With students in another room monitoring the test, I’m alone in the dark, staring at a computer screen a few feet in front of my face. Being the competitive sort, I am highly motivated to get the right answers, and I get mildly ticked off when I miss one. As the test wears on, however, I begin to get sleepy—a big problem for excelling on what are essentially boring, repetitive tests.
Afterward I wash the goo out of my hair and join Gazzaley and his students to review my data. My thought waves appear as jerky lines running across a monitor, like multiple tracings from a polygraph test.
“Am I OK?” I ask, slightly nervous as I realize that this EEG is what amounts to my brain talking in streams of electricity.
“We’ll see,” Gazzaley says.
Later that day, the team repeats the same basic experiment with the faces and landscapes, except this time an MRI measures the blood flow in my brain as I react.
A few weeks later, Gazzaley summarizes his findings and tells me he sees nothing alarming or unusual in my results for memory. “You aren’t abnormal, and you have no evidence of disease that affects your memory,” he says, pulling up some slides of my results on a large computer screen on his desk. “You did great on reaction times and accuracy, better than even the younger group.” This is unexpected, given that I was close to falling asleep for part of the experiment.
I am pleased by this—it almost mitigates the knowledge that my brain is shrinking—but then Gazzaley reveals that I did not do as well on filtering the distractors. “You came out where we expect you to be at your age, about halfway between the younger and the older groups.” Like the older group, I remembered things fine, but my brain betrayed me by revealing that I was not always filtering out what I was supposed to ignore. More precisely, my aging brain is unable to suppress irrelevant information either as well or as quickly as when I was younger.
“It means your brain is aging,” he says. “Sorry about that.”
HIGH ANXIETY
Deep in the tunnel of another MRI machine, this one at Stanford University, I am reliving one of the most anxious moments of my professional life.
It happened years earlier when I was a junior correspondent for Life magazine. I was in a staff meeting led by managing editor Dan Okrent, a legendary and (to me) intimidating veteran of books and magazines. We were discussing one of the first major stories I reported, a possible cover piece. Colleagues were saying I did a great job and that the photographs shot by Joe McNally were fantastic. In those days I was quite shy in such meetings with senior editors, but I was feeling good. Then Okrent, who could be gruff and blunt, blurted out that another reporter would write the story and get the byline. I couldn’t believe it. As the meeting continued, I felt my heart rate surging and my gut contracting. I felt ashamed, and I am sure my face turned red. I knew I should say something. I needed to stick up for myself, but my overriding desire was to say nothing. I had to regain control.
Inside the MRI machine, the intensity of the emotions from that long-ago afternoon are flooding back into my brain as I hear the distant whir of the great magnet wrapped around my head and a stream of clicks and sounds of grating metal. On a monitor above my eyes, the tale of the Life magazine meeting is being displayed in reminiscences that I have written at the request of Philippe Goldin, a Stanford research scientist, and Kelly Werner, a postdoc, both working in the lab of Stanford psychologist James Gross. In their work Goldin and Werner ask for stories that are personal and socially embarrassing and that seriously punish their subjects’ self-esteem. They then use fMRI scans to investigate the phenomenon of social anxiety and examine those who suffer from phobias and disorders that make them terrified of social situations and personal interactions.
Fear and anxiety are crucial to human life. They are evolutionary tools developed over the eons to protect us. They alert us to run for the hills when a lion roars and to fret when our children are sick so that we will take care of them. My genetic forebears, however, never had to face a humiliation delivered by the managing editor of Life magazine.
Despite my nervousness about this test of nervousness, at least I am being examined as a healthy subject—I hope. Researchers have found that the imaging of supposedly normal brains reveals clinically significant findings 8 to 10 percent of the time—“disconcertingly often,” says Henry Greely, a law professor at Stanford who works on legal and bioethical issues that include neuroscience, genetics, and stem cells.
In the scanner, the Life magazine story continues to flash in front of my eyes. I’m supposed to rate how anxious the statements make me, on a scale of one to five, by punching the appropriate button on the response pad in my right hand.
Back in New York, the managing editor at the weekly staff meeting congratulated me—and then assigned the story to a veteran reporter to write.
I press four, meaning this memory still makes me pretty darn anxious. The screen clears and up pops another sentence in bold capital letters, this one written by the researchers:
I am a loser.
This is intended to induce “negative self-beliefs” to see what happens in my brain. “Some people launch into a cascade of negative self-beliefs,” Goldin says. “We want to track how that happens.”
I am too insecure to stand up for myself.
The test then asks me to make an effort to modulate these negative self-beliefs, to use strategies to tell myself I’m not that bad. This is the second part of the experiment: seeing how well people’s strategies work to alleviate their anxiety. Once I have made an effort to chill out, I am again supposed to press a button to indicate how I feel.
People will think I’m a wimp.
“The amazing thing is that the brain can make changes,” Goldin says. “Most of this happens in the connections between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. It can be tempered to learn and adapt.”
That is just what happened in my Life magazine case. I overcame my terror and stuck up for myself after the meeting. Okrent agreed to let me write the next story that I reported. This experience was among the first of many where I worked hard to modulate my fears, apparently pushing my amygdala—one of the seats of emotion activated by social anxiety—to shape up. This largely successful battle to squelch my anxiety could be clearly seen in my scans. In one, my anxiety is shown as my brain’s amygdala lights up—along with the visual, color, word, and number recognition centers—as I relive a vivid emotional memory. A second scan shows areas of my brain associated with language and modifying beliefs flare up as I try to regulate my anxieties.
“You seem to be able to control your emotions, which is good,” Goldin says. “Some people have exaggerated reactions.”
I tell him I’m surprised at my ability to tamp down my reactions, given my state of high anxiety when I was younger. “You’ve been alive long enough to learn to use your mind to respond skillfully to anxiety,” he answers. “That’s what people are supposed to do.”
Still, as I write this, I’m looking around at people in my favorite café near my home in San Francisco and wondering: Are some of them even more anxious than I am? Or is my brain just better at covering it up?
See David Ewing Duncan's previous article about subjecting himself to the latest in medical testing. Read about more of the author’s findings in his new book, Experimental Man: What One Man's Body Reveals about His Future, Your Health, and Our Toxic World, published by John Wiley and Sons.
