A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention Read Online Free PDF Page B

California at San Francisco, one of the world’s leading scientific institutes.
    Dr. Gazzaley’s lab is housed inside the Sandler Neurosciences Center, a five-story, 227,000-square-foot research facility that opened in May 2012. Located minutes from downtown San Francisco, a baseball’s throw from where the San Francisco Giants play, it is a gleaming example of a new dedication to understanding the workings of the human brain. That pursuit itself is nothing novel, of course, but now, a new generation of powerful technology lets researchers see the inside of the brain, watch it work, literally, and observe when it fails to work.
    Dr. Gazzaley’s lab contains around $10 million worth of equipment that the researchers speak of only by acronyms, the fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), the EEG (electroencephalography), and the TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation). With the machines, the scientists study blood flow in the brain, look at electrical wave patterns, and create images of ultra-thin slices of neurological tissue. The various techniques let researchers understand which brain regions control what functions, and how tissues and tasks get impacted by different activities, say, when a person tries to multitask.
    Mickey Hart’s is one among many brains Dr. Gazzaley has imaged. The pair have been working on a pop science project together in which Dr. Gazzaley shows what Mickey’s brain looks like while he’s drumming, trying to elucidate not just the brain of a rock star but that of an aging one. They do presentations where Mickey drums and Adam shows off images of the percussionist’s brain taken in real time using sensors attached to Mickey’s head. Your Brain on Rhythm.
    Dr. Gazzaley himself might pass for a hipster musician. He’s a youthful-looking forty-five, with short-cropped silver hair—not gray but silver—that looks like it’s been dyed to get attention, even though it’s been the same color since it prematurely aged in his early thirties. He wears a serpentine ring on his right index finger. He tends to sport black jeans that are on the tight side, and a silk shirt. His car is a BMW M3 convertible, the super-fast kind. He’s become friends not just with Mickey but also with the lead singer of Thievery Corporation, a rock band, as well as some of the tech billionaires who attend the late-night parties he holds on the first Friday of each month.
    A few months earlier, Dr. Gazzaley had gone to Germany to speak at a conference. At the airport in Berlin, a woman at immigration control asked him his business. He explained that he’s a scientist.
    “Really?” she asked.
    “Yes.”
    “You don’t look like one.”
    DR. GAZZALEY TRAVELS A lot. He’ll put on 150,000 miles a year on airplanes, give or take. He gives upward of fifty talks.
    “Sometimes I ask myself: ‘Why do I constantly put myself in these stressful situations?’ ” he says. “It’s not like I have to do it.”
    The toll that Dr. Gazzaley is referring to comes in large part from the challenge of juggling all of his responsibilities. The thirteen people he supervises, the constant fund-raising, the media appearances. He regularly forgets where he parked his BMW in the adjoining parking structure because he’s so busy thinking of other things when he gets out of the car and walks into work. Or he’s fiddling around on his iPhone. Once, lost in thought while brushing his teeth, he put moisturizer on his toothbrush, not toothpaste.
    Dr. Gazzaley isn’t particularly absentminded. He simply feels like he’s experiencing a pressure so many people feel in their everyday lives—to keep up, push on, achieve.
    “Everyone feels that burden in their own way of trying to squeeze as much out of our brains per unit time as possible.”
    We’re all struggling to maximize our attention.
    Attention .
    Dr. Gazzaley is one of the world’s foremost experts in the science of attention. He’s consumed with how we focus, what causes us