About the author
I used to be smart. And I worked a lot, even though most of my work was at a lab or my desk at home.
This story is from 2005 and mentions my old friend Andy Weir. Here we are with a couple other college buddies in Munich in 2007.
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Blossining AddiCtIon by Brendan ZaChary AllIson
“WOO HOO! WOO! WOOOOO HOO!”
I was grateful for the distraction. I’d been roiling in the depths of my own (in)eptitude. Smart enough to figure out we had a problem with our BCI, and even one piece of why, but neither smart nor confident enough to push for a proposed solution. Naïve too.
Then that whooping began. It hit me like the enthusiastic slaps I also heard, rising and ricocheting off the skyscrapers near Five Points Station. I looked out my window. Twelve stories below, I saw someone slapping his own thigh and high fiving another man as he doubled over in laughter. Was his offer of marriage just accepted? The greatest joke in human history? Just found out his lotto numbers hit? Something involving a tongue in a non-speaking role? Unexplained joy is still infectious. Thank you, I thought to that random man.
I was less grateful about 24 hours later, when the same sound woke me up. Same guy.
Then the third night, right on schedule. The next morning, I told my old buddy Andy about it. “There’s something I’m not figuring out. Nobody is naturally that happy, night after night.”
There was my crude hypothesis. The next stage of the scientific method is to gather data. So when I heard it on the fourth night, I walked outside, then around the corner into the plaza. Alone, unarmed, late at night, long before ubiquitous cameras, in a very high crime area with no sign of law enforcement. I already ceded naivete. The two men saw me and fled. Hm.
But returned the next night. “Woo hoo! Woo!” Long pause. “Woo.” The sixth night lacked the happy slappy laughy components. The seventh night, only two subdued, forced whoops.
“Hey Andy. I’m pretty sure what I heard was someone becoming a crack addict. That poor guy just burned most of his lifetime supply of happiness in a week.” Andy agreed.
I never heard him again. I heard other voices with the same pattern, mania decaying to silence over a week or so. They no longer made me happy. I started sleeping with earplugs.
Author Commentary
You think making an SSVEP BCI is easy? What if you’re in a computer science lab with 2 engineers working on it and all the hardware you need? OK. Fine. But it was a lot harder in 2004. My PhD was so new I could still smell the diploma. I was Assistant Director of the BrainLab and the project lead. Earlier that day, my boss Melody Moore (not yet Jackson) and I endured a difficult conference call about said project failure. Jon Wolpaw Himself chewed us out, and I could still recite most of his rant today. Not a good way to start a gig working in a BCI lab.
The problem I discovered that first night is that none of us produced SSVEP while looking at the flickering display that the two engineers developed. I pilot-tested it with us. We should have had spikes at the oscillating frequencies. Especially me, since I knew from recording myself at the Wolpaw lab that I had strong SSVEP. Instead, our frequency spectra looked flatter than a bad metaphor.
The engineers insisted that DirectX way back then was producing oscillating stimuli at 10 and 12 Hz. They suggested setting up hardware to detect whether the display was in fact oscillating properly. “We did that,” I replied. “Our occipital lobes are such detectors.” Since all the other components of the system checked out, the only remaining solution was that the display was not in fact oscillating properly.
I suggested recording me while looking at an oscillating LED. My EEG had the correct frequency spikes. Last spike in the coffin against the monitor-based display.
We later worked out that Windows wasn’t reporting correctly. It’s not a true real-time operating system and we needed millisecond precision. I remain friends with Melody and Jon today; indeed, I have a paper in press with the latter. He never chewed me out again. Melody did, but that’s another story. I never again attempted an April Fools’ Day prank at work.
Thanks also to Rick Jackson, now Melody’s husband and a candidate for Georgia governor. I read his very eloquent homage to his life in Atlanta and it inspired me to write about my time there.
Realism
This is nonfiction. So it’s quite realistic. I suppose that disqualifies it as BCI-fi. It’s BCI-re. Worse, it only relates to BCIs because I was working on them in the background, so it may not even belong on this website. I could write a letter to the author and site host.
Another story here about my BCI work in Atlanta is mostly true. I changed some details for anonymity.
Hope
Crack addiction isn’t often associated with hope.
But a bad day can improve! A friend sent me this a while back and it did exactly that when I first read it – and sometimes when I recall it.
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