Page 28 of Under Story

In the hallway, a small but respectable group of attendees lined up for discussion. The botanist wasn’t one of them. Neither was Eli. Laurel felt disappointed; she hadn’t seen him slip out. But when she opened a side door, trading the staleness of the auditorium for the brisk, reviving air outside, he was sitting on a bench with a notebook. He smiled to see her, squinting into the clouds.

“You took notes,” she said. “I won’t quiz you on it.”

Eli laughed. “I take notes on things that interest me.”

“I’m honored.”

The conference took place at the University of San Francisco, whose hilltop campus bordered Golden Gate Park. Cypress trees—perpetually windswept—slanted sideways.

“You did a good job with the curveball from the front row,” Eli said.

Laurel shook her head. “I thought I was in the clear.”

“Never relax your defenses,” intoned Eli, and Laurel laughed. “Really, though: it was fascinating, what you said. The memory piece—how do you think it works?”

The tension Laurel had felt all day was unspooling, and so, too, in the equanimity of afternoon, was some of her anguish about Eli and Angela. If they talked about work, maybe she could enjoy herself.

“I’ve been toying with the idea of electrical signaling,” she said.

“How’d you think of that?”

Laurel sat down on the bench, holding her bag on her lap. “In animals, that’s how nerve cells communicate: charged elements pass messages throughout the body. They’re also crucial to memory.”

“Cells that fire together wire together?”

“Exactly. And we know that fungi produce electricity. Plants do, too. In fact, they’re better at it than we are,” Laurel said. “If bioelectricity underlies human intelligence, I thought it might contribute to intelligent behaviors in fungi.”

She told Eli about the developments that took place over the summer. Laurel brought her hypothesis to Gloria, who pointed out that the brain, like mycelia, is a collective: billions of neurons in a coordinated web, which gives rise to behaviors that would be impossible for one neuron alone. Gloria suggested that Laurel listen to an interview with a neuroscientist, Urmi Bhattacharya, who had recently been featured on The Larry Meiller Show.

Laurel found the episode in Wisconsin Public Radio’s online archives. She brought her laptop to a study carrel in Memorial Library and plugged her headphones in, to listen while she read the transcript.

Bhattacharya: None of us can understand what it’s like to lack consciousness, because we are conscious. You might think that sleep is the same as unconsciousness, but that isn’t true. When we wake up in the morning, we might not remember what happened overnight, but we still have the sense that time has passed. So the closest we get to an unconscious state isn’t sleep. It’s anesthesia.

Meiller: What’s the difference?

Bhattacharya: Well, during sleep, the mind is actually quite active. We have all these connected regions, and they’re talking to each other: information is integrated, memories are processed. Whereas anesthesia—what we call going under—is characterized by a loss of connectivity. The brain stops working as a collective, as a whole.

What anesthesia also does is that it suppresses electricity. You can think of it like turning off a light switch. The brain goes dark.

In the carrel, Laurel looked up.

Meiller: Now, let’s backtrack for a second. When we say “consciousness,” what does that mean? Is there any kind of consensus?

Bhattacharya: Absolutely not.

(laughter)

Bhattacharya: But we know that it has to do with individual experience. It has to do with feeling and, somehow, with tone. My internal monologue is different from yours.

Meiller: So what creates consciousness? What triggers it?

Bhattacharya: Well, no one agrees on that, either. But most of us do agree about why consciousness is so baffling. The question is: How does something ephemeral, like thought, emerge from a physical system? Because the brain is physical, right? I mean, what’s it made of?

Meiller: Oh, I don’t—blood vessels? Gray matter? You’re sending me back to seventh grade biology here…

Bhattacharya: No, you’re exactly right. Blood. Tissue. Water. The brain is actually 60 percent fat. It’s three pounds of physical matter, and from that comes—what? Emotions. Thoughts.

Consciousness seems to be tied to complexity. For instance, so far as we know, a single neuron isn’t conscious, doesn’t create consciousness. So what does? Do you need five neurons? Five thousand? Five million?