll get out of reporting as soon as it gets tough. Once you start thinking like that, start asking yourself what brings you the most pleasure, you'll look for the easy life. You'll take the easy stories, without realizing what you're doing. If you tell me you want to spit in the faces of the liars in charge, OK. But you can't be doing it because you enjoy it. That won't last."

She didn't buy it. "Life doesn't have to be that way!"

"Maybe some reporters live that way, always taking easy street. Maybe most do. But they aren't worth their weight in piss. They go home and leave the job behind at the end of the day. If you want to be great, you've got to live it, breath it. And everyone wants to be great."

She started to look annoyed. (She always attempted to be the calm collected one in conversations, but Spider would inevitably break this mask.) He reminded her of the old saying about Americans: Europeans work to live. Americans live to work.

"To be a reporter, you've got to turn yourself into a gun. And aim the gun. And shoot it. That's reporting."